One of the features many are looking forward to in Leopard is resolution independent user interface, which means you can scale the user interface to give yourself higher resolution (more detailed) graphics.

But sometimes people have the opposite problem... they need more screen real estate, less resolution. This is the problem I've faced several times playing poker on my PowerBook G4 running Tiger. I have a 15" model with a 1280x854 pixel display. I can't play more than one table simultaneously without the windows overlapping significantly... not good. Not that I really WANT to play multiple tables often, I don't, but it's bugged me that I couldn't.

Until now, that is. :-)

I was recently reminded of the Quartz Debug application which comes with Apple's Developer Tools (Xcode). It lets you enable an experimental resolution independent UI feature in Tiger!

Most people will use that to increase the resolution of the UI, but I've used it to decrease the resolution... at a 0.75 factor, I can comfortably fit 4 windows on the screen...

In fact, at 0.5, I can fit nine poker table windows on the screen simultaneously with no significant overlap. Awesome! And, the cards and text are still readable. Mind you, I don't think I could possibly keep up with 9 tables, actually 4 is hard enough that I rarely ever try it, but the fact that I can do it without using a 2nd monitor is pretty darn cool. :-)

Check it out...