Applepeels

When Apple, Google, and others can't agree, things can get messy

Apple is probably to blame for a fascination that I have had with video.  Sometime in mid-eighties when I was working for Apple, I won a Sony Video8 camera in an Apple sales contest.  I was hooked.

Like any good father, I took hours of soccer, hockey, and dance video over the years.  I still have some of the video of our children playing on the beaches north of Halifax, Nova Scotia, one spring in the late eighties.  I ended up with at least two other Sony video cameras over the years.  A few years ago I spent days going through video and putting some clips on a DVD using iDVD.  That DVD is now a family treasure.

I can also remember taking photos, movies, and music and creating a great prom video for my youngest daughter almost twelve years ago.  I used iMovie and eventually did a version in Final Cut Pro.

When Apple's original .Mac service came along and eventually offered the opportunity to post movies on the web, I was quick to try that.  Over the years Apple has changed .Mac and its descendant, MobileMe, so much that my early movies are no longer visible on the web.

I have long looked at the web as my filing cabinet, but Apple's propensity for change has made it a challenging storage partner.  However, I suspect the motives of other "clouds" on the web are probably just as suspect.  Google's motives are often especially hard to determine, and I'm not exactly excited about the somewhat forced connection between Picasa Web Albums and Google+ albums.

For almost four years I have been posting my videos to YouTube instead of Apple's cloud.  Some, like this simple one of a sail boat docking in Beaufort, NC have been viewed thousands of times.

I find it rather ironic that Apple, the creator of Quicktime, has made it so difficult to keep my movies created using their software and hardware in their own on line world.  With iCloud maybe things will get better, but Apple's track record doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Unfortunately, things have gotten even messier than a few early pages with Quicktime clips not working.  Apple's war against Adobe's Flash and other vendors' worries about the H.264 standard have created a mess if you want to do your own video and post it on the web on your own site.

It is to the point that the easiest way to do video on the web is to embed a YouTube video in a web page.  Today, except on an experimental basis and for mobile users, YouTube video is Flash based.

You can get an idea of the problem for web developers by going to this YouTube site which lets you opt into their HTML5 trial.  Depending on which browser you use and how your browser is configured if you use Internet Explorer, you will see different things.  Just taking the time to visit the YouTube HTML5 site with both Safari and Firefox will give you an idea of the challenges faced by webpage developers who want to use movies.

Being very geeky, on my Windows laptop I have Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer. On my Macs I have the same without of course Internet Exploer.  On my Ubuntu Linux machine, I have Firefox and Chromium.  I also have a Kindle Fire and a new LG Spectrum Android phone where I use Opera Mini.  I have friends with iPhones and iPads.

While all my browsers on most of my machines are the latest versions, there are plenty of old browsers out there.  Even my 2004 Dual G5 is running a very old build of Firefox.  Getting a web video to work on all of these is not easy.

I can remember when getting someone to see a video posted on the web was as simple as making sure they had installed a Quicktime plug-in.  Of course a lot of people never could figure out how to install plug-ins, and they do cause troubles.

All of this led me to experiment with posting some video on the web. Over Christmas I got a new beach camera, a Nikon COOLPIX P500.  I bought the COOLPIX so I wouldn't have to subject my Nikon D3100 and nice telephone lens to sand and surf dangers.  So far it has been a great beach camera.

It turns out that the COOLPIX P500 takes some really great long distance HD video as long as you use a tripod.

One of the reasons that I wanted to do my own movies on the web is that I have seen increasing difficulty in posting YouTube videos directly from either iMovie or Quicktime exports.  However, I can upload a movie directly from the Mac using the YouTube up-loader.  Unfortunately the Mac program connections seemed to be broken on my iMac.

I actually didn't learn how bad the video mess was until after my first efforts which involved using code directly generated from Quicktime using save for the web.  When I started testing that site with different browsers, I figured out there was a problem with most other browsers besides Safari and Internet Explorer.

I had an Apple friend runs some tests, and he also was surprised at the challenges.  I did some searching on the web and came up with the site Video for Everybody.  It has a pretty good discussion of the issues.  Even more useful to me was an automatic code generator.

Of course Quicktime is no help in generating the new formats that some of the browsers are using so I ended up using two video converters, the Miro Video Converter and a video to Flash converter which I can't remember.

Based on all that I created a site with several movies in different formats of a Pelican preening itself.  While I was working on all this, I put the Pelican movie up on YouTube.

After a little tweaking, I now have this Pelican Movie site which seems to work on all computers using all browers including Firefox and Chromium on Ubuntu Linux, my Kindle, and my Android phone.  However, in order to get the Pelican movie working on the iPad and and iPhone I ended up creating another site done with Apple code and a reference movie.  It also works with many but not all browsers.

This was an interesting experience, and certainly convinced me that embedding a YouTube movie into your website is the easy way to go.  It does appear to me that most of the other vendors are lining up against Apple, but in the world of technology, today's enemy is often tomorrow's strategic partner.

On a side note I use Picasa on my Windows computer to manage most of my photos and video clips. So far I have had no problems directly exporting video from it to YouTube. That shouldn't be too surprising.

This summer I used a small Sony pocket camera to take some ACVHD video including the clip that I exported to YouTube for this great run down the White Oak River in our skiff. 

However, the only way that I could deal with AVCHD video was through Sony's movie software.  My Mac using Apple software didn't recognize the movies.  Picasa on Windows was also no help at the time.  I have noticed some conversion utilities recently, but I am using the Nikon with HD format now so the problem went away for me.

Perhaps these issues will get better over time, but someone is going to have to give in, and none of these large technology companies like to do that.  My personal bet is that however YouTube goes, so will go the majority of the web.

If the end of January has you thinking about nice places to visit, read my post on why Beaufort, NC is such a nice place to visit.

Perhaps my tales of Beaufort's uniqueness might convince you to vote for Beaufort in Budget Travel's Coolest Small Towns of 2012 contest.  Those of us living on North Carolina's Crystal Coast would greatly appreciate the votes of technology folks interested enough to read about the challenges in posting web video.

You are even welcome to join us during the fantastic weather that has given us some magic moments on the beaches even during the heart of winter.

 

 

Apple's "free iCloud" services? Not really.

I guess that I am guilty of not paying enough attention to the world of Apple.  However, I have been a loyal and long suffering paying member of Apple's .Mac and MobileMe services.  I lived through all the changes such as my web pages coming down and my photo albums disappearing into incomprehensible folders.

My account was also one of those whose renewal coincided with the announcement of the new free iCloud services.  That meant that my account got extended until summer of 2012 which is probably why I have paid so little attention to iCloud.  The other reason is that the cloud that has my attention is Google's.

However, when I got the notice below last week, I thought perhaps I should spend some time investigating iCloud's free services.

Actually it turns out to not be so easy to move to iCloud unless you have already jumped onto Apple's newest bandwagon with both feet.

Apple's "free" services are actually free only if you already own an IOS device or have already upgraded to Lion.  Apple doesn't hide this fact, but I have missed any discussions that you have to be running Apple's Lion operating system to enable iCloud from a Mac.

Since I saw Windows 7 mentioned, I thought that I might be able to sneak by with that, but I had forgotten that this was Apple that was offering a "free" service.

I though surely this must not be the case so I contacted one of my favorite Apple system engineers, and he confirmed that you do indeed need to be running Mac OS X Lion.

Now I am not exactly out of date on my Macs.  I did buy an I5 iMac about fourteen months ago.  However, I have seen no reason to upgrade to Apple Lion's operating system, and a couple of good reasons to not upgrade.

