Entries in the Cult of Mac category:
It’s the App Store, stupid
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Last year, I resisted the temptation of the first generation iPhone. This year I’ve succumbed, and my iPhone 3G is on the way (my cunning plan to wait a week after the launch and just walk into an AT&T store and pick one up as been scuppered by the strong demand).
So what’s changed? Part of it is that my resistance has been worn down by the many reports and sightings of people happily using (and raving about) the phone. Also, we’re now just out of contract with Sprint, so there’ll be no early termination fees for jumping carriers.
But the 3G version of the phone also offers some solid reasons to jump on board now.
Apple Certified Pro
Monday, June 30, 2008
Last week I went to all4DVD in Orange County south of LA for a 2-day training course in Apple’s Aperture. And when the training was over I took the certification test, and passed. So I’m delighted to say I’m now an Apple Certified Pro Level 1 in Aperture.
The course, taught by Aperture Master Trainer Victor Maldonaldo, was pretty intense - it’s been a long time since I spent 2 days solid doing one thing in front of a computer, let alone trying to absorb all the information and instructions coming at me.
iPhone? No thanks
Sunday, July 01, 2007
it might seem an unlikely thing for a devoted Apple fan like myself to say, but I really don’t want an iPhone. I’d take any number of products from Cupertino with no bother, but there are 2 main reasons I’m holding off indefinitely on the phone, cute and all as it is, and as impressive as the touch-based UI seems to be.
I don’t need one
This is the boring but true reason - I carry my laptop with me most of the time, when I’m largely at the office (within striking distance of several wi-fi enabled cafes if I want to wander), or at home. I don’t have a long commute, I don’t travel on business (except riding my bike to visit clients), and I often carry a real camera with me in addition to the computer.
Color management - welcome to a corner of hell
Friday, June 22, 2007
I must confess to have been only vaguely aware of the wide differences in the way colours are displayed online - until recently. Or rather, I was aware of the differences from testing sites in different OS and browser combinations, but I was only vaguely concerned - Macs’ 1.8 gamma meant a difference from PC’s 2.2, and every now and again I’d get a photo to edit that had a colour profile attached, but that was it.
And I was partly right about this - unlike the print design world, where color profiles for monitors, printers and the like are carefully controlled, and there’s a real struggle to get color matching as right as it can be, in the online world, we have to be a little more flexible. Almost all of our audience wouldn’t know a calibrated monitor if it ate their lunch, and most browsers (the programs, not the people) are a sorry bunch that don’t support color management anyway. It’s a sRGB world, for better or worse. Or so I thought.
Broken Windows
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Over at Macworld, Rob Griffiths outlines how badly infected his Parallels-powered version of XP became in a hurry.
I ran AVG and AdAware on the version of Windows XP I have on my Mac, and found over 30 problem files that needed clearing - bots, trojan horses, viruses: all that malarkey.
What was startling was that I’d hardly used it - maybe a total of 6 hours for site checking over the last 6 weeks. Everything was tidied up quickly, but it makes you realize the kind of nonsense Windows folks have to put up with all the time.
Oh, and the extra one gig of memory I put in the MacBook Pro now makes things much speedier when I’m running both OSes.
Hell Freezes Over
Monday, January 22, 2007
OK, so it’s happened. As you can see, there’s Windows XP running on my new MacBook Pro.
Using Parallels went pretty well, except the XP disk I got was corrupt so the installation hung. Welcome to the world of Microsoft.
Another disk installed perfectly, and soon I was opening sites in IE6, and adjusting them in TextMate on the mac, refreshing and seeing the changes.
What’s a GTD boy to do?
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
So I need a new GTD solution. Christmas came a day or two early, with the arrival of my shiny new 15” MacBook Pro (a refurb bargain that cost me only slightly more than the black MacBook I was looking at). This simplifies my life greatly (as well as looking very nice on my desk), as before I had a Mac Mini G4 at work, and an old first-gen Titanium Powerbook at home (where I probably do about a third of my work).
Now I can just carry the MBP back and forth and have all the files (and processing speed) I need, wherever I happen to be. But it creates a GTD problem for me (especially with this being the New Year, and I’m all keen on setting up good working practices for 2007).
The Sad Death of the Album
Thursday, October 12, 2006
The debate about the randomness (or otherwise) of iPod’s shuffle has got me thinking about how the evolving technology of music has changed the way we appreciate the art.
I’m a child of the early seventies, so my music collection spans several media - first cassette tape (now almost all gone, thank goodness), then vinyl (which I still have, with a new turntable to play them and rip them to MP3), then CD and now digital download.
Two screens good
Friday, August 25, 2006
I’d read all the stuff about efficiency being improved by having more screen real-estate, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.
For some things (like graphic design) I could see the benefit - arrange your palettes and toolbars as you like, having a scratch pile of raw images or sketches off to one side, and then the main area you’re working in - less scrolling, less window shuffling.
But for other things, like article writing, I figured too much stuff going on would be a distraction. You just want to focus on one thing, right?
But I took the plunge and gerry-built a 2-screen solution for my Mac Mini using the unfortunately-titled Dual Head2Go.
iPod usability problem
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
One side-effect of my plans to rip all my CDs (and vinyl, too, when I get round to it) has been the discovery of an annoying usability glitch when using 2 Macs and one iPod.
My basic setup is like this:
- Mac mini (at work) with all my tunes on it (and backed up to an external drive)
- old Titanium Powerbook (at home) without enough hard drive space to hold all my tunes
- 20Gig 3G iPod
Sounds simple enough right? I want to auto-sync the mini with the iPod, and then just plug the iPod into the powerbook at home (i.e. not sync at all), so I can stream the songs from the iPod through iTunes to the hi-fi across the room. Straightforward. Or so you’d think.