Applepeels

Tim Cook, the right person for Apple's evolution?

New products have been the heart and soul of Apple for most of its history.  The recent comments by Forrester Research chief executive George Colony have received a lot of discussion. 

It is easy to jump on the bandwagon that Apple will decline without that next great thing and the vision of Steve Jobs.

I would disagree with Colony's analysis for a number of reasons.  My first thought is that it is impossible for any company, even an Apple, to turn out hit after hit. Setting the expectation that this is the only way Apple can be a great company is to consign Apple to a future which won't be very bright.

The Apple of today is really the result of three straight home-runs by Steve Jobs, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.  The Apple of tomorrow does not have to be defined by products that break the mold every time.

There is no guarantee that even if Steve left Apple with that next great thing that it will be another product hit.  Despite what has come to be popular wisdom, even Steve had some less than successful products.  You might want to remember back to Steve's wonderfully designed PowerMac G4 Cube for just one example.

Tim Cook might be the person who finally turns Apple into an adult company.  It doesn't have to be a company that declines like Sony has.

I have already heard some thoughts from Tim which indicate that he might be right for this moment in Apple's history.  His comments on the convergence of tablets and laptops are on the money.  I just hope he is strong enough to keep Apple from making its OS X operating system look too much like iOS for the wrong reasons.

Apple has a tremendous amount of momentum, and there is plenty that can be done to grow Apple's business.  Despite what the technology press and analysts would have us believe, computers besides tablets are not dead.  There are plenty of people who will be using laptops and desktops for years to come.

Just as Microsoft is envious of Apple's share of the smart phone and tablet markets, Apple should be eyeing the huge numbers of computers that still ship with Windows around the world.  As the world of technology matures, finding new markets with that next great product might be beyond any company's ability.

However, getting beyond a 10% market share in the world of computers could be within the grasp of a Tim Cook led Apple.  One of the weaknesses that I saw in the leadership of Steve when I was at Apple was the ease with which a market or a product could be sentenced to a slow death as resources were drawn to that next great thing.

My experience with Tim Cook showed me someone who is willing to tinker with things until he gets them right.  It happens to be one of the things that I have admired about Microsoft.  That patient ability to keep working on product until it meets customer needs is what has kept Microsoft alive and still making money.

So what would I like to see Apple do to begin its journey to sustainable growth?

Obviously Apple has to keep churning out new iPhones and iPads, but Apple needs to resist the temptation to load them up with features that distract from their core functionality.  You can make something better without feature creep.  That is part of Steve that Apple needs to keep in the minds of its product designers.

At the same time, Apple needs to focus substantial resources towards making OS X the absolute best operating system for computers on the planet.  At one time it was.  It no longer is the best.  There are things that Windows 7 does better, and I find Windows 7 is more reliable.  Apple should not make OS X look like iOS just for the sake of doing it.  If there are good reasons fine, but don't mess more things up like we have already seen in recent updates to iPhoto.

Apple should not depend on Microsoft screwing up with Windows 8.

Next Apple absolutely must focus on style with reliability.  I should not be sitting here saying that my last three Mac laptops are dead while my last three Windows laptops are still running.  There is no reason why Apple cannot deliver its absolute drop dead gorgeous products and have them be ones that have spectacular reliability.  You can build a company on reliability and customer satisfaction.  You can lose a company if your products don't stand the test of time.

I really don't care if there is another laptop a little thinner than mine if my laptop lasts five years instead of two.

Next, the world of desktop computers is a wasteland.  The iMac and the Mac Mini have not revolutionized it.  They also haven't taken Apple very far into the world of two digit market share. 

There is a product somewhere between the iMac and the Mac Mini with a feature or two from the Mac Pro that could own the desktop world.  While it might not break completely new ground, it could be a home run for Apple.

Things will have to gradually change at Apple under Tim Cook's leadership for all this to happen, but I think it is very possible that Apple has not yet seen its peak.  Maybe the stock won't be as high, but the company could find a spot in the list of companies who have survived the loss of their visionary leader.

It would be good for all of us consumers of technology if Apple could not only survive but thrive.  I really couldn't care less if Apple comes out with a television, but I would be really ecstatic if Apple re-invented the desktop computer and delivered it with the world's greatest operating system.

There are lot of challengs out there for Apple. Android and Amazon will be fierce competitors, but Apple already has a lot going for it and should not face the decline that so many expect.

With that I am back to enjoying spring as it continues to unfold here along the stunning waters of North Carolina's coast.  With warming weather I plan to be back out in my kayak and anchored on the oyster rocks once again.

 

 

 

A Quick Take on Apple's part in Kodak's history

It was the spring of 1994, just before things really started to get interesting at Apple.  I called my higher education team together for a spring meeting at Mountain Lake Resort not too far from Blacksburg, Virginia.

We were planning for back to school at universities and colleges from Maryland all the way through North Carolina. It was still in the days when college students could get a real deal by buying their computers on campus.

As an Apple manager, I never bought into the idea that Apple reps should focus on marketing by brochure.  I believed that my people needed to know what they were selling so I always managed to set aside some dollars for demo equipment.

That spring, I ordered Quicktake 100 cameras for my team.  They had revolted when I had suggested an overnight camping trip and a hike on part of the Appalachian Trail as a prelude to our meeting.  We settled on a digital scanvenger hunt around the trail at Mountain Lake.  It gave them a chance to get familiar with their Quicktake cameras.

The first Quicktake was actually manufactured by Kodak.  It was a revolution in its day.  I can remember using both the Quicktake and Kodak's earlier Photo CD product.  My oldest daughter did a Hypercard project for a high school science project, and we had a Photo CD created.

