A Month with a Mac - Part II: The Mobile Experience
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 24, 2005 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Display and Fiber Optic Keyboard Lighting
The display on the PowerBook is one of its strong points. While it doesn't hold a candle to Apple's desktop Cinema Displays, it is quite strong as a notebook display. I'd say that the display on the PowerBook G4 is one of the best, if not the best, display which I've ever used on a notebook. The 15" display has a native resolution of 1280 x 854, which is what you can expect from just about any current generation 15.2" widescreen display.Apple outfitted the Powerbook with ambient light sensors to control two things: the brightness of the display, and the fiber optic backlighting of the keyboard. The light sensors for the screen are located behind the grilles for the speakers, on the left and right of the keyboard.
Both features can be overridden, but their pros generally outweigh their cons. The best example of their use occurred while I was writing this very sentence on a flight over to Taiwan. Given the length of the flight, there are many times when the lights in the cabin are dimmed as well as brought back up again. I started writing while the cabin lights were dimmed, which caused the Powerbook's sensors to activate the keyboard lighting and dim the screen. About two hours before I landed, the cabin lights were turned up for breakfast service. Almost instantaneously when the lights went up, the brightness on the screen increased (to compensate for the higher ambient light) and the illumination on the keyboard turned off. The same types of features are useful for office environments when the lights are turned on after the end of a presentation, or in a school environment when the same occurs.
The fiber optic lighting on the keyboard is fairly impressive. Instead of being lit by a few LEDs causing bright spots on the keyboard, the face of each individual key is lit using a fiber optic network of lights. Only the letter or number on the key is illuminated; for example, the majority of the F key remains unlit, but the letter "F" itself is lit creating a very unique effect that is very well appreciated by someone who has to type in the dark a lot on airplanes.
We apologize for the blurriness of the image, but you get the point.
The fiber optic lighting isn't without its weaknesses; for starters, it does help contribute to the cost of the PowerBook, but that's not a huge issue.
You can control the degree of lighting by using the F8 - F10 keys on the keyboard. F8 will turn the keyboard lighting off, F9 will decrease the level of illumination and F10 will increase the level. Depending on how you have your keyboard settings configured, you may or may not have to hold down the "fn" key.
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garote - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
A note about Exposé usage on a powerbook:I know it's unorthodox, but consider using the 'Fn' key, on the lower left, for activating Exposé. It's easier to reach in general, but especially easy to use when you want to drag an icon/file _through_ an Exposé operation (via hold-release), from one window to another. Especially if you're right-handed.
You can still use Command-up/down for home/end, Command-left/right for begin/end of line, and Option-left/right for next/prev word. You'll have to invoke F6 to use the keypad, however, and you'll lose quick access to page-up/page-down.
The big difference, of course, is that you'll lose access to the regular invocation of the FN keys - however, I find that I never want to use the FN keys anyway, unless I want to embed a bunch of Photoshop macros in them.
Try it for a while. If you're a heavy Exposé user, you may find the change quite pleasing.
adespoton - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Hi Anand; just thought I'd clarify a statement you made in your conclusion:"Unless you do a lot of .NET development on the road, just about anything you use your laptop for is available under OS X...."
For anyone in this situation, Project Mono is available for OS X at http://www.go-mono.com/archive/1.0.5/macos/MonoFra...
Of course, this doesn't give you *all* the .NET bindings etc., but for basic .NET development it works quite well -- and has the added benefit that you can test the programs out under OS X as well, without resorting to emulation.
jayemcee - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Thanks for a nicely balanced article. The speed issues tend to fade a bit (especially pure cpu speed) when looking at the way the system operatesand how it helps productivity. Less downtime for the system (my uptime has been continuous except for reboots at software updates times). Drag and drop into and between applications make the system appear very elegant to me and a bonus is when I want it... there is BSD *nix underneath OS X.The hardware is as good as it gets for the price and I do not feel cheated by Apple. Of course, there is also that indefinable Apple experience that you get when opening the boxes of a new piece of apple hardware. I guess that I am addicted to that as well. :)
You write well and many PC magazines would do well to emulate your methods of testing the unquantifiable variables of all machines that they test and then write about... for public consumption.
mattfaulds - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Great article. Good to see someone weighing things from a bablanced point of view.Would like to reiterate the greatness of Sidetrack (www.ragingmenace.com)
I have an iBook G4 and have changed the button to a right click button, the corners of the tap pad to exposé functions (and a right click corner) and a scroll on the right side. It's very customisable and very stable.
Apple really really should pay him lots of money and incoporate the optional function as standard. You need it with the limited space on a laptop.
Cheerio
waterbug - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Anand,Another thing to compare between OS X and Windows is sleep/wake behavior. Try this at home:
Connect both your Wintel laptop and your PowerBook to a WiFi network with DHCP and verify connection by opening a browser. Close both lids for 5-10 seconds, until you're sure they're both asleep. Open the lids.
You should be able to click a link on the PowerBook within 5 seconds of seeing the LCD come on. If you have a static IP, it'll be even faster.
On my XP laptop, it takes anywhere from 10-45 seconds to reacquire the wireless signal, figure out the encryption, reacquire a DHCP address, and then finally be able to do anything.
It sounds trivial, but imagine this scenario: imagine you're working with your laptop in the kitchen, and you decide to move to the dining room. Do you close your laptop, or walk over to the dining room with it open? With my Dell, I walk around the house with it open. With our iBook, I close it even to rearrange things on the bed. It's not a huge issue, but it's one of those "little touches" that makes for a more satisfying ownership experience.
lookmark - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Nice article, as always. I too am slightly disappointed by my 15" PB's wireless range, and hope Apple is able to improve it in fure models.Just want to chime on the fabulousness of Quicksilver, which is like just a little taste of Tiger's Spotlight, focused on launching (or more, if you want). Well, well worth checking out.
I too started with the Applications folder in the Dock -- didn't we all? -- but Quicksilver is so much better it's quite astonishing, and considering it's completely free and open-sourced all the more so. Apple is clearly taking notice as well.... it's been reported from the latest Tiger builds that the (customizable, of course) shortcut for hitting Spotlight quickly is now command-space, a la QS.
jim v - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Actually, the ethernet port on the PowerBook is 10/100/1000bcstanding - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
I am one of those guys that switched from PC to Mac (3 years ago). This article (with Part I) is one of the most insightful and unbiased articles I've ever read on the subject of the Mac User Experience. Very well done!I also thought I'd chip in an idea - if you don't have quite enough RAM, you may want to leave apps open (just hide them) instead of quitting them. OS X seems to be faster when swapping a program back into memory than starting it outright. I'm on a 3 year old PowerBook, though, so this may not be applicable for faster Macs...
davechen - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
As an old school Unix programmer, I've always hated keyboards that have a large caps lock and a small control key (as most do these days). I use control a lot more than caps lock. Hell who ever really uses caps lock.So on OS X, I'd be lost without uControl. It's a little control panel that allows you to remap modifier keys (along with a lot of other things). Here' the link:
http://gnufoo.org/ucontrol/ucontrol.html
jsares - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
I second and third the suggestions for SideTrack. Great shareware from a great guy.