Mac vs PC

The funniest part of these commercials is that the PC guy is a lot more interesting - and a better a actor - than the Mac guy. And I'm really only doing this to test out the new Flock 2, built on the Firefox 3 platform. Very fast and nice.

Leopard 10.5

Man, do I want it! I've never been one to update OS's quickly. I've got an old beige Mac that is still running 8.1 (that's a pre-OSX system for the uninitiated). When I got my Quicksilvers in 2002 I ran OS 9.2 for a couple of years because I didn't want to mess with OSX. Didn't use it until Jaguar. Then when Panther came out I waited a year before upgrading to that. Tiger I went to much faster, upgrading after only a few months after it came out because it had some cool features.

But Leopard I really want. All kinds of good things in it. The most important for me is the new Finder, which works much more like Mail or iTunes but I especially like the preview mode, Quick Look, in Finder. I bought a Finder replacement app, Path Finder, a while ago mainly because it had a good preview feature and the few times I've stopped using it and gone back to Finder I've quickly gone back to Path Finder because I really needed the preview feature. Works even better now that InDesign makes previews as well.

But my favorite feature is Back To My Mac. If you have a .mac account (and I do) you can connect to any other Mac of yours that is registered on .mac and use it like you were there. Which means while I'm at work I can open my home Mac and vise versa. There has been many a time I've left things at work I wanted to work on at home and forgot to take with me. Nothing for it but to wait until I get into work the next day. But with the new Leopard feature I can access the work Mac right from the Finder. You used to have to buy Apple Remote Desktop for that, a $500 program.

Time Machine looks great too. It saves a snapshot of your system and files every hour, but not the whole system only what is changed. Suppose you have a file you've been working on for days, at some point you realize you really want to go back to the version you had yesterday afternoon. You can flip through Time Machine until you find just that version of it and copy it back your hard drive.

And there are several other cool features, too. Preview will now let you combine several PDF's into one. Partition your hard drive without erasing it. Notes and To Do's in Mail look interesting. They have Dashcode, which is supposed to make designing Widgets easy, maybe I'll give that a try. Guest login so if I want to look up some porn without Darcy knowing it's all gone when that Guest account is gone :-) Or Private Browsing in Safari will do the same thing.

But my rule is to wait until at least 2 updates on a new OS for them to get some bugs out, but it's going to be hard. What does keep me in check is that there are several system enhancement apps I use that aren't fully Leopard compatible yet so I have to wait for them. Also, I just can't afford it right now which is what is really holding me in check.

Adobe Icons

I final got Adobe Creative Suite 3, so now I am fully Intel Mac-ed with my most important and most used applications. They are very nice and very fast - but man, what god-awful icons they came up with!!

This is a company whose main focus for years is making the top creative apps in the biz, every graphics pro uses these apps, and this is the best they can do for their own icons? Sheesh!

Fortunately, all is not lost for people are coming up with new ones to replace them with - Adobe Icons.

None of these are great but great isn't needed to be better than Adobe's icons. Actually, just being awful would be an improvement. The Adam Betts ones are my favorite.

How Fast is Your Mac?

Primate Labs, the blog for Geekbench, has tested the speeds of just about every Mac in the last 6 years or so up to the present. It's pretty spectacular. My old Quicksilver G4 comes in at 841. This is based on the score of a Power Mac G5 @ 1.6 Ghz being the base at 1000. My new iMacs came in at 2862, more than 3 times faster than the Quicksilver, and they probably used only 1 Gig of ram where I have 3. Tests at OWC show going from 1 Gig of ram to 3 is a better than 30% speed jump.

But it is very interesting to see where everything stands. At the very top is the new Mac Pro Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeons (which means 8 processors) at 8626. It better be that fast since a single one would have cost more than both my iMacs combined, which is why I didn't get one.

Zen of Mac

A friend of mine once told me that Mac people would rather click ten times than write a single line of code. To which I said: “Exactly the point!” Apparently very smart people like Macs as Noah Gift says in his article, the Zen of Mac:

“Why would I use a terminal, it is a mac, that is the whole point!”. That taught me quite a bit, as here was one of the most successful and intelligent people on planet earth and he “got” Mac. He didn’t want to think about his computer as his thinking time was spent in other areas like making sure Caltech continued to be one of the top Science Universities and doing research on curing AIDS.

I've been working on my new iMacs all weekend and enjoying the heck out of it, my kind of meditation.

The new iMac

Rumors have been flying about a new iMac coming out at the end of July, beginning of August. Of course, they were saying it would debut a month ago, too. People are speculating what it would look like and I found this picture, some one thought it would match the new iPhone. Looks very cool.

