[Judge_Fire]

[instead of bumping this up in 'General Discussion']

Hey

While I'm busy advocating a swivelable revision of the iMac screen in this thread: http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ulti...c&f=5&t=005264

, I'd be interested, in the meanwhile, to find a way to flip my PowerBook's screen from 1024 x 768 to 768 x 1024, ie. Portrait, in OS X.

As stated in the above mentioned thread, single pages in Word, pages like this in a browser and especially portrait pics would of course benefit from being viewable 'sideways'.

With my PowerBook and a photo, no problem, I just turn my computer on it's side.

But with any other app, including Word, IE, Acrobat and MacMAME (Galaga!) it of course doesn't work. I want Full Screen A4/Letter pages!

Could a 'Portrait Mode' be achieved by just a software hack tricking OS X to think it's connected to a tall monitor, or does the display card screw up my dream?

With the new iMacs, this would be a funky feature, just swivel the screen and it autosets itself, but in the meanwhile I could enjoy stuff upright on a more booklike PowerBook (External KB needed...)

TIA for any ideas,

J

[absmiths]

I'm pretty sure that the video card or monitor (or both) would have to cooperate for that to work. I remember an old portrait display that Apple had that was just that - it was taller than it was wide and it worked perfectly. At some point I remember seeing a display that could swivel - when you crossed a threshold it switched orientation.

Besides, on most displays that would look terrible. It would only work on the TiBook and the new iMac display (Displays that are significantly wider than they are tall). I don't know of any others that could display 768x1024 even fairly reasonably.

[ 01-11-2002: Message edited by: absmiths ]

[chatwood2]

There was a hack made at the last machack (www.machack.com) that could do this called AppleTurnOver. The only problem was performance was awful, i'm sure the code needs much improvement. He released source, and told people he had no qualms about others modifying and using it. I think his exact words were "Take it, use it, claim it as your own."

I'll dig it up and send you if you want

- Chris

[crayz]

I just happened to still have Apple Turnover sitting on my HD. Here is the original package(app for G3 + G4, and source code).

If people are serious about this, maybe someone should start a SourceForge project. I think this is a very cool idea.

[ 01-12-2002: Message edited by: crayz ]

[benh57]

Looks like its not carbonized. Should be simple enough to carbonize.

I think for OSX you might have better results working with CoreGraphics on this, using some sort of transform matrix rather than doing it yourself. I'll play with it a little.

-Ben

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by Judge_Fire:
<STRONG>, I'd be interested, in the meanwhile, to find a way to flip my PowerBook's screen from 1024 x 768 to 768 x 1024, ie. Portrait, in OS </STRONG>

That sounds like a very involved hack... I don't imagine that the results you'd gain from the hack would be worth all the trouble you'd go through to accomplish it.

I don't see what purpose this would serve, though, and if anything, I think it would be most valuable to the person that develops this, as he would learn massive amounts of information about the OS and the particular parts of the OS he is trying to hack. Good luck, though. It is definitely an interesting endeveaur, though.