I’m almost fully “up and running” on the new Powerbook, and I’m having a blast. Last night I copied document and music trees over from my Windows machine, and will now consider the Mac to be “primary” for buying music on iTunes. I’ll probably prune the “laptop-resident” document tree (I have many gigs of stored research papers, etc, on my Windows laptop), and keep them at home on the file server, with a mirror on my Mac for use in writing or doing research. The windows laptop will get cleaner and cleaner and will become just the “work” machine like it was intended to be.
For documents I’m working on (rather than stored static PDF archives), I’m using a Subversion repository on a home file server, running out of Apache2 with WebDAV. This means that “working copies” are stored on Windows and the Mac which then get treated just like source code — update, merge, commit as needed. This has been working for months on my Windows machine, and gives me a combination of backup, multi-machine sync, and version control for critical documents and writings. We’ll see how well this works when split across Windows and Mac, but if Microsoft Office is happy with the documents, it’ll probably be seamless.
At this point, all that’s missing from the Powerbook is Microsoft Office itself, which I’m getting this week (hopefully tomorrow). At that point, I’ll be fully functional. I do need to make a final decision on outliners/notetaking software, to replace Microsoft OneNote (which I love but which doesn’t have a Mac version, hint hint…). At the moment, I’m trying four of them and NoteBook from CircusPonies (oddly enough) is winning. Probably wouldn’t win if I were interested mostly in project tracking, todo lists, etc, but I do all of that in Outlook (probably soon, Entourage), and Microsoft Project when necessary. For my purposes, the outliner really is more of a note-taking environment, and NoteBook is winning.
I spent time at the Allegro today with the new machine and loved every minute of it. I’m not bothered by the smaller screen, since with good display technology and typography I can read and edit text at smaller sizes. And I bought a Bluetooth optical mouse, which gives me a thumbwheel and a right-click button. I’m sorry, but Apple went overboard simplifying the mouse, and as a result the clunky but beautiful Apple mice are more like art than tools. But Kensington had a nice travel-worthy wireless mouse which will work equally good at home and on the road. Now I just need one of those Incase neoprene envelope things to protect my sexy little laptop when I throw it in my 13-year old Mountainsmith lumbar “day” pack and I’m good to go.
Hey, another question for Mac-inclined readers…on Windows I was using Picasa from Google to organize my photos and loving it. How is iPhoto, really, and is it worth buying iLife? Is there something better for photo management? (And no, Tim, I’m not looking to write my own just for fun!)
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Adobe’s Photoshop Elements could be a worthwhile buy for you – more expensive than iLife but also more tools and options for editing photos. If you’re looking for basic editing and organizing, iLife is a good bargain, esp. if you plan on doing your own quick movies and making DVDs out of them…then it’s a steal.
iPhoto’s pretty good, but I don’t use it enough to say if it’s worth paying for iLife just for iPhoto. I have way too many pictures floating around for iPhoto to manage (although rumors say that newer versions are a lot better at this then older ones were), so I’ve been using iView MediaPro. It’s almost certainly not what you’re looking for, though.