New PowerBook
I'm typing this post on my new PowerBook. I had planned to wait until the G4 PowerBook hit 2 GHz (or maybe 1.8 GHz -- I still feel Apple might come out with another speed bump of the PowerBook G4 before being able to move to a G5 due to heat and power considerations.) However, seeing the 1.67 GHz, 15-inch model introduced last week made me decide to not put off the move, not due to the speed increase (I'm moving up from a 1.25 GHz model), but for the availablity, via a build-to-order option, of a video card that is able to drive my 30" monitor.
There are a few other improvements that are nice to have as well. It has a faster, larger hard drive, an acceleration sensor to protect the hard drive in case of a fall, and a trackpad that supports scrolling by using two fingers on the pad instead of one.
That last feature is also something I appreciate. I have been using a utility named SideTrack on my PowerBook for some time now. It is a replacement for the Apple trackpad driver that adds several features. It supports scrolling by dragging on the edges of the trackpad (and can be set to support horizontal and/or vertical scrolling). I also discovered just today that the latest version also allows the corners of the trackpad to be programmed for things like right-clicking, extra-button clicking, etc. (I wish I had noticed that before). If you're a PowerBook user (I'm pretending here that people actually read this blog...), I'd recommend downloading a copy and trying it out for yourself -- using it can become second nature. As for myself, I'm going to try living with just the new Apple scrolling support for now, as I expect that using SideTrack on the new computer might disable the two-finger scrolling feature. But I might try installing it just to see.
One thing about the trackpad that is a little odd is that it's more sensitive to movement horizontally than vertically. The distance of motion will move the cursor further left-to-right than top-to-bottom. My previous laptop doesn't seem to behave that way (though it is using SideTrack...).
There are a few other improvements that are nice to have as well. It has a faster, larger hard drive, an acceleration sensor to protect the hard drive in case of a fall, and a trackpad that supports scrolling by using two fingers on the pad instead of one.
That last feature is also something I appreciate. I have been using a utility named SideTrack on my PowerBook for some time now. It is a replacement for the Apple trackpad driver that adds several features. It supports scrolling by dragging on the edges of the trackpad (and can be set to support horizontal and/or vertical scrolling). I also discovered just today that the latest version also allows the corners of the trackpad to be programmed for things like right-clicking, extra-button clicking, etc. (I wish I had noticed that before). If you're a PowerBook user (I'm pretending here that people actually read this blog...), I'd recommend downloading a copy and trying it out for yourself -- using it can become second nature. As for myself, I'm going to try living with just the new Apple scrolling support for now, as I expect that using SideTrack on the new computer might disable the two-finger scrolling feature. But I might try installing it just to see.
One thing about the trackpad that is a little odd is that it's more sensitive to movement horizontally than vertically. The distance of motion will move the cursor further left-to-right than top-to-bottom. My previous laptop doesn't seem to behave that way (though it is using SideTrack...).
3 Comments:
Sidetrack is great -- I've been using it for a few months on my own (old) G4 PowerBook. My only frustration with it is that sometimes it seems to have a hard time figuring out focus -- it will try to scroll inside a field rather than a window, or vice-versa. But it's still mighty useful. Apple could have just bought it. But then, they could have just bought Konfabulator.
Don't know if you caught this, but apparently it's possible to turn on Apple's two-finger scrolling on older Powerbooks as well:
http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/
Cool. I had read that some of the previous laptops were already shipping with a trackpad that supported two fingers, but hadn't seen this modified driver for them.
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