In a little over three years, Steve Jobs would be back at Apple.  Apple would focus on just computers.  Cameras, scanners, printers, and even the Newton would disappear from the product lineup

For a time I thought Apple had made a mistake in abandoning cameras, but within a few years, it was clear that to win in the digital camera business took a focus that Apple didn't have if you will pardon the pun.

Apple's next great contribution to the world of photography would be iPhoto which was released in January 2002.

Like most folks I have a history with Kodak cameras and film.  We even used Kodak disc film and some of their multi-format cameras.  When I was in college in the sixties, I actually had a Kodak SLR camera that I carried with me on a trip to Alaska.  It didn't have interchangeable lenses so in 1969/70 I switched to Nikon which is the camera line that I still use the most.

As someone who sometimes takes a thousand pictures a day and still sells a few prints, I am a dedicated camera user and not particularly interested in the cameras in devices like the iPhone.  I am certain you can take great pictures with them, but they don't meet my needs.

Apple has been a company that has been able to re-invent its business a number of times.  There are myriads of reasons why Apple and Kodak are different companies on completely different trajectories.

I am also not sure if the world of digital photography would be much better if Apple had gotten serious about the camera market.  However, I do think Apple deserves some credit for helping create the bridge between the world of photography and computers.

I know that I have a very rich history of digital images which I probably wouldn't have except for the Quicktake, iPhoto, and actually the Apple OneScanner and its Ofoto scanning program.  All of these gave me an early start in the digital world and likely a path away from Kodak.

While I can live with Apple not being my digital camera supplier or the source of my scanner and its VueScan software, I certainly do miss Apple in my world of printers.  Actually I can live without Apple in the world of laser printers, but I certainly do miss Apple's genius in the world of color printers.

I keep floating between Epson, Cannon, and HP color printers, but none have the magic of Apple or even work much better with Apple's OSX than they do with Windows 7, but that is fodder for a post another day.

Aside from complaining about the death of common courtesy, that is it from the Crystal Coast where winter never stays very long, but we are enjoying some brief winter beach time.  If you are using Safari for your browser, you can check out my belted Kingfisher movie.

Perhaps he had a comment on being photographed about three quarters of the way through the move.  The movie was done with a Nikon Coolpix 500.  I might have some comments soon on the pain of movies and browsers in 2012.

 

My wishes for Apple in 2012

To start I want to get off the plate my perennial wishes for Apple that I know will never happen. 

The first is for a nice $1,000 mini-tower that has room for a couple of hard drives and an optical drive.  All it needs is an I5 processor but an I7 would be a nice option.  It doesn't have to be designed to survive a nuclear holocaust like the current Mac Pro. Just a simple elegant case will do.  I don't need to elaborate on the specs since this does not appear to be anywhere on Apple's radar.

The second wish that I know will never come about is a reasonably priced 15" laptop.  I don't expect Apple to compete with low cost laptops but it sure would be nice to be able to get a 15" laptop from Apple for only 50% more than the competition instead of more than double the cost.

My third never-going-to-happen perennial wish is that Apple would establish real communication with customers. While I know that customers can be a pain in the rear when you are the most successful company in the world, I really think both customers and Apple would gain from having a dialogue instead of mostly one way communication.

I have no idea whether or not my last wish from previous years has been fixed since I still haven't figured out how to access iCloud without spending money for an upgrade that I don't want or becoming best buddies with someone using Mac OS X Lion.  The holidays did not help in this respect since my adult children gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas.

Now that my old wishes are out of the way, what do I really hope for Apple in 2012.

Well the first thing that I would like to see Apple do is to focus on making things work really well instead of adding things that might be of questionable value. Changes to iPhoto are what I have complained about the most but there might be significant issues in OS X Lion.

While I wish I had hands on experience with OS X Lion, I don't.  What I have heard from my valued testers has not been very positive and has kept me from installing it on my I5 iMac.  This recent article in Slate confirmed what my tester-friends have been telling me, that Apple perhaps has stretched a little far with Lion.  I'm not saying the direction they're headed is completely wrong, but it would be really nice if things just worked really well.  That is usually the case on a Mac, and that is why most of use Macs.

My next wish is that Apple would quit playing the game of forcing people to buy more expensive products just to get what they want. Now I will give credit where credit is due.  You no longer have to buy the iMac with the largest screen to get an I5 processor like when I bought mine in October 2010.  My desk really didn't have room for the large screen, but I had no choice at the time if I wanted an I5 processor.

That being said there are still some nagging issues like having to buy a 13" MacBook Air to get a SD slot and having to buy an external CD drive for the MacMini.  Just about the time the Mac Mini got updated enough for me to consider buying one, Apple takes out the CD-ROM drive

Now I understand Apple wants everyone to go to their online app store which most people seem to think has reduced prices but having an external CD-ROM sort of defeats the elegance of the Mac Mini.

Beyond that I don't have a lot of complaints about Apple, but that might be because I don't have both feet in the world of Apple.  If I want to transfer photos from my Android phone, I just plug it into my computer and drag them over. I don't have to go through iTunes which I hardly use.

If I want to share files across multiple computers, I use DropBox which is a drop dead elegant solution that works on everything.  My pictures are in Picasa Web Albums, and I am even giving Microsoft Skydrive a try since it also works on everything and seems very fast.

I know that the life blood of Apple is innovation, but I am hoping that the reign of Tim Cook becomes know as much for refinement as it does for the latest technology. 

There is already an overwhelming amount of technology out there. Apple's core strength has always been making technology easy even when not everything was built by Apple.  I hope to see that direction revitalized this year. It is something desperately needed in our world.

