mindflayer.net » mac

VMWare, Parallels, and Boot Camp

mindflayer — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:27:05 +0000

I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for Mac since the early beta days. I bought a copy for my wife’s MacBook and upgraded to version 3.0 when it was released. It worked pretty well.

As of today, though, I am running VMWare Fusion from a Boot Camp partition. Why? The list:

Parallels performance went downhill recently.
Weird Coherence issues – ghost windows, mouse control gone wonky, etc.
The kicker – my Windows XP image was corrupted.

I have been told by several users that Parallels really messed up their Boot Camp partition. That’s not promising. I may switch back to Parallels, but I’ll need to see performance and reliability increase.

MarsEdit 2.0 released

mindflayer — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:57:52 +0000

MarsEdit 2 has been released. Some UI improvements, and a vastly improved media manager. It appears that this will simplify uploading photos, which addresses the points of previous posts about needing to upload different images to compensate for the .Mac gallery compression.

.Mac iPhoto Gallery quality

mindflayer — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:03:49 +0000

I’m hardly a pro-am but I still want my photos to display well. It is argued that today’s consumers more than ever accept “just good enough” when it comes to audio and video and disregard any increase in quality, but I disagree. The quality of content is indeed heavily influenced by the quality of the medium. A grainy photo or film is not going to have the same impact as a vivid representation (unless that is the intention of the medium as in film noir).

In any case, this first photo is from iPhoto publishing to .Mac – click on the thumbnail for the full photo.

This one is hosted locally on the Coppermine gallery. Again, click on the thumbnail for the full photo.

Quite noticeable is the drastic reduction in photo size. In this age of 12MP prosumer DSLRs this is an acceptable price to pay to keep Apple’s bandwidth costs down. I resize the photos as well in consideration of the resolution ranges most people use. How about quality, though? It’s not a superior photo – there is some visible artifacting and non-intentional blur from holding the shutter open while standing in the wind. Is the .Mac quality good enough for this level of photography?

I think so. Thoughts?

iWeb versus WordPress

mindflayer — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:23:53 +0000

WordPress, Livejournal, Blogger, Blogspot, and Moveable Type cover darn near the full spectrum of tools for the more savvy blogger. I’ve run my blog on MT and WordPress for years and they are the tools with which I am most comfortable. There is a level of control in being able to really get in and mess with code that appeals – even when the user is not a savvy coder.

However, it was time I tried iWeb and .Mac publishing. There are some using it as their full-fledged blogging and site construction solution and it is a matter of time before someone asks me if I have used it. Time to dive in and test the waters.

Right off the bat, there is no work on the backend, no databases to set up, no Apache conf files to edit, and no hammering away at the command line. However, that loss of initial complexity is instead replaced with the complexity of the tool itself. With WordPress I can use ecto, MarsEdit, or the Web interface to quickly write an entry. It’s a self-contained action. With iWeb, I have to use the tool to specify to add an entry, change the template, and then publish. That seems to be a disruptive workflow, especially in today’s world of Twitter and Pownce and SMS-to-Web publishing.

Another failure of iWeb is the inability to drag and drop a link straight to galleries created with iPhoto ’08 and published to .Mac. Users are instead given Web “widgets” that are dropped onto the created pages. They certainly don’t have the polish that the iPhoto-created galleries exhibit.

I’ll continue to work with iWeb as I also process in parallel with WordPress. Several friends use iWeb and seem to enjoy it. With most things of this sort it is probably the change in workflow that is keeping me from really getting the flow of the product. Expect continued feedback in a few days.

.Mac gallery

mindflayer — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:30:34 +0000

I’ve started posting photos to my .Mac gallery that’s a component of iLife ’08. I’m pretty pleased with it so far. The ability to quickly and easily post photos from the iPhone is slick. It would be nice if the photos were at full resolution but I guess Apple figures the pain of EDGE is minimized with a resized photo:

(Click on the image for the “full .Mac experience”.)

Got .Mac mail and an iPhone?

mindflayer — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:16:48 +0000

One of the annoyances about .Mac email versus Gmail, AOL mail, or self-hosted mail (we use Spamassassin) is no server-side filtering. That means having to do manual deletions on the iPhone. Well, not until now – as of yesterday Apple offers junk mail filtering.

Edit: Just got an email from Apple:

Improved webmail spam filtering. .Mac Mail also helps you better manage unwanted email with enhanced junk mail identification and sorting in webmail. To activate this new feature, just turn it on in your webmail preferences—go to www.mac.com, click Mail, and select Preferences in the upper right.