First I don't like the on-line upgrade process, and second, I am afraid it might break the older version of iPhoto which I am using.  I quite like the older iPhoto, and as you can see from my posts, I detest the newer version of iPhoto. 

So I have happily stayed on Snow Leopard. While it is not perfect, I no longer have to enjoy the latest and greatest to get my work done.  I am even a version behind on Microsoft's Office on my Windows laptop though I do have the latest Office on my iMac.

It is interesting that Apple's new "free" services are only available to Apple customers with the latest and greatest operating systems.  I might sound like a technology party-pooper, but I have a very usable dual G5 tower that I bought in December 2004.  It has a couple of one terabyte drives in it, and I still use it almost daily.  I can't upgrade it to Lion.

Until late last month, I was still using my 2006 MacBook. While it isn't completely dead, it doesn't run for more than a few minutes before dying on me.  I even tried a new hard drive, but beyond backing up all my data, I had no luck in fixing the MacBook which happens to be our only other Intel based Mac.  I should mention that we still have a very usable white half moon iMac at our other home.  Our youngest daughter is also using one of those.  I bought three of those one summer.

So I guess I am stuck trying to figure out the best, or more properly, the cheapest way that I can enable Apple's new "free" iCloud services. 

When my MacBook died, I was actually thinking about perhaps buying a new laptop of some sort from Apple.  I have been carrying an Apple laptop since Apple started shipping them.  It feels a little funny to not take one into a hotel room when we are traveling.

However, I got a quick reminder of why I am sometimes hesitant to buy Apple products.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I am writing a book about about my career at Apple.  In the fall just before my MacBook died, I sent Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, an email congratulating him on re-instating Apple's charitable match.  I saw it as a very positive change at Apple.  I mentioned in the note in passing that I was writing a book about Apple and would send him a copy when it got to market.

The next week, the day my MacBook died, we got an envelope from Apple's legal department reminding me of all the non-disclosures that I had signed with Apple.  They also included copies going back to the first one that I had signed in 1984.  I took the letter as a not very subtle attempt at frightening me into dropping the book.

However, I sent Tim back a note thanking him for the reminder, but also telling him that I have been writing about Apple for over seven years and until I pulled down much of the content in preparation for my book, I had over 1,000 pages of articles about Apple on-line.  Not once in the seven years did I receive a note from Apple complaining about the accuracy of my posts or about my disclosing any proprietary information.

I did tell Tim that the letter from his legal folks had convinced me that there might be more friendly alternatives to an Apple product such as a Kindle Fire.

So here I am stuck between some family members who would like to keep their old email addresses that go back to the .Mac days and Apple which is requiring me to buy something before I can use their "free" services.

It is hard to believe that even Microsoft is better at free than Apple.  Microsoft's Skydrive which is truly free now even works on Firefox.  Of course Google has a host of free services which seem to work from just about any platform.  Actually Google pays me more in my Adsense account each year than I pay them for the extra storage that I need on Picasa.  They also host one of my domains for free, and their email has become a favorite of mine.

The truth is that Apple is one of the most proprietary companies in the computer business. They are also among the best at mining their customers and accumulating a huge pile of cash.  Much of what Apple does is dedicated to getting you to buy their latest gear and only their latest gear.  I don't have a problem with Apple making money, but I find it wasteful to throw away perfectly good hardware that is still doing the job.  Perhaps that is one reason I love what Ubuntu is doing.

So I am wondering how Ubuntu can create a very simple distribution disk that I can download from their servers and use to install the latest and greatest flavor of Linux on my old Dell Pentium III while Apple wants me to go to their store?  The obvious reason is that Apple wants to lock me into their store and only their store.

Well I might have to figure out if I can buy an iPod touch and use that to migrate my Mobile me services.  That might be the cheapest and least painful of the solutions that are out there.

Any suggestions from others facing this dilemma would be appreciated.  I am not giving up my Android phone because I love the integration of the mapping apps with Google Maps. Besides I like the choice that the Android world gives me.  Also my Droid won't be two years old until March, and it is still doing a good job of keeping me connected.

My Apple book is now being edited by my trusted family staff, my wife and my oldest daughter.  At this stage, it is 295 pages and covers the time from September 1982 when I started selling Apple IIs in an Atlantic Canadian dealership to July 2004 when I left my position as director of Apple's federal sales in July 2004 just after sitting in a Senate hearing with Avie Tevanian.

I feel like I have done a commendable job describing life at Apple, but it has taken me seven years to get far enough from the situation to write a book, so I will await the judgment of others. I am glad that it is all down on paper.  Some of it is still hard for me to believe even though I lived it.

I am grateful that I wrote down about twenty-five pages of thoughts the fall after I left Apple.  That and a habit of using a daily planner have helped me nail down many of the important dates.  Not so surprisingly, the more I wrote about the old events, the more that I remembered.   Somehow I still haven't remembered any secrets, but that might be because I didn't know any even when I worked at Apple.

I have talked to a number of ex-Apple employees to get refreshed on a few things, but the story is mine.  Next week I am talking to agent recommended to me by someone well known in the Apple world.

Beyond that fishing has been good here this fall on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  We were still in shorts weather through December 16 when I had a spectacular afternoon over on the beach.

While there have been signs of the seasons changing, somehow, the warm weather has managed to help us forget last winter.

With all the great weather, I am glad that I still have the ability to focus, or I would never have gotten my Apple book written in this fall to remember.  Hopefully my next post will have some details on how the book is going to published.  However, after the letter from Apple legal, Tim Cook will have to buy a copy if he wants one.

 

 

One last batch of iPhoto and Picasa tests

I was traveling when I did the recent tests that I published regarding iPhoto 9.1.5 and Picasa.

Returning to North Carolina's Crystal Coast gave me a good chance to run some more tests and include my I5 iMac.

Again I formatted a SDHC device using my Sony camera.  I took 48 pictures.  I tested to see how long it took a computer to recognize the card, automatically launch the photo software and import all the photos.  I configured it so I only had to click once on each system for the import to start. Timing was done with the stopwatch App on my Motorola Droid phone. (Perhaps iPhoto 9.1.5 was protesting the Droid being the timer.)

Here are the results with the fastest system listed first

1. I5 iMac w/Picasa on Snow Leopard, time, < 30 sec.
2. HP I7 laptop w/Picasa on Windows 7, 31 sec.
3. MacBook, w/Picasa on Snow Leopard, 35 sec.
4. I5 iMac w/Photo 8.1.2 on Snow Leopard, 42 sec
5. Dell P3 w/f-Spot 0.8.2 on Ubuntu 11.04 47 sec.
6. I5 iMac w/Aperture 2.1.4 on Snow Leopard  52 sec.
7. MacBook w/iPhoto 9.1.5 on Snow Leopard  84 sec.
8. Dual G5 w/iPhoto 7.1.5 on Mac OSX 10.5.8 118 sec.

It is not unusual for me to import 500 photos in one day so speed in importing photos is important to me.

I have made my decisions on what to use. I will be using Picasa on my MacBook where I cannot go back to the previous version of iPhoto.  I'll continue to use iPhoto on my iMac where I still have iPhoto version 8 libraries.  I hope these tests might be helpful to others.

While it would be interesting to run tests with Lion, I keep getting reports from my more adventurous friends that are keeping me on Snow Leopard.

Here are two sample quotes from friends whose technical opinions I really respect.

