Optimal Aspect Ratio

With Connect 8 we lost the ability to adjust because we moved to Adobe Flex to create Connect. There is no option to do that with Flex. So, yes Flex allows us to take up the screen of the attendee.

The new way take a bit to get used to but most customers agree it is better visually.

Yes, 1024 drives me crazy and it is impossibly small for a large 17" screen that I have on my MacbookPro. The key point is that some folks have 1024 as their only resolution. As newer PC's get deployed that changes a bit.

Do you want to maintain visual parity on both the screens?

Visual experience across different resolutions used to remain consistent till Connect 7.5. But to maintain that Connect had to waste quite a bit of space from bottom-left side of the screen.

So, to avoid that wastage of space, Connect now occupies all the available space and allots it to each pod proportionally. Then each pod lays out it's content according to what seems fit. e.g. chat pod, notes pod, etc would re-flow the content to occupy all possible space. But share pod tries to maintain visual parity across all clients and hence has to resort to letter-boxing of pillar-boxing.

As a result, over-all screen space utilization get increased (as wastage of space is now done on pod-type-basis. Look and feel wise, the whole meeting room would not be consistent. But there should not be any drop in quality of content viewing.

So, all that being said, do you feel that viewing experience of the presentation across resolution is worse than previous version of Connect? (Personally, I had to break out of the comfort zone...and now feel that the new way is better).

Well, we recommend that 1024 x 768 be used. But that resolution is good on some graphic cards and not so good on others. It's the nature of the beast....some people love higher resolutions while others prefer smaller. Not sure there is a happy medium. We generally say use 1024 x 768 and then when you use screen sharing use the zoom to fit option to make it crispy clear.