Ok, I'm a graphic designer. It's a major reason why I go with a Mac.
It's really hard for me to imagine a software platform that would require me to have IE and WMP installed in order to run programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. Just what in the hell would IE and WMP have to do with the basic operation of my design tools? IE and WMP are taking up RAM that could be better allocated to my design tools.
I'll stick to my MacOS thankyouverymuch where IE eats up RAM only when I launch the app and not at boot time.
Premiere is being dumped left and right by small and big studios alike in favor of FCP. Hell, some production houses are even dumping their Avid's in favor of FCP.
From a performance and usability standpoint, Premiere just doesn't even hold a candle to FCP. Avid and Media100 still have an edge over FCP, but they are cost prohibitive in the smaller markets; hence FCP being chosen in their stead.
AfterEffects is used for totally different reasons than FCP. It's more motion graphics oriented than it is editing oriented. AfterEffects is also a low end solution for motion graphics. High end shops are going to go with products from Discreet and Nothing Real.... er Apple.
Actually, Sorenson has more than just Apple as a client.
Macromedia is including the Sorenson codec in Flash MX. Discreet licenses Sorenson for inclusion in Cleaner and other products. (How long before Apple snatches them up!?)
Sorenson provides great image quality at great compression rates. I took an 6GB video file, edited it in Premiere (unfortunately!) and exported it to a CD quality.mov file at a final file size of 170MB with uncompressed CD quality audio. None of the other video codecs could even come close to that level of compression with that level of image quality.
I agree that it's kind of silly to have QTSS running on Linux when there isn't even a player client for it, but why don't people stop bitching here on/. and actually approach the people at Apple? Someting might actually come of it!
I could just sit around and bitch to my friends about a lack of video editing work, but I seem to get more results by actually contacting people who have need of editing.
If you design a website, the first thing you should do is find out who your audience is. Once you know who your audience is, then you can start figuring out how the design should work. It's all about the audience.
Indeed! Usability, simplicity and legibility are the most important aspects of your UI design.
Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience
The Design of Everyday Things
Those are possibly the two most important books you could read. Of course you should read Tog and Nielsen. They are a good primer. Generally they tell you more what you should not do rather than what you should do.
I realize I'm being totally trolled here, but it's fun.
To quote the original post:
BTW, I second most of what you said. For example, there are so many turnkey PCs out there, that mentioning it as a Mac selling point is laughable. But you'll see a lot of Mac sales points that ceased being valid 10 years ago. The people still using them are really that out of touch.
Mac users are, I'm assuming, the people who use these no longer valid sales points. Is that not what your sentence implied? You don't hear many Wintel people defending the Mac with ANYTHING let alone ten year old sales rhetoric.
Also, 10 years ago there were no PowerPC Macs, 486's were the top of the line consumer offering from Intel and Windows was still in it's infancy. The Mac had a much larger marketshare back then. They didn't really need to make any dubious claims as to the performance benefits of the Mac over Wintel.
You have proven nothing other than you like to be argumentative. It's fine with me. I actually enjoy playing semantics.
Ok, so you're not going to buy a Mac. That's fine. Based on your criteria, a Mac does not fit your computing needs.
What bothered me about your original post was the tired, old "Mac users are out of touch" comment.
I have 4 Macs. They work exceedingly well for me. They're getting a little old, but they're still good for the web design that I do. Video editing, well, not so great by current standards.
I do graphic design and video editing for a living. I need Photoshop and Final Cut Pro running at peak efficiency. Photoshop has always been more stable and in most (though not all) cases faster than in Windows. There is no Final Cut Pro for Windows, so there goes any compelling reason for me tu purchase a Wintel machine.
Do you see the point here? Purchase the system that best matches your professional and personal needs. You apparently REALLY don't want a Mac. Fine. Don't get one. I have no need for a Wintel box except to mess around with Linux and teach myself some new things.
BTW, I second most of what you said. For example, there are so many turnkey PCs out there, that mentioning it as a Mac selling point is laughable. But you'll see a lot of Mac sales points that ceased being valid 10 years ago. The people still using them are really that out of touch.
Ok, please provide a list as to these out of date selling points and reasons why Mac users are so out of touch.
Well, essentially Apple and Adobe are merketing to the same people and they share a lot of technology. Last I saw, Mac sales of Photoshop accounted for the largest pecentage of the application's sales. 5% of the desktop market creating more than 50% of the demand for Photoshop is signifigant. The same is true for Illustrator and InDesign as well.
