Buy a new macbook with caution!

So, Logic has pretty much turned me into a mac regular, so I decided to sell my pc laptop, buy a macbook and parallels and just use my macbook to run both OSes. Sounded like a solid plan, until a friend of mine with a brand new macbook and a Canon HD camcorder complained about how imovie wasn't recognizing her camera. After more talking and research, it turns out that my horror story with having bought firewire audio interfaces before figuring out that almost NOBODY other than super expensive Apogee has drivers that truly work on Leopard. My alesis board gave me grief, my Mbox made me think my whole mac was rotten. A friend's lended MOTU interface worked, but didn't have any of the features I wanted. Wow. All dressed up and no place to go. After I bought my Tascam audio/midi interface and logic shuttle control surface, I'd figured out that I'd just have to downgrade back to Tiger. Before doing that, I used a backup Tiger image from an external hard drive, with much success.

This is the MAIN thing I REALLY love about macs. The ability to boot off of another drive, or another operating system. If a PC had a workaround like that, I'd still be a pc only person, Logic or not. But macs give you the option of making a clone with a free program like Carbon Copy Cloner, and dealing with your headaches later, granted you keep your data someplace accessible.

Back to the story before the story. So 3 interfaces and one downgrade later, I'm a happy mac user. My friend's dilemna with the camcorder made all the Leopard terrors come back to me. What Apple advised me to do is to sit around and wait for the manufacturers of most audio interfaces to figure out how to make good drivers for Leopard, and not be productive (EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of all the advertising) or through money at the problem (the usual mac solution - did I mention I only got a mac when I was rich enough to deal with how much cash outlay it requires? It's amazing how many problems money solves). Actually, I got this comment from an Apple customer relations person (which explaines my love-hate, contentious relationship w/mac and stalwart supporters) "well, I guess those manufacturers had better hurry up to keep up with us?" What, are you serious?

Well all that lead me to this creepy discovery: macbooks purchased after October 2007 CANNOT be downgraded to Tiger! So if you buy a shiny new macbook, you can't workaround Apple's Leopard limitations. You're a paying guinear pig on a still-relatively-new operating system. Works fine for average people who don't need to be productive other than surfing, checking email and writing a few word processing documents. For the other portion of creative professional, on whose backs mac has built their brand, this is unacceptable.

For pride's sake, you refuse to admit to the limitations of your Leopard product, so you're forcing people to switch from a nearly bulletproof Tiger, to a so-so Leopard? They don't have any choice or say in the matter? Are people told about this when they purchase the laptop? I wouldn't have known if my friend's problem hadn't happened first. I would've been REALLY upset with having a $1500 doorstop that I couldn't use for the sole purpose I bought it for.

So due to the timing of when I entered the mac market, I get screwed and now HAVE to purchase my mac from some random person on Ebay. Nice. Anyhow, I didn't buy it yet, so no harm no foul for me. But I wanted to let you happy shoppers who are in the market for a new mac laptop (I hate referring to mac jargon, it makes it so hard to search for stuff in Ebay, Google or craigslist - if I want some type of mac laptop, I have to search separately for macbook, powerbook, ibook, and then I also have to go lookup what the freak the differences are, vs. searching for laptop or Vista laptop at worst. Don't even get me started on trying to find help for mac "mail" in google. Could the name be any more generic?)

If you need a mac laptop for use with third party AV hardware, check first to see if it REALLY works before you purchased the laptop. Although a lot of sites says they have leopard drivers, if you do a little digging in google, you'll find out if your device ever really works for anyone.

Wish me luck with Ebay!

The Skeptical Switcher's Take on alternate color picker apps for mac:

When I switched to mac, I found disturbing the general disruption to my workflow with the lack of font management and previewing, previously available in Windows (freeware and Shareware programs available, not OS-native). I'll address my solutions to font management in a later article. For a platform so touted as a DESIGN friendly platform, I've been floored by the lack of functionality in Tiger in regards to previewing pictures and fonts, and then underwhelmed by Leopard's prettiness and improved preview capabilities, but at the expense of functionality and stability.

However, seek and ye shall find, and in that spirit, I've found some great, great finds for color scheme management on the mac platform. And so far, most problems I've had on the mac are easily enough solved if I'm willing to spend a little cash.

So I'd been a bit bummed out about losing two of my favorite color scheme programs: Tiger Colorimpact (my tool of choice) and Colorschemer, my second choice. Color Schemer is available for mac, but doesn't export the palettes to a format that the native mac colorpicker can use, so in programs using the standard mac colorpicker, it takes many extra steps to used these predetermined schemes. Okay, maybe not so many extra steps, but a LOT of extra clicks. And for someone who uses their hands and arms for a living, every keystroke counts!

Additionally, I was confounded by how basic the mac color picker was. It's been so long since I've actually had to deal with that horrible Windows native color picker, that I forgot how deficient the native tools given to us by Apple and Microsoft are.

So in my quest, I found some really, hidden gems that not many people seem to know about. I am the queen of "pimping my mac," so I found these two things that caught my eye:

Shades and
Painter's Picker.

Of the two, Painter's Picker is more heavy duty. It's a color scheme program in it's full glory: complementary, split-complementary schemes on the fly.



Shades is a little more monotone (get the pun?) in it's usage. It just gives you varied shades on the selected color. You can make a few alterations, but it's nowhere as full-featured as Painter's Picker, although the GUI look is much prettier.


The beauty of both of these alternate color pickers is that they show up in all cocoa apps like ilife, iwork, Photoshop (after you toggle a setting to use the apple picker and not photoshop's native picker). Any app that displays the standard mac colorpicker, will place icons for these third party pickers after the standard mac colorpicker choices. Cool, right?

Look at where on the colorwheel bar and how they show up in your average mac application:

After the 5 icons for the standard colorpickers, I have icons for the following color pickers: (left to right)
Tangerine, Shades, Colorate's Hex Converter/Picker, and Painter's Picker.

And for prices that don't break your wallet, even though they are starting to add up (see a future article of mine called, "The Real Cost of owning a Mac") I'm still fairly satisfied. I might even buy them both.

Some other solutions that I'm not in love with or haven't really tried so much thus far (will update) are:

Tangerine (Priciest $39.95) and seems highly powerful, yet unwieldy so far...Seems to be great for STORING schemes, but offers no help creating schemes other than just picking with the magnifying glass or entering the color values numerically. That to me isn't very great for workflow. I'd rather just create a colorschemer scheme, export it as a gif, put the picture on my desktop or in my document temporarily and use the mac dropper to pick the colors out manually. There doesn't appear to be a way to export the color schemes either, so there's got to be some finite number of schemes held. That's not really strong enough for me for $40. I think software developers might appreciate this more than web or graphic designers.

and
Mondrianum (Leopard only and looks cute - but I just switched back to Tiger) - so I don't think I'll get a chance to try that one out just yet. From what I've seen thus far, it's not a creation tool, more a showcasing of color schemes shared on the Adobe Kuler site which is a part of the Adobe Air development/delivery platform. Don't really get it yet, but I know this app isn't what I need the most.


If you're reading this post and there aren't screenshots, please check back within a day. In an effort to lessen excuses and procrastination, I make myself write the article first and publish it, and THEN come back and jazz it up. Seems to work so far.