Leopard Incompatible Peripherals List

I was looking for a list of things that don't work at all, or well with Leopard, but can't seem to find much on the net, so I figured I'd start a list and let anyone else chime in from their personal experience.

Since I'm a little frustrated that I'll actually have to pay MORE for a used or new in box older macbook than I would for shiny new one with more RAM and more HD space from apple themselves, I'm trying to make sure that it's really necessary.

I mean, you'd want a thousand dollar toy to be able to do everything, right, but since I DO have a desktop at home, I'm considering just buying a new handicapped laptop and hoping the manufacturers of these devices come up with drivers that work sometime soon (although it's already been 6+ months).

• Mbox - some people can get it to work sporadically in Leopard, but Protools won't work (update 7/31/08 - newest protools upgrade - for pay - is now Leopard Compatible)
  
• Canon HD Firewire Camcorders (newer ones, since Novemeber of 2007 at least)
  
• Alesis Multimix
  
• Tascam FW-1082 (couldn't get it to work on Leopard, even after downgrading the firewire to the 10.4.x version)
  

What other things are people coming across?

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!

Preview installed fonts inside of programs...

In general, I've found that PCs handle fonts better than macs, mostly due to the fact that most apps that I use on the PC have instant font previews, where the font name is listed in the actual font typestyle, within the program itself so that you immediately know what you're getting. Additionally, there are several shareware programs that let you preview, move and categorize fonts that aren't installed (not seeing a lot of that in mac programs yet). Maybe I should mention them by name since mac users can run windows programs with Parallels or VMWare Fusion or Bootcamp.

My faves for PC are OT1Font Manager, Font Xplorer. I have my fonts stored in an extensive folder directory structure, with about 20 to 30 categories of fonts, such as whimsical, dingbat, all caps titling, formal cursive, handwriting non-cursive, etc. I found it easier this way, when I was designing websites and logos for clients, to easily narrow in on a font type and generate speciments in less than an hour, without the client ever having to know the difference between slab-serif , monospaced, unicase or anything.

Fast forward to current life on the mac. I've mostly gotten over not being able to peruse my uninstalled fonts. I believe I might have found a program that showed font previews of uninstalled fonts, but it didn't generate type specimen sheets, didn't allow for any moving of the fonts between folders and subfolders, and was all around inferior to the couple of PC progam I already paid for and own. Linotype Explorer is a freeware program that does fairly well, but I ended up opting out of that after finding this app that I'm about to mention.

So I skipped that portion of the problem and insteaded focused on the easiest to solve: being able to instantly see a font specimen of an installed font. Enter Stone's Fontsight. This program adds a top level menu in most cocoa apps, such as pages, textedit, etc., that allows you to see the fonts installed, listed in their own fontstyle. Like such:




So, although Linotype Explorer allowed me to make font groups and uninstall and install them with 1 click as a group, it didn't work with Fontsight, which uses OSX-native Font Book groups. So if I made a group in FontBook, I can preview the group in the menu, which is VERY helpful when discriminating between several similar fonts. It's worth mentioning that Linotype FontExplorer is a kick-butt app in general. It does for free what Suitcase did for $100+ and a better job than that. There even might be a way I could get it to work with Fontsight, but the reason I switched to mac is that things are supposed to just work. So I stop myself from doing too much research and patching. If I spend all my time (I've spent enough) trying to research fixes to problems I've already found solutions to for my pc, I wasted my purchase money in buying this mac.

The Fontsight program costs a measly $19 with FREE LIFETIME UPDATES! This my friend, brings me to one thing I really like about the mac. A lot of apps are REALLY cheap. Whereas most PC apps, even shareware, starts at about $35, mac apps can go for as cheap as $12! (Not if they come from Apple: who on earth thought it was reasonable to jump from $0 for Iphoto to $299 for Aperture? Are we paying for the free Iphoto retroactively?)

