360Desktop Solves My Media Center Control Issues

I’ve been having a few challenges with my multi-monitor HTPC setup. Control via iPod Touch with Mobile Airmouse is fantastic, and Vista Media Center is pretty slick. However, my problem is that occasionally I want to do a little more than just launch and navigate Media Center on my tv. The simplest example is web browsing. Firefox defaults to my computer monitor, where I use it 99% of the time. If I launch it via iPod remote while watching tv, it still of course displays on the monitor, not the tv. There is no simple way for me to get Firefox over to the tv while viewing the tv only. I can move my mouse over to the monitor, but since I can’t see the monitor I’ve no idea what I’m doing.

What I need is a “clone” mode where each display is a window to full control of all the PC’s features. I use only one display at a time, so everything can be on the same single desktop rather than an extended one. There is in fact a standard Windows clone mode where each display shows exactly the same single desktop, which would be the perfect solution except that clone mode forces each display to the same resolution. My monitor (1280x1024) and tv (1280x720) are not, and I do not want them to be, the same resolution. Scratch that.

I have read about several multi-monitor utilities, most notably the famed UltraMon, freeware taskbar extender Multimon, and open source DisplayFusion. I have not tried any because from the feature descriptions they do not seem to address my particular issue. They are geared toward the more typical multi-monitor setup where all screens are in front of the user and one is seeking to maximize the potential of spreading one’s computing tasks over a multiple display area. None address my one computer, two monitors, two rooms scenario (though I don’t believe this is an uncommon setup). Even with these applications the individual monitors act independently as their own encapsulated regions with their own functions, rather than a single space duplicated on two displays.

360Desktop is a very cool application I tried a while ago, but abandoned because I didn’t have much use for it and my old machine didn’t run it very well. It’s a twist on virtual desktops, but instead of replacing one complete screen with another, it stitches the virtual areas together into a seamless scrolling panorama. I never liked it as a virtual desktop solution because I preferred the instant complete screen swap rather than the prettier and more dramatic, but also more cumbersome and manual, panorama scrolling.

However 360Desktop’s design has a simple feature that makes it a pretty good solution to my problem. Instead of creating virtual desktops tailored to individual displays and their settings, 360Desktop creates a large virtual space and maps both displays, at their own resolutions, onto that space. All my apps can run wherever I want them and I can slide the virtual space side to side to move the view back and forth from monitor to tv. Now I can watch Media Center on the tv, and if I need to browse the web I can launch Firefox on the monitor and slide the tv display over to Firefox, and then slide it back to Media Center when I’m done.

I’m still not sold on 360Desktop as the most efficient control of virtual space, but so far it seems to be the only app that solves my issues.