So I am about two months in on changing from my personal Windows laptop that was showing its five years of use. It was having stuck pixels and it was slow. It does not support WPA encryption, it has two megabytes of memory, an 80GB hard drive, and well it has had a rough life. So the L&T Jennifer got me a MacBook Pro at the end of July, 2007. It has been a little bit more of a change than I expected to migrate operating systems.
On the plus side, iTunes is a lot more integrated with the OS than it is with Windows. This is not really that surprising given that the iPod and iTunes was designed to sell more Macintosh computers. I have found that iTunes and iPod synchronization is a little better than it is on the Windows machines. Now as to what the differences are, that is harder to quantify but I perceive the differences to be a few things. It seems that the iPod sync process is faster on the Mac. I am using the USB port on both operating systems. Yes, I know that USB is a standard and the speed should be the same but the Mac OS seems to be faster to the iPod. Yes, they are both USB 2.0. It also seems to handle using the iPod as a disk better than Windows does.
On the negative side, it seems that stuff is too integrated into using the Apple software and the .mac service. An example of this is trying to send a page from Safari using Microsoft Entourage results in an error window saying that one can only send the link, not the content.
Why I am using Entourage you may ask, well to be honest I am not 100% sure. When I installed Microsoft Office it installed with it. I might try migrating over to Mail to see if it is any better. What is interesting is what happens when one gets a file with a PowerPoint included. When I double clicked it to open in Entourage, the result was a window telling me that I had to authorize iWork.
Click for larger image
Kind of interesting that it did not just open up PowerPoint. Rather I had to save the file and then open it through PowerPoint. It appears to me that the way the software association is setup is that one should just be using the Apple software or else it is not as integrated.
Then comes the fun of the Internet. I am still looking for a good FTP client. I have tried a few and well they all seem to have their little flakiness. I am still looking for a good client. I think that the next one I am going to look at is FileZilla as I am pretty happy with it on the Windows machines. Of course next I have to figure out what the version to use is. I also have found that Safari does not work as well as Firefox on some websites. An example is the control panel for my website, this includes the admin panel as well as Blog entries. Also Safari does not work with the Google toolbar, which I have gotten to like quite a bit. The chat stuff seems to work better on the Mac, but that is mainly due to iChat and Adium. I highly recommend Adium, I like it better than Trillian that I use on the Windows machines.
I am very happy though with the speed of Adobe Creative Suite 3 under Macintosh instead of Windows. I am comparing it to my work laptop which is about equal in power. It just seems to work faster.
I am a little disappointed by some of the stuff that is not as available on the Mac. I can not find a mapping software package that works with Mac. So I have a Garmin GPS but if I get rid of my Windows machine I will have no way to program it or load maps. I also have not been able to find a batch download program for SmugMug.
I have already purchased VMWare’s Fusion but still have not pulled the trigger on installing it yet, cause I have to have an install CD of Windows XP and all my XP installs are OEM and I am not 100% sure that they will work.
What is interesting is that while talking with the L&T Jennifer, she is not having any of these issues. I think that is mostly because I am a little bit more of a power user. Maybe the Mac is a better personal machine and Windows is a better work/power user machine.
Back to looking at FTP clients so I can download my website to back it up before doing a major update…
So at the hotel, I connected to the network. I try to be somewhat careful in how I connect and where I connect. I turn on the firewall on my laptops. I also use a Linksys WRT54GC
However what surprises me is how many people do not even think to protect their stuff on the network. The first surprise was when I started up iTunes and saw other iTunes libraries. I did not know I even had mine setup to browse for other libraries. But what really surprised me was what I was able to see on other machines.
Click for larger image
I did not even know that there were X Rated Podcasts! But I guess I should not be surprised.
So then I figured I would see what else was on the network. I was amazed at how many shared drives I could find…
Click for larger image
Kind of surprising just how easy and open some stuff is. I wonder if people do not know or just don’t care.
Tomorrow’s comment will probably be about some of the stuff that has had me confused on the Mac… more fun coming.
