Categories
Archive

Rotating iMac Screens


If you have a 15-inch LCD monitor, try this experiment: using Acrobat Reader, open a PDF file meant for printing on letter-size paper. Resize the window so that it fits the screen. Choose ‘Rotate View Clockwise’ or ‘Rotate View Anti-Clockwise’. Now physically rotate your monitor so that you can read the file. Isn’t that nice? You can see a whole page of text at a time: no more of that infuriating scrolling.

This brings me to my point: wouldn’t it be great if the joint connecting the screen to the computer on the new iMacs could pivot, making it easy to switch from a landscape to a portrait format for text viewing and editing? It’s an amazing missed opportunity, but we can always hope that they’ll introduce it in a future generation.

I think it would be very popular: most people who use a computer use it for text editing and viewing, and in my opinion the portrait format is just better for those applications. They could even write a fancy animation into Mac OS X to go with the format change. An unbeatable new reason to own a desktop computer as well as a laptop!

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.