Applepeels

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.

A Google search shows 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.

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.

Surviving, maybe even thriving with my Mac

When I left Apple I fully expected to have to adapt to the Windows world that I knew was out here in the world.  My less than warm and fuzzy exit from Apple even pushed me towards the dark side and the world of Linux.  I am actually glad that I took the time after leaving Apple to get familiar with Windows and Linux.  That time and effort has actually paid off by giving me some survival skills that have served me well in the battle to keep using my Macs.

While working for a government contractor, I carried a Windows laptop for a while, but I did not abandon my Apple laptop.  When I went to work at Webmail.us, I found almost no Mac users, but with a little help, I ended up writing a post, "Heterogenous Apple nirvana well almost," which pretty well summed up my experience there.  I could use my Mac, but it didn't bring me any special advantages.

Last summer, I started transitioning to the world of real estate.  Everyone told me that I would have to give up my Macs, use Bootcamp, or Parallels software.  I had a lot of experience dual booting systems when I got my Linux experience. It does not fit the way I use computers.  I am pleased to report that not only have I been able to resist using Windows on my MacBook, but I have also been able to turn my Mac skills to an advantage in real estate.

That is not to say that I am getting rich selling real estate, but immediate success just does not happen in real estate.  My expectation is that my Mac skills will let me be successful sooner rather than later.

I will admit to having a Dell desktop at home, but it really has not seen a lot of use.  We use two MLS Systems, the Carteret County, NC one and the one in Onslow Country, NC.  Fortunately the Carteret County system is our primary system.  I have yet to find anything on it that  does not  work with a Mac.  We do use a SmartCard to access lockboxes, but we have one Windows system in our office which has a SmartCard reader for weekly updates so I do not have to worry about that.  I have been able to do tax address exports without any problems on the Carteret system.  The Onslow system which uses a securid device for log on also is not a problem for most uses with a Mac.   

The biggest problem that I have had with the Onslow system is tax address export does not even work correctly on a Window machine.  I have been able to copy and paste the addresses into a Windows based Excel spreadsheet which I send to my Mac.  I take the spreadsheet and open it in Nisus Writer Express and strip out all of the funky characters.  Then I open it as a CSV spreadsheet on my Mac, do the data sorting and save it as a merge document to be used with Word and to import into Filemaker Pro for printing addresses.  The combination of the Windows machine and the Mac lets me do something others are having a hard time doing.

Today with the help of my wife, we put together a mailing to 185 individuals.  It included a personally addressed form letter signed by me.  A flyer about the real estate services that I provide.  Each letter also had one of series of five very cool post cards that I have designed and printed.  We even put stamps on them so someone could easily ask to be taken off my mailing list.  The typical postcard had a scene like this Golden sunset with my signature.

If you look at the tools that I used to put all this together. It's pretty amazing, and even more exciting that they all work with my Mac.  First there are my cameras, the one I use the most for real estate is my Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2.   Then there are the various printers that I use, the HP AIO Photosmart C6180, my HP Color Laserjet 2600N, an Epson C88, a Brother 5250N,  and recently the big Konica C250 color laser copier-printer in our office.

The hardware does not do much without software.  To get the mailing out, I used Microsoft Word and Excel, Pages, Filemaker Pro, and InDesign.

On a regular basis, I use Photoshop for preparing photos for the web.  Dreamweaver,  ShutterBug,  Rapidweaver, and Fetch as my web tools.  My  photo library is in iPhoto.  I use Adium to communicate with colleagues, and Meebo as as web client for customers to reach me from the web when I'm online and they want to remain anonymous.  Firefox is my browser of choice.  Vuescan runs my scanner, Apple Mail is my mail client when I am not using a webmail interface.  I also use Ultralingua as my dictionary, Google Apps as my calendar and writing tool.  A published iCal calendar is also used on my Realtor® site.

I think the suite of tools that I use will make me successful without being having to become a card carrying Windows user..  The only place that I have seen the need for Windows is in the tools designed to help real estate agents do what I am already doing with my tools.  Both Point2Agent and eNeighborhoods really require you to use a Windows machine and IE for full functionality. A couple of other tools are also Windows specific, but I think that I can survive without any of them.  At least I am going to give it a try.

ActiveRain is one of the real estate tools that I have found that does not require a Windows machine.  Mapwing is another tool which is friendly to Macs.  I do extensive blogging for real estate. I almost always use my Mac to write my posts on Typepad.

The skills that I have learned while using Macs and working at Apple are serving me well.  While  I might run into something that pushes me off the Mac, I do not see it on the horizon.

The photo sites of homes that I have created have been admired by many agents.  The ease of working on images with a Mac is pretty hard to beat.  Data portability between applications on the Mac also helps greatly.  The fact that I have been to use data directly from a Windows machine with no problems is also great.  I think having a webmail interface available has also helped others be more accepting of attachments from Macs.

While using a Mac initially looked like it was going to be a liability in the world of real estate, well designed access in our home MLS system, the wide variety of tools available for the Mac, and strong data portability has proved that not to be the case.

We have a couple of Windows users who continue to have wireless problems.  My MacBook continues to work well as a tool to help differentiate me from other other Realtors®, some of whom are still struggling with computers.

As long as Firefox and Camino work well with Typepad,  I will continue using my Macs with great success.  Macs have helped me do some wonderful things including all the photos that I have on the web.

Being a Realtor® is a challenge given today's market, but at least I haven't had to give up my Macs.