Coty's Radio Weblog

	Friday, February 14, 2003

Tabletvision

A couple of months ago, I rambled something about how cool it might be if you could put a PowerBook screen into portrait orientation.

Just today I found this press release from ATI, which states quite conclusively that ATI Mobility Radeon chipsets support rotation of the display at ninety-degree angles at the hardware level. My PowerBook has a Mobility Radeon 9000.

So, who wants to hack into the Radeon kext and figure out which bit to flip to expose this feature? :) Sadly, the source to Apple's ATI driver does not appear to be available via the Darwin project.

How annoying to find out your hardware is capable of doing something neat, but the OS won't let you play with it... C'mon Slava, seriously, it's haxie time! [~stevenf]

Steven is right about how excellent a portrait mode would be. I'm not as interested in having it for working on doc. via a keyboard as I am in reading doc. As I mentioned a while back, I am able to accomplish this after a fashion by rotating PDF docs in Acrobat, but I'd really like to be able to do it with any app., and I'd like to be able to have it work by flipping the screen around on top of the keyboard like one of those Tablet PCs or my wife's NX70. I guess if you had that, you'd have what Steven wants, as well, as you could flip your screen around put it on some sort of easel and attach an external keyboard. The 15" Powerbook G4 is such a perfect size for this, IMO, that it frustrates me terribly that Apple doesn't just do it. Perhaps they are letting Microsoft test the waters.
comment [] trackback [] 5:26:51 PM

Thank you, Aaron Faby

Just wanted to post a public "Thanks" to Aaron Faby who was kind enough to package Apache and PHP into MacOS X installers. (He also has MySQL and Tomcat installers.) While it is terrific that I can compile almost anything to run on MacOS X, IMLO*, it is even better that I often don't even have to.

* L is for lazy.
comment [] trackback [] 3:43:06 PM