The Mac is a huge part of Adobe's market and they know this. They put a lot of effort into the UI design of their programs and let each of the programs share some basic functions of each other reducing the learning curve between apps. I'll gladly pay a premium for a company that caters to me in this sort of way.
When the GIMP and Killustrator can boast this sort of interoperability, I will be duely impressed. Here's to hoping that happens.
I actually never use that, but I can see the usefulness of it. I've generally found that you can navigate via the keyboard just as easily though. Spacebar and command + or - works just as effectively for me.
This just proves that there are as many ways to work in Photoshop as there are users of the program. Hence it's beauty.
Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?
on
Photoshop for OS X
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· Score: 2
And how much does Adobe pay Macromedia to license the SWF format? (maybe nothing. I don't know MM's licensing terms) How much for LZW compression and Pantone and who knows what other licenses so that I and millions of other Photoshop and Illustrator can create smaller color corrected graphics.
Damn those closed source proprietary bastards for making my life easier and more profitable!
Dust and scratches are just the tip of the iceberg. Very complex photo restoration is very easy with Photoshop. The toolset native to Photoshop is amazing. I've repaired photos that were torn and mangled very very quickly. With the GIMP or anything else it would have taken much much much longer. The care and thought that Adobe put into the engineering of Photoshop is worth the price tag/ Initially $600 and then only $99-149 for upgrades every two years. My copy of photoshop usually pays for itself in the course of one job that takes about 2 days. I actually MAKE money by using Photoshop. I could make money using other tools, but Photoshop allows me to do my work the most efficiently.
If you're looking into good scanners check Agfa out. Expensive, but worth the money, especially if you're into photo restoration.
Well, basic CMYK support would be useful. A history palette, non-destructive layer effects, vector text and layers, basic knockout features. Well, hell, there's a lot that Photoshop can do that the GIMP can't. Plus, PS has a very well thought out and useful interface.
The GIMP is a pretty decent application and you can't beat the price, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a standard part of a professional graphic artist's tool box.
Re:Great... Content Control Features For Creators?
on
Photoshop for OS X
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· Score: 2
The security implementation in limited to Photoshop PDF fles. They aren't trying to lock you out of your own.psd, tiff, eps, gif, jpeg, etc. files.
Re:The submitter made a misleading quote...
on
Linux and Mac OS X
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· Score: 2
Sheesh. I should have known that! Regardless, my macs almost never crash and when applications do, generally, I'm right back at the Finder.
Re:The submitter made a misleading quote...
on
Linux and Mac OS X
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· Score: 2
I don't know what Macs you've used or who set it up, but my 4 Macs all have uptimes that range into months rather than weeks. Generally if there is a crash it's because of a poorly written application rather than the OS. Lirterally, I have 4 Macs that have uptimes in the 4-6 month range. The laptop gets shut down a lot, but then again, that's a battery and portability issue. Though I'm sure someone could find a way to make that Apple's fault also. "Can you believe it? A one button mouse AND I have to shut it down when I'm carrying it around? What a load!"
Personally I think it's MS that has fooled everyone all of the time. They have actually convinced the general public that they are creating innovative products when in fact they are either stolen or copied from from smaller competitors who are soon out of business once their "air supply has been cut off".
What the/. Linux crowd fails to see is that Apple customers don't mind paying a little extra money for the time and care put into developing Macintosh systems. Most Mac users don't want to get into the guts of their computer except to maybe install an extra harddrive or some extra RAM. We generally don't care about getting under the hood because the people who made the computer engineered it so we don't have to do that if we don't want to.
For Linux users I can understand why getting to the guts of the computer and the OS is so important. It's part of the computing experience for that market. Linux users LIKE getting to the very core of their computers. I don't understand why they have to bash Apple and it's users just because Apple doesn't consider them part of their target market demographic. Why would Apple market to people who don't want to spend money on anything? They are a company whose goal is to make money and they can't make money off a free OS and low margin computer components.
I don't go around bashing Linux because it doesn't meet all of my computing needs. It's a good OS for what it's intended to do, but it doesn;t come close to meeting my needs or the needs of millions and millions of other computer users... users being the operative word.
Macs just work out of the box. Ceratin people want that.
Linux only works if you configure it to work the way you want it to and have the technical knowledge to do that. Certain people want and need that from their OS and computer. Windows has lots of games and is ubiquitous. Very few people really want Windows but it is the only option they know. It seems to meet their needs reasonably, but then again their standards and expectations of a computer might be a bit lower than Mac or *NIX users.
