Mike Schaeffer's Blog

This post spoke to the use of ClearType to improve text rendering in vCalc. This "after" screenshot was taken from a laptop running ClearType:

Since ClearType depends on the unique properties of LCD's, it won't look as good on a CRT. (I still think it looks better than normal, though).

Lately, I've been finding myself spending lots of time toggling between two Excel spreadsheets to make edits. This little macro makes it easy in Excel 2000 to toggle between two spreadsheet windows. I reccomend you bind it to a keystroke.

 Option Explicit
Dim lastWindow As Variant
Sub HereAndThere()     If IsEmpty(lastWindow) Then         Set lastWindow = ActiveWindow     Else         Dim currentWindow As Window         Set currentWindow = ActiveWindow         
    lastWindow.Activate
    
    Set lastWindow = currentWindow
End If
End Sub 

Here's how you use it:

• Run the macro once to save your current location.
• Switch to your other spreadsheet
• Now, running the macro will switch back and forth betweeen the two worksheets.

The "saving excursions" in the title is a reference to the save-excursion special form in Emacs Lisp. This macro isn't quite the same (and not nearly as powerful), but it reminded me of the Emacs feature. If it turns out to be useful, I might generalize my little macro to include some of the capabilities of Emacs' save-excursion.

This is a little add in for Excel that takes formulas and reformats them in a more readable style.

I've been shopping for a laptop recently. My target specs are these:

• Any modern laptop processor is probably adequate.
• 1GB RAM.
• 30-60GB Disk.
• A DVD writer would be nice, but not necessary.
• 14-15 inch display, the highest dot pitch I can find.
• Reasonable 2D graphics performance, 3D is not that important to me.
• Touchpad pointing device.
• 3 year warranty, accident insurance is a nice plus
• Long battery life, >3 hours.
• Reasonable expectation of 2-3 years of reliable life.
• Can run a couple small Windows applications I need to do my job.
• Can run MS Office.

That's a long list, but nothing on it is very demanding. Let's see how close a couple vendors get:

	Dell D610	Thinkpad T4x	Apple 15" PowerBook	Apple 14" iBook
CPU	Pentium M, 1.6	Pentium M, 1.8	G4, 1.5	64, 1.33
Ram	1GB, 2 DIMMS	1GB, 1 DIMM	1GB, 2 DIMMS	768MB, 2 DIMMS
Hard Disk	60GB	60GB	80GB	60GB
Optical Disk	DVD+/-RW	DVD+/-RW	DVD+/-RW	DVD+/-RW
Screen	14.1", 1.5MP	14.1", 1.5MP	15", 1MP	14", 0.75MP
Warranty	3 year	3 year	3 year	3 year
Insurance	3 year	none	none	none
Price	$1,893	$2,306	$2,648	$1,948

So, as ever, Apple is the most expensive choice, even when compared to nicer PC's like the ThinkPad.

Maybe the thing that suprises me the most about this is that Apple isn't even close to the bleeding edge of display technology. Given the energy they've put into OS X's desktop rendering pipeline, I'd expect them to have displays that could compete with Sony's XBrite or maybe the 2MP 15" widescreen that Dell makes available on the D810. OS X could drive those displays better than pre-Avalon Windows. Maybe this is a artifact of the suppliers Apple is using?