Beautiful Macs.

One thing I love about Macs is that their aesthetics are completely different from what you find on a PC. Even the websites you download the software from look much better than the PC competitors, as shown by the site http://versionsapp.com/

Beautiful icons, elegant artwork, and ease of use are what you can find on most Mac developers' websites. It also applies to the computers themselves; I find myself hassling less with my Mac than I ever did with my PC. While the drawback is that I can't use Windows apps (in OS X), I think it's a fair trade, especially since the Mac market share is growing and more applications are being built for the Mac that either match or exceed the applications of PC's.

I'm trying to get my Mom to convert. She needs one really badly, she's a designer and in my opinion, she shouldn't have to hassle with backing up her computer and having it crash on her all the time. I try to tell everyone to convert to a Mac because they're great, but Windows users seem to fear the unknown, which is odd, because all I hear about Vista is complaints about the unknown.

BWAH!!!!

In the words of David Crouch...

HAPPY FACE!!!!!!

BWAH!!! (actually, that one is mine.)

I just got a new external hard drive and Windows 7 which isn't even out yet!!! *happy dance*

Now I finally have a place to put all those movies that cram up my hard drive...

*watches as it fills up*

I HATE GREASE!!!

Ugh, I just have to rant about this one.

I HATE greasy food. Hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it. Did I say that enough times?

My dad keeps buying these 'breakfast bowls', and even the smell of them just makes me totally not hungry at all. Maybe it's because they fill the room with the smell of McDonald's, or maybe it's the fake egg and sausage they contain (and they put together a sausage croissant, apples and hashbrowns. Gross.), or possibly the thick syrup they contain.

In any case, eating the croissant thing today, I think I almost threw up (and I only ate the croissant, I didn't eat the apples or hashbrowns)

5'6", 115 pounds... I dunno if I can afford to hate grease, but I do.

BWAAAAAH!

So, I just found this AWESOME deal on a MacBook Pro, for $1,150. Here are the specs, if you can understand them :P

15.4" NOT-GLOSSY screen
2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo
2 GB RAM
200 GB HDD (5400 RPM)
2 USB Ports
1 Firewire 400 port
1 Firewire 800 port
All the works, iSight camera, headphone/mic slot, slot loading DVD burner, etc...
256MB nVidia GeForce 8600 GT

It's all pretty much the same as what I already have, except that this thing has one more firewire port, more hard drive space, and a WAY better video card than what I have, which would still be a HUGE performance gain, and it's CHEAPER than what my MacBook is worth right now. I'm hoping that my parents say yes to letting me sell my current macbook, 'cuz this is a GREAT deal... I could walk out of this deal ending up with at least $50 extra =]

(So can I? huh huh huh?)

CS4

Well, time for my review on CS4! =D

Firstly, I'd like to say that I'm SO impressed with how small the installation for CS4 was. I don't know if it's because I just downloaded a trial disk image, but I also didn't install the content for After Effects and Premiere Pro; Simply because I didn't need them.

It installed fairly quickly; The installer GUI was pretty nice, but it didn't quite tell me what some of the applications actually did; and I'm still peeved about having to close Firefox in the middle of it.

I had tried out the Photoshop CS4 beta and was greatly impressed on the features it had over CS3; It acted much more like a canvas with its rotational tools, and the 3D feature would have been cool had I had a more advanced video card (it doesn't work with integrated ones, like I have). It also performed WAY better with my Bamboo tablet, in terms of speed and reliability. I'm also fond of the refined Mac interface, since it's an actual window, just as in Windows, instead of it surrounding the screen, though that was a feature, but I wasn't too fond of it.

The rest of the applications seemed to have retained this for the Mac version, but there may be some preference to change that somewhere in the preferences.

They also load _WAY_ faster. I'm very impressed with it, it seems that Adobe worked on performance as well, though the performance gains may only be for Dual Core processors.

If you own CS3, I wouldn't recommend an upgrade just yet; you'll be fine with what you have =]

If you own CS2 or CS1, and you can afford it, _AND_ you have a somewhat high end computer (or at least have a Dual Core processor) I would definently recommend this to you. If you need ImageReady, though, you might not want it; ImageReady was discontinued when CS3 came out, though Fireworks is a GREAT substitute for it.

I'm With the Band =]

So it's been a while since I touched my guitar...

We just got some new strings for it and today I put them in =]

Here is my inspiration! =D

Chrome?

I'm a bit disappointed in Google. Chrome's beta is only for Windows for now, and their excuse is that they started development for Windows first (if they were going to make it multi-platformed, you'd think they would have released all three at once)

But I tried it on Windows, and it looks... Simplistic at best. I haven't seen much performance increase, though since I was on Windows I guess I kept looking for the speediness of my Mac. It also has its own little GUI, but the address bar was pretty neat in being able to fetch website names before you even go to the site. I still like Firefox's "Awesome Bar", which displays the titles of the pages instead of just the URL.

Safari is great for the Mac with it being so integrated with the rest of the computer, I like that when I download DMG (disk image) files it automagically mounts them so I don't have to do it, and it also extracts archives and deletes the original archive for me. Just a nice time saver =] I don't like how it switches tabs though, you have to hold Cmd + Shift + ] (Cmd + }) which is annoying since I have to use both hands just to switch through my tabs (in Firefox it's Ctrl+Tab).