So, if the macintosh doesn't fit your criteria for a computing environment, DON'T BUY ONE OR USE MAC OS! Stop complaining about the price of their hardware and buy the system you need. You're just wasting energy and the time of other people.
Just because you can't get OS X on anything other than a Macintosh does not mean that Apple has a monopoly in any meaningful sense. They own 5% of the personal computer market. To be a monopoly a compnay must own at least 51% of their respective market. M$ has a monopoly in operating systems, office suites and web browsers. Apple makes their own hardware and OS and competes with M$, SGI, Linux and Sun. They don't have a monopoly in anything.
So Linux is ready for the desktop of the vast majority of users, who never go beyond word processing, spreadsheets, and email. The fact that it doesn't have what you think is necessary is irrelevant. Claiming that it isn't ready for the desktop just because it isn't ready for your desktop is an exercise in ego.
Ah, but lots of people want to do video editing, manage their photo albums without configuring DV camera drivers and other simple tasks that, yes, can be accomplished using LInux if you are a fairly adept user. However, there are millions upon millions of people who never want to have to compile a kernel, deal with drivers or use a terminal.
Again, I think KDE and Gnome are pretty decent desktop environments and are only getting better. However, until the UI behaves as consistently or stably as Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, or shudder, Windows it's just not going to take off. The core of what's needed is there. It's just that pretty much most Linux development is targeted at creating a user experience based around the desires of programmers and networking people.
Yes, Linux is a desktop OS, but it's main strengths are still in the back end arena where the lack of an inconsistent UI is not that much of an issue.
I use Linux at home. Mostly for teaching myself new things, but when I need to get honest work done, I switch over to my trusty PowerMac and fire up applications that I know are going to behave and perform in a very consistent and predictable way. KDE and Gnome are still just a little too rough at this point for the average user, which, yes, includes those millions and millions of parents out there who are going to be spending their disposable income so that their children can have computers. Hopefully, some of the kids will be adventurous and try installing Linux or OS X or NetBSD or BeOS (if they can find it).
Linux is NOT going to take over the desktop but I sincerely hope it has a long and fruitful run serving people faithfully.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'm a graphic designer. It's a major reason why I go with a Mac.
It's really hard for me to imagine a software platform that would require me to have IE and WMP installed in order to run programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. Just what in the hell would IE and WMP have to do with the basic operation of my design tools? IE and WMP are taking up RAM that could be better allocated to my design tools.
I'll stick to my MacOS thankyouverymuch where IE eats up RAM only when I launch the app and not at boot time.
Premiere is being dumped left and right by small and big studios alike in favor of FCP. Hell, some production houses are even dumping their Avid's in favor of FCP.
From a performance and usability standpoint, Premiere just doesn't even hold a candle to FCP. Avid and Media100 still have an edge over FCP, but they are cost prohibitive in the smaller markets; hence FCP being chosen in their stead.
AfterEffects is used for totally different reasons than FCP. It's more motion graphics oriented than it is editing oriented. AfterEffects is also a low end solution for motion graphics. High end shops are going to go with products from Discreet and Nothing Real.... er Apple.
Actually, Sorenson has more than just Apple as a client.
.mov file at a final file size of 170MB with uncompressed CD quality audio. None of the other video codecs could even come close to that level of compression with that level of image quality.
/. and actually approach the people at Apple? Someting might actually come of it!
Macromedia is including the Sorenson codec in Flash MX. Discreet licenses Sorenson for inclusion in Cleaner and other products. (How long before Apple snatches them up!?)
Sorenson provides great image quality at great compression rates. I took an 6GB video file, edited it in Premiere (unfortunately!) and exported it to a CD quality
I agree that it's kind of silly to have QTSS running on Linux when there isn't even a player client for it, but why don't people stop bitching here on
I could just sit around and bitch to my friends about a lack of video editing work, but I seem to get more results by actually contacting people who have need of editing.
The problem with OSX is that non-unixy people programmed the UI.
Well, if the NextStep people aren't *nix people I don't know who are. They're the ones who built the UI.
I watch more Toonami then any channel.
/. editors learn some basic grammar?!?!?!?!?!?!?
than than than than than!
When will
If you design a website, the first thing you should do is find out who your audience is. Once you know who your audience is, then you can start figuring out how the design should work. It's all about the audience.
hallelujah!
Indeed! Usability, simplicity and legibility are the most important aspects of your UI design.
Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience
The Design of Everyday Things
Those are possibly the two most important books you could read. Of course you should read Tog and Nielsen. They are a good primer. Generally they tell you more what you should not do rather than what you should do.