"Not having a good Lion experience, it is a dog on my 2006 iMac and my 2009 MBP."

"Lion is not what it is touted to be. As have some others I have found it slower...."

However, this is not a discussion about Lion on which I have zero experience.

Also I realize that there is a newer version of Aperture, but I don't use Aperture nowadays so I'm am not interested in the spending the money for the upgrade.

The interesting question is why Apple would release a product like iPhoto 9.1.5 which is so much slower than the previous version?

I could speculate all day on that, and it would still just be pure speculation.  However, here a few thoughts on the issue.

From 10,000 feet, I still believe this has more to do with Apple trying to get their software more IOS like.

People who read the first post in this series might remember my statement that it took twenty years for Apple to come up with a piece of internally crafted software that I really loved.

Apple has also introduced some other really poorly performing software over the years with iWeb being the best example.  Additionally while I have finally grown to like Pages for certain uses, it has never been fast.

While this might seem out of left field, I believe the explanation can be found in some of my old experiences at Apple.

One of the interesting things about life at Apple is doing executive briefings and trying to get Steve to show up to talk to customers.  I can remember a time when we hauled some enterprise clients out, and Steve showed up and would only talk about iMovie.

Within Apple having Steve's focus is a good news, bad news scenario.  You will get the resources to do something, but it will be done Steve's way or heads will roll. A great breakthrough product like iMovie can result from Steve's focus.

One of the real challenges of a company driven by one person's genius is that even an extraordinary one like Steve has only so much bandwidth.  With very little real decision making power passed down to the troops, products or strategies can languish until Steve happens to turn his laser glance towards them.

I call it the "Keynote Phenomenon."  I believe Keynote has gotten regular upgrades and remained a solid piece of software because Steve uses it regularly.  I would be willing to bet that Steve never used iWeb and I suspect MobileMe services fall into the same category.

I can almost guarantee that if Steve tried to import 500 photos into iPhoto 9.1.5, we would have a fix and perhaps a much more usable piece of software.

If Apple still took the time to have customer advisory boards or to let heavy users test software changes, I suspect iPhoto 9.1.5 would have never gotten out the door.  Maybe Steve doesn't do movies and photos anymore?

Apple has a history of coming up with some really great ideas, but the company sometimes forgets the importance of staying laser focused on what is really important to users because it has so little interaction with users.  I think it is a company weakness, but I doubt it will change because it has been that way for so long.

I am not a huge fan of either Adobe or Microsoft software, but I still reach for Word and Excel at times, and I have been doing that for more than 27 years in the case of Word and almost that long for Excel.  I also still pull Photoshop out once in a while.

Unless Apple can figure out how to give products like iPhoto a life of their own, and Filemaker might be a good example and even role model, iPhoto, introduced in 2002, might not make it much beyond the ten year mark as a tool for those of us who are more than just casual users.

We can always hope that small developers continue creating more great tools like Rapidweaver, Coda, Pixelmator, Nisus Writer, and Shutterbug which I recently used to create a very nice non-flash based slide show that will play on my smartphone.

 

 

Balanced technology with Apple at the core

Over the years I have worked myself into a technology solution that might be described as revolving around Apple but by no means dependent on the whims of Cupertino.  It works well for me, and lets me have the best of both worlds without being tied to any particular technology vendor.  How I got to this point, and how my solution works is something of a twisted story.

When I started using Apple computers back in 1982, it was not very hard to use an all Apple solution.  The only non Apple hardware I had was an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. Times changed, the Mac was introduced, and I went to work for Apple in 1984, but lots of business software came out for IBM compatible computers.  While I was working for Apple, the experience I had using and selling MS/DOS computers gradually faded into the past. Macs and Apple peripherals from printers to scanners and even cameras dominated my life.

Even during the years at  Apple when there was a concerted effort by the company to provide DOS compatibility, Apple was vehemently anti-Windows internally.  If you wanted to demonstrate Windows compatibility on a network, you had to be pretty creative with your local budget dollars.  We managed to get a few PCs in our Reston office.  They were invaluable in helping us learn what our customers' faced in getting Macs to work in their enterprise.

I sometimes felt like our work with Windows computers was a skunk works project. We actually ended up driving a lot of Apple's ActiveDirectory solution with a system engineer on my staff doing much of the development, but the reality even then was that Apple was a consumer company at its heart. Our enterprise efforts were just a holding action until Apple could find hits that would free it from the need to pay any serious attention to the enterprise.

Most people would agree that I bled rainbow colors in those days, so it would be no surprise that my family's personal technology and my own remained 100% Apple. I was even pretty happy with a Nokia cell phone that I synced with my Mac. When I was happiest, the Nokia was on Cingular which eventually got bought by AT&T. Then there was my departure from Apple just shy of my 20th anniversary and just after I reached the magic age of 55 at Apple.

Within a month after leaving Apple I bought a 15" Aluminum Powerbook.  It got a lot of use, but that same fall I also bought a Dell Dimension Pentium desktop.  Probably some of the reason I bought the Dell was Apple deciding they no longer needed my services, but I also really wanted to see how the majority of the people using technology got along in their daily tasks.  For about six months I didn't have a job, so learning about Windows XP and Linux was a way to make myself more marketable. It was an interesting experience and was my start in blogging.  I did purchase my trusty dual G5 PowerMac in December of 2004.  I am still using it and the Dell. I sampled a lot Linux over the years before deciding to stay with Ubuntu.

Both my next two jobs were in the government space.  I eventually got tired of being the only person in the room with a Mac so I bought a Dell laptop in the fall of 2005.  Eventually I gave up the world of a consultant for a job with benefits.  I became the VP of sales and marketing at an email services company.  The Dell laptop turned out to be a necessity with that job.  There were a couple of apps that we used which just would not work on the Mac so through some of 2006, I came to work carrying both a Mac laptop and a Dell laptop.  By that time I was pretty proficient with Windows XP. Eventually I managed to get most things working well in my new workplace, but I had sort gotten to like having two machines on my desktop.

In the summer of 2006, I bought a new MacBook.  My aluminum PB had sucumbed to a number of problems, including a bad lower memory slot and flaky ribbon cable, neither of which were covered by extended warranties.  In the fall of 2006 we moved to coast, and I started looking for a new job.  I wanted something where I did not have to live and breathe technology.

Somehow I thought that was real estate, and just as the the market was tanking, I ended up becoming a REALTOR®.  I did not understand at the time that I sticking my foot into a field which had the potential to require an even greater use of technology than selling computers, networking or cloud services.

By then I had loaned my Dell laptop to my youngest daughter for final years of college, but I was able to get by the first nine months as a REALTOR® using my MacBook and my old Dell desktop at home.  Our office provided us with an ancient Window XP desktop to use while on duty so that helped.

Eventually when I got to the point of writing contracts, I decided that I needed a new Windows laptop so I bought a new Vista laptop just when Apple was introducing Leopard.  It was a lesson in Windows humility. There were some challenges with XP, Vista was a nightmare. and I eventually concluded that it as quagmire.

I bought the Vista laptop because it was a cheaper solution for generating forms than anything else.  Supporting myself on Vista was a time whirlpool.  If anything Vista made me appreciate Macs more.

During all this time I continued to do my website and creative work on Macs.  My Windows computer let me access one of our MLS systems which required IE and let me create approved real estate forms.  It also let me print on our office printer which I could never make work on my Macs after some security software was installed on the printer.