So, if you like to know what your fonts look like ahead of time, I'd suggest you invest in a test run of Fontsight. The demo is very forgiving, so much so that I purchased it mostly to support such stand up work from a great developer. Some other apps on my 'to buy' list get waylaided if the demo is too short or too crippled. So check it out and tell me if you like it.

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.

Dual display issues, screensaver crashes, and plain ol' quirks with a 2nd display

My system setup is this:
20" imac
4GB RAM
22" HP w2207 LCD monitor (rotated vertically)
Firewire audio interface - FW400
WD Terabyte Firewire 800 drive

I have an HP w2207 monitor as the 2nd monitor for my imac. The ATI Radeon video card is supposed to be able to handle two monitors, but that doesn't mean it's seamless. It struggles a lot and I'm sure that fact isn't publicized about some of the video weakness in the new aluminum imacs, except for the one graphics update that erroneously downplayed the problem as applying only to avid gamers and video hogs. I did neither and had serious probs before that. And then the update was renamed completely with references to video problems stripped out. Hmm?

I've noticed the following quirks:

1. When I had the infamous crashing imac before mac replaced it and gave me a later batch model, a lot of crashes were caused by or related to the unit going to sleep and not being able to wake up with 2 monitors attached. If I turned the extra monitor off before letting the system sleep, less crashes. Hmmm.
2. Something about how the imac handles Firewire somehow interferes with the video display. I had a firewire audio interface, that even when it wasn't actively demanding system resources, it causes the video display to flash erratically. This is the only thing I'm mentioning, but not the only problem I've noticed where Firewire takes something else unrelated down with it. I've since bought a different Firewire interface, but among the 3 I've used, there are some consistencies. I've since DOWNGRADED not only from Leopard back to Tiger (which ran like a charm) but I've downgraded my version of Firewire implementation. Apple wrote a patch for Tascam that took the Firewire implementation back to the way it was done in 10.4.9 which was super stable. If that's not an admission of something, I don't know what is.
3. When I reboot and the 2nd monitor is already on, my mac will hang on the blue start up screen, sometimes indefinitely (today I walked my dog and came back and it hadn't progressed at all) until I flick the power for the 2nd display on and off and then voila! The mac osx progress bar comes on the screen and it tries to redraw the desktop wallpaper, etc. So it works, but I actually SEE it struggle with the 2nd monitor on. If I were to do this whole startup b4 turning on the monitor, it goes much quicker and you don't see the redrawing of the screen with the temporary blue screen while it's thinking. Meaning, the progress bar comes up, it flash back blue on both screens for 1 second or 2, then it brings up the wallpapers.
4. Even with the new Firewire audio interface, my system wigs out if I have the screensaver on both screens. I got some crashes until I told it to just turn the 2nd screen black and only do the moving screensaver on the 1st screen.

So there you have it. If this helps anyone with similar issues, I'm happy to share it.

1. 
   

Better than Iweb?

I've got a shiny new mac, and it comes with all this free softare. Having gotten over my initial aggravation with iPhoto (will retroactively post that stuff sometime), and gotten over my snobbery at the limitations of free software, I'm sort of leaning into it.

Iweb doesn't create real HTML. It isn't a real HTML editor. Coming from Dreamweaver and Frontpage, I was very snotty and horrified at the thought of using it. However, one day I needed to post some pics of a church event where everyone could get to them. And I wanted to do it fast. And here's the beauty of Apple: it's not always poweful, it's not always technically correct, but it's FAST, and fairly elegant to be slopped together. So with barely any effort, voila, I had a slideshow of photos and a website up.

Thus my initial complain about switching to mac: macs are for idiots. But guess what? I like the option of being an idiot if I want to. Now that I'm trying to be productive, rather than prove my mental prowess at untangling knots of computer logic, maybe being an idiot is a great luxury. It costs thought - macs are pretty damn expensive. That's why I never really switched before. Macs are definitely in the domain of the wealthy, but after my tour, I entered those ranks. So I pay for the ability to slop together a generic, yet elegant website in 20 minutes or less.

