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Finally, Mac


jaapv

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If you can afford a Mac Pro , go for it. But it is way overkill for photoshop unless you do a whole bunch of batch processing.

 

For simple photo manipulation, a mini will do fine, so will an iMac. I have run it on a bare 13" macbook with 1 GB when I travel.

 

I had unimaginable trouble with PS and a PC. I finally learned to manually wipe the PS history after each photo and it ran better. After I bought a mac, I found that OS does it by itself and I will never go back to pc.

 

Adobe will send you disks for Mac if you sign an affidavit you destroyed the PC version and offer $25. You can not run windows PS on a Mac unless you partition and installt windows. Why buy a Mac then?

 

Other World Computing, OWC, will . also furnish drives and ram a greatly reduced prices.

Thanks, but as my late PC used to choke on panoramas over six images I do appreciate the extra power I will get :)

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There are a couple of things annoying me about my new i-mac and the OS.

 

1. Could an experienced user explain the logic regarding closing an application window but the application remaining open with its menu bar at the top of the screen?

 

2. Being able to resize a window only by using the bottom right corner is an annoyance. Why not as in Windows where any edge/corner can be used?

 

Hope this does not offend any 'mac only' fans around.

 

Jeff

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1. Agree this does not seem logical. And it is not consistent across applications. Some will quit when you press the red button, and some stay (in)active. There are too many ways to close/hide windows: red button, yellow button, hide command, quit command. I think window and application management could be cleaned up a little and made a little more logical. It seems they are starting to address a few of these things in the next Mac OS X.

2. This one is definitely being "fixed" in Mac OS X Lion. Long overdue as well I might add.

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There are a couple of things annoying me about my new i-mac and the OS.

 

1. Could an experienced user explain the logic regarding closing an application window but the application remaining open with its menu bar at the top of the screen?

 

2. Being able to resize a window only by using the bottom right corner is an annoyance. Why not as in Windows where any edge/corner can be used?

 

Hope this does not offend any 'mac only' fans around.

 

Jeff

 

No offence taken :)

 

1. Why should closing a window shut down the app? That's one of the most annoying "features" of Windows XP. Constantly having to restart the application.

 

The Menu bar is locked to the top of the screen so that your muscle memory always knows where it is. Attaching the Menu bar to the window is ridiculous, as you have to look for the top of the window every time you want to choose a menu item.

 

As you change application, the menu items on the bar at the top of the screen change to those of the new app.

 

The red button on the top left closes the window, the yellow one minimises it and the green one maximises it

 

2. It's just a different way of doing things.

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Hi Jaap,

 

I converted to mac 2 years ago and don't regret it for one minute. I was so fed up of viruses, fatal exception errors and illegal operations etc.

 

I bought parallels and installed windows to run PS as dealing with adobe for a cross grade was a nightmare, but now I find I never need windows or PS, I can do everything I need in aperture.

 

Enjoy!

 

Graeme

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There are a couple of things annoying me about my new i-mac and the OS.

 

1. Could an experienced user explain the logic regarding closing an application window but the application remaining open with its menu bar at the top of the screen?

 

 

Jeff

 

Hello Jeff,

 

Yes this was annoying for me too. But, once you learn the short cut "command-Q," everything will be fine. This is the shortcut that will close the window AND shut down the application. This will help you a lot.

 

Another good shortcut to know about is the "command-W." This one will close the window ONLY and will NOT shut the program down. For example, you have multiple windows open under Safari and you want to quickly close only the tabbed window (site) you are looking at...use command-W. Safari stays open, but the site you are looking at closes.

 

How this works for me...and, by the way, I have about 8 of the l-camera forum sites bookmarked under one main folder in my "Bookmarks." This is key! Ok, this is how this works...once, I open Safari I hotkey "command-option-B." This opens up my bookmark folder. Next, I point my pointer to my "Leica Forum" folder that has my 8 l-camera forum sites in it, and then I hold down the control key and select the "Leica Forum" folder and click. A pop-up comes up and I select "Open in Tabs" and it opens all eight URL's in one window, but in tabs. Now you can follow all of us in all of the Leica forums!

 

Try this and you will love it. Hope this helps,

 

Rick

 

p.s. This is a hot tip. :D

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Just another comment on the mouse discussion: when I finally replaced my dying G5 with a 3.2 Quad a couple of months ago I got a Magic Trackpad as well purely, to be honest, because I like shiny toys. I now use it to the exclusion of all else and the slight tendency I had to RSI has gone. It was a bit of a learning curve but I love it now. I find it works well with Lightroom but cannot comment on Photoshop as I so rarely use it now.

 

I work from home for my former employers (a large multinational) and have to use their custom Vista OS on my Mac through a thin desktop-type application. I then get out the Microsoft keyboard as using Windows on a Mac keyboard is too much for a simple bloke who cannot multi-task, but keyboards are another topic. The Trackpad, however, works very well on the Vista side with a few minor exceptions.

 

Geoff

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Hello Jeff,

 

Yes this was annoying for me too. But, once you learn the short cut "command-Q," everything will be fine. This is the shortcut that will close the window AND shut down the application. This will help you a lot.

 

Another good shortcut to know about is the "command-W." This one will close the window ONLY and will NOT shut the program down. For example, you have multiple windows open under Safari and you want to quickly close only the tabbed window (site) you are looking at...use command-W. Safari stays open, but the site you are looking at closes.

 

How this works for me...and, by the way, I have about 8 of the l-camera forum sites bookmarked under one main folder in my "Bookmarks." This is key! Ok, this is how this works...once, I open Safari I hotkey "command-option-B." This opens up my bookmark folder. Next, I point my pointer to my "Leica Forum" folder that has my 8 l-camera forum sites in it, and then I hold down the control key and select the "Leica Forum" folder and click. A pop-up comes up and I select "Open in Tabs" and it opens all eight URL's in one window, but in tabs. Now you can follow all of us in all of the Leica forums!

