Macopinion

How to Play Poker on a Mac

The Road Warrior Mailbag -, June 9, 2008

Re: The Ideal Mac Notebook For Road Warrioring
Two-finger clicking in early Powerbook
You don't need two hands to right-click on a Mac notebook


___

Re: The Ideal Mac Notebook For Road Warrioring

From Stuart

Charles,

The point I was making about CPU intensive tasks on a 12" screen was that truly CPU intensive individual applications are also usually screen intensive. I say this in the following sense. Let's say that you are using Photoshop or Aperture, and you have even an average digital camera (like my point and shoot Kodak that shoots 8MP shots for less than $200USD) then you already have images that far exceed the resolution of even a 30" Cinema Display. God help you if you are trying to edit even a single one of those images on 12" 1280*800 or even 1440*900 (which do not, last I checked, exist) resolution display. Now imagine if that is a 12MP RAW image... sure, the RAM and probably the CPU will be up to snuff, even my poky Core Duo (I know, poky is a relative term, my old 12" PowerBook had a 1GHz single core G4, now that was poky in comparison) can handle something like that, but I would never want to do it on this screen. The same goes for Final Cut Pro, Blender, Aperture and any number of other large programs. You need screen real estate to really fully utilize these apps, and a 12" screen just can't quite deliver that in my opinion

-Stuart

___

Hi Stuart;

I understand your point. My digital camera's default resolution exceeds the ability of even the 1440 x 900 display in my 17" PowerBook to display the whole thing, and definitely the 1024 x 768 12" display in our old iBook, but I did manage reasonably happily when the iBook was my main workhorse for graphics work.

Incidentally, while I really like the crispness of the display in the PowerBook, I think its 106 dpi pixel density is the tightest I would want to go on a 12" display.

Anyway, my workaround was and still is the wonderful little freeware utility Toyviewer, which I use to quickly and slickly reduce the high-res photos to managable size for viewing, and of course Photoshop Elements lets you work in "Fit on Screen" mode. It wouldn't satisfy a graphics professional, but I find it works well for me.

Video editing is terra incognita for me, so I'll not venture any opinion about that.

Charles






Two-finger clicking in early Powerbook

From Jan

Hi Charles,

There might be hope even for you pre-two-finger-click Powerbook users. iScroll2 ( http://iscroll2.sourceforge.net/ ) adds both two-finger scrolling and two-finger clicking functionality to most Al Powerbooks out there.

Jan

___

Hi Jan;

Thanks for the tip. Looks interesting, although my G4 AlBook spends most of its time connected to an external keyboard and mouse, so I rarely use its trackpad. I hardly ever use anything but the trackpad on my two old Pismos, but alas they are not supported by this cool little hack.

Charles






You don't need two hands to right-click on a Mac notebook

From Brett;

Re #8: you don't need two hands to right-click on a Mac notebook. Hold two fingers on the trackpad and click with your thumb. Takes a few times to get used to, but I do it all the time.

Brett

___

Thanks Brett; I think that only works with the last two Aluminum PowerBook revisions and later machines, but that covers a lot of ground.

Charles


***



cmoore@macopinion.com

Note: Letters to The Road Warrior may or may not be published in The Road Warrior Mailbag at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context.

If you would prefer that your message not appear in The Road Warrior Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published.

CM