 Mac OS X in the early days. We’ve already lived 10 years past the end of the world and gosh, how quaint 2000 sounds already! Remember Y2K? What I also remember from 2000 is the Windows flavor of the same name. It was the marriage of professional NT robustness with the friendlier interface of Windows 98… Ten years later, that line ended with XP and is finally tweaked to the point of usability with 7. In Jost Zetzsche’s February Tool Kit for Tranlorial you can read about how so many Mac-like features finally made it to the PC with Windows 7 but still on a patched, tired architecture. Continue reading »
Written by Yves
Having followed the genesis of Leopard closely, I was wondering if I should be once again (like for Tiger) an early adopter of that cat. I was reassured by a source close to the team in charge at Apple, that the long awaited fruit of their workings was possibly their more achieved yet. So I made the leap and got the new OS installed on my two machines on the day of the release.
Now, how is Leopard relevant to the translator’s experience, what does this upgrade translate into, to paraphrase NCTA’s newest slogan? First, surprisingly enough, I must say that even on my 4.5 year old PowerBook G4 at 867MHz (slowest configuration permissible), this cat is still faster than the previous one. I had read that a particular effort had been made on the optimization of the system and it is notable!
Then, there’s the look: Every time your familiar environment changes, you may be ruffled at the edges. And ruffles there were, notably with the side dock, modified at the last minute to calm the storm. Overall, it’s darker, and funnily, because most of the unified look draws from iTunes, though more serious, it remains very much playful. The icons are even more detailed and the three dots in the top left corner of your window, even shinier! What impressed me the most after only a few hours on the system was how crisp everything had become. There has obviously been a serious effort applied also to the resolution of the characters on the screen. It is a very welcome improvement since Mac users had to pay for more accurate rendition of the fonts with a tad blurriness… until now.
If you don’t feel like those enhancements are enough to pull your wallet out and spend $129 of your hard earned money, Apple has over 300 more reasons on their site to convince you. One of my favorites in the list is screen sharing, to take over mom’s machine in France and fix remotely the shenanigans that scare her, without any prior voodoo settings, and allow you to grab your home machine from your laptop on the move to get a file you had forgotten or even work on that remote machine! And don’t start me with the Finder: You can now see the front page of most of your documents (Office, PDF, images, and more) in Cover Flow view like you do in iTunes. No need to open anything to see what you are looking for and get rid of unnecessary files.
And the best for last: the application I will not be using yet because I’m a good boy backing up my machine every single day with Super Duper! but I haven’t figured out yet how to combine this with the new feature, Time Machine. That is pure high tech magic made simple. Don’t ask me too much about the hard links that keep your files on the drive after you have trashed the files they link to, but this is what allows you to virtually go back in time and retrieve long lost documents where they were at the time you are rolling back to in the past. And you can then restore just any piece to your present! All you need is an external drive, configure the app for the type of files you want Time Machine to protect. Besides, it also keeps hourly snapshots of your system. In case of major crash, you can restore your whole setup from a happier time. Welcome to the advent of the “no configuation, no excuse” backup, all in the background.
So visit Apple.com/macosx, and if you don’t find a good reason to upgrade, or switch to that superb platform that has become the Mac, email me. You may also want to join TransMUG and debate with us the merits or issues you have with your computing environment. Please visit our Yahoo! Groups page for more info.
Finally, if you will attend the ATA Annual Conference in San Francisco, come see TransMUGians Catherine, Christine, and I in the panel discussion “The Merits of Using a Mac in a PC-centric Translation World,” Thursday November 1st at 3:30. More on this panel discussion here soon.
Written by Yves
I love to compile our friend Jost’s Tool Kit for the Northern California Translators Association’s journal, Translorial, not only because I always learn interesting bits, but also because it reminds me of all the annoyances I don’t have to bother with anymore since I stopped being a regular Windows user. It also saddens me when he has to caution “when it ain’t broken don’t fix it.” After all, one of the pleasures of paying a lot of money for those fancy computers is to equip them with the latest technology. It is unfair to have to fear breaking the whole thing each time you want to try a cool new gadget or simply upgrade to the latest version!
As a Mac user, you can upgrade your apps endlessly without fear, and the best tool I have found for that purpose is the MacUpdate website. Every time you download an app from the site, its reference is kept with your account and each new update is signaled to you by email. Mac shareware is fantastic and covers almost every productivity need you may have, and beyond. Try these applications without fear and keep them up to date; you and your Mac deserve it.
The Mac platform is getting new converts everyday, particularly since you can now run Windows at full speed on a Macintosh; so, to answer the much anticipated launch of Vista, Apple dressed all its store associates in “Beyond Vista” T-shirts. After reading a few critiques of the new Windows system, there are very, very few features I find that I haven’t been using for almost two years now in Mac OS X Tiger. Even the new Windows system font looks like the Mac’s! And Mac OS X Leopard is poised to bring great new breakthroughs this Fall.
