Several of the nicer flat-panel monitors support display pivoting, aka display rotation, aka "portrait" mode, aka the ability to grab your expensive new screen with both hands and twist 90 degrees such that the side edge becomes the top edge. You want to do this because your wide screen would then be tall, and you can preview or edit a typical printed document a full page at a time, or see more of a long web page at once, or just enjoy the novelty of a tall screen.

At least, you would be able to do this if you had a computer running Windows, or Mac OS 9 (or 8 or 7), and special software distributed with such monitors to detect the fact that you twisted your screen and flip everything accordingly. However, what appears to be the only company in the universe that writes such software has decided not to write it for Mac OS X.

Cursory googling brings up a MacSlash thread from earlier this year that provides almost no information, which indicates there really is no solution. Someone mentions a thingy that enables features of OEM Radeon video cards, of which this might be one, but it isn't clear if that does me any good. I'm amused by the suggestion of the technical feasability of arbitrarily rotating and zooming OS X windows in code, but any hack involving this technique would be rather advanced and not entirely useful.

So how 'bout it, Mac fans. Are OS X users stuck without portrait mode? Are there any solutions that work with Powerbooks? Is this really a hard problem, or is there just an OS X culture bias toward Apple Cinema Displays?