Wow! insightful!
Aw, man. It is so tempting to just keep this going, but alas I have work to do on this computer.
It would be much more fun if you weren't an AC also.
I realize I'm being totally trolled here, but it's fun.
To quote the original post:
BTW, I second most of what you said. For example, there are so many turnkey PCs out there, that mentioning it as a Mac selling point is laughable. But you'll see a lot of Mac sales points that ceased being valid 10 years ago. The people still using them are really that out of touch.
Mac users are, I'm assuming, the people who use these no longer valid sales points. Is that not what your sentence implied? You don't hear many Wintel people defending the Mac with ANYTHING let alone ten year old sales rhetoric.
Also, 10 years ago there were no PowerPC Macs, 486's were the top of the line consumer offering from Intel and Windows was still in it's infancy. The Mac had a much larger marketshare back then. They didn't really need to make any dubious claims as to the performance benefits of the Mac over Wintel.
You have proven nothing other than you like to be argumentative. It's fine with me. I actually enjoy playing semantics.
Ok, so you're not going to buy a Mac. That's fine. Based on your criteria, a Mac does not fit your computing needs.
What bothered me about your original post was the tired, old "Mac users are out of touch" comment.
I have 4 Macs. They work exceedingly well for me. They're getting a little old, but they're still good for the web design that I do. Video editing, well, not so great by current standards.
I do graphic design and video editing for a living. I need Photoshop and Final Cut Pro running at peak efficiency. Photoshop has always been more stable and in most (though not all) cases faster than in Windows. There is no Final Cut Pro for Windows, so there goes any compelling reason for me tu purchase a Wintel machine.
Do you see the point here? Purchase the system that best matches your professional and personal needs. You apparently REALLY don't want a Mac. Fine. Don't get one. I have no need for a Wintel box except to mess around with Linux and teach myself some new things.
BTW, I second most of what you said. For example, there are so many turnkey PCs out there, that mentioning it as a Mac selling point is laughable. But you'll see a lot of Mac sales points that ceased being valid 10 years ago. The people still using them are really that out of touch.
Ok, please provide a list as to these out of date selling points and reasons why Mac users are so out of touch.
Well, essentially Apple and Adobe are merketing to the same people and they share a lot of technology. Last I saw, Mac sales of Photoshop accounted for the largest pecentage of the application's sales. 5% of the desktop market creating more than 50% of the demand for Photoshop is signifigant. The same is true for Illustrator and InDesign as well.
The Mac is a huge part of Adobe's market and they know this. They put a lot of effort into the UI design of their programs and let each of the programs share some basic functions of each other reducing the learning curve between apps. I'll gladly pay a premium for a company that caters to me in this sort of way.
When the GIMP and Killustrator can boast this sort of interoperability, I will be duely impressed. Here's to hoping that happens.
I actually never use that, but I can see the usefulness of it. I've generally found that you can navigate via the keyboard just as easily though. Spacebar and command + or - works just as effectively for me.
This just proves that there are as many ways to work in Photoshop as there are users of the program. Hence it's beauty.
And how much does Adobe pay Macromedia to license the SWF format? (maybe nothing. I don't know MM's licensing terms) How much for LZW compression and Pantone and who knows what other licenses so that I and millions of other Photoshop and Illustrator can create smaller color corrected graphics.
Damn those closed source proprietary bastards for making my life easier and more profitable!
Dust and scratches are just the tip of the iceberg. Very complex photo restoration is very easy with Photoshop. The toolset native to Photoshop is amazing. I've repaired photos that were torn and mangled very very quickly. With the GIMP or anything else it would have taken much much much longer. The care and thought that Adobe put into the engineering of Photoshop is worth the price tag/ Initially $600 and then only $99-149 for upgrades every two years. My copy of photoshop usually pays for itself in the course of one job that takes about 2 days. I actually MAKE money by using Photoshop. I could make money using other tools, but Photoshop allows me to do my work the most efficiently.
If you're looking into good scanners check Agfa out. Expensive, but worth the money, especially if you're into photo restoration.
What?! A crash prone, buggy version of Freehand?!?! The minds reels!
Well, basic CMYK support would be useful. A history palette, non-destructive layer effects, vector text and layers, basic knockout features. Well, hell, there's a lot that Photoshop can do that the GIMP can't. Plus, PS has a very well thought out and useful interface.
The GIMP is a pretty decent application and you can't beat the price, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a standard part of a professional graphic artist's tool box.