So I am sitting in the Red Carpet Club in LAX, or is it at LAX. Just sitting here minding my own business at a desk doing some work e-mail. This older gentleman comes in and a desk away he throws his briefcase onto the table and keeps on walking. I am not exageratting he litterally through his briefcase/bag onto the table and it went skidding across. It knocked the phone off the table and banged into the light. I figured okay maybe he is in a hurry as nature might be calling.
Nope from there his wife follows him in. She sits across from him in a chair and they start having a conversation at fairly high volume. To say she seemed like a nag is putting it nicely. She is telling him what to do and how to call people and make his schedule and the like. They are arguing across the aisle way. Then they decide that they need to make a call on the speakerphone. I am not kidding, one can not make this stuff up, truth is stranger than fiction. So I got to listen to them talk with their daughter as they were acting as their attornies about some homeowner’s assocation issue.
It is down right rude and comical and sad all at the same time.
Yup, travel resumes for work. I am currently in lovely Los Angeles, California. Pretty uneventful day just travel and visiting the site. Seems to be like all sites it is behind schedule. So the audio racks do not yet have power, and well they have not figured out the IP addressing scheme yet. However that is still better than expected given some of the previous job sites I have been on.
I got an e-mail from a friend after reading my blog that had an answer to a Mac question I had from a previous blog entry. So that was pretty cool and I got an answer on how to use Image Capture to turn off the “automatic” launching of iPhoto when I attach a camera that it does not do the right stuff with anyway. Kind of cracks me up. All the “plug and play” of Mac and despite the fact that the webpages say that a Canon PowerShot S50 will work with iPhoto and in the RAW (.CRW) format, it does not.
It just goes to prove that any operating software or software application can fail to live up to the hype of the marketing material.
These little idiosyncrasies are coming up more and more as I use the MacBook Pro more and more. Such as writing this blog works better under Firefox than it does under Safari.
I came down to St. Louis for the BMW MOA Open House. Somehow I am responsible for the PA. So I came down early to get ready for that and to talk with the home office about some of the Foundation stuff. So I figured while I am down here there is an Apple Store about 10 minutes away from the hotel. I might as well try to get some of my questions answered so I set up a One to One Session.
- I had questions about a few things. So I figured that would be a good way to get them answered. My questions were:
- Why doesn’t iPhoto import RAW format? It says it is supported on the website.
- How do I erase a CDRW? The only way I have found so far was to go to Applications, Utilities, Disk Utility; not the easiest thing to do.
- How to quickly create a readable DVD Menu?
- How do I turn off the autoimport of iPhoto?
- Is there a way to make it so that the computer does not go to sleep while doing a file transfer?
So I showed up at the appointed time and met with my trainer. It seems as if his solution was to look things up via Google when I had questions. Which is what I had already done. So I was not exactly feeling like this would be a successful visit. So let’s go through the questions in order and the results:
Why doesn’t iPhoto import RAW format? It says it is supported on the website.
Well it is unknown. However there was not a whole lot of investigation or looking into it more or asking anyone else. When we get calls like this at the office, we look into it and try to get more information to see if we can reproduce it. The answer was go to iLife 08. I asked what happens if it doesn’t fix it. I have Adobe Lightroom already and it does support it, so I am going to stick with that.
How do I erase a CDRW?
Yup that is the only way to do it; after searching on the web for a little bit.
How to quickly create a readable DVD Menu?
Well he seemed to know less about it than I did so I gave up.
How do I turn off the autoimport of iPhoto?
Well it should be under preferences. Nope, it is not there. So once again the answer is iLife 08.
Is there a way to make it so that the computer does not go to sleep while doing a file transfer?
Apparently inactivity is based on user input, not on processing or file transfers. So I can turn off the sleep feature but that also means it will not sleep after the file transfer is complete.
So I am little less enamored with some of the features and support from Apple. So I am going to look for solutions elsewhere at the moment. I might also try another Apple store and not on a Friday night.