In the winter of 2009 I was hoping that Apple would ship some new I5 and I7 laptops at a reasonable price.  Considering the tough state of the real estate market, spending money on a premium laptop like a Mac seemed like a gamble especially when it stil had an old processor.  Of course I was also to the point that I could no longer take Vista even though it had improved somewhat.

After listening to a lot of technology people whom I respect, I ended up buying both myself and my wife new Windows 7 laptops.  In about a month, we will have used those two laptops for a year without any problems. Windows 7 has proved to be a great operating system that might even be more reliable than OS X.

I have ended up helping a couple of folks get I5 laptops similar to my wife's HP.  Neither has expressed any regrets. I also convinced my daughter to stay with Macs because I thought it was right for her.  If money had been no object I would have bought both my wife and myself Macs.  But as it ended up, we both got very good systems, mine an I7 and my wife's an I5 for less than the price of one I5 Mac which didn't ship until months later.  Of course all my real estate software worked out of the box with Windows 7.  My son's company is all Windows so he long ago stopped using a Mac.  He also loves gaming so he has a souped up Dell I7 desktop with a solid state drive at home.  My youngest daughter is still using a desk lamp iMac. 

A week or so after I bought the HP laptops, I ended up choosing a Droid as my smartphone.  I was completely frustrated with AT&T's service in our area. Three years of it had been a lesson in dropped and missed calls. I only managed to get 50% or less of the phone calls when I was in my home, and the idea that I would pay AT&T more to fix their problem by installing something in my home just drove me up the wall.

Through all of this Apple peripherals including monitors have mostly disappeared. I have added HP, Epson, and Brother printers to my technology solutions.  I have an HP AIO printing/scanning/fax solution and an Epson scanner.  I live with a mixed wireless/wired network. It has a fair amount of old network equipment in it, but with some help from my son, I manage to keep the network running.

This winter I finally gave in and bought a new I5 iMac.  The old Dual G5 was getting very slow in spite of a number of hard drive upgrades. While I am pleased with the speed I have gotten with the new iMac, I stll believe it could be a better product.  Both my Windows I7 laptop and my old Ubuntu Dell boot faster.

The one thing that I have on every piece of hardware is Dropbox.  It is a great utility.  I spend a lot of time in Firebox, an increasing amount of time in Chrome, and a little time using Safari.  I useTweetDeck on my Windows box and my Macs.  I have the latest version of Office on the Mac, but I am stuck on Office 2007 on Windows.  I use Thunderbird for most of my mail on Windows, but I do access my Gmail with Chrome.  My Linux box runs little more than Firefox with an extra tab for Gmail.

On the Macs I run Apple's Mail client, but I find it getting a little creaky.  I have used Powermail in the past so I might go back to that eventually.  Right now I am using Dreamweaver and Rapidweaver, but I am evaluating other solutions.  I do use Pages for some brochures.  For word processing I use Word on Windows, OpenOffice on Linux, and Nisus Writer Express on the Mac.  I have given up Photoshop on the Mac for Pixelmator.  I manage my photos on Windows with Picasa and on the Mac with iPhoto 09. I find the most recent release of iPhoto an abomination so I am looking for alternatives.

I really like SnagIt on Windows, and while I have it for the Mac, I rarely use it there for some weird reason. It is a great tool on Windows for creating directions on a map.  Building my Housevision.us services site pushed me back firmly in the Mac world because I could not find an inexpensive Windows CAD solution that fit my work style so I now use MacDraft PE.

I have made lots of movies on the Mac, but I have also done some recently on Windows because of some trouble getting iMovie to work with YouTube.

MobileMe is not a service that I find worthwhile even though I am still paying for it because I have a couple of family members who just don't want to change their email addresses.  I am still bent out of shape over Apple taking down some photo sites that I had there for years.  I now store all my photos on Picasa web albums though I still maintain a presence on Flickr.  I will sometimes do photo editing on Pixelmator on the iMac, save the photos to my Dropbox, and them import them to Picasa on my I7 Windows laptop and then upload them from there. The uploads seem to go faster than on the iMac, but I have not sat down with a stopwatch and timed it.

Living in a world of IMAP email, Microsoft Office, and Dropbox makes it relatively easy for me to be platform agnostic. Even the brochures that I do with Pages, I save as Word files and modify them in Word on Windows and eventually print them on our doubled sided color laser printer at the office which I cannot get to work with a Mac.

The fact that I don't use Macs for everything is not a slam against Apple, it is just a response to Apple's expensive pricing, and the fact that not everything that I need can be found on a Mac unless I run Windows on a Mac which I don't want to do.  It is also just the way things happened.

For a variety of reasons I have chosen to have Windows hardware for Windows and use my Macs as dedicated Macs.  While I could easily run Windows on the new I5 iMac, I have no need to do so.  I would rather have the redundancy from the extra hardware.  I also like the feel of competence that I get from being able to use multiple platforms.  When I was still doing duty at the real estate office, I was often pressed into service to solve Windows problems.

Fortunately after my recent home network repair, all my technology tools are working well and doing what I need them to do.  I like having three screens on my desktop. The integration between My Tracks on my Droid and my Google maps is just icing on the cake of my technology world. I am happy that I no longer have to use the somewhat flaky i-gotU software on Windows to do my GPS tracks.

I don't ever expect to give one vendor all of my business. I would far sooner have them compete for my business.  I expect over the short term, Apple, Google, and Microsoft will all continue to find me both someone who users their products and a critic when something needs improving.

Over the long term, I am not placing any bets, but I sure would like to see Apple focus a little more energy and competitiveness on their laptops and desktops.  I think there is still a big place for them in the world.  I hate to see Apple give up that space completely to Windows vendors.

The recent news on developers and smartphone app intentions is a pretty good sign that no one has the market sewn up.  That market will be interesting to watch.

I am happy to report that we finally got a normal storm this winter and that Wednesday morning we woke up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit.  That is a nice change from the snowstorm we saw last weekend.  Even this winter's weather has not shaken my belief that the Southern Outer Banks is a great place to live.  It was nice to make it to 59.7 Fahrenheit on Wednesday.  I even ordered the seeds for my tomato plants.  It's almost time for the great tomato race to start.

 

 

Ten months into my life with Vista & Apple's OS X

It was October 23, 2007 when I bought my Vista laptop. I was faced with a business requirement of Internet Explorer on Windows and some forms that required PC based programs.  Mainly due to the small screen on my MacBook, a need for more storage and a tight budget, I decided to purchase a Windows laptop instead of a Mac laptop with a 15" screen or use one of the Windows solutions on a Mac.

I have done a couple of posts along the way detailing my journey, The continuing saga of a Mac guy in Vista land and A Mac user's conclusion that Vista is a quagmire.

Now ten months and many Windows updates later, I have a better perspective on the Windows world.  My Vista laptop works well most of the time.  It is hobbled by being limited to 2 gigs of ram.  I am convinced that Vista probably needs four gigs of ram to function well.

The updates have finally fixed most of the serious problems that I had with Vista.  Some of the real estate specific software that I use with the system still has problems with Vista.  The problems are minor, and there are workarounds, but they are still irritating problems.

My Vista machine still has a problem switching from our work wireless network to my home wireless network without flipping out the screen resolution and requiring a reboot.

In the meantime, I have upgraded to Leopard on my G5 and on my MacBook.  The installations went well, but I wouldn't call them flawless.  Dreamweaver will eventually require an upgrade if I want to continue using it.

However, I have no complaints about Leopard at this point.  It seems to work and even work well in the 1.5 gigs of ram that I have in my MacBook.

