Multitasking

Right this minute I have on my laptop Dreamweaver and Firefox open, but I'm just surfing around and playing with a TXP Plugin. Lotus Notes and X-Fonter are open, but idle. There also appears to be several instances of IE open, which are just cluttering my Taskbar. On the PC I have Adobe Encore and Premiere open, as I needed to get the last 6 months of family film edited and onto DVD - a chore unto itself.

As you are working on a client CMS, guess you're not able to work on TypeSpace, eh?

Let's see. 2 IE windows, 1 for internal project management app and another for test site on current project. 2 visual studio windows, one for current web app, another for a console app. 3 msn messenger windows for communicating about development projects. 1 Intervideo WinDVD window showing Oceans 11 for sanity. 1 Firefox with 3 tabs (test site, this site, bloglines). Outlook. 4 Blackberry emulator windows to test web app in handheld environment (1 is MDS simulator, 3 required to run blackberry emulator itself).

That's a total of 15 windows.

At this moment I have 7 tabs open in Firefox, 4 Trillian windows open, and photoshop openned.

Let's see at the moment I've got 9 PHP pages open in SubEthaEdit (7 for a client site, and 2 for my own site), Firefox with 2 tabs open (1 client site, 1 my own site), Safari with 5 tabs open, 2 Transmit windows (client site, my site), Mail, NetNewsFire, as well as VirtualPC running Windows 2000 that has 2 IE windows open. My poor Powerbook is being severely taxed at the moment.

Right now, I've got a movie playing on the right screen, and on the left screen, Photoshop loaded, Firefox with 3 tabs and IE6 open, wamp server turning, HTMLKit with, hum, 3 page loaded, and my eyes are turning crazy :) - my PC seems to work well (arg, sorry, it's a PC)

I love posts like this as it makes me realise that I'm not the only freak out there with too many windows open

At the moment, I have 3 Firefox windows with a combined total of around 50 tabs (1 window for browsing, 1 for research and 1 for the site I'm working on), RSS Bandit, my links file in Word, 3 tables from my links database (unfinished), DWMX with 9 files open, 4 Thunderbird windows, 2 Explorer windows and, in order to maintain my sanity, I also have the WMP mini-toolbar visible to keep cranking out Stone Temple Pilots tunes at high volume

I love my new notebook! I could never have done this much at once on the old one

You need to go read this posting: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html

All I can say is Thank Goodness for Dual Monitors and Tabs...

Firefox with 6 tabs open (that's low for me), previewing some of the work I'm doing in BBEdit (about 10 documents open in that... hallelujah they added a document drawer). Two IM sessions going on. Just finished writing a paper in Word, so that is closed now... but still. Highly considering opening a window to watch some TV, but I'm enjoying this Jeff Tweedy performance in iTunes too much...

Oh, yeah... thank goodness for exposé!

This is funny... I'm reading some of these comments and I'm starting to hear The Twelve Days of Christmas in my head.

...
3 IE's running...
2 Photo's printing...
...and a unknown something in my task bar.......

:P

Two IE's, six Firefox tabs, Photoshop, Crimson Editor (five PHP files), Windows Word (JavaScript articlee), and of course, iTunes. ;)

Typically several Firefox tabs, phpBB Admin a word-processor, Adobe Photoshop CS some web development tools and trawling of USB key and that's when I am not busy.

Spooky. I posted about this kinda thing last night. It wasn't something I used to do very often but since I got used to tabbed browsing in Firefox I know have a 'tabbed application' approach when working.

So I currently have: my HTML editor open (Homesite), two emails containing details of sites to be added to Scottish Blogs, a blank email, a list of confirmed people for the Blogmeet, Picasa (creating a photo CD), a web browser with Amazon, PHP.net, BBC News, HaloScan Forum and four other tabs of articles still to be read, Outlook contact list. Ohh and iTunes. Of course.

At work I usually have 4 different folders, Outlook, internet explorer, access, acrobat, IE and the command prompt.

At home I usually have Visual Studio, Html-Kit (approx. 4 windows), Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer, 3 Firefox tabs, possible IE (if I don't want a crappy looking MSDN). That's all I can think of right now.