Now moving on. Iweb has converted me to the concept of simpler is better. If I can build something that's GOOD ENOUGH, maybe I shouldn't always be so quick to crack open Dreamweaver or Photoshop.

So I've played with iweb, and it's sort of created a monster in me. The mac side of me wants easy and pretty, but the PC side of me wants MORE. I'm bored of the templates, and modifying them officially to create more templates is SO much work and so esoteric that it'd be better to design from scratch in Photoshop, chop it up and code it in Dreamweaver. Also, there is a freeware/shareware alternative for Dreamweaver on the mac platform called Nvu which is pretty darn sexy (score 1 for mac).

I've looked into iweb templates from third party vendors, and I'll talk about that later, but iweb 2.0 broke a lot of vendor's templates, so that turned me off some.

So now I have the iweb mindset, with a pc hunger for customization. So I wonder outloud, is there anything like iweb, just better? PS - most mac users are SO complacent that the search for the phrase "better than iWeb" (for things posted w/in the last 6 months) only comes up with 7 hits on google!

Here's what I've come up with so far for WYSWYG editors most like iweb for mac:

Rapidweaver
Sandvox
Goldfish
Freeway
and
Shutterbug

Also just found out about
Galerie and
Joomla.

No reviews just yet. I'll revisit this and also revise some of this post before I go on to in depth reviews and screenshots etc. But this is what I've found to be out there. Y'all let me know if you find other stuff. So far, the order I listed them in appears to be the order I prefer. Although Sandvox appears to be stronger, it has less theme offerings than Rapidweaver. Shutterbug actually might be my fave, but it's more specific in it's purpose. I'll let you know.

In terms of more traditional approaches to web design, there are some more apps to consider:
SeaMonkey Composer - Mozilla
Style Master - Mozilla (CSS prog)
NVU - already mentioned
Good page and
Kompozer - apparently an offshoot/update of NVU

Hello mac world!

I keep waiting until the proper time to start my switching to mac blog, but I realize, the proper time is now while I'm learning! I wanted to predigest the food like a mama bird and spit it out once it's nice and masticated, but I might as well write while I'm still researching and struggling a bit.

I'm a singer, and went on tour for 6+ months with about 12 other musicians, 10 of which had macs, so I thought, maybe it's time to just consider getting a mac. Having had a past life as a graphic designer, I'd owned an old G3 before, strictly to use to check website rendering of my sites in mac browsers, but I wasn't particularly impressed with macs then. And I'd also worked at the Discovery channel using a mac, and although I was quite competent, still not that impressed.

So finally, practicality and peer pressure made me pick up a shiny, new Aluminum Intel imac. And although I still have gripes and am not a total switcher (didn't throw out my pcs or laptops), I've got to notice that I spend more and more time on this machine. And it didn't solve all my life's problems are was advertised by all my mac friends.

The deal is this: PCs are cool. Macs are cool. The existence of both, hopefully, will force each other to keep being cooler, in an effort to bash each other's heads in.

This blog is dedicated to all of the problems I've had as a power user of PCs, while switching to mac. As much as mac is the underdog and the trailblazer, I see so many things that could be better were it not for the stubbornness of not wanting to admit that sometimes PCs get it right. Bill Gates has no problem seeing something cool on the mac and imitating it. It's time mac does the same and takes the best of both worlds and propels it into new heights ala Apple.

So in breaking the tradition of mac users everywhere, I am actually going to COMPLAIN about mac! The heresy. But I'm going to do it, because if you never ask for more, you won't get more. And in the words of the Abraham-Hicks manifestation camp, I'm not complaining to complain, every time I blog about what baffles me in mac land, I am launching a little rocket of desire for what I DO want. And so it is and so it shall be. Join me on this ride into the cult known as Apple.