 

Try this and you will love it. Hope this helps,

 

Rick

 

p.s. This is a hot tip. :D

Thanks, confirms I had figured out how to do this correctly :) I must say I am more than happy with the switch.:) But after a few hours with the magic mouse I did plug in my old Windows one, as it is far more tolerant of the surface it has to run on. Overall I can only say I should have switched years ago. The only thing is I have to work through The Missing Manual and that is close to 900 pages :(
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There are a couple of things annoying me about my new i-mac and the OS.

 

1. Could an experienced user explain the logic regarding closing an application window but the application remaining open with its menu bar at the top of the screen?

 

2. Being able to resize a window only by using the bottom right corner is an annoyance. Why not as in Windows where any edge/corner can be used?

 

Closing an app window does not terminate the program. command-q is the same as alt-F4.

 

There are some other helpful short-cuts. fn-F11 for example. Read up on Expose and Spaces for a lot of good help.

 

You can minimize a window using the button in the upper left corner. The middle one minimizes.

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In some applications, closing the only open window closes the application. This is likely to be true of an application that can have only one open window, such as Disk Utility. I suspect that there are programming guidelines for this issue.

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Here is my double secret keyboard shortcut. I'm only giving it up because it is Christmas! :D:D:D

Ok, try this: "control+option+command+8"

 

It is useful when you are displaying a white page with black print and you want to save your battery because, for example, you are on a plane. Or, maybe you are trying to read some annoying RangeFinderForum site and your eyes are about to fall out because of the background and font color or a all screwed up.

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The red button on the top left closes the window, the yellow one minimises it and the green one maximises it.

 

Not quite right surely? Click on the orange dot and the file shoots into the dock where it is recovered by clicking once on the associated image in the dock. Useful if you have opened a string of jpegs and want to work on them one by one. To get a Photoshop image full screen on your iMac simply use the key sequence CMD [hold down] +0 [zero].

If in Safari your window is less than full screen height Green will maximise it as Andy suggests, to sit above the dock – if your preference is for that to be at the bottom of the screen, rather than L or R.

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There are a couple of things annoying me about my new i-mac and the OS.

 

1. Could an experienced user explain the logic regarding closing an application window but the application remaining open with its menu bar at the top of the screen?

 

2. Being able to resize a window only by using the bottom right corner is an annoyance. Why not as in Windows where any edge/corner can be used?

 

Hope this does not offend any 'mac only' fans around.

 

Jeff

 

When designing an OS the designer tries to figure out a logical way that procedures can be performed and then sticking to them consistently throughout the OS.

 

It is not infrequent that someone would have several windows open in an application, for example, someone may be working on 2 or more images in Photoshop simultaneously. If the metaphor of closing a window closes the application, how do you reconcile/explain when the user closes one window when 2 windows are open at the same time? Have you closed the app? Apparently not because the second window is still open. Typically one may have several web browser windows open in Safari or another web browser. Does closing one web browser window close the app? Etc.

 

IF you decide that closing a window doesn't close the app but rather just the process going on in the particular closed window, then the app itself should likely continue to remain open, hence the menu bars remain. For example, again with Photoshop on a Mac; you have an image open and you close it but you next want to open another image. You close image A and with no windows open you go to the menu bar and open a new document or open an existing document on your hard drive.

 

It's a very consistent way of working. You choose close (or cmd+W) for a window, use Quit (or cmd+Q) to close an application. You may be used to working within a different metaphor system but that doesn't make Apple's any less "logical". I think I could argue that Apple's approach is more "logical". But in any case they each are what they are.

 

Regarding the enlargement of a window, Apple's approach is that you expand/contract a window either by clicking on the yellow button on the top left to jump between two known states or you click on the lower right edge to manually adjust the window's size. You use the sides or top of the window to drag/move the window around on the screen. The approach suggests that moving a window and expanding/contracting a window are 2 different actions and thus should not be performed using the same tool. This may have contradicted God's design of certain genital areas on a male but in general it's consistent to say that you expand a window one way and drag a window a different way.

 

Having used Macs for most of my life (I've painfully owned a few PCs) I never find this arrangement annoying.

 

What I agree is annoying (in the sense of frustrating) is having to learn a new way of doing things which contradict muscle memory learned at an old way of doing things. When I moved to England I had to retrain myself to speak about lifts rather than elevators and not to talk about the pants I was wearing today (pants in American = trousers, pants in UK = underwear). And so it goes... as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Apple is not perfect but they do excel at interface design. Your frustration I think is simply due to the fact that you bought into Microsoft's world view when you owned a PC without realising that there are other equally valid but different world views on OS design.

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Any recommendations for a book to show a PC user now a new mac user the ins and outs of the mac or snow leopard operating system?

 

Thanks,

 

Jeff

 

I switched [back] to a Mac in 2008 and found this little book very helpful: Amazon.com: The Mac OS X Leopard Book (9780321543950): Scott Kelby: Books

 

We all know Scott Kelby (love him or hate him :D) from his photography books, so you will know what you are getting into here.

 

Kelby restricts himself to 'one page per topic' which is just enought to dispel any initial confusion. He also introduces you to the Mac way of thinking about keyboard shortcuts and other hidden features that are just long-standing Mac culture. You wouldn't know these coming from a PC no matter how skilled you were, without an introduction from someone. After that I found my general knowledge and explorations got me the rest of the way.

 

An easier start than the 900+ pages of the Missing Manual, but obviously not as comprehensive -- probably complementary.

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