Older Software Great for Netbooks

Josh Lowensohn of C|Net's Web Crawler blog writes:

One of the things that has been most-surprising about the advent of netbooks is that it has become less about the hardware as much as how mainstream operating systems and applications have had to adapt to fit within their confines.

I agree. I especially wish Google would adapt Picasa to netbooks, allowing us to collapse areas of the screen that we rarely need, like the lower fat bar that holds the Mail, Export, and other buttons.

However...

Last week I was on "vacation" visiting the in-laws, taking along my LG X110 netbook. I took with me the corrections from my copy editor for the new book I'm writing on the behalf of Bricsys.

I use PageMaker to write my books and ebooks, software that was obsoleted by Adobe several years ago. One of the things about PageMaker being so old is that it has tiny dialog boxes, some of them displaying just a half-dozen items at a time in list boxes. They are frustrating to use on the 23" 2048x1152 monitor I employ in my office.

But on a netbook: fabulous! I suspect PageMaker was designed to work with screens as small as 640x480, so the standard 1024x600-resolution sported by netbooks seems expansive.

Maybe old software will enjoy a resurgence, like LP records are.