The only thing that has been stopping me from replacing Rose’s elderly PC with a Mac has been her rotatable LCD display which lives permanently in portrait mode. For somebody who does as much writing as she does, the ability to see a whole A4 page at a time is an amazing benefit and one which, sadly, has not been available under OS X. The chief providers of ‘screen-pivoting’ software, Portrait, stopped supporting the Mac after OS 9.
I was thrilled to hear, therefore, that there may now be an alternative, at least for some Macs. If you buy the new ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card, which is really designed for heavy-duty gaming rather than word-processing, it has a feature called VERSAVISION, which is hardware-supported screen rotation. The Radeon is also available as a factory-build option on the new PowerMac G5, but that seems overkill for what Rose needs. I’m going to try and get a G4 and try this out.
Anyway, the strange thing about all this was the ridiculous feeling of elation I felt as I walked to the office yesterday thinking about how I might finally get Windows out of the house…
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