After Macworld, I wrote online about the impeding incompatibility of Wordfast with the next edition of Office for the Mac and today, as I am writing this column, Wordfast creator Yves Champollion just announced that a Java version of Wordfast is in the works. NCTA members will meet with him when he visits SF on April 18th. To learn more about this, come to the next TransMUG meeting on May 12th, where you will get the full report.
Stay up to date with this TM saga, and more, here and by subscribing to the TransMUG list. Membership in this full-fledged Mac User Group recognized by Apple also offers advantages such as discounts on Mac products, among others. And it’s free!
This article was written for the May issue of Translorial.
Written by Yves
Switching to the Mac is taking strange turns lately. At the far end of the spectrum, there are people who buy top-of-the-line Macs to run Windows, like a friend of mine who’s making his Mac-fan wife green with envy over his 24″ iMac wastefully running Windows XP… A more middle of the road category of switchers is that of those who transfer their mandatory Windows environment into their new Mac thanks to Parallels.
Håvard Risvaag, who authorized me to reproduce his post to the Wordfast mailing list, is in that latter category and shared his experience folding that old PC into his new MacBook.
Since I have never used Parallels to transfer a PC to a Mac, but having instead built directly from scratch a virtual machine, I found Håvard’s testimony a very helpful addition to our knowledge base for our friends who still keep a PC side-by-side with their Mac and/or are considering upgrading to one of the new Intel machines to run their legacy PC environment. As you can see below, our Norwegian colleague is rather happy:
“Just an update, now that I’ve left the dark side.
It works like a charm, and the transition from PC to Mac was quite simple. With a new maxed-out MacBook, I bought and installed Parallels build RC3. On my old XP PC I installed a small program from Parallels, a Transport Agent allowing me to migrate the whole XP installation over to Parallels, I hooked the two machines together via Ethernet and after a while, my old PC was up and running inside my Mac. I’m rather amazed.
My relocated PC sensed that there was something new about the hardware environment, so I had to reactivate XP and Office, but otherwise it is
all the same. Only faster.
The coherence mode is great, all windows from both OS-es mixed together in utter bliss, the Windows task bar resting in bottom of the screen. Now, however, I’ve hooked an external display to the Mac, thus running OS X in full screen on the MacBook and XP in full screen on the other screen. One keyboard, one mouse, drag-and-drop between screens.
I’ll tell you if I run into trouble, but so far it’s all fine. Now I’m finally mobile.
And I’m not getting paid or anything for this ad-like post.”
Håvard wrote this piece on February 28th, and the next day, the new version of Parallels, with Coherence mode, was coming out of beta. Time to give it a look if you haven’t yet.
Don’t hesitate to share your experience or ask questions in the Comments section below or on the TransMUG list.
Written by Yves
Switching to the Mac is taking strange turns lately. At the far end of the spectrum, there are people who buy top-of-the-line Macs to run Windows, like a friend of mine who’s making his Mac-fan wife green with envy over his 24″ iMac wastefully running Windows XP… A more middle of the road category of switchers is that of those who transfer their mandatory Windows environment into their new Mac thanks to Parallels.
Håvard Risvaag, who authorized me to reproduce his post to the Wordfast mailing list, is in that latter category and shared his experience folding that old PC into his new MacBook.
Since I have never used Parallels to transfer a PC to a Mac, but having instead built directly from scratch a virtual machine, I found Håvard’s testimony a very helpful addition to our knowledge base for our friends who still keep a PC side-by-side with their Mac and/or are considering upgrading to one of the new Intel machines to run their legacy PC environment. As you can see below, our Norwegian colleague is rather happy:
“Just an update, now that I’ve left the dark side.
It works like a charm, and the transition from PC to Mac was quite simple. With a new maxed-out MacBook, I bought and installed Parallels build RC3. On my old XP PC I installed a small program from Parallels, a Transport Agent allowing me to migrate the whole XP installation over to Parallels, I hooked the two machines together via Ethernet and after a while, my old PC was up and running inside my Mac. I’m rather amazed.
My relocated PC sensed that there was something new about the hardware environment, so I had to reactivate XP and Office, but otherwise it is
all the same. Only faster.
The coherence mode is great, all windows from both OS-es mixed together in utter bliss, the Windows task bar resting in bottom of the screen. Now, however, I’ve hooked an external display to the Mac, thus running OS X in full screen on the MacBook and XP in full screen on the other screen. One keyboard, one mouse, drag-and-drop between screens.
I’ll tell you if I run into trouble, but so far it’s all fine. Now I’m finally mobile.
And I’m not getting paid or anything for this ad-like post.”
Håvard wrote this piece on February 28th, and the next day, the new version of Parallels, with Coherence mode, was coming out of beta. Time to give it a look if you haven’t yet.
Don’t hesitate to share your experience or ask questions in the Comments section below or on the TransMUG list.
Written by Yves
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