During any given day, I spend some time with XP, OSX, Vista, and also Linux.  My LInux is running on a Zonbu system which is the most trouble free of all my systems.  If my computing needs were simpler, that would be my main machine.

I should also mention that the Zonbu shares a monitor with my aging Dell Dimension which still runs Windows XP.  Some update along the way killed the KVM switch that I have, but I now function with just one of those machines running at a time.  With the workaround on the real estate software, I rarely need to slip back to XP now.  When I do, I find it snappier than my Vista system.

Whenever I pull duty shifts at our real estate office, I am in front of one the company's XP desktop machines.  I usually also bring in my Vista laptop and my MacBook which results in having three computers on the desk at one time.

I should also mention that I use Apple's Mail program on my Macs along with a healthy dose of browser driven Gmail on a domain of mine supported by Google.

On my Vista machine I use Outlook after trying both Windows Mail and Thunderbird.

The XP machine uses Thunderbird for mail, and the Xonbu machine is exclusively browser email.

I use iPhoto 08 on my Macs to manage the hundreds of photos that I take weekly.  I have been subscribing to .Mac for years so I am now a MobileMe user and have posted a number of albums. I am hoping to try Aperture this fall.

On the Windows machines, I use Picasa for photos.

I use Google's calendar app.  It is synced to Outlook on my PC but it also beeps me before an appointment by calling my cell phone which is not an iPhone.  The Google calendar also goes to iCal but i use iCal more for keeping track of the tides than anything else.

I am no longer a big spreadsheet user, but I use the PowerPC version of MS Office on my Macs and the latest version of Office on the Vista machine and Office 97 on the XP box.  Open Office is on the Zonbu machine and occasionally get used.  I periodically slip into a NeoOffice mode where it becomes my office suite of choice.

I am a Firefox 3.x user except on the Zonbu machine which is at version 2.0,0.12 or something like that.

I do not like the latest versions of Internet Explorer and while I keep trying to like Safari, it just doesn't work as well for blogging as Firefox does.

Most of my writing is done in a browser window.

I also use Pages, Adobe InDesign, and Photoshop on the Macs.

One of my favorite applications on the Windows' machines is Snaggit.

I tried doing my website work on Windows and never found a product as compelling or inexpensive as RapidWeaver.  The latest version of RapidWeaver has added the functionality to have Google Analytics code added on the page so I mostly can ignore Dreamweaver at this point.

So what are my conclusions ten months into my Vista journey.

1. The hardware requirements for Vista are severely understated
2. Given the hardware that I have, Vista is much slower than OS X, the version doesn't matter.
3. Outlook is a clunky piece of software, it takes far too long to open an email.
4. Contact management might be a little better integrated in Outlook, but it is not worth the pain.
5. The time to wake from sleep is unacceptable on my Vista laptop when compared to the MacBook's almost instant on mode.
6. I find that I am forced into conforming to ways that make my Vista laptop work better, they are not necessarily how I want to work.
7. I have not been impacted by a single virus or malicious piece of software.  My system seems to devote a lot of resources to making sure that remains the case.
8. While the Mac sometimes doesn't tell me enough about what is happening, the Vista machine almost always tells me more than I want to know and requires more input than I want to give.
9. In spite of buying a HP AIO Printer/Scanner/Fax machine, I find that it works better using VueScan with the Mac than it does using the HP software either with the Mac or the HP laptop.  I haven't taken the time to try VueScan on the Windows or Linux boxes.
10. There are still people out there who write to IE on Windows.  I am surprised but I recently started writing a blog for our company and was told that I was the first administrative user who used something other than IE.  They had to rewrite some stuff so I could use Firefox.

Would I buy another Windows PC?  I am tempted to say not until hell freezes over, but I have to face the reality that Apple has made a conscious decision to keep their hardware prices high.

Before I get the inevitable Apple makes better hardware comments, I worked for Apple for twenty years so I know Apple is capable of making great hardware and not so great hardware.

Since I left Apple in the summer of 2004, I have bought seven computers.  Three of them are Macs, two are from Dell, one from HP, and one from Zonbu.  As to hardware, the Macs have been the systems with the hardware problems.  I have a very nice 15" Aluminum Powerbook with a bad lower memory slot and a bad ribbon video cable.  My G5 had some early memory problems which required multiple tries before the memory worked.  It also had to have its hard drive replaced.  The MacBook had to be sent back to the factory because of discoloring and the inability to take a charge.

None of the Windows machines or the Zonbu have had any hardware problems. The Dell laptop which I have and which is a dual boot Ubuntu Linux system was dragged around college for a couple of years by my daughter and still managed to survive.

Logically this would drive me to wanting to run OSX on generic hardware, but I am not interested in the pain of staying ahead of the Apple software police.

The combination of iPhoto and Rapidweaver along with continuing support from Firefox for the Mac platform will probably make certain that my next machine is a Mac even if I do have to pay through the nose.

I am actually still a desktop guy who likes to work with relatively large screens so I might bite the bullet and buy a new iMac the next time around.

My experience with Windows has taught me that there is certainly a good reason to have a Windows centric IT Department.  I know the IT support guy in our company stays busy.  However, based on the problems that the few of us with Vista have experienced, I am not surprised that companies including Intel are holding off on pushing Vista through their enterprises.

As I see some of my colleagues fighting such basic things as resizing pictures, scanning documents, or creating PDFs, I am amazed at how much aggravation people will take before they have had enough and are willing to make a fundamental change to another operating system.

I have recently used Apple's new iMovie 08 and while I initially questioned the changes, after lots of work I have concluded it works better for what I need to do than the previous version.  However, I have to wonder how many user interface guidelines you can violate in one package?

The bottom line is that if you are an individual working with lots of photos, maintaining a number of websites, and publishing some brochures, you are probably better off with a Mac.  My guess is that factoring in software costs, the Mac is pretty close in price at least at the iMac level.

I credit part of the success of my Coastal North Carolina website to the Mac and of course Rapidweaver.

Right now it is a toss-up on whether MobileMe Gallery is a better solution than slideshows which I do with Rapidweaver.  My son who sits on a lot of bandwidth in Northern Virginia complains that the MobileMe albums are often very slow while the ones on my outsourced server are zippy.

You can make a judgment call yourself.  This MobileMe slide show, Recent Favorites, has very similar pictures to my Rapidweaver slide show, Coastal Carolina Collection, which sits on a Hostway server in a site that I maintain.

MobileMe is definitely easier to create, but it might not be the best long term solution.

In fact that about sums up the whole article.  The Mac is definitely easier and actually allows for more flexibility in the way I work, but I am not sure it will always be the answer.

Right now it is my platform of choice, but I will continue to monitor the battlefield.  As online platforms mature, the innovation might get to the point where I can use some of the blogging platforms to cover my main web needs.

I already use Typepad where my View from the Mountain is hosted, Blogger for my Ocracoke Waves, Squaresapce for another Ocracokewaves site, and Wordpress for a final Ocracokewaves.  They give me a pretty good taste of where the technology is headed.  Of course I also use iWeb for another coastal presence, but it certainly isn't in the same class as the others when it comes to flexibility and features.  It is an exception to the value equation in ny Mac universe.

Overall the Mac adds value to what I do whether it is creating a website , working with a high definition movie, creating a flyer, or printing pictures of our grand daughter on our new portable Canon Pixma 320 printer.

As long as that value is a reasonable tariff, I will stay on the Mac platform.  I will complain about the high prices, but I do not see where else I could go.