Finally I would love to see Apple take some of their cash horde and figure out how to help jump start the American economy.  Certainly Apple can't do it alone, but by the same token Apple could become a leader in helping America retool for the future.  Other Silicon Valley companies are used to following Apple's leadership, and this would be a great place for Apple to use it's influence.

If you are wondering about the donation button that is now on the Applepeels blog, you can read details in this post. It is just an effort to generate some cash to be able to review more products which will then be auctioned off to readers. Any donation from a buyer will be credited towards a purchase.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

The saga of Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa with some tests

I got a few interesting comments on my decision to move to Google's Picasa on my MacBook instead of using the newest iPhoto version 9.1.5.

Perhaps the one comment most illustrative of what I like least about the Apple world said that the whole thing was my fault because I had an issue with iPhoto and I couldn't solve the issue.  That is perhaps the best example of Apple thinking that I have seen in a long time.

The same people who think it is my fault because iPhoto 9.1.5 wouldn't run would be the first to rant and rave and blame Microsoft if Microsoft shipped a program which didn't install properly.

Somehow Apple gets a free pass from many of its users no matter what it does.  Unfortunately that just feeds the arrogance that has often been Apple's downfall. However, they have such a big cash cushion now, it is hard to imagine what they would have to do to screw up, but I have been surprised before.

I try to hold Microsoft, Google, and Apple to similar standards.  When they provide software free or otherwise, I expect it to work which includes installing without screwing up my data.

When I have paid money for a piece of software and the company ships me a piece of software to update it, it is reasonable to expect it to work.  I have been around Apple hardware and software for twenty-nine years this month which is the anniversary of my Apple II+ purchase.  September will be the 29th anniversary of the first Apple computer that I sold, so I have seen the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly.

Perhaps what I should have said in my most recent post is that I was a lover of iPhoto until the version that came out last fall, and I was willing to put up with some blemishes, but now I feel like that I have lost a valued tool since it has grown some ugly warts.

In the interest of putting some facts behind my assertion that Picasa is a better piece of software than iPhoto 9.1.5, I decided to once again try to get iPhoto 9.1.5 running.  I tried another repair of the library and actually left that running all night.  In the morning iPhoto was unresponsive so I forced iPhoto to quit and threw the whole iPhoto package in the trash and emptied it.

Next I got out my firewire drive and copied over a small iPhoto library that I was sure had been untouched by the most recent versions of iPhoto. It was around 9 gigs of photos, and I made it the main iPhoto library.

Then from the DVD, I reinstalled iPhoto 9 which came with iLife 11.  Of course I ended up doing all the updates and eventually got to the screen which asked me if I wanted to update the library which I did.  Finally iPhoto 9.1.5 decided to work.

As a bench mark I checked my old dual G5 system downstairs, it has over 50,000 photos in one of several libraries, but of course it is running iPhoto 8.

Having gotten iPhoto 9.1.5 running on my MacBook, I decided to run some tests.  While I tried to make it as fair as possible, Picasa ended up being a little handicapped.   The iPhoto library that I used for the tests has about 2,600 photos in it and came in at a little over 9 gigs.  Picasa because it was managing all the photos on my MacBook which includes several libraries, all my jpeg downloads, and even screen captures had 46,000 photo and over 30 gigs of data.

One of my assertions about the newest versions of iPhoto is that the program is flat out slow. To test that I wanted to see how long it would to take to upload photos.   I have two cameras with me on this trip, my Nikon 3100 and my Sony DSC-HX7V pocket camera.  I formatted both their SDHC cards and drove down to the Roanoke River and then visited a local farmer's market.  From the two spots I got about 50 pictures with each camera and made a couple of movies with the Sony.

When I got back, I set iPhoto to the default Photo application on the MacBook, I did a trial upload of another SDHC card just to check that everything was working.  Then I took one of the SDHC cards from my trip and timed with the stopwatch app on my Droid how long it took for iPhoto to launch and import all the photos on the SDHC card in the USB reader that I plugged into the MacBook.  It took just over 50 seconds to import the 50 photos from the Sony formatted card.

I quit iPhoto and set the default photo application to Picasa, once again did a trial import, and then timed how long it took to launch Picasa and import all fifty photos.  It was less than 30 seconds until completion.

I repeated the tests with HDSC card from my Nikon. It had only 49 photos, but they were larger files.  This time I did Picasa first.  It got the photos from the Nikon formatted card in 35 seconds.  I switched to iPhoto 9.1.5, and it took 53 seconds.

Just out of curiosity, I did the Sony card on my HP I7 laptop.  It took 32 or 33 seconds for the import, but it did take a couple of seconds to click and quit the Sony app that imports my movies.  With that said the times for Picasa were a dead heat on both platforms.

One thing that I did find out in all the changing of settings is that there is a setting in the new iPhoto that allows you go back to using Apple Mail for the default way to email your pictures.  As the next tests show, that is a very good thing.

I set the default picture size to be small and "shared" a photo by email.  With both Picasa and IPhoto set to use Apple Mail, it was a dead heat with both programs coming in at close to 4 seconds.  However, when you change the setting to iPhoto using its own email program and Picasa using Gmail, the results were very different.  Picasa took 3 seconds using Gmail, while iPhoto took 8 seconds using its email program.

Next I tried to run some tests of taking a picture, cropping it, applying an auto enhance, and uploading it from iPhoto to MobileMe Gallery or from Picasa to Picasa web albums.  I thought the tests looked pretty even, then when I tried to quit iPhoto, it told me that it was still updating the gallery.  I gave up trying to come up with a consistent way to see which was faster.   From what I could tell it looked like Picasa took 41 seconds, iPhoto 46 seconds, but again I am not sure iPhoto was finished.

