fun with Photo Booth ;) from Kris Van de Vijver on Vimeo.All shot with Photo Booth on Macbook Pro. The movie features Johan & Renee Rymen, Abel Berlage, Eric & Luna Van Waelvelde, Sven Roofthooft, Kathy and me.

Adventures in the OS/X world

Okay, let me just start with saying that this is the best laptop on the market, heck no, it’s the best computer on the market! The hardware is simply mindblowing. Simple as that.

When i wrote Mac Stories, part I, i was still getting used to this machine and especially to OS X Leopard. To be honest, i wasn’t convinced that OS X was that great compared to Windows XP or Vista, but the more time i spent on it, the more i started to realize how fantastic this operating system really is.

So i’d like to share with you some of my experiences of the last couple of weeks.

Last time i wrote that my first Safari experience was about Gmail not working properly.  I fixed it quite fast by selecting the new Gmail interface, but still, it didn’t give me a lot of reason to trust the new Apple browser i was starting to use.   Now, after a few weeks, i can honestly say that this was the only problem i had with Safari.  So far, everything else went very smooth and fast and without further problems.  I’m also still using Firefox because of the many amazing Greasemonkey scripts available, especially for Flickr users.  Both Safari and Firefox have their own unique features so using both cannot be avoided right now. :-).   Adding sites to bookmarks isn’t a problem here, because i decided to put all my favorites on Delicious, that way i can easily access them on every computer regardless of platform and browser. Both Safari and Firefox have neat Delicious plugins, so putting my bookmarks online involved no hassle whatsoever.

OS X Leopard has a great new feature called “Time Machine”.  When I connected a USB drive for the first time, Time Machine automatically became active and asked me if i wanted to use this drive for Time Machine backups.  I confirmed and then the drive is formatted and the first full backup is created of your entire OS X system.  It runs in the background and while i continued to work, i didn’t notice any slowing down of the system. After the first backup, Time Machine will automatically do incremental backups (for the non-techies: this means backing up only changed files instead of all files).  The only way i can tell that Time Machine is doing this, is because i can hear the USB drive starting to spin. If the USB drive would be completely silent, the Time Machines process would be 100% transparant!   Maybe the experienced Windows users are asking now when and how i configured Time Machine. Well, that’s just it:   you don’t!  :)  As a Windows user and engineer, it’s hard for me to understand how it’s possible that i will have the opportunity to restore files one hour in the past, or eight hours or three days, whatever, or even restore my full system *without*(!) any configuration on my part.  So… does it work you ask?  Well, a few days ago i installed a small update for one of my applications. After the update ran, i couldn’t start the application because it asked me, again, for registration and activation.  Because i didn’t want to go to this activation process again, i decided to just restore the application from an hour ago.  Allright, time for my first Time Machine test! :)  I clicked on the Time Machine icon and i browsed the timeline to one hour before that moment (it’s a very cool interface btw!). I selected the application and clicked on restore.  At that point, you get a visual representation of the application flying through time and space from one hour ago to now, which is nice, because then you know you did it right.  Time Machines starts the restore process and after 30 seconds, the application was restored and i could start it again!  This is a fine example of smart and very user-friendly software, which does the job without annoying the user during its install, setup or afterwards when using it.  Ten points for Apple on this one. :)

Allright, enough for now..  more on my OS X adventure later on, so stay tuned.

Adventures in the OS/X world

I was in the market for a new laptop. My girlfriend needed a computer of her own (it was a bit of a hassle sharing my notebook all the time) and because i’m doing a lot of photography in my free time, i always looked to Mac & OS X as a possibility to work with photos more efficiently. Professionaly i need Windows, so a complete conversion to OS/X was not an option. But because Apple moved to the Intel platform, people have now the possibility to run both, even at the same time.

So, after 15 years of using Windows on Intel or AMD hardware, I ordered a Macbook Pro 17″.

And why exactly did you want to buy a Macbook Pro 17″?

Well, one of the things I was looking for, was a quality machine to edit photos and one of the things you then need is a very good screen in high resolution. After looking around, Macbook Pro 17″ was the only machine offering a LED-backlit screen with a resolution of 1920-by-1200. The high resolution is great for photos or having lots of information on the desktop and the LED-backlit screen is good for your battery life. As most photographers know, running Photoshop and Lightroom at the same time while viewing and editing RAW files imported from your dSLR camera is pretty resource intensive, so i needed a (very) fast machine having lots of RAM (os/x can use the full 4GB unlike the 32bit version of XP or Vista).

Also, i was looking for a fast machine -but- without the fan noise and apparantly, this is hard to find! A silent notebook with top performance sounded like a dream (the fans of the Asus were driving me crazy sometimes, especially when playing movies when i’m trying to focus on the film). Another spec that pointed me towards Macbook was the fact that the main competitors (Dell m1530 and the Sony Vaio series) didn’t have a GB Lan port, only a 100mbit port. I have a NAS device at home with a GB lan port so it was obvious i was looking for a notebook supporting gigabit ethernet connections. Another thing that i wanted was a 17-inch screen notebook without the heavy weight usually accompanied with a screen of that size. My current Asus 17″ is so heavy i cannot lift it with one hand. And yes, the Macbook Pro (MBP) 17″ is one of the only 17-inch notebooks which is light and easy to carry even with one hand.

But i’m also a geek -i work as a system engineer mainly in Microsoft environments- so i really needed Windows XP or Vista. I didn’t want to miss out any of the technical tools running under Windows…. but, as i already mentioned…. Macbook runs both! Best of the two worlds on one machine? That must be Utopia! :)

Any concerns?