Finally I would consider getting an Apple iPhone but the battery and dropped connections worry me somewhat.  I would not necessarily lay all of the dropped calls in Apple's lap.  My wife has a 3G Nokia phone from AT&T.  We rarely have a phone call when her phone doesn't drop me.  That leads me to question the AT&T network.  I think that I will wait and see if the iPhone get another revision and perhaps another network.  My contract isn't up until January anyway.

A Mac user's conclusion that Vista is a quagmire

I am six months into my Vista experience.  Today I reached the tipping point.  While I have to continue using it, I am going to say flat out that Vista is not worth the effort.

My efforts at liking Vista go far beyond what I would normally do for any piece of software.  I have used Vista ever day for over the last six months.   I have let Microsoft do whatever it wanted to do to my system through automatic updates.

I have intervened once and that was only when the wireless networking on the my Vista HP laptop was so bad that I was ready to throw it into the water behind the house.  I searched out some new drivers for my wireless card.  That improved wireless performance to the point where the system became usable.

Still I struggled through the stupid situation where every time I put the system to sleep I had to deal with a distorted screen once the system wakes from sleep.  The only solution seemed to be rebooting the laptop. Any Vista user can tell you that takes far more time than any computer in recent memory.

My guess and the guess of others is that I have graphics driver issue.  So I went to the nVidia website.  After I finally got it to figure out what system I was using, I was told that I could only get driver updates from HP.com.

When I got to HP.com, I found that there were over 40 systems with the name of HP Pavilion dv6000.  So I looked on the back and found another model number HP dv6451.us.   I made a mistake typing and put "Pavillion dv6451" instead of Pavilion dv6451.  At that point I was told that over 400 products claimed the name.  I finally got the name right only to find out that HP has no recommended driver update.

While I was on HP's site, I decided to see why my system has not been updated to Vista Service Pack 1.  First I found HP Notebook PCs  - Update to Vista SP1 Frequently Asked Questions and then the even more scary HP Notebook PCs  - Precautions to Take Before Updating to Vista Service Pack 1.  After reading that I decided that I did not even want Vista Service Pack 1, but I still wanted to fix my problems with the video.

I have been a little suspicious of HP Update program anyway since it has failed to install updates recently so when I saw this paragraph I decided to roll the dice and see if I could shake things up on my system.

The HP Update utility will check for updated drivers and software, however the older versions of HP Update (v4.000.005.007 or earlier) will not work properly after upgrading to Vista SP1. To install the latest version of HP Update, open the Control Panel and uninstall the older version of HP Update. Then go to the hp.com web site and search for the softpaq SP38202 HP Update and HP Software Update - Critical Security Update (English only).

I uninstalled my HP Update software and managed to get the new version working after a number of tries. When I finally ran the new HP Update, I got a message that no updates were available for my system.

So at this point I was beginning to think there was no hope for the driver update that nVidia hinted that HP might have available for me.

I decided to run Windows Update just for the heck of it.  Windows told me that there were no critical updates available for my system.  However, when I looked in optional updates there was a new graphics driver update for my system.  I installed it, and just gave my system the sleep-wake from sleep test.  Much to my amazement, I no longer have a distorted screen on waking from sleep.  Tomorrow we will see if that was chance or it is really fixed.

One would think that I might be making some type of convoluted progress, but it was just the appearance of progress.  If you have perhaps read my On the eve of Apple's Leopard, I buy a Windows Vista Laptop post, you might remember that the overriding reason for me, a user of Apple products for 26 years, to buy a Vista system was so that I could do real estate forms.

This afternoon I once again needed to send a PDF form to a remote customer so they could renew their listing with me.  Last week I had a problem doing PDFs with the forms package that I had installed to get around the one which had become very flaky on Vista.  An older program seemed to work once I retyped the client's information.  When I tried to do that tonight, I got an error and could not create a PDF. I tried the first program, and it wouldn't work either.

I resorted to the help menu only to get this message. It is amazing to me that Microsoft would not build some sort of mechanism to read old help files.  After all Apple figured out how to run non native software on Intel processors.  I decided that it was time to punt on the two forms packages on my Vista machine.

This was a two page document so I decide to save the file to my Sony USB thumb drive which I have never used in my Windows Vista machine.  I inserted the thumb drive and Vista started searching for a driver.  It actually hung the machine, and I had to reboot.  At that point I decided to print the document to my upstairs office where my old XP machine is.  I did that successfully and entered the information on the real estate forms package on the XP machine.  The PDF file was created successfully, and I emailed it to the client.

I had carried my USB thumb drive up to perform a test.  I stuck it into my Zonbu Linux computer.  I was not surprised when it automatically was able to use the USB drive.  I took this screen snapshot and actually sent it to my Windows Vista box.  First it went as a PNG file.  I tried to upload the image to Typepad.  Typepad didn't recognize it.  So after checking to make sure it had an extension, I went to my Mac and imported it to iPhoto and emailed it again as a JPG file to the Windows Vista machine.  Once again I tried uploading from the Vista machine and Typepad refused to recognize it.

At that point I saved my post as a draft, turned around, and climbed on the stool by my Mac.  I took the same file that had been sent by the Linux box and uploaded it to Typepad without any problems.

While all this might seem like enough to chuck the Windows Vista box, it really isn't the straw that broke the camel's back.  That actually came earlier in the day.

I have multiple email accounts from a variety of providers since I live by email.

This morning I noticed that two of my email accounts were unresponsive.  Since I used to work for the company hosting those accounts, I chatted with their Director of Infrastructure using my Adium instant messenger client.  He admitted they were having "bandwidth" problems.  I did not think much of it as my Mail app on OSX just put those two accounts offline.

Unfortunately I had something to do on my Vista laptop and happened to click my Outlook email client which was running and trying to download messages. Those two unresponsive IMAP accounts hung Outlook completely.

All of this taken together shows me that Microsoft has done a terrible job with Vista.  The Linux from Zonbu works better.  The forms packages that I bought the Vista system to use barely work and certainly do not have the promised functionality. And if two unresponsive email accounts are going to lock up my email package, I need another email package.

The amount of lost productivity due to Vista is amazing.  Now there are likely people out there whose Vista systems work perfectly for them.  Mine doesn't.  It was a brand new machine, and is only six months old.  While I am getting a few problems fixed, worse ones are cropping up.  The machine is scanned regularly, and the worst thing that has ever shown up is one tracking cookie.

It all boils down to this. Windows is a time sink. This morning we were having a debriefing on a promotion that our company recently did.  Someone happened to mention that it would have been a better promotion if he had been able to get to his files off his crashed Windows machine.  Apparently our support person has been trying to recover them for a couple of weeks.

I just smiled to myself since the head of our company had told me that the flyer I produced recently was one of the best he had seen.  It had taken less than an hour on Pages.

It is clear to me that if you are an independent contractor like I am, you might have to use Windows for some Windows specific things, but if you are trying to produce high quality work with a minimum effort,  a Mac is the only way to go.

Otherwise consider yourself in the never ending quagmire of Vista.

It might be easy to say that the problems with Vista are to be expected since the OS comes from one company and the hardware is thrown together from a variety of companies who have lived in a world where no one has taken responsibility for the user's problems for years.

However, it is not easy to be that Vista user in an environment where you have to support yourself.

It is much easier being a Mac user.  Apple certainly isn't perfect, but using OS X is an order of magnitude better than fighting with Vista.

