[design tools] The Question Of The Mac Mini For Design: Answered ...

2429.... and the answer is good!

A few chapters back I wondered aloud about whether or not a Mac Mini would be a good machine to base my design center around. I'd noticed the specs and cogged that I would get more than twice the computer I have now on my desktop and use my current monitor (a 17" Apple Studio Display) and keyboard for less than half the price of the original G4.

I did get quite a few hits from MacSurfer's Headline News, who notice I asked the question, which made me happy, and somewhat less comments (which made up for in quality what I didn't get in quantity), and the results are, so far as I'm concerned, in … the Mac Mini looks like it'll be a nifty machine indeed, and quite enough for me to go forward from the old G4 with.

A top concern was basic performance. Anonymous (1st commenter) allayed this:

So my first Intel mini was a 1.85MHz and it simply rocked. Not only with photoshop and InDesign, but rendering video (not the heavy stuff, but the day to day conversions.

I purchased the latest generation of Mini and it really rocks, due to the inboard GFX card, not relying on CPU RAM, but it's own.

Kevin Cole chimed in:

Can't hurt. Grab the one w/the best card and most RAM available and it'll work dandy. (We're already using one in the office and it couldn't work more smoothly. Don't know if I'd want to do a LOT of video at once, but for what we're doing, it's smooth!)

Gahlord Dewald had this to offer:

I am very satisfied with my Mac Mini. I am easily driving a Samsung 26" LCD, have my Wacom medium sized tablet plugged in, have a brace of external RAID arrays (though the internal disk is great, I love the speed of RAID stripes so I keep them on hand). I am currently running CS4 and plan to upgrade to CS5.

...

Not sure how it will go for you, but I can say that I do not regret my Mac Mini at all. Wish I had done it sooner.

Jeff, who works at KGW (I'm guessing on the PDX Tweeter's favorite program, Live@7 (@TheSquare), reported in from the trenches:

Go for it. The mini is a powerful little box. I've used one with dual monitors (19" and 24"), and it worked like a champ. We use a couple of previous-gen minis as render boxes at KGW, rendering full HD After Effects projects, and they've never failed to handle the workload. Dollar for dollar, probably Apple's best computer.

Also, as a couple of commenters pointed out, the Mac Mini does indeed have a fan, which means I was probably confusing the concept of the Mini in my mind with that of the G4 Cube, which worked by convection only (which I thought nifty). The form factor of one is reminiscent of the other to me.

Bottom line, though? The Mac Mini will equal my current needs and exceed them a little, and get me back up near enough to the leading edge tech-wise that I can take a role in the reindeer games once again, which is what I need right now.

So, after that payment comes through from the tech editing job, I have a date with PowerMax, or maybe The Mac Store, whichever. They have good deals. And at the price of a new Mac Mini, I won't have to settle for a used unless it makes better economic sense along the transaction. And both stores have excellent return policies.

Since I rarely get feedback or comments, also, a huge thanks and word to the commenters on that. I enjoyed reading them and watching them come in, and really kind of treasure them. You guise were the excellent kind of excellent, and I thank you very muchly indeed.

Mac Mini, here I come ... by and by.

NB: Young, non-creepy SJobs and Macs sourced hither: http://s787.photobucket.com/albums/yy160/kdlipton/?action=view&current=steve-jobs-1984-macintosh.jpg&newest=1

Technorati Tags: Mac Mini, Macintosh, Apple, Apple Mac, Graphic Design, Digital design, design tools

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[design] I Like Windows 7 - But I Still Prefer Mac OS X. Here's Why.

2425.Just like a lot of people trained in design, I love Apple. And the previous post where I solicited public comment on the idea of using a Mac Mini as my design center made me think about why I was so set on staying Mac.

I love Apple.

Well, let me qualify that a bit.

I like the company. Jobs sometimes leaves me with that "uh-oh" feeling. But I love Mac OS X.

I've had a foot in both the Mac and PC worlds almost ever since I owned a computer. I've known friends who swore by their Macintoshes while we were piecing together Windows machines before we could finally own a Mac. I've seen and used Windows 7 and I've got to say that, within the Windows paradigm, all the upgood press you've heard about it is dead on the money: Win 7 looks good, works good, and is the most well-behaved Windows yet.

But, given my choice I'll stick with the X.

Why?

One word: Darwin. Another word: architecture.

