Mac OS X & MacBook Pro: my (exhaustive) review (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

A quick follow-up on the use of a Mac as a "creative" tool. In the past week, using the iLife suite I've created a web-page with online video for my Toastmasters club. While not top-end professional quality, I'm impressed that I can almost trivially edit video, produce a DVD, and also export QuickTime video for the web, and throw together a web page. And I do this with iLife and a few other free tools.

I've worked with the Windows tools that could do the same job, and Mac tools are higher quality and better suited to the hobbyist, like me. (Actually, in XP, I didn't know how to burn a movie DVD. I gather Vista includes a tool for this.) I do think the Mac tools are better suited for the novice who wants to get things done. Even iWeb, for all its over-simplifications, makes it so easy to toss a web page together.

Moreso, I'm amazed it only takes about 10 hours of work to go from raw footage to both finished DVD and online video. I suspect I can bring this down to perhaps 5 hours as I continue to refine the process.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dave,

Another reason why I love my Mac.

These are tools provided for FREE with a new purchase and yet
they practically blow away a lot of Windows programs.

Mac is the perfect system for creating.

 

[KevA]

DaveF:

Although I've rarely used a Windows computer and therefore I am only slightly familiar with the "Start" menu, here is how you can create a similar feature in OSX that is completely customizable and requires no hacks or applications. It simply uses folders and aliases.

It is similar to dragging the Applications folder to the dock, as someone else suggested, but puts you in complete control.

In Documents (or wherever you want) create a folder called "Apps&Docs." In that folder, create sub-folders (Graphics, Video/Audio, etc.) and customize the order by naming them starting with 01, 02, etc.

For instance,

Apps&Docs (folder)
01_Graphics Apps (sub-folder)
02_Video & Audio Apps (sub-folder)
03_Music Files (sub-folder)

Now, find the applications you want to put in the "Graphics Apps" folder and drag them to the desktop holding Option-Apple as you do so. This creates aliases of those applications. Re-name the aliases to put them in the customized order you want. For instance, "Adobe Photoshop CS3" can be re-named "01_Photoshop." The next app could be named "02_Illustrator" and so on. Now drag those aliases into the "01_Graphics Apps" folder.

Once you have a set of sub-folders (with application and document aliases in each one) in the order you like, place the Apps&Docs folder on your Dock and then you will have a Start-style menu with whatever apps and documents you want in various sub-folders.

I hope this makes sense. It takes some organization, but once it's complete, it works beautifully. You can, of course, have a number of folders in the dock instead of just one and any file or application aliases in any number of sub-folders. This gives you complete control.

Give it a try. I did this some time ago and it's great. My most-used applications are on the dock (maybe 15) and the rest are aliased in the fashion I've just described.