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From: mystone@caen.engin.umich.edu (Dean Yu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Observations on the Portable
Message-ID: <463b736d.1285f@maize.engin.umich.edu>
Date: 15 Oct 89 01:18 GMT
Reply-To: mystone@caen.engin.umich.edu (Dean Yu)
Organization: Univ. of Michigan College of Engineering, Ann Arbor, MI
Lines: 42


  Well, we got our Portable (the third on campus!) yesterday, and after
having played with it for a while, here's my $.02 worth.
  Obviously it's cool.  The screen is everything it's cracked up to be.
At this moment, I'm about 10 feet away from it at a diagonal, and I can
still see what's on the display.  However, the images cast shadows, and this
can get annoying after a while.
  The keyboard is a Mac keyboard.  So if you like the Mac keyboard, you'll
like typing on the Portable.  If you hate the Mac keyboard, well...
  The trackball is the weakest point on the portable.  Let's face it.  It's
not a replacement for the mouse.  While I could move around ok, and the nice
big bar of a button is nice, it's still rather awkward.  My contention is
that it's because the hand motions to use the trackball is backwards from
what you're used to on the mouse.  Think about it.  On the mouse, you click
with one of your fingers, and you kinda of guide it around with your thumb.
(At least I do.)  On a trackball, it's backwards.  You move the ball around
with your fingers, and you click with your thumb.  The absolute worse thing
to try to do with the trackball:  try selecting something from a heirarchical
menu.  Go ahead.  How many times did it take y'all to get the right item?
Get the idea?
  The floppy drive gave out on us today.  I don't know if this is something
particular to our machine (we DID lug it around quite a bit) or if it's
something affecting the entire batch...
  The other fun thing was seeing how many programs try to use Color QuickDraw
on it because the portable has a higher machine number than a Mac II when
_SysEnvirons is called.  The one that gave us the biggest headache was
NCSA Telnet 2.3.  It's really odd how it works.  It tries to make a color
window and it fails, and it comes back with a 'Host not responding' message.
A few of us wound up patching out some of the color routines that get called,
and it worked fine.
  So, what's my final verdict?  Well, if you INSIST on taking a Macintosh
with you on the run, the Portable's good enough.  Me, I'd rather stay at my
desk and use my IIx with 5 megs of RAM, a 13" color monitor, a 19" black and
white monitor, and an EtherNet connection.  (So I'm spoiled... :)

_______________________________________________________________________________
Dean Yu                            | E-mail: mystone@caen.engin.umich.edu
Self-declared License Czar         | Real-mail: Dean Yu
University of Michigan             |            909 Church St
Computer Aided Engineering Network |            Apt C
     INCLUDE 'Disclaimers.a'       |            Ann Arbor, MI 48104
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