A few days ago an Apple loving co-worker showed me a new piece of software installed on his MacBook Pro laptop, Mac Saber. While I don’t have an embarrassing video of my co-worker to share, a quick search on YouTube yielded this overly happy Mac geek.

It is based on the sudden motion sensor built into the new Mac laptops that essentially detects when the laptop has moved a significant amount and tells the computer to spin down the hard drive so no data is lost. The purpose for this being built was in case you dropped your laptop, it was smart enough to know it was being dropped and spin down the hard drive and park the read / write heads to prevent any physical damage to the platters inside the drive. Also for those idiots who insist on walking around with their laptops powered on and open.

This technology isn’t new, it has been used for years in digital cameras to auto-rotate an image. These sudden motion sensors can be setup to know what level is and 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. Additionally, they are used in video cameras and cell phones, so they’ve been around for a while.

Mac users tend to be a little more on the geeky side and being based on the UNIX kernel; all the UNIX geeks are now writing small little apps for Mac users as well.

Yesterday my co-worker installed a new, frighteningly more geeky game onto his laptop based on both the sudden motion sensors and the built in microphone, Tilt Scream Pong. While this is more of a one person Pong game, it is unique in that, like the name implies, you tilt the laptop to move the paddle around. After a few seconds the ball speeds up and a second one is introduced. When you feel that you need a little help, simply scream out and the paddle grows in size. The louder you scream, the bigger the paddle, the easier it gets to play the game, that’s how it’s supposed to work anyway. Take a look at this chick going nuts flailing her spendy laptop around and screaming like an idiot.

Generally speaking, moving a laptop around in this kind of manor while turned on is not the best of ideas, but leave it up to those silly Mac users to come up with a way to look amazingly stupid while doing so. I’d strongly advise that, should you install either of these, you do not use them in public nor make videos to upload to YouTube for all of us to laugh at.

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