Coding with a 13" screen

[Korialstrasza]

Hey guys,
I'm thinking about a laptop I can take around with me to class and work, so I'd like it to be nice and small. The 13" macbook really sparks my interest.
My main concern though is how it would fair for short/medium periods of coding with a <15" screen. Not talking more than a few hours. At 13", would I be straining my eyes a lot?

Thanks for the insight

 

[jukem]

Well, there was this guy in one of my cs courses about a year ago that would code on his 13in macbook all the time during lectures. I asked him once if he felt hindered by having such a small screen, he said it was actually not a hassle for him and he preferred portability over screen size when coding on the go.

 

[CFlux]

Its hard to say, so most 13" screens are pretty low res so you won't strain your eyes any more then on a 15 but where you get into trouble is you can put much less on the screen at the same time. So its really your prefrence. If you can manage with not seeing as much of your code at a time then it should work ok. I know it would drive me nuts. At work I use dual 20" screens (1600x1200) on my development box and I wish I had a 24" and a 20 on there.

So I guess you'll ahve to look at your work style how much will it impact you to be able to see less at a time.

 

[0ptional]

I ran VS.net 2k5 in Parallels on XP Pro SP2 on my MacBook for all of CS140, 141, 145, 103 and 225 so far...

I do enjoy going back to my 1920x1200 desktop for coding when classes are out though.

Of course it's just or class and sometimes labs as I dislike using the school computers just... iunno because. I'll code on my MacBook then just USB-key it to the school computer to turn it in.

I could have ran it in BootCamp as well, but I didn't have any speed problems and the stuff I was compiling in class was pretty small anyway and I was generally done before the teacher with the examples anyway...