This year, once more, TransMUG is at the ATA Conference to help translators on the fence make the decision to switch, and to support Mac users in a PC-centric professional world. We are renewing our “Trados on the Mac” card campaign at a time when it has never been easier to run the PC-based Translation Environment Tools on the Mac.
Moreover, a panel moderated by Language Technology Division Administrator Michael Metzger, TransMUG members Catherine Theilen-Burke, co-founder Christine Lemor-Drake, and myself, as well as consultant and recent switcher, and now evangelizer Emmanuel Lemor, will review the many advantages of using the Mac platform. Catherine is introducing our November 1st session:
We are gearing up for our presentation at the ATA conference “The Merits of a Mac in a PC Centric Translation World.” Some of you probably believe the product speaks for itself and will naturally attract converts. There is something to be said for that. Certainly the timing is good for this type of discussion. Your support at our session is welcome, come to the ATA session Thursday November 1st at 3:30. We are not looking to preach to the choir, but to lay out options, resources and to create a forum. The information from the session will appear on this blog, and the conference DVD. Many translators have invested their intellectual and financial capital in PC tools and that must be respected. Others will be tempted to explore the Mac given the momentum created by new products.
The contents of the session will set the context for this exploration into Macs. Many of us have had drummed into us that PC’s were the only option and you couldn’t get translation work unless you abandoned the Mac. Even three years ago, if you weren’t a savvy Mac user, to a certain extent this was true. Everything depends on what kind of translation work you do. As translators we are always looking to our next computer and for the most part constantly fine tuning and problem solving to keep the systems we have running smoothly. Now that you can buy a Mac and run a total PC environment, if that is what it takes for people to discover the Mac, so be it. Sooner or later, they will venture into the Mac platform and discover it’s potential.
Articles accompanying the release of Leopard have been very positive.
In Thursday’s New York Times (10/25/07) business in David Pogue’s State of the Art Column titled “A MacLeap Courtesy Of Leopard” continued on page 9 by “A Leap in Cleverness Sure as Leopard’s Feet” goes over the set up of the big feature Time Machine, “one click – that’s got to be the shortest setup of any backup system in history”, one click set up has always been a feature on Macs and continues to be so. Time machine is visually attractive and innovative according to Pogue. Spaces, virtual screen software, improvements to Boot Camp receive good marks; the see-through menus have mixed reviews. The article ends with “Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises and very few disappointments, lie around every corner”. An altogether encouraging review given the context of Apple’s market share and the dominance of the PC.
An article appearing in Monday’s New York Times business section (10/22/07) gives us some details of Apple’s growing market share. Apple will continue with its pace of frequent upgrades and it’s expected growth for the next quarter is higher than expected by industry analysts, “(the research firm) Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 percent based on shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1% share of the domestic market.”. Visitors to the Apple stores numbered 100 million last year. How many of these visitors are potential switchers? Mr. Wolf (Industry newsletter Wolf’s Bytes) “estimated that 60-70 million of them were Windows users drawn by the iPod or the iPhone, who could potentially shift to the Macs.” So we are in an interesting period of time, many avenues to explore, tools to look at. This period of transition and new products is a perfect setting for an examination of using Mac’s in a translation world.
Don’t hesitate to stop by the NCTA table, at the entrance of the Grand Foyer if you are attending the Conference. Welcome to San Francisco!
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
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
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
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