Usually when I'm working I have Dreamweaver open with 3-7 pages open, Firefox with a zillion tabs open, IE (for testing purposes only), Fireworks, Photoshop, Napster, Thunderbird (4 email), WS_FTP Pro and Paint Shop Pro. Any or all of these can be open at one time. Usually its quite a few. I really do want dual monitor's as I see a couple of you do have. Maybe I should just connect this flat panel to my laptop as a dual? SOMEDAY!

When I'm really "working", I have at least ten tabs open in Firefox, more than ten PHP pages open in my PHP editor, connection to FTP open via Filezilla, internet radio playing (Winamp), continuously checking e-mails with Outlook, various files open in Photoshop and folders open in Explorer, FeedDemon checks for new articles, the Apache is running and there is also the firewall, Norton anti-virus, ICQ, Skype... thanks for 1 GB ram and 64 bit!

I'm working on my wife's website and I currently have Firefox (11 tabs), Adium, Smultron, SubEthaEdit, Photoshop, Cyberduck, iTunes, Mail and Flash open. Usually I'd also have Dreamweaver open and probably not SubEthaEdit, but that's what I happend to have now.

I'm loving the G5 though, I could probably open up a quite a bit more and not really notice :)

Mark: Kudos on the NADD link. I saw this and was going to post that, but didn't make it in, obviously.

Yeah, I'm running ~20 FF tabs, two IE6es, one IE5.5, one IE4, Photoshop, MSN, Winamp, Edit+, Filezilla, and calc.

It's a crazy world.

When I am at work, I have Entourage, Mozilla with four or five tabs of personal browsing and client sites, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Adobe Reader, iTunes, TextEdit, Interarchy, Calculator, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and Microsoft Excel and/or Word. Currently I have Windows Media Player for MacOS X running because a local public radio station only streams in Windows Media.

I am currently at school in an ICT lesson for which no work is required so the only window I have open is this one, annoyingly it's IE.

I usualy have a couple of Firefox's open, one with forums in, one with general sites that aren't fourms, a few msn windows open, a few skype windows, real player smartFTP, EditPlus etc. etc.

4 Windows:
Opera 7.23:
This site
My Blog
A Secret project on my dev site
Another page of above
PHP Manual: substr
Thesaurus.com: 'elegant'
iTunes: George Michael, "Carless Whisper"
TSW Webcoder: 5 documents, all of them for the aforementioned project
Windows Media Player: the Zeldman WDD Keynote Video

Wow. Thank God for tabbed browsing.

You know, I'm new to this whole web design stuff (community wise, that is). I have been reading around on these blogs and have found myself realizing that I, too, am not alone in my desires for web design perfection, and computing methods (with all the open windows).

Currently I have Dreamweaver with 4 files open.
Firefox with 4 tabs.
Thunderbird.
Photoshop and Fireworks.
And IE5 (not for browsing but for testing purposes for all those people that don't feel like blessing themselves with Firefox ;) )
Wmplayer for all that ~groovy~ techno music that keeps me alive.
And GAIM for instant messaging.

And now I want to thank the dual monitor thing. That sweet desktop switcher thing?? And again, the music.

Keep it up guys, you really are an inspiration. All of you.

Aww. Thanks Brent

I have to say I'm suprised at the number of people still using Dreamweaver. I mean, TSW Web Coder isn't perfect either, but still.

Dreamweaver with 6 tabs open, 4 of which im working on. My firefox is pretty much overworked like most of yours, just 6 tabs here though and I applied some new tweaks from forevergeek. My photoshop is dormant but still has 4 images open, winamp plying through my music collection, an IE for testing, and Opera. Panda and Protowall also sucking resources, but hey, don't go wading if you can't wear wellies!

Jumping in late....

PC Screen 1:
FeedDemon, Photoshop, 2 x IE6, mIRC, Grabbit

PC Screen 2:
MSN, Winamp, FlashFXP, 3 x Firefox (with aroun 12 tabs or so), MS Word

Laptop
Sage Line 50 (doing data entry allllll day).

Fun Fun Fun

How many programs are running right now? Just Mozilla with 4 tabs: 2 for my personal site and 2 for yours.