Installing applications in X is a breeze and, even though the under-the-hood works has changed since the days of the earlier Macintosh OS's, the basics are still the same: for most applications, uninstalling still remains a matter of simply dragging the file to the trash.

I've just never been able to do that in Windows, even Win 7. And what dependencies there are are pretty easy to find. I don't need a "wizard" to install or uninstall a lot of things. That's simplicity because I can see what's going on. DLL? What's that?

The organization of the file system makes a great deal more sense to me. It's more intuitive. I also know Unix ... not as a pure power user, but enough of a power end-user that if I need to find something, I can break open Terminal and go looking. To me, the command shell of DOS is was always like a kind of poor-mans Unix, that doesn't quite work the way it ought to. Unix command line cryptic? I took one look at DOS Power Shell and my eyes instantly glazed over. And, unlike Windows, since Darwin is a flavor of Unix, it has a bunch of nifty and useful things installed that I'm well familiar with – vi, ftp, rlogin, ssh, all sorts of stuff that I learned to use effectively a long time back.

So, it's my hat's off to Win 7. It is indeed everything they're selling it as. But I'll stick with the X, because the X makes a whole lot more sense, and I feel a lot less lost in the Darwin environment.

It just works ... for me.

Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, macintosh, apple, mac mini

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[design tools] A Mac Mini for Graphic Design?

Special Update! 30 May 2010 Z1637: I am quite suddenly (and delightfully) getting merrily hit by MacSurfer's Headline News page, an am already on the way to having the biggest Sunday this blog's ever seen! Nifty, and gratitude obtain! Whoever loved me enough to put me at the top of the opinion section – words cannot express!

I am seriously interested in the opinions of designers about using the Mac Mini for everyday use, so if you have any opinions, please, sound off! I like the information I'm getting so far! - Samuel John Klein

2422.Presently, an opportunity might present itself for me to upgrade my equipment.

Not that I'm all that dissatisfied with the old stuff. But it is, as they say, old.

My design center has, for a long time now, consisted of a dual-processor PowerMac G4. It's a lovely thing. It has (in two versions, thanks the the donations of a few angels back when the first one let me down about two years back … thanks to you all, I still appreciate this boon) served me very well.

Actually, it's not so much as it's showing its age as the world is moving on. It's a 1.25 Ghz 2-processor machine, mounting standard 80 GB hard drive (and a couple since added), and runs Creative Suite 3 pretty well (unless I want to try drawing in 3D in Illustrator, which makes it cry like a schoolgirl).

In particular the moving on has been in the move of Apple to Intel, and the move of software away from the old Power PC. Snow Leopard – if I could get it, wouldn't run on this machine. Adobe Creative Suite 5 – forget about that. In the tech editing job I'm doing right now, I'm borrowing a Windows 7 laptop (and it's a nice OS, that – almost like using a Macintosh).

So, however successful I  do get, even though the old Macintosh is running quite well right now, I'll have to try to keep up.

As budgets go, I could move up to a 13" MacBook Pro, or something like that. And then more than one acquaintance suggested I look into the Mac Mini. I'd heard of them some time ago and loved the idea but I didn't know how they would support graphics apps. But looking at the specs of recent models has caused me to consider it seriously.

For less than $800, I can get a Mac Mini that has this amazing-looking SuperDrive, more than three times the OEM online storage of my original G4, and a clock-speed that's more than 2x as fast - and something that only consumes 14 watts when idle and uses no fan. That's something that turned my head. It's like getting more than twice the computer I have now for less than half the price I originally paid for the old warhorse G4.

And they're not making software I need for the Power PC anymore.

So, I'm wondering - is the current brand of Mac Minis worth it to do design work on? They make excellent economic sense for me, and would get me back closer to the cutting edge, where I need to be.

If anyone has anything to say, especially users of Mac Minis who may right now be using them to do design work, I'd be interested to hear it. Sound off in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Macintosh, Mac Mini, graphic design, digital design

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[design] Free Scripts To Help Adobe InDesign Deal With MSWord Files

2415.Here's some free niftyness that I stumbled on today, via CreativePro.com: four scripts that will help you deal with text formatting in imported MSWord files, which is pretty much the bulk of the files you'll be importing and styling and which, even I can say, will occasionally give you unforgivable pains in da tuchas ...

