Rotate your screen on Tiger

June 6, 2005

Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus: Apple and Intel: A tale of rumors and truths

"Too, there's a hidden display option that lets you orient the screen in landscape mode in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger," a clue that such a device is on the way, I was told by others. (However, I can't get this secret option to work because my PowerBook doesn't support it.)"

I was intrigued by this so I tried to figure it out. It's easy!

  1. Quit System Preferences (if it's running)
  2. Launch System Preferences
  3. Hold Down the Option Key
  4. Click on the Displays icon

You'll see a popup for rotating the display... Standard, 90, 180 or 270. I've tried 90 and 180 and both worked! I wonder if it'd be bad for my powerbook to run it upside down... then I could build a nice stand for the PowerBook so it could run upside down and I could put a keyboard on the table where the bottom of the PowerBook (ie: its keyboard) would normally be. :-) It would kinda suck to have all the cables hanging down but maybe the stand could have some port repeaters in it. ;-)