Generally I try to run as few programs at the same time as possible. Every once in a while my system gets overwhelmed and shuts down -- maybe because it only has 256mb memory, so I don't feel comfortable having a lot of files open that could at any time close without their changes being saved.

My typical scenario: Mozilla (with any number of tabs - sometimes 20-30), IE (for testing), WS_FTP (no local server so I upload frequently to test updates), any number of text files (I edit in Notepad), and once in a blue moon - PaintShopPro for editing graphics. That's about it. Simple and sweet.

Just a day in the life of ... me.

Windows environment:
5 IE windows opened (1 client site, 1 google in case I need a little help with ANSI C++, 1 viewing CSS rules, 2 viewing an online book on Tcl/Tk, 1 viewing my investment portfolio).
1 Firefox (but with 8 tabs)
1 Notepad (strange admittedly, but I was copying some text for personal use)
1 Word (putting together a document for my wife)
Lotus Notes

Unix environment (UltraSparc, using CDE):
3 Terminal windows
3 NEdit windows (currently working on command line program for work)

I Need a help in Multitasking in TCl .I Do Want to run 'n' number of process and any timer function available in TCl so that some schedule job can be automatically executed on the specified schedule . I need it urgently

Thanks&Regards
Sanju

This is really funny. I was reading the various responses and then I got to the link for NADD.

I use Unix (or Linux, bear with me, it's relevant due to being able to use multiple desktops). I design software for embedded systems. In my last job, it was not unusual to be working on several products at the same time since there was a large amount of code sharing going on.

I worked out a functional screen layout that would (as a base) have three open CLI sessions, two editor windows (emacs lets you have two or more views of the same file plus multiple other files loaded into other buffers), a card simulator with two CLI sessions and a gdb (or ddd) session, and a C++ class browser. Then, since this was Unix and X11, I would have all this on a single desktop and open up other desktops for other similar projects. Just as mentioned in the NADD article, each window was in a specific place on its desktop, in fact, similar windows were in identical spaces on the different desktops so that I could switch from desktop to desktop (product to product), and be able to pick up exactly where I left off, albeit with a different product. Compiles would run on multiple machines throughout the office.

In addition I would have a couple of other desktops with email clients, web browsers, system monitors, etc. loaded on them.

In crunch times, when we were merging two software streams, it was not unusual to have between 20 and 30 desktops, each fully populated with the programs listed above.

At one point I ran out of system resources to open up new windows. I doubled the number of ptys from 128 to 256 (it might have been from 256 to 512) to get around the problem, so I know for a fact that I was running with somewhere between 128 to 256 (or it might have been 256 to 512) windows open as I bounced from task to task and desktop to desktop.

Right now, at home, I only have 18 windows open across 9 desktops, but that's only because I just rebooted. Two of my regular desktops don't even have anything open on them yet. I don't even bother counting tabs in editors and web browsers.

Sanju,
You'll have to use the thread namespace and thread pooling, via the tpool namespace.
I haven't had to do any of that yet, but then again, it's scripting anyway, so have at it.

Me, I've got MSN messenger contact list, iTunes, Dreamweaver, Photoshop 7, 3 firefox windows open, one viewing this page, one on my website, the admin side, and phpMyAdmin for the server its running on, and another with ALA loaded on it, checking out some articles about "negetive margins" ;)

My tray has limewire, iTunes, MSN, wireless connection, wired connection, sound, remove hardware, hotsync, apache monitor, avast, QuickSet.

On my desktop PC I always have to have my start bar a minimum of 2 rows high or I can't read even the first word of the titles!

Im practically always running Dreamweaver, Firefox(prob with about 5 or 6 tabs open), Fireworks and then the occasional folder or 2 in the background. also running things like ICQ, MSN, BlackIce and anti-virus software on the taskbar

This comment was edited by Eric at 08:47 am

Ok, lets see...

Two Windows Explorers
Two MS Excel
One MS Word
One Notepad
Photoshop
Picasa
Homesite (only one file open)
Outlook Express
Outlook
Firefox (8 tabs)
AIM Buddy List
Three AIM conversations

Programs that are running but minimized:
iTunes, MSN Messenger, Google Desktop Search, Weatherbug

this is all on my home computer on a Sunday.