I upload a lot from the iPhoto on my I5 iMac to Picasa web albums.  Of course you have to add something to iPhoto to make that happens since Steve has a holy war going on against Google.  I have long had the perception that it takes much longer to upload from iPhoto on my iMac to Picasa web albums than it does going from Picasa on my Windows I7 laptop to Picasa web albums.

This morning I took the same photo, cropped, auto enhanced, and uploaded to Picasa web albums using the I7 laptop.  It only took 24 seconds seconds and was clearly faster than either program on the MacBook.  Both computers are on the same wireless G class network.  My guess is that the difference was not in the editing but in the uploading.

I tried one more test.  I added some photos to one of the cards I used for the previous day's test and went through the uploading to the library test again except this time, I also tested the Windows laptop using the same external USB reader as I use on the MacBook.  Picasa on the MacBook took 29 seconds to get the photos.  iPhoto on the MacBook took 61 seconds, and the Windows laptop took 50 seconds.  The one caveat is that the way I have the Windows laptop set up, a Sony program launches for an optional import which is what I use for movies so I have to cancel it before Picasa on Windows can do its job.

From my tests I don't think that there is any doubt that Picasa is a faster program on the Mac.  It will remain my choice of a photo program on my MacBook while I will continue to use an earlier version of iPhoto on my iMac for as long as I can get away with it.  I will also continue using Picasa web albums since I believe it is a far better solution for my needs than MobileMe Gallery or its successors.

Your needs might vary, but here are some thoughts beyond speed that have gone into my decision.

Number one, I spent much of the last five years of my nearly twenty years at Apple preaching to enterprise customers that it was a very bad thing to let an application or a vendor hold your data hostage.  The biggest example in the enterprise world is Microsoft Exchange mail which at the time was certainly not standards based.  We preached IMAP which lets you use any standards compliant mail client that you want.

In a certain sense, iPhoto with its libraries also holds your data hostage.  Once you have used a library with a new version of iPhoto there is no turning back.  It there is a problem with the library, you need to have a back-up. I think the iPhoto library is a bad idea.  I like Picasa's method of just finding the jpegs and keeping track of them.  If I have a folder of jpegs, I can take it to a Linux computer, a Mac, or a Windows computer and find something that will look at them just like various email clients will look at an IMAP mail server.  I think we are really fortunate to have a free program like Picasa that to certain extent frees the data in an iPhoto library.  It certainly saved me lots of time when I needed to print some pictures.

What I love with the older versions of iPhoto is that I don't have to do a lot of switching around to get my tasks done.  When I have a batch of photos that need the same adjustments, it is easy to apply those exact same settings. I could click on a photo and click again and be back to the main library. That has all changed in the latest versions whose interface I find dumbed down for lack of a better phrase. iPhoto was a better program than Picasa for editing, but no longer.  It adopted some of the things I don't like about Picasa and added some of its own truly ugly interface changes.

The only thing that I do to my photos is to try to make what I see on the screen look like what I saw when I was taking the picture.  Since I live at the beach and shoot in lots of difficult light, a good auto contrast is worth a lot to me.  Picasa has a very reliable one that works most of the time in a way that gets me close to what eyes and memory caught when I took the picture.  I also like to put a watermark on a photo and sometimes I like to put a frame around it.  Picasa does the watermark easily when I want and with access to Picnik's online services does a better job of framing than what I get using iPhoto and Pixelmator.  I can get the same results with both, it is just easier and faster with the Picasa/Picnik combination as long as you have a fast Internet connection.  I pay $25 a year or so for the enhanced version of Picnik.  I think it is a good value for the money, and certainly a better value than I have gotten out of MobileMe.

Another area where I believe that Picasa is substantially better than iPhoto is the touch up tool.  There are photos where I might want to take a stray branch out of the finished picture.  For many years I would resort to Photoshop for that task, but the touch up tool in Picasa, once you learn how to use it properly, does an exceptional job.  I can't even remember when I have had to resort to Photoshop.  I find that the iPhoto retouch tool does more smudging than anything else.

Another really big point for me is that it is very easy to share a single photo using Picasa web albums. I get the link for sharing, embed it into my blog post, and I am off to the races. I also like that I can choose in Picasa whether to use Gmail or AppleMail to send my pictures by email without going to the preferences.  Of course Picasa syncs automatically to my the photo gallery on my Droid.

I always try to use the best tool for the job.  I have Aperture and have tried Adobe's Lightroom several times, but I don't need their features.  That said, there are days that I take 500 to 1,000 pictures, and it would be a rare day when I don't take fifty or sixty pictures.

I use Nikon, Panasonic, and Sony cameras.  I use Apple, HP, and Dell hardware along with OS X, Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux.  I have Epson, Canon, and HP printers.

Sometimes a different camera lets me see a scene in a different way, and there are tweaks that are better done in one program or the other.  The results are highly subjective.  I still prefer the editing on the iPhoto 8 that I have on my iMac. Sometimes now I use Picnik with it for watermarking and framing.

Your needs are going to vary from mine, but I have given this a lot of thought, applied some tests, and come to the conclusion that Picasa is far better software for my needs than iPhoto 9.1.5.  All the tests were done on my July 2006 Intel MacBook running Snow Leopard.

This settles the issue for me, I might run some more tests when I get home to my I5 iMac just to see how fast it is importing, but I won't be upgrading to iPhoto 9.1.5 ( or LIon for that matter) since the newer iPhoto just doesn't meet my very demanding needs.

This isn't the first time I have had comments about iPhoto and interface changes.  Share has once again moved.

That said I am probably going to need some more Marsh time after all this thinking about computers.

 

 

A Mac user reports after one year on Windows 7

It was on Februay 15, 2010 that I ordered both my wife and myself HP laptops running Windows 7.  About a week later I reported my first experiences with Windows 7. 

