SplashBlog

Seems the folks at SplashData have come out with another Palm app, this time allowing you to post photos taken by a cell phone camera like the Treo's. I just downloaded it, but haven't taken the time to install and run it yet. I am, however, a registered user of both SplashPhoto and SplashID, and know that they do good stuff. I'll post something done with it here once I have something worthwhile (assuming I can get it to work with my Blogger account).

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...).