Sure, what concerned me though, is the fact that when i spent a lot of time in Vista, that the Apple keyboard would be limiting to work fast and comfortable in Windows (the layout is different from a standard pc keyboard). There were also some reports about a lot of heat coming from the machine and because it’s a bit more expensive than the competition, i would never be totally at ease until i would actually see, feel and use the machine.

So, bottomline: my ideal situation would be using a MBP with OS/X for the design and multimedia stuff (lightroom, photoshop, Aperture, webdesign, etc) and switching (fast) to Vista for the professional stuff (tech tools and other software not available for os/x). I wasn’t sure what to do with the office stuff in between (administrative things and especially e-mail and calendar in Outlook for example): convert to OS/X or keep doing that in Vista?

Besides a few concens, the good stuff sounded really very tempting, but maybe i was just dreaming and the reality would be a little less utopic? I would soon find out…

Yesterday, the guy from the Apple shop called me to say my Macbook had arrived!… I stopped early at work, drove to the shop and picked up my very first Mac.

So, what happened next?

Well, I unpacked the machine and it looked absolutely great. The adapter is very small and light and booting was fast as lightning. A wizard (or is that Windows terminology?) guided me through an easy and short setup and i was up and running in 10 minutes! Wow! The machine is definitely top quality. The high resolution screen looked absolutely amazing and the keyboard leds turn on automatically when you enter a darker environment… i just love that. Further more, it’s definitely a quiet notebook (i just couldn’t hear any fan noise) and indeed, despite the large 17″ screen, the machine is light and easy to carry. So far so good.

And what about OS/X Leopard?

First, i’d like to point out that i’m a pretty broadminded guy and that i’m not a typical Windows or OS/X ‘fanboy’. I just want a cool, fast machine that works great without too much hassle and enables me to do the stuff i want it to do. Sounds pretty logical, doesn’t it?

Leopard (the lastest version of OS/X) looks and behaves really well. Without any configuring or installing drivers i was opening my favorite websites and browsing through my personal files on my NAS device in no time! The only thing i had to do was on the NAS itself: i had to enable the Mac file sharing protocol, that’s all.Everything went fast and smooth, just like we all expect from a Mac, until I encountered my first problem… with gmail. I was composing a new message and it appeared I couldn’t type any numbers or characters in CAPS. When i pressed the shift button, instead of going in CAPS mode, the cursor changed focus to another field. So after only 15 minutes, i was browsing the Mac forums looking for a solution to a Safari bug. (Safari is the standard OS/X web browser). It appeared that the problem wasn’t caused by my lack of OS/X knowledge, but indeed, that a lot of people were reporting this bug. An easy workaround was changing the gmail interface to the new (beta) version of gmail solved the problem. Not a big problem, but then again, not something you would expect after using OS/X Leopard for only 15 minutes.

The second thing i wanted to try was editing a little movie i made with my Canon Ixus camera. I looked up the avi file, double-clicked and Quicktime opened it without any problem or need to install video codecs. Nice. Now i wanted to import the file in iMovie. It should be more than dragging the file to the iMovie window, but it didn’t work. I dragged again but nothing happened. Back to the forums and again, i wasn’t the only one having this problem. It looks like iMovie isn’t supporting the Ixus avi files natively and you should convert it first using third party tools. What the hell? I’m not planning on converting gigs and gigs of movies just to be able to edit them in iMovie? Windows Movie Maker didn’t have any problem importing those files, so..

Conclusion

So far -and i’m just starting to use the Macbook Pro- it looks like the perfect operating system does not exist. Both Windows and OS/X have their strenghts and weaknesses and both systems have bugs and flaws. Still, i’m exited to step further and further in the Macbook world.

Okay, that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more Mac adventures later on…

We made a poster for Dominique’s birthday, featuring her as one of the stars of the movie!(You can see the original here.)

If you’re into music don’t stop reading because I’m gonna tell you about the two coolest instruments on the net to … uhm … “enhance your listening experience”.

The first one is Last.fm. This site contains a few really great tools. First of all there’s a fantastic search tool to look for similar artists. Let’s say you like Air, then you type ‘Air’ and the result will be a list of all artists played by the 100.000 Last.fm users who often play Air. How does it work? Simple, you download a plugin for Winamp and when you’re playing music, the info is uploaded to Last.fm. I must say that it really works cause i’ve discovered some really great music lately. And there’s more, just check it out.

The second instrument is even more spectacular! Jesus, what would I do without it?! So … you’ve got yourself a really nice collection of music. Come on, admit it… you’re the proud owner of thousands and thousands of mp3 tracks (or other formats). But it’s getting a bit out of hand. When you’re looking to play a few tunes, it doesn’t take long before you start feeling a headache. Too much choice? Don’t know where to begin? Or just feeling lazy? Then you have to try ‘MusicMagic Mixer’ from Predixis. It will create a playlist for you based upon one or more songs you select. After the first installation, MusicMagic Mixer (MMM) will analyze all your music. This means that MMM will scan the sound wave of all your music tracks, one by one, and create a fingerprint database. The first time this will probably take a long time depending on the size of your music collection. And then what? Let’s say I have to drive for a couple of hours or a few people are coming for dinner. What to do? Run MMM, choose a few songs you’re in the mood for, tell MMM you want a playlist of uhm …4 hours or 20 hours … whatever! Load the playlist on your MP3 Player or put them on a cd or dvd and that’s it. The playlists are amazing. I remember making a list based upon a few downtempo chill tracks from the last couple of years but MMM threw an old Roxy Music song in the mix. At first it didn’t seem to fit until I listened … it was a perfect match! Try it out, you’ll love it.