A IS FOR MAC

Everything is up and running.  The next thing I’m going to do is scrap some of these external drives, or see if I can stick the drives inside the machine.

They are annoying.  They run hot.  Noisy.  Take a while sometimes to start up.  And just don’t fit in with the new space.  I have a lot of work that’s piled up while I was going through the conversion, so I have to make a dent in that first.  But that is next on the list.  That and make a clone of the HD with Superduper (what a name) but highly recommended by Elliot and Macworld and several other enthusiasts.

Now you may wonder, since I have spoken about this at all, what’s the new machine like to work on.

In one word: speedy.  In two words, Speedy and Glorious.

The Lightroom application, which as you know is the workhorse of my workflow – runs like a dream with it’s 60,000 images, even though they are spread across three external (annoying) drives.  But any sort of work I do is just about instantaneous.  Simple things like exporting an image for the blog just speeds by in maybe 1/10th the time of what it used to take.

The masking brush, which was a horror with previous machines, has no lag, doesn’t do anything weird, and most of all, actually works.  Just about the only time I would go into Photoshop was because I needed to do a mask.  Usually something fairly simple.  I don’t see much use for it anymore.

I could be wrong, but there seem to be a few more options in the mac version, even though it’s also 2.6 which is what I was using in windows.

I still make small changes to the environment as I become more familiar with the OS.  Now I have the trackball in the mouse scrolling at the right pace (it was too fast before); right click on the mouse works.  The Wacom tablet is nice and speedy (though I did have to download the driver) which was easy to find and install.

So the main thing, that will come with time is simply getting used to the environment after decades in Windows.  For example, there are still simple things I don’t know how to do, such as where is the button to maximize a window?  (Don’t all answer at once).   What I’ve done is maximize them individually and then they re-open to that size with the green button… at least I think it’s the green button (they have a paradigm based on traffic lights.  Really.  Yellow, Red and Green.

I know how to customize the dock, and how to use the finder.

One thing that struck me was that when new applications are installed, or rather before they’re installed, you are asked essentially to login… sort of like what you’d do at an ATM.  Why in the world doesn’t Windows do something like that.  Windows will allow programs to install without even telling you about it until it’s finished.

Anyway – once I get the cloned backup and the drives installed – I’m going to feel better. (I still have backups of all data on external backups which are sitting in a cabinet now).

I still have some questions, but not many.  For example, is there a specific size that the internal drives I get should be?  Can I put a 2 TB drive in?  I feel like I saw something about using 1 TB drives… but that could just be some confusion on my part.

Oh, and in the firewall settings – other than turning the thing on – what settings should I use?

That’s about it for now.  Should sleep well for a change.

As far as the title of the post – now that I’m set up and actually turning out prints – I thought I would start with the alphabet and organize things that way a la Sue Grafton.