Now that I am all about digital photography (at least this week) I've noticed some limitation of having only 2GB of RAM. If anything will tax your system, be it PC or Mac, it is digital media. Aperture really puts some serious load on my Mac Pro. I wanted to see exactly how much. Introducing iStat. It's a great little application (donation ware) that comes in either Widget or application flavors.
It's no secret that OS X is way ahead of Microsoft Vista. One example is the Core image built into OS X. One of the advantages of having image support built into the OS is that you can handle large image files with less strain on the cpu and memory. It also ensures that the user experience is consistent across multiple applications. I'm no expert, but there is a reason many graphics professionals choose the Apple platform.
I have a rather long intro for today's software review, but hang in there. Alternatively, you can just skip to the section labeled "Review:" and ignore my theories altogether. I look back at the first half this decade as the age of digital music. MP3 players came into wide spread use, music file sharing exploded, and iTunes was born. From that period forward, music has become a more integral part of my life.
When Apple bought Coverflow to include in iTunes 7, I was both happy and sad. At first I was happy that iTunes finally had a nice interface for my album art. Sadly, Coverflow was no longer available (or so I thought). Coverflow downloaded album art from Amazon while iTunes uses the iTunes store (makes sense). I have some unusual CD's which iTunes just ignores the cover art for while Coverflow happily found.
Is there really any reason to have so many different media formats? WMV, mpeg4, QT, FLV... the list goes on. While Quicktime handles many of the most popular formats, there are still plenty that it doesn't and that really gets frustrating. Sure, I have VLC running on my Mac Pro, but it is far from a finished product. Why can't Apple just finish the supported format list for Quicktime? I even upgraded to Quicktime Pro to get some extra formats (like Mpeg2).
Simplicity is the Apple way. Sometimes that comes with a shorter feature list. Apple's Mail is a good example. Even your grandmother could use it with little or no help, but that is partly because it has so few features. Just try to get granny to have a go around with MS Entourage. Luckily, there are more than a few Mail users out there that have cobbled together some of the most asked for features in the form of add-ons and Scripts.
The latest revision of Parallels Desktop for the Mac is running butter smooth on my Mac Pro with 2GB of RAM. No hangs or crashes. In fact, right now, I'm using Ecto for Mac to write this post while watching DL.TV Episode 100 and installing software updates on Windows XP. To be more specific, the update is for my Sandisk 4GB flash drive. I can't recommend this drive enough.
Here's a simple use for Quicksilver. Create a new trigger with the first pane set to your music library. Set the second pane to "Search Contents" and now you can load any song while working in any application. Shouldn't iTunes come with this feature built in? Update: Another way to do this is with the iTunes plugin for Quicksilver. Invoke QS and start typing "iTunes", then right arrow in to see a list available options like browsing artists, tracks, genre etc.
If you're not using keyboard shortcuts and tricks, you are wasting precious time that could be better spent on YouTube. Here's a couple of my most used keyboard shortcuts for the mac. Safari Specific shortcuts to switch between tabs in Safari to jump to the search field in Safari command and '+' or '-' to change the size of text in Safari General tricks Hold down the ctrl key while scrolling the wheel/ball on your mouse to zoom your display in and out (I wish my PC had this) to lookup a word in the built in dictionary cmd and tab to bring up the application switcher Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Mac, OSX, Tip, Trick
Remember back when Steve Jobs introduced us all to Spotlight. He did a demo that seemed like magic. He typed in a word and Spotlight found audio, video, photo and text documents related to that word. I was amazed and rushed to get Tiger installed on my mac. What a let down when I realize that this only works if you have tagged your files with Spotlight comments.
