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.