SketchUp & Laptops

[tim rowledge]

>You have been able to use multi-button mice with the Mac since Mac OS X was first released.

Of course; in fact for much longer than that with some effort installing extensions etc under dear old MacOS 7/8/9. The place where it is still a bit of an irritant is on laptops (to return to topic!) and there doesn't seem to be much change coming there. You just have to decide to tolerate pressing the option or command key on occasion. It might get annoying if you were trying to use it full time, and I suspect you might even start to feel it in your thumb joints if you're as ancient and creaky as me.
One neat thing you can do with OSX and a laptop is plugin an external keyboard and mouse/tablet plus a nice big desktop display, close the lid and treat it as a small desktop machine. When you travel just unplug everything and carry it away. No having to sync files or worry about forgetting something. I suppose WinXP might do something similar but I Don't Do Windows Anymore.

[Pam Niedermayer]

I've been using Powerbooks as my main computer for about 7 years, software development in the old days before the world retired me on 9/11, these days for writing and drawing in Sketchup. For writing, the 15" is overkill, an iBook would do, but for SU the 15" PB is pretty darn good. There are times I could use more pixels, would probably have gotten the 17" if I'd known, but it's manageable.

Pam