The security implementation in limited to Photoshop PDF fles. They aren't trying to lock you out of your own .psd, tiff, eps, gif, jpeg, etc. files.
Sheesh. I should have known that! Regardless, my macs almost never crash and when applications do, generally, I'm right back at the Finder.
I don't know what Macs you've used or who set it up, but my 4 Macs all have uptimes that range into months rather than weeks. Generally if there is a crash it's because of a poorly written application rather than the OS. Lirterally, I have 4 Macs that have uptimes in the 4-6 month range. The laptop gets shut down a lot, but then again, that's a battery and portability issue. Though I'm sure someone could find a way to make that Apple's fault also. "Can you believe it? A one button mouse AND I have to shut it down when I'm carrying it around? What a load!"
Personally I think it's MS that has fooled everyone all of the time. They have actually convinced the general public that they are creating innovative products when in fact they are either stolen or copied from from smaller competitors who are soon out of business once their "air supply has been cut off".
What the /. Linux crowd fails to see is that Apple customers don't mind paying a little extra money for the time and care put into developing Macintosh systems. Most Mac users don't want to get into the guts of their computer except to maybe install an extra harddrive or some extra RAM. We generally don't care about getting under the hood because the people who made the computer engineered it so we don't have to do that if we don't want to.
For Linux users I can understand why getting to the guts of the computer and the OS is so important. It's part of the computing experience for that market. Linux users LIKE getting to the very core of their computers. I don't understand why they have to bash Apple and it's users just because Apple doesn't consider them part of their target market demographic. Why would Apple market to people who don't want to spend money on anything? They are a company whose goal is to make money and they can't make money off a free OS and low margin computer components.
I don't go around bashing Linux because it doesn't meet all of my computing needs. It's a good OS for what it's intended to do, but it doesn;t come close to meeting my needs or the needs of millions and millions of other computer users... users being the operative word.
Macs just work out of the box. Ceratin people want that.
Linux only works if you configure it to work the way you want it to and have the technical knowledge to do that. Certain people want and need that from their OS and computer.
Windows has lots of games and is ubiquitous. Very few people really want Windows but it is the only option they know. It seems to meet their needs reasonably, but then again their standards and expectations of a computer might be a bit lower than Mac or *NIX users.
So, if the macintosh doesn't fit your criteria for a computing environment, DON'T BUY ONE OR USE MAC OS! Stop complaining about the price of their hardware and buy the system you need. You're just wasting energy and the time of other people.
Just because you can't get OS X on anything other than a Macintosh does not mean that Apple has a monopoly in any meaningful sense. They own 5% of the personal computer market. To be a monopoly a compnay must own at least 51% of their respective market. M$ has a monopoly in operating systems, office suites and web browsers. Apple makes their own hardware and OS and competes with M$, SGI, Linux and Sun. They don't have a monopoly in anything.
Well that's just ducky! Thanks for answering that for me.
It is true that you learn something new everyday!
So Linux is ready for the desktop of the vast majority of users, who never go beyond word processing, spreadsheets, and email. The fact that it doesn't have what you think is necessary is irrelevant. Claiming that it isn't ready for the desktop just because it isn't ready for your desktop is an exercise in ego.
Ah, but lots of people want to do video editing, manage their photo albums without configuring DV camera drivers and other simple tasks that, yes, can be accomplished using LInux if you are a fairly adept user. However, there are millions upon millions of people who never want to have to compile a kernel, deal with drivers or use a terminal.
Again, I think KDE and Gnome are pretty decent desktop environments and are only getting better. However, until the UI behaves as consistently or stably as Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, or shudder, Windows it's just not going to take off. The core of what's needed is there. It's just that pretty much most Linux development is targeted at creating a user experience based around the desires of programmers and networking people.
Yes, Linux is a desktop OS, but it's main strengths are still in the back end arena where the lack of an inconsistent UI is not that much of an issue.
I use Linux at home. Mostly for teaching myself new things, but when I need to get honest work done, I switch over to my trusty PowerMac and fire up applications that I know are going to behave and perform in a very consistent and predictable way. KDE and Gnome are still just a little too rough at this point for the average user, which, yes, includes those millions and millions of parents out there who are going to be spending their disposable income so that their children can have computers. Hopefully, some of the kids will be adventurous and try installing Linux or OS X or NetBSD or BeOS (if they can find it).
Linux is NOT going to take over the desktop but I sincerely hope it has a long and fruitful run serving people faithfully.