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
On the road, at a client’s office, I often use two methods to access my mail: Horde on my web host servers for my personal and professional mail, and GMail for all the mailing lists and other services I subscribe to. After having tried Yahoo! Mail (too limited when it comes to using other accounts in combination), and .Mac Mail–a thing of beauty with, yet again, some frustrating limitations–I came to the conclusion that GMail was the best bet for me. (You won’t catch me using Hotmail…) But first, let’s look at Horde.
Rough but Powerful
Horde is a full-fledge organizer you may only meet when you have a web host. It is generally part of their suite of goodies included in CPanelX, the control panel for the complete management of your site. Having your own private place on the Web is not a luxury anymore. With Hostgator, I enjoy 200GB of storage space, unlimited email address, unlimited domains, on and on… for a measly $9.95 a month. After the terrible experience I endured with Lunarpages, that switch, a year ago, was a great move. And when web domain are under $9 per year at GoDaddy, there shouldn’t be any reason to depend on your ever changing ISP for your email address and basic web page…
Back to Horde: The workhorse is inelegant, but quite powerful, and with tons of messages to sort through and IMAP synchronization of my mail with Apple Mail, it’s nice to have the possibility to run some searches you can save as “Virtual Folders,” Horde’s name for Apple Mail’s Smart ones. Spam filtering there is not tops, though. So I keep that solution for the personal email I only share with friends and clients.
Searches you can save in Virtual Folders with Horde
Catch All… and All
For all my mailing lists and other registrations that can turn bad, I have another domain name I create addresses with that can be disposed of when they are abused. Until this year I had a “catch all” account and it worked great. XYZ Industries wanted my email for their survey and I would write XYZIndustries@mydomain.com, and their correspondence would come to my catch all account. Unfortunately, any spammer creating a random address with my domain name, i.e. random@mydomain.com, would also reach my account. As long as spam filters had to deal with “simple” worms and viruses, all was fine, and my web host spam filter worked fine. Pestmongers have become more refined with time and this solution doesn’t cut it anymore.
GWorld
Enters GMail: I redirect all my catch all accounts to my GMail account and let their spam filter, the best free filter in the business, and let them sift out the crap. I keep my spam on the server for a month, in case I have to search for a message that would have been picked erroneously for the trash. At the end of the first month, GMail had stopped 10,000 messages… Now, 3-months later, the average monthly load has risen to 18,000! You have to wonder how long email services will endure that constant assault. In the meantime, I will soon abandon the “catch all” solution, but the transition is not that simple.
I wasn’t joking…
The only reason why I don’t redirect my own personal email to GMail, is the possibly only shortcoming of the service: it’s not IMAP. In other words, it does not synchronize with my mail client, i.e. if I delete a message in my mail client, it won’t delete it on GMail. Being a POP mail system, GMail offers you to either leave your messages in the Inbox, or remove them.
I find the IMAP alternative very convenient and am keeping that system for my main email account. This way, when I am away from home, when I log into my mail server, the Inbox is the same that the one I have at home, lest the large message archive I keep on my home machine.
Depending on your setup, on your needs, a GMail account may offer a solution to some of your email woes. The private beta phase has ended so you don’t need anybody’s sponsoring you to create your own account anymore. Try it if you haven’t already, you may like it.
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
Apple has been working hard at helping us keep our info up to date with the syncing features integrated in Tiger. Still, it can be sometimes confusing, and even alarming at times, when warning dialogs ask you if you want 11 unnamed events to be modified (but how?) or the whole syncing operation to be canceled at once… The process is not yet completely convincing. Still, I have two success stories to report: A public calendar synced with .Mac for my clients, and the coordination of my iCal calendars with Google Calendars. (Accessorily, all this information also ends up on my phone, from across the room, thanks to iSync and Bluetooth.) I’ll share the technical details at the end of the artlicle.
.Mac to the rescue
One of my clients has devised a convoluted system to be informed of their favorite translators’ availability. I love them, but not to the point of jumping through their hoops. Besides, the day after downloading, printing, filling in and scanning, all this information may already be obsolete. So I looked into iCal’s features and, lo and behold, you can sync any number of calendars with .Mac while keeping the detail of their information private.
I have two types of calendars: the practical ones, three, grouped in an Availability folder, covering my work, personal, and associative activities; and the rest: birthdays, holidays, moon cycles, etc. When I add or modify any event in the practical group, the online Availability page I keep on .Mac is immediately and automatically updated.
For anyone visiting the web page displaying this compounded calendar, in Week view, big blue blocks (see picture) mark the busy times. In Month view, lists on start times are displayed (see picture). Not only this system answered my client’s request for availability disclosure, but it is always up to date—as long as I enter my appointments in time. Finally, the viewer, if using a calendar program with the same open source standard used by iCal, can even subscribe to your calendar or simply download it in its current shape from that same page.
Once my Availability page was in place, I realized that I could suddenly direct other clients to this page to help them schedule our collaborations. Once again, this only works if your keep your original calendar up to date. And this is where my second solution makes the whole thing tick beautifully…
Spanning Sync to tie it up
One of my main challenges has been to schedule new appointments when working on site. Either I would have had to enter the appointment on my PowerBook, in an iCal that is not synced (many good reasons for that), or I would have had to use paper notes or other online solutions to be copied back to iCal at home. Enters Spanning Sync, bridging one of the best online calendars with iCal. The software (a Preferences pane) is still in development, and not perfect, but I must say, since I’ve been using it, I have never been so on top of my schedule!
[UPDATE:] Spanning Sync eventually had to become commercial… and presumptuous: they imagined that because of their popularity they could push the boundaries of shareware price. They are asking $25 for a yearly subscription and $65 (!) for a simple license, for a Preference pane! A great one, for sure (when it’s not buggy, and version 1.0 was terrible), but still. Needless to say, outrage has been huge, and on their very own forum. Personally, I am looking for another solution since I will not support this kind of greed.
If this whole sync business has been challenging you like it has for me, give those solutions a try. And if you feel like your own solutions are more effective, do not hesitate to share them with the rest of us, here, in the Comments section, or on our Members list.
How To
To publish your iCal calendars, you need a .Mac (dotmac) account, $70 with a new Mac, $100 renewal. .Mac’s Learning Center has a short movie to show you how to publish your calendar. Priorly, you will need to create a calendar group (if needed) in iCal (File > New Calendar Group; see picture); and configure the publishing details from the info dialog of your calendar or calendar group where you can choose a private server instead of .Mac. The iCal Help also refers to a technical article on how to publish on a private server. This is not as simple as .Mac, of course.
Alternative solutions to .Mac include the Do-It-Yourself .Mac; and, someday, may be, the notMac challenge. In the spirit of the DIY .Mac page, you will find a lot of technical articles on how to set up the type of server with which to sync your calendars by running a Google search on “WebDAV server.” The results are not pretty: You better be seriously technically inclined to follow the steps that will help you save some bucks.
Google Calendars and Spanning Sync are free (as long as they are in beta, at least), and pretty straightforward. If you are not convinced yet, the Spanning Sync video demo might change your mind…
Written by Yves
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