I actually was pretty surprised with the hostility that showed up in some of the comments to that post. I did not intend to offend the Apple world by once again purchasing some Wintel gear.

I wanted a fast processor in a laptop and had gotten tired of waiting for Apple to deliver one. 

It has been a year since I placed the order, so do I regret not waiting for that MacBook with an I7 processor?  Actually I do not have any regrets about my decision to spend money on non-Apple products.

My wife really needed a new laptop.  Her old Mac laptop had gotten so slow that even she had noticed. Initially I was going to buy just her a new Mac laptop, but in February 2010 I just could not see laying down good money for outdated processors from Apple.

When I found out that with rebates we both could get new laptops with the latest processors for less than the price of one Mac with an outdated processor, it did not take me long to place the order.

I was surprised that I got accused of being a shill for Microsoft especially considering that I had called Vista a Quagmire in a not very old post.  And just because I bought HP laptops for us, did not stop me from using Macs.  In fact this fall I ended up buying an I5 iMac because much of my work is still done on Macs.

I continue to use my old dual G5 tower and an even older Dell Pentium 3 desktop that runs Ubuntu Linux. I am pretty pleased with my technology set-up, but I think some of my observations on Windows 7 might be of interest to Mac people who would never consider dabbling in the world of Windows.

First off Windows 7 is an exceptionally reliable operating system. It is just a few days shy of a year since my wife and I both started using Windows 7. There have been no problems either hardware or software related with the systems.  That is no as in none. That is a pretty heady accomplishment for a brand new operating system running on new processors.

The systems have not crashed, locked up, or misbehaved in way that I have been able to determine.

In the year's time I have migrated my dedicated Mac using wife to the Windows world.  Would she still like to be using a Mac?

The answer is probably yes, but she also realizes a bargain when she sees one, so she is very happy with her HP laptop and saving some money.  She does claim to still miss her Apple address book, but her real problem is that she doesn't use an address book enough to really remember it in the Windows world.  She had years of hardly using her Mac address book for it to become second nature.

Our systems are set up very similarly.  My primary browser is Firefox, but I also use Chrome, and once in a while I have to use IE to print some GIS maps that our county has posted.  We both use Microsoft Security Essentials which is free, less intrusive than Norton, and also less of a resource hog.

Neither my wife or I have been bothered with viruses or any malware in the last year.

We use Thunderbird for email, Picasa for photos, Snagit for image captures, Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007 and Excel 2007.  I also use RealFast for my real estate forms.

Since I have dual Gmail personalities, Firefox is logged in under one ID and Chrome under the other.  The reasoning behind this is separate photo storage that I maintain in Picasa Web Albums.

I share files with Dropbox as does my wife.  Dropbox is actually part of my workflow since I will often first download my photos from SD cards to my HP I7 laptop. 

Any that I want to use in a post that need only minor editing I will fix in Picasa and save in my Dropbox which also puts it on my three Macs, the dual G5, my 2006 MacBook, and my new I5 iMac.

If there is a file that needs more work than I like to do in Picasa, I will save it in another Dropbox folder and work on it with Pixelmator then save it back to Dropbox.

Much of my work is writing or web pages. I do a lot of my writing in the mornings at the kitchen table.  The HP I7 laptop is my favorite machine for that since it has a 15" screen and a full sized keyboard.

I often do my web site work in the afternoon or evening.  Then I usually retire to my upstairs office and also download any photos to my I5 iMac where I might take another look at several of the best ones.  My new iMac has iPhoto 09 on it.  I made a mistake and put iPhoto 10 on my MacBook so I am not fond of doing iPhoto work on it.  I also have Aperture on the iMac but I rarely use it.  I have pretty well quit using Photoshop.

All of the blogs that I work on are done through a browser interface.  With a browser as an interface, it really doesn't matter to me which system does the writing.

However, I am working on a book which I write on the iMac using Nisus Writer Express.  When I finish a section I do take the time to open it in Word 2010 on the Mac and save it also as a Word document.  I have enough effort into the book that I don't want to take any chances of losing it.

Our Windows laptops seem to perform just as well on our networks as my Macs.  I certainly haven't seen the problems that I had with Vista.  The HP laptop also gives me the ability to print double-sided brochures on our color laser printer at the real estate office.  Unfortunately when they installed accounting software, it locked out Macs and since I was the only Mac user, no one was interested in fixing the problem.  I finally removed the old Mac desktop that I had in the office last fall.

One measure of the success of moving my wife to Windows is that it has been months since she started her old lamp shade iMac. It was the system she used in our second home. I have started it a couple of times just to make sure it works but that is it.  She now prefers to carry her HP laptop.  Her old Mac laptop had not been travel worthy for a long time due to its battery.

I still prefer using a Mac over a Windows machine for most things.  And there is some software on the Mac that I think is better than what is available for Windows computers.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that Windows 7 is a very good operating system and that you can find a very decent computer for much less than what you can in the world of Apple.

If you just want email, browsing, and sharing basic pictures, I would have a hard time recommending a Mac purchase unless you just want a Mac or have been using one for a long time.

We have no trouble printing to our wireless network of HP and Brother printers. In fact I think I have more trouble with my MacBook printing than I do the Windows laptops. Sharing files with DropBox is a piece of cake.

While I haven't timed it, I believe that my I7 HP laptop will boot more quickly than my I5 iMac but the difference is hardly worth arguing.

Those who said that my I7 HP Windows 7 laptop would slow like a typical Windows machine were wrong.  It has turned out be a very good experience.  I have actually helped a couple of people buy HP laptops identical to my wife's I5 machine.