There lots of things to do here on the Carolina coast that are more fun than trying to use a Vista computer.  Tomorrow, I plan to not torture myself with Vista.  I might even go fishing again.

My mostly Apple workflow

It seems that it might come as a surprise to some readers that I actually spend more time on a Macintosh than I do on a Windows machine. 

When I am not working with clients, I am usually writing or taking pictures.  Both the writing and the pictures help me get clients.

I use the pictures and my words to describe the extraordinary scenery and relaxed life along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks. 

While I wander from Cape Lookout to Swansboro, I am mostly concerned with the area from Beaufort to Swansboro which happens to be the area most newcomers like.

I have several tools that help me get my work done.  If you have been reading my blog for a while, you probably know that I use my HP Vista laptop to do my real estate forms and access the few real estate sites that require Internet Explorer.

Beyond that I use my Vista laptop for storage of photos which I take every day. The cheap portable storage is one of the reasons that I bought it.  Other than that and SnagIt to make some custom maps with captions for clients, Windows is not my OS of choice.  There are some things that SnagIt does very well and sometimes I wish I had a Mac version.  I cannot say that of Vista.

As a Realtor® I do not take many interior home pictures.  That is typically done by listing agents. I do list properties, but with the whole world already listed, I have found bringing buyers to the area is far more likely to make me successful.

The unique challenge for our area is that it is mostly a secret that has been passed from visitor to visitor by word of mouth.  There are tourism sites that bring lots of people in each year and some of those people decide to stay.

However, there has been little concerted effort to use the web to attract people to the area.  About eighteen months ago, I used Dreamweaver to develop my first Southern Outer Banks site.

Probably six months after that I settled on RapidWeaver as my main web development tool.  My Southern Outer Banks site went through a major renovation and ended up much as it is today.  I might have stayed with Dreamweaver, but it only comes with two licenses, and I use three or four systems.  I also like the the modern templates and reasonable price on RapidWeaver.  I haven't upgraded my Dreamweaver since December 2004 so it may be a totally different beast at this point.

In addition to the main Southern Outer Banks site, there is also a clone of part of the site with somewhat out of sync content and no advertising in order to stay with the rules of City Data forum where I often participate in discussions concerning our area.

There are also a number of feeder sites done with RapidWeaver.   My Carteret County Blog would be one example. 

Processing and choosing the right photos to match my content is key to my efforts.  I use three digital cameras and many days take over 200 photos.  The cameras are a Nikon D50 SLR, a pocket Nikon S9, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2.

As soon as I come in from chasing sunsets and capturing the area scenery, I often download the pictures using Picasa and my HP laptop.  Once that is done I take the same SD memory cards and suck the photos into iPhoto 08 on my Dual G5 which has a couple of large internal hard drives.

If I have some photos that I want to place on the web for individual reference, I usually do that in Photoshop.  This a sample of a sunset on Bogue Sound which I took this past Sunday and put on the web with Photoshop. 

The only adjustments which I do are typically sizing and getting the image back to what my eye remembers that I actually saw.  That's always a challenge but I am pretty good at it, and mostly know just enough Photoshop to get in trouble so I try not to waste a lot of time on that part of the process.

These days I have been very successful at getting images shown during the weather broadcast on one of our local television stations.  I have usually identified those by a quick look in Picasa and will often send them directly from iPhoto with just some basic cropping and sizing.

I will also size a few images to use with my numerous blogs, Ocracokewaves at Blogger, Squarespace, and Wordpress.  I also have to feed my main blog, View from the Mountain and a couple that have sprouted off from it, Once a Reston Resident, and Roanoke with some sea salt.  I also have a real estate blog at Active Rain.

With the exception of the TypePad blogs, all of the other blogs have little photographic quirks which sometimes require some special sizing.

Once I have a few photos that I am happy with, I'll usually pick something to write.  As you can tell I rarely add a photo to Applepeels, but I seem to require it before I can write for the others.

I do almost all my writing for the blogs in Firefox using whatever tools the blog software offers.  Of course my main Southern Outer Banks site and Carteret County Blog are written directly in RapidWeaver.

Usually after finishing the writing in RapidWeaver, I export the site changes to a folder and upload using Fetch.  There are a few pages that I watch with Google Analytics so once I have uploaded with Fetch, I open the files from the server with Dreamweaver and insert the correct analytics code in it.  Sometimes I also correct any minor errors with Dreamweaver instead of republishing the whole site.  So far that has worked well.

Sometimes like last night I am working on a slide show.  I use ShutterBug exclusively for doing web slide shows.  Last night I did one of the beach village of Emerald Isle during the winter.  I also took a slide show that I had done in January of a new subdivision, Cannonsgate, and added a link to active MLS listings.

The slide shows like those and the ones I did of Swansboro in December or boating last summer help people figure out if this area is right for them.

Sometime I also write for one of the local magazines or create other articles.  Normally I will use the writing tool in GoogleApps so I can access the files from anywhere.  I am working on a book in my "spare time." I typically slip into Nisus Writer for that.  I have been trying to use NeoOffice more and more since I find it very comfortable.

In addition to using the pictures for the blogs, I also use them for postcards which I use both as something to mail and as a business card.  About once every six months, I have 1,000 postcards printed professionally using five or six different local images.  I place those in local restaurants and hand them out at shows.  I use InDesign CS to create the postcards.  I do print some small batches on my HP Photosmart 6180.

I have a couple of mailing lists that I manage using Filemaker.  I use a Dymo LabelWriter Turbo 400 for most of my client letters.  When I do the small batches of postcards, I hand address and write the message with a fountain pen.

Once in a while I will do a mail merge letter for some potential clients.  Then I am stuck using MS Word.

About once a quarter for a week or two I will spent twenty minutes each morning collecting statistics from all my spots where I have an online presence.  I total up how many people touch my websites.  I use Excel and often post a graph on the web that I share with our sales management.  It produces a hard number which validates that my web traffic continues to grow.

In addition to the blogs that I mentioned, I play with a Mac one done with iWeb.  It suffers the most from inattention because I have to lug around over 50 megs of files from one system to another. Mostly I just work on it from one spot. Unfortunately that just doesn't work for me.

I also use Flickr uploader to get my photos to my Flickr site.  In spite of the ease of sending the photos directly from Picasa to my Picasa Web Albums, I will often use a web tool and send them from my Mac.

While I have toyed with Microsoft's new web authoring tool which I like, I mostly stick with Dreamweaver for maintenance on my homepage and my main photography page. 

I have created a few special pages like this one on the White Oak River and this area photo archive.  I have done all those in RapidWeaver which I find to be a very capable tool.

While I do write some of my posts on my Windows machine, it has more to do with disliking the trackpad, screen, and keyboard on my MacBook than it does with any love of Vista on my HP.  The HP just has a better keyboard, trackpad, and a very readable 15" inch screen.

When I have a choice, I will write from my Mac desktop.  This post has been done on my Mac desktop.  Part of that is because it is in my office where it is quieter.  I have a XP desktop and my Zonbu system both in the same office so I could and do use them once in a while, but mostly I use my Mac desktop.

I also use VueScan to scan some documents and photos from my Mac.  It works very well hooked up by USB to my HP6180.

Once in a while I will do an iMovie, a podcast, or use iDVD.  I haven't used them nearly as much as I though I would, but I wouldn't even attempt the same thing on my Windows or Linux boxes.  I have one flyer that I have done in Pages, and I probably would use Pages again for the same type of thing.