I need new computers now and was just looking to buy when I saw this rumor, now I'm waiting. It seems reasonable that a new one should come out, last revision was Sept. 2006, they just upgraded the MacBooks and the Mac Pro about a month ago so they should be doing iMacs soon. Some are saying they want it now for the back to school crowd, others are saying Sept. when Leopard comes out. I think sooner, in fact, they are behind schedule as far as upgrades, almost a year for the iMac when they usually do it every 6 months. I think it was supposed to come out a month ago but got pushed back because of the iPhone the same way Leopard got pushed back because they took their top people off of other projects and put them on the iPhone to get it out in time.

ShadowClipboard

One of my favorite Mac Apps is ShadowClipboard, and it's probably the one I use most after Path Finder. It's a multiple clipboard app, it not only keeps the last 20 or 30 copies to the clipboard it also allows you to set up clipboard sets. I have one just for web related stuff, another for working stuff, such as the DC legal line that must go on all DC Comics tee shirts, to a personal one.

Ever need to sign on to an FTP account for a download with info you got in an email? They always give you URL, Username and Password and each of these is on a separate line. To copy and paste with just the standard OSX clipboard you'd have to copy one from your email, switch over to your FTP app and paste it, then back to email to copy the next one and back to the FTP app, then do it a third time. Whew, I'm tired just writing about it. With ShadowClipboard you simply copy each item one at a time from email, then switch to your FTP app and paste them in one at a time, easy and simple.

I have to admit a special fondness for this one because I was a beta tester for the latest version. In fact, the latest update of the latest version was done because I was having major problems. I sent him many crash reports and he discovered a memory leak he didn't know was there, patched it up and did the latest version, worked great ever since. For my efforts I got a free upgrade to 3, which saved me, I think, $10. So this is the one app I actually have a financial stake in! I'm also fond of the company name which you will see if you click on the name at the top which links to the web site.

CandyBar

One of the things I wanted to do on this blog was talk about the OSX applications I like but I've fallen down on the job. CandyBar is a favorite, it allows me to change all the system icons to anything I want, I've also downloaded a ton of premade icons from the web and made a few myself with some other nifty applications and I just found the perfect folder icon which is why I'm thinking of it.

This is a screenshot of my external hard drive. The brown, round Japanese boxes are my default folder icons, much better than those ugly light blue things. Then I've put individual icons on certain folders so they stand out. One very cool trick is I have specific icons for each of my client's folders so I can find them instantly. My comic book guy gets superhero heads, Flash, Superman, Martian Manhunter, Batman and Wonder Woman. I did use a full figure of Green Lantern just for variety, other clients just get a single icon for all their folders. All my zip and dmg files are a cool black and unknown documents are cool blue orb instead of a blank sheet of paper. Other images are my defaults for Illustrator, InDesign and Preview apps.

Now, applications that mess with your system can be dangerous but the beauty of CandyBar is it merely replaces the icons at the system level then it's turned off, so it isn't running all the time to cause problems. It doesn't have to maintain the icons just put them in once and it's done. There are times I don't even open the app for months at a time, so I've had zero problems with it. It can be downloaded for free and used up to 25 times, after which you can no longer make changes but all changes will remain if you want them. So if you get all your icons set up just right within 25 uses you never have to pay for it, but I did because I'm always changing things around.

Procrastination

Blogging is a great way to put off work when you want to procrastinate. Here it is, Sunday, I'm at my home computer ready to work, football on my little TV, and what do I do? Post on my blog, of course.

One thing I want to do on my blog is talk about OSX applications I like, I have about a dozen good ones for making life easier for a Mac. Apple makes their basic system then third party people come in and develop all kinds of apps to do all kinds of things so OSX becomes as customizable as it's possible to be. Today I'm going to mention my number one app - PATH FINDER, that's the screenshot above. It's a Finder replacement, I didn't even realize how inadequate Apple's Finder was until I started using Path Finder. On the left I have a shelf for all the folders I use all the time, just to the right of that is all my hard drives and below that are folders of my current works in progress. In the middle is my usual Icon View, at the bottom right is my Preview, it will show a preview of pretty much any image file including Illustrator files (that's my granddaughter Ally in the preview). Above that I have all open apps which I can quit from PF one at a time or all at once, but I usually have that set for Info. It would be impossible to describe all of Path Finder's features except to say I can no longer work without it, and with version 4.6.1 they seem to have gotten all the bugs out and it's fast and never crashes. Check it out for yourself at Cocoatech, you can download it for free and test it for 21 days, must have Tiger. That's just long enough to find out you can't live without it and the $32.95 price is very reasonable and includes a full version of Stuffit 11.

Now, time to get to work. . .