I would never suggest that anyone who is happy with their Mac go out and get rid of it and buy a Windows 7 machine, but if you are faced with aging Macs and a limited budget, you might be surprised at how far your dollar will go in the Windows world.

Switching one machine to Windows does not mean that you have to start hating Macs or stop using them, it just means that you have a few options that you didn't have when you were only using a Mac.

I do find wireless networking still something more of a pain on Windows computers, but it has improved greatly even with the not so new networking gear that I run.  Even my aging MacBook has a habit of deciding that it does not have an Airport card once in a while when changing network locations.  I have to pull the battery and generally reconfigure the Airport card.

I long ago got to the point that computers are tools to get my job done and not part of a religious experience.  Apple makes very good but sometimes very expensive computers.  If you can afford to live in an all Apple world, I am happy for you.

For the rest of us, you can find happiness in a mixed platform world. Sometimes success is measured by keeping old gear going long after the manufacturers would have us retire it.

We are finally into some great weather on the east coast. After some cold damp weather along the ocean shores, the sun feels great.  It is really nice to have afternoon temperatures into the sixties and see some signs of spring even if we might face a little more winter.

Unfortunately there areas in North Carolina and Virginia where the lack of winter snows and rain have made for very dry conditions.

As the weather gets warmer and the boat rides longer, I might just have to forget about computers for a few days.  I hope everyone get their needed rains, but I sure hope there is some sunshine for a few winter busting days on the water.

 

A Mac user & Windows 7 on an Intel i7 laptop

Sometimes when you use a product that nearly drives you crazy, you wonder if the vendor can ever get back your business.  I would have to say that Vista was the product that almost caused me to give up on Microsoft.  I had battles with my Vista laptop from the day I brought it home until the days before I replaced it with a shiny new HP Pavilion laptop powered by Intel's new i7 processor.

During this whole time my white Intel based MacBook with OS X stood tall.  For the first year of my life with Vista, my MacBook was always in my backpack. When the Vista laptop would have trouble booting, I would reach over and grab my MacBook and often find out what I needed before Vista recovered.

Still I have to give Microsoft credit, they slugged away at Vista and made some huge improvements to it. However, even with the changes, Vista is nowhere close to OS X.  When Snow Leopard shipped, I installed it on MacBook, and really saw little improvement other than some disk space that I recovered.  Eventually Vista got to the point that I did not have to carry my MacBook as a backup.

To be fair, some of the problems that I had with Vista might have been caused by having a laptop that was limited to two gigs of ram.  However, I did not think that was a problem when I bought it since my MacBook only had two gigs of ram.

I am a hardware junkie who pays attention to processor families, and when Intel announced their new i-series processors, I decided that my wife and I would get some new laptops.  Her 12" aluminum PowerBook was ancient and starting to make some strange noises.  In addition to a next generation processor, I wanted some more hard drive space, a quieter laptop, and again I was after a 15" screen that would be friendly to my old eyes.

My wife's system was the priority, and I was willing to buy her one of the new unibody MacBooks but only if Apple would come out with the new processors.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I remember one of Apple's best reasons for switching to Intel was so that Apple customers would not have to wait for the latest and greatest processors. So I wonder what the excuse is now that IBM cannot be blamed for not shipping processors on time?

When I started seeing Windows machines with i-series processors in Staples stores, I questioned my Apple friends who seemed surprised that these systems were actually shipping.   As is always the case, the Apple folks had no idea when there would be new Apple laptop systems.

When Staples announced a sale where I could end up with a 14" i5 laptop for my wife and a 15" i7 laptop for me for a total cost of a couple of hundred dollars under the price of one 15" MacBook Pro with an outdated processor, I decided to go for it.  For those interested the total price for the two laptops before taxes will be $1549 after getting a $100 cash back rebate.  I will also get a rebate back from my credit card and some coupons from Staples.  My cost for the two machines will be under $1,500 before taxes.

We picked the two machines up on Tuesday night, and I have been working when I have time at getting them both up and going.  It took just a few minutes to get both machines out of the box and hooked to our Airport wireless network.  Windows 7 is a huge improvement in this regard.

Applying updates and loading software has taken a little time but it has not been onerous.  Of course, it is not as easy as with a Mac, but to be fair I did not even try the Windows migration assistant. I did not want all of the software on my old machine (particularly Outlook), and I was curious if I would run into any hurdles that might be a problem for others.  My wife's system is a different story since she is going from a Mac to Windows.

Before I did anything, I went to Microsoft's web site and installed their free security suite which lets me ignore Norton.  That is also a new benefit in the Windows world.

Then I used Internet Explorer to download and install Firefox.  Then with Firefox, I downloaded and installed Thunderbird 3.  I used one of my USB memory sticks to bring my addresses over from Thunderbird. Then it just took a few minutes to set up my six email accounts. Five of them are IMAP so getting my mail going was no big problem.  At the same time I brought over the certificate that I use for signing and encrypting mail on one of my accounts.

Bookmarks were not a big deal, I sent myself an email with the dozen that I need. I could have used another method, but I just wanted to bring over a few bookmarks.   I then installed MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.  Then I downloaded Picasa for my pictures and Google Chrome which I use sometimes.  During all of this I installed Flash and approved an automatic Java update. Before I went to bed that evening I started both systems on their MS updates.

By the next morning, all I had to do on my system was to install TweetDeck and get some printers going. My Brother 5250DN required downloading a driver, but the installation went flawlessly and even duplex printing worked without a problem.  The drivers for my HP6100 series printer came with Windows 7. It also worked fine the first time.  I finally installed the finicky NC real estate software that I use.

Then I brought over all of my data and the library of pictures that I wanted with an external USB drive.  The final pieces of software were SnagIt and CutePDF writer which is a free piece of software that lets me print PDFs from any application just like a Mac does out of a box.