I have given up loading photos onto my Linux machine since I have to use a cable plugged from the camera into the computer to get things to work.  I do like to write on my Zonbu since it is so quiet with no moving parts and the fancy keyboard that I bought for it.

I use Google calendar so it get updated from whatever computer I use. It does sync with Outlook.  I do use iCal to grab tide tables which are pretty important for a guy who loves to fish and always has his boat ready to go.

As far as email, I use Apple's Mail app, Outlook, and Gmail.  I like a few things in Outlook, but I don't ever see myself becoming addicted to it.  It's too flaky for my taste. Email is just email, and I will use whatever I need in order to access it.  I have a couple of my IMAP accounts with Webmail.us which has become Mailtrust.  They have a very good webmail interface and when I worked there I got used to it so dropping into that is not a problem.

So while I might enjoy the technical challenge of having to live in a Windows world, using a Mac is like coming home.  I get the same feeling when I work on my Mac as I do when I spend some time in my kayak.  Appropriately I did my most recent kayak photo album using .Mac.

So the next time you read one of my post about my struggles on Windows, remember I am a Mac user and have been using Apple products for almost 26 years continuously.

I also would recommend a Mac to anyone who does what I do.  Though I have had my share of Mac laptop problems, my Mac desktops have mostly been models of reliability.

Also know that if the real estate market turns around, maybe I will get far enough ahead that I can hire someone to do my real estate forms on their Windows machine.

That way someone else can worry about Vista.  Did I tell you about my forms package crashing three times on Saturday night?  Surely people can build better software than that.

A Vista perspective from a Mac user

Actually I like to think that I am more than just a Mac user.  I have been using Windows XP for over four years, and Linux for nearly the same amount of time.  I have also seen operating systems come and go since 1982 when I got my first Apple II+.

First off I suspect that Microsoft will work hard and eventually get Vista to be the operating of choice for most of the planet.  The reason that it will have that honor has more to do with inertia than engineering prowess.

The inertia comes from two sources, Apple and end users.  People do not like to get out of their computing comfort zone, and switching operating systems is a sure way to get a few headaches no matter how good the new system is.

After a few months of using Vista, I have some opinions on the product. 

It is almost deadly slow when it comes to booting, shutting down, and waking from sleep.  A Powerbook running OS X is an instant on machine compared to a Vista machine.

Second wireless networking on Vista is a work in progress.  While I will admit that my Airport Express network needs replacing, a number of laptops visiting us including multiple XP ones have had no trouble using it.

in the mornings I often get to the point of having to reboot my Vista laptop before it will connect to the wireless network.  In its defense, I do not have that problem at our office or at our other home which has a standard Airport network.

I have found Outlook to be a fairly capable email client, but it also is slow and somewhat prone to stopping if I click once too many times.

I have seen far fewer 'Firefox has stopped working" problems on Vista than I do on the Mac.  I still do not like Internet Explorer though the 64 bit version seems fast.

I also find Google Desktop search integrated into Outlook by far the most productive search engine that I have used.  I like Google Desktop search better than Apple's Spotlight, but I am only speaking from OS 10.4 Tiger experience.  I have not used Leopard (OS X 10.5).

Google Desktop as a side panel hangs regularly on Vista usually after the machine awakes from sleep.

I have had far fewer problems than I anticipated using Vista to hook up the wide variety of printers that I have access to at home and work.

I am not particularly fond of Windows Live Messenger, and I try to use Pidgin when chatting.  I find that I keep wishing for Adium on Windows.

I have the latest version of Microsoft's Office Suite.  I have had little trouble with it, and it seems to do whatever job that I throw at it.  Here I have to admit that I am no longer someone who is a power office suite user.  I have used Excel more than the other applications.  The new user interface took some getting used to, but now I find it more productive.

I also miss Fetch, the FTP Client that I use on the Mac.  I use FileZilla but it is not as nice as Fetch.

One of the best applications that I have found on Vista is SnagIt which does screen capture and a lot more.  I certainly do not mind paying for it.

On Vista I miss the ability to turn something into a PDF from any application at the operating system level.  I think it is a huge feature advantage for OS X.

In general most of the applications done for Vista do not look as good as Mac applications.  However, there is so much flexibility in Windows, that you can build a very productive work if sometimes painful work flow.

The combination of a built-in photo memory card reader, Picasa and SnagIt do almost everything that I need in the world of graphics.  I find it faster than iPhoto and  Photoshop.

I  have yet to do much web work on my Vista machine.  To be fair, I think I will wait until I have some more time with the Vista products.

So would I recommend Vista as a main operating system to anyone who had other choices?  The answer is probably not.  It just doesn't have the high quality feel that I thought it would after all those years of development.

Vista is not unusable, it is just disappointing.

But I am also disappointed in Apple.  It continues to amaze me that a company with Apple's financial resources and popularity cannot seem to fight its way out of the paper bag of Windows.

Bill and team have done everything possible to hand over the market to Apple, yet Apple does not seem to want the opportunity.  Back when XP was having unbelievable security problems, Apple was so insecure about their own security that they would not market it.

Apple has changed chips, and Macs can run Windows natively and in virtual machines.  Still Apple's market share even in the US is barely half way to double digits.  As we have heard  from some international visitors to Applepeels, Apple is not exactly rolling over the competition selling and supporting computers in other countries.

Apple might have a few bumps with Leopard, but I seriously doubt it is the anything like the pain in the rear that Vista is.  With Vista languishing while waiting for a service pack, the best Apple can do is a few funny commercials.  Even with the best retail chain in the nation and  a stock price that is headed over $200, it looks like the majority of the computing world will remain Windows centric for the foreseeable future.

I guess there is not enough pain in the Windows environment or enough innovation in the Apple world to get consumers moving on their own.  Steve Jobs apparently was serious years ago in his concession to Bill over desktop operating systems.  He certainly does not appear to be interested in winning that war even with his superior weapons.

I would love to see the innovation of the Zonbu computing  model married to the better than anything else user interface of Apple and the nearly unlimited choice of the Intel hardware world.  If you could integrate it into better bandwidth and a choice of server providers that would store and protect our data, we might get people to try something else.

Right now I guess I am stuck with Vista for my real estate world,  and Macs for my website work with whatever computer I am using being the repository for my photos.

I managed to get a batch photos into my Zonbu machine, but I do not see me using it for the 100 photos or more a day that I do until we take another leap in bandwidth.

So maybe Apple will surprise me and take the next leap forward at MacWorld this year.  If it is iPhone II, pardon me if I yawn.

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A Real World Update

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I had to work this afternoon so I lugged my Vista laptop into one of our offices.  The wireless network was down so someone rebooted it.  The Windows XP machine on my desk connects immediately.  The Vista laptop which had successfully connected to this network several times before, cannot see it either before or after the wireless reboot.

So I decide to reboot the Vista machine.  I joke to one of the administrative assistants that the best thing Microsoft can do is to buy OS X from Apple and replace Vista with it.

While my Vista machine is still in the process of rebooting, I pull out my spare computer, a MacBook, and bet that I can be surfing the net before the Vista machine is done booting.

I count out loud and in eight seconds from the time of opening my MacBook, I am surfing the web.

While I am logging into Typepad, the Vista machine finally gets to the point of needing a password for login.  Even with the reboot, I still cannot see the network which the MacBook sees and the Windows XP desktop beside it also sees.

I would be embarrassed in the year 2007 to ship an operating system that cannot reliably and without failure hook to wireless networks.

As I said long ago, Windows, This is nuts.