These scripts help you correctly apply styles without having to bother with overrides, deal with GREP and export character styles. They also help you apply nested styles and turn GREP styles to character styles.

• Get The free Scripts by going to this page here: http://www.creativepro.com/article/easy-fixes-microsoft-word-formatting-indesign.

And a bonus free nifty free thing! I just found this out, but a membership to InDesign Secrets, a very good resource site to keep as one of the tools in your online toolkit, is now free! I just signed up and since there's no such thing as too much good quality free advice about InDesign, I think everyone should.

Just go to http://indesignsecrets.com and click on the Become A Member! link on the upper right below the search box. They'll send you a registration code … put the code number in the box and you're home, son!

Technorati Tags: design, design tools, Adobe InDesign, Free Stuff, Free InDesign Resources

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[art] Insights To Drawing In Adobe Illustrator For The Vector-Intimidated

2410.Using Adobe Illustrator can be an intimidating experience if you're new to vector drawing. Vector drawing creates wonderful illustrations that are crisp at any size and don't "pixelize" when you scale 'em up or scale 'em down.

Drawing lines with pencils, pens, or whatever you fancy and then filling in (or not) the areas you define with color, texture, hatchings or whatever is wonderfully intuitive when you're doing it on da paper, but not so much when you have to think of those lines as vector objects.

You might figure that doing a successful vector drawing involves a bunch of near-miss vector creation then a bit of tweaking to get the line just in the right place using the anchor point handles, but the pros know just where to put the line, every time, right?

Not quite true! As illustrator David Lanham shows in this sped-up drawing process posted in a video on Vimeo, even a pro puts down a line and adjusts it until it's just right. Like every other pro, though, they take the basic movies and use experience as a multiplier to get the job done,
and that's why you practice if you really want to accomplish.

View it:

Threaded from David Lanham on Vimeo

Like with me, it probably verifies that you probably have the beginnings of how to work with paths to create your art in Illustrator, as you can probably understand that David's doing there. Practice and use them, and you can expand them and make them yours.

• View the entire "Thread Troll" drawing completed at: http://dlanham.com/art/threadtroll/ (It's a free wallpaper too!)

Technorati Tags: Adobe Illustrator, David Lanham, vector drawing, illustration, illustrators, digital art

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[type] Saving Ink When You Print Ad Absurdum

2389.

Ink. Damn, but it's expensive. When you got your inkjet printer you thought Hey, Groovy, they're giving away these printers for a steal these days. And then you saw the inkjet cartridge prices and knew that you were being played.

What to do, what to do? There are a few things actually.

Once you've cut every corner – we have an HP inkjet that takes the 56/57 cartridge pair, which will run you $50 for a replacement – you're forced to turn to the one last thing you can control – the rate of ink usage. Surprisingly, some technical solutions have been implemented.

Ecofont (http://ecofont.com) takes it right out of the middle. That is to say, it reduces ink usage by literally "punching holes" in the letterforms that are big enough to reduce your ink usage by about 15-20% overall but still leave enough of a letterform to be readable. A sample document is available via the Ecofont link above. Here's a closeup of some of it:





The document is still readable though a little light. Ecofont offers one free font download and a handful of other fonts for prices.

The absurd extreme of this, beyond the limits of parsimony, is represented by the AP article published at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100406/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_money_saving_fonts, suggests changing the font to one that uses less per glyph and therefore less overall.

This looks good on paper, but seems a little kooky when you consider that the individual user is only saving about $20 on the year and, since (the example given) Century Gothic takes up more space than Arial, you're actually using more paper. So you got six of one, half-dozen of the other – or, more appropriately, a few molecules saved there costing you a few molecules there.

Now, this is not to say that it's not completely without merit. The example given posits an educations instituion that spends over $150,000/year on printer cartridges and toner. So, for a economy of this scale, it might make a few thousands of dollars difference.

But for the individual user? Best practices might more effectively include:

• Using both sides of paper
• Test-printing on already-used paper
• Only printing when absolutely necessary
• Printing out to a PDF before printing to see how they look in Adobe Reader

One thing that I did agree with was the observation that what they were after was to move the point where you press the print button to a more conservative place.

But if you're the individual user, it might not be so effective to use Century Gothic vs. Arial when compared to using a judicious attitude toward printing in general.

(h/t Twitterer Ugly Mug Advertising for the pointer to the AP article)