All of this probably took me about three hours, and all I have left to do is put Thunderbird on my wife's system and install her printers.  I am not looking forward to getting her Mac address book into Thunderbird but fortunately she just has a relatively small number of email buddies.  Her two email accounts are both IMAP, so I might just go through her emails and use Thunderbird's add address feature.

I actually took my new laptop to work the afternoon after I picked it up.  The only problem that I uncovered was the lack of a Windows 7 driver for the old Konica-Minolta printer in our office.  It might just take a little more looking, but it is not a huge issue for me, since my Macs did not work on it anyway.

To be very honest, I have found Windows 7 to be an immensely pleasing surprise.  It is stable, fast, and enough Mac-like that I doubt that my wife will have any problems using it.

I am truly amazed at the progress which has been made.  My new laptop wakes from sleep very quickly.  In two days of using the two machines, there has been no crash or system hang.  Windows 7 has worked flawlessly.

My new laptop is so quiet that I can once again hear the tapping of my keys.  It is very fast, and so far I am exceptionally pleased with it.  Even creating the two Windows 7 recovery disks was a piece of cake.

I love the Mac-like Windows 7 task bar at the bottom of the screen.  The little rectangle on the right side of the task bar that toggles to the desktop is easier than a keyboard combination.

As much as I love Macs, I would have a very hard time recommending that someone currently shopping for a laptop buy a Mac.  If you use your laptop for a long time like my wife, it would be a crime to spend your money on a last generation processor when you can get the newest processors for much less.

Windows 7 has really closed the gap with OSX.  It is an impressive operating system.  I think Windows 7 will certainly help Microsoft reputation in the world of operating systems.

On another note I recently signed up for Microsoft's free Office Live workspace. I installed a piece of software that lets me easily save a document that I have created using one of Microsoft's desktop applications to the free online storage.  It is a nice bonus, and the price is right.

Microsoft still does some interesting things, and I suspect Windows 7 and aggressively priced hardware are going to go a long way towards protecting Microsoft's base of users.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes Apple to come out with their own i-series laptops.  Even then I seriously doubt that you will see an i7 processor from Apple with a 15" LED screen for under $900.  My bet is that the only i-7 laptop from Apple will be a top of the line PowerBook with a 17" screen. 

I can remember the days when Mac laptops were great values.

In the world of today's laptops, I think that day is long gone, and I am sad to say that.

While lots of folks might be excited about placing an order for their iPad,  I am pretty excited at the great technology that I got in my new HP i7 laptop.  I suspect it will be able to handle my computing needs for a long time, and it came at a very reasonable price.

I will be providing more updates as I get more familiar with the machines. I am sure there will be glitches, but right now I am a very happy customer, and I am enjoying my new computer which is functioning perfectly.

The warm glow is enough to give me some spring beach dreams.

Is a Windows Machine Less Expensive than an iMac?

When everyone gathered for Thanksgiving, I shared the victory of my college friend buying a Mac Mini instead of a new Windows 7 box.  As is normal for our family of technology users, my story brought a yawn.

However, later my son shared with his mom that my eldest daughter was thinking about replacing her aging white half moon iMac with a Windows box.  She has been using Windows stuff at work for nine years, but she has always had a Mac at home.

It is always interesting how the information comes back to you, but that is another story.  My son also said his sister was considering Windows mainly to save some dollars. 

My initial thought was that she might save four or five hundred dollars if she bought a Windows box.  It ended up that I was wrong.

Being the shy dad that I am, the next time I got some time with my daughter I asked her what she wanted to do with her new computer when she got it.  The response was that she mostly wanted it for email, browsing, and to work with photos.

That was the opening that I had hoped to find.  I told her that I used both my HP laptop with Vista and my Macs for photos.  My conclusion after comparing them for two years was that Picassa on Windows was the only good low end product, but that it did not match the feature set or ease of use of iPhoto.

On another level, I argued that the integration between iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD is just not there on the Windows machines.  I even told her that she could expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars adding program functionality to the PC that was included on the Mac.  Based on my experience much of it is not as good as the included Mac software.

I also pointed out that iPhoto can have the same integration with Picassa Web Albums that Picasa does on Windows.  I did not want to confuse the issue by mentioning  Picassa on the Mac.

I did mention that some good web tools are built into iPhoto and that additional excellent web tools like RapidWeaver are available for the Mac while I have been unable to find something as good or inexpensive in the Windows world.

On top of that I pointed out that at least once a week something hangs up on my Windows Vista machines which I told her I suspected was not that much different than a Windows 7 machine.

Finally I mentioned that she should factor in the yearly costs of Virus protection on Windows.

Still I told her I would look into Mac pricing and compare it to Windows pricing.

I went to the Dell website and put together a system configuration (PDF file) that was based on one of their Studio Slim Desktops.  The only challenge that I had was figuring out the monitors, and I eventually just gave up and went with a 22" one.

I never could determine which monitors had LED back-lighting like the iMac.

Anyway the base level iMac with MS Office Student came out to $1328.95.

The Dell box came out to $1156, but according to my son, I probably did not have an equivalent monitor on the Dell.

With the difference at retail being $172.95 and the Dell monitor likely not as good as the Mac's, my daughter has pretty well decided to stick with a Mac.

I closed my investigation email to her with a reminder of how easy it is to migrate from one Mac to another.  She said she would check at the Apple Store to see if they had the right kind of Firewire cable.

Once again I am sure you could get a PC that costs under $500, but I seriously doubt that my daughter would be happy with it.  She wants something that will last as long as her white half moon iMac did.

That is about it from North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks on this rainy day which will not change my mind about how great a place this is.

