Here's a neat little trick that is sure to get some laughs. If you already knew this existed, please excuse this post, as I thought this was way, way cool. Open up System Preferences. Click on Universal Access. Click on "Switch to White on Black". Ta-da! Paradigm shift! Enjoy!
It's amusing how often I hear of people wandering into Universal Access and posting about how insanely cool some random feature of it is.
Thanks for saying that PBG5, I went in there to play and tried to turn on the keypad mouse. That's when System Prefs. crashed. Now my PB blinks for alert sounds
Remember that it's the simple pleasures in life that make things interesting. I was poking around, and BAM there it was. I didn't know, and I bet I'm not the only one who doesn't know. Edit: sorry I wasn't a computer geek quite as early as you guys. 2nd edit: weren't you guys surprised when you first stumbled across that feature?
Computers today are black-on-white, because that's the way print appears in physical media-- newspapers, books. However, because of the brightness of monitors, it should properly be white-on-black, white text on a black background. For the most part, people don't notice the problem... but people that have poor eyesight have a very hard time making text out. So, negative mode makes white text on black... try it, it's easier to read. if you're not familiar with command-lines, it may take a moment to get used to. paul
I took an ambien a little while a go. right now i am drinnking a bacardi silver. I think this feature is for my situation!!! You gotta ry it some time !!!
Yeah but when you reverse it all the panels are turned on, sucking up more power, try it and see what happens to your battery, whew!
Thanks for warning me/us, I would have turned it on on my 12" PowerBook G4 tomorrow at school. Believe me, I need my battery life to be as strong as possible.
i'll gladly try it. you give me some ambien, i'll report back. about 14 hours later. good ****, ambien. paul
About a year ago I knew a cooler trick, it didn't make it go grayscale and inverted, it inverted the whole mac while keeping the colours. It was crazy, I can't remember the key combo anymore.
i found that trick in jaguar once when i was shutting down my quicksilver all drunk and pushed the wrong button... i thought it was so cool i went to my local apple store and did it to most the demo computers... they couldnt flip it back and got kinda pissed at me... i fixed them and showed them what i did... its fun to show the apple store employees new tricks...
I thought that black was off, for LCDs, as in no light. Whereas white is a combination of R+G+B fully on. But then, I don't have a PB (nor an LCD of my own, save my work wintel laptop), so I can't comment on power consumption. Regardless, the inverted display is pretty cool indeed. Speaking of the Jaguar-era trick... In Panther, by default, doesn't the "Switch to White on Black" button make the colors invert, so that the traffic light control widgets become purple, blue, etc.? I'm at work stuck in front of the aforementioned wintel laptop.
For the inverted color effect turn on "Switch to white on back" and then click "set display to grayscale".
Additional Cool Trick, Use Cmd-Opt-Ctrl-8 to go negative greyscale. Now go to Universal Access and turn-on white on black, viola, you have an inverted screen, with color. Its cool. TEG
You know, I always knew the feature existed ...but I never took the time to use it. It is quite obviously much better on the eyes, and *is* cool enough to make a note of. The close, minimize and maximize buttons sure are ugly in negative color...
I love the zoom feature. I use it all the time to get in close on drawings I'm working on or to zoom in on photos etc. Sometimes it's good to get a quick zoom and then back out.