Apple's application integration the key to productivity

In my case, I am certain that technology has opened doors for new ideas.  There is also no doubt that I have found it easiest to implement those ideas on an Apple platform.

I actually keep giving the Windows platform more of a chance than I should based on the number of brick walls that pop up in Windows.  I recently gave a seminar on making movies with a computer.  Since my audience tends to have more Windows users than Mac users, I usually go out of my way to demonstrate concepts on Windows.

Before this last seminar, I spent a lot of time working with Photoshop Elements 7 and Premier Elements 7.  The only reason I went through the exercise is that I had come off of a positive experience of a free trial of Adobe Lightroom 2 on my Windows machine.  I figured that I had little to lose on the $99 Best Buy bundle of the two Elements programs.  It turned out that I lost a lot of time.  In spite of considerable effort, I never could get Premier to run very long without crashing.

I showed some basics interface elements in my seminar and did the the real work in iMovie.

While iMovie and the rest of Apple's iApps (iWeb being the exception) are great for the occasional personal projects.  In real estate they become powerful tools that allow you to seamlessly reuse content with recreating the wheel.

I have a good friend who is a mostly retired Realtor®.  He has been impressed with my web centric efforts at marketing real estate.  From a Google search for "SOBX Real Estate" showing my Realtor® site as top ranked to my travel guides for Emerald Isle and Beaufort being ranked at the top, I have managed to get some traction on the web and through social media.

I was honored when he asked me to help market his home.  Marketing homes this days is a very visual thing.  I take great pride in the quality of the photos that I produce.  A lot of the credit goes to my equipment, a Nikon D50 and what I like to call my digital real estate camera, a wide angle Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2.  Last winter I added to my arsenal an inexpensive HD video camera, an Aiptek HD-DV 1080P.  It only cost $199 so it has taken me a while to learn how to use it effectively and work around some limitations.

The ability to do what I have done with my friend's home is a credit not just to Apple's applications but to the whole Mac environment where applications are integrated in way that saves users a tremendous amount of time.   If anything close to that integration exists on Windows, I am still looking for it and not likely to find it before I completely quit using computers.

After visiting my friends home on May 8 with my full bag of cameras, I came home and let iPhoto import all the photos.  I did some minor cropping and work with shadows and put the best of the photos in an iPhoto album where I also put them in the order that I wanted. 

I will admit to waiting until my friend's yard looked really green so we did not have to play with colors. However, he did have a couple of winter kill patches in the yard which were well on their to recovery but which look a lot better after a quick application of the stamp tool in Photoshop.

Once the photos were in an iPhoto album, I could have used iPhoto's built-in web page generation, but I prefer to use the most excellent slide show that is generated by Rapidweaver.  And this is one spot where the OS X platform integration really shows.  In Rapidweaver I get to see my iPhoto albums.  I do not have to go back and rearrange the photos.  I just pick the album and set the show up as I have found works best.  The operation takes almost no time.  I then use Fetch to FTP the slide show to my server.  In this case, this is the slide show that resulted.

Now it is time for the Movie.  My HD camera stores its Quicktime movies on SD cards.  I usually import them into iPhoto just for the sake of convenience.  I have found it is more effective to work with HD movies around one to two minutes long.  Often once I have found the movie that I like the best, I will export it to the desktop from the Quicktime player using my favorite settings.

My iMovie of the place is a combination of the HD movie and the slides that I have already arranged.  Only a few slides are culled because they do not scale right in the movie.  I add some transitions, some titles and a couple of area beach scenes since the home is close to the beach.  Since I could hear the waves from the home's backyard and the movie has turned out so nice, I decide it needs the sounds of ocean waves in the background. After an abortive try at getting some good quality sound from using my old Sony video camera at the beach, I break down and buy a really nice sound clip of waves for $9.99.  Once I am satisfied with everything I export my iMovie in large Quicktime format suitable for a DVD.  With my old G5 that takes a couple of hours so I head off to bed.

This morning before breakfast I checked to see if the movie is what I wanted.  It turns out to be a winner so I start the processing for posting to YouTube.  You can check out my Pine Knoll Shores, NC home YouTube video and decide for yourself if it gets the message across.  Click the "HQ" button to get the full benefit of the HD video, see if you can see the bug and cardinal flights in the video.

Once I have the slide show and YouTube video done, it is easy to update the pre-listing page that I have on our local electronic village site.  It is easy to change the photos and add the new links to create a great information sheet for the property.

Once that is done, I pull the original slide show and the larger movie into iDVD.  I add the wave sound clip that I bought and a few maps and some info that I have imported into iPhoto and turned into a slide show.  Once that is done I will print a high quality image right on the DVD and give a copy to the owner.  I have a potential buyer in Oklahoma who will also get a copy.

With a G5 bought in Dec. 2004, a couple of less than state of art digital cameras, a $199 HD video camera, $10 for a sound clip and the $79 that I spent for Rapidweaver several years ago,  I have put together some terriffic marketing materials for my friends property.

My video and photo marketing efforts are already on Twitter and Facebook.  Tonight I will do a post with them on ActiveRain and update some other websites.  I think that I am getting a lot more mileage out my Mac than I am out of my Windows box.

Next I will probably use Pages to create a tri-fold mailer.  Of course I will pull the images from the ones that I have just taken.

It is rather ironic that I spent $99 on software for my Windows machine which got me almost nowhere.  That is more than I spent on my actual project.

I am certain that there are plenty of Windows guys out there who could do the same thing, but I would like to hear what they use and how much the software and hardware cost.

There is just no question in my mind, I am more productive on a Mac.

The weather is getting great and even the winds from last week seem to be dying down, come for a visit to the coast.  The water is warming quickly.

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.