Timeline 3d Review

It wasn’t so long ago that I reviewed Bee Docs’ Timeline application. In case you didn’t catch that review, it followed my general survey of OS X timeline applications and I found it the winner for the ease of use and the outstanding final product. I still use it often in my day job to great result.
Timeline is the brain child of Adam Behrenger. I have to admit I love using software developed by small companies like Adam’s. As a user, I know my comments and suggestions are going directly to the guys writing the code. As a result, the software seems tighter and you can feel the sense of pride in the final product that you often don’t get with software designed by committee.
As an example of this, Bee Docs has recently released Timeline 3d. The big difference with this new version is 3d presentation. A universal problem with using timelines is that you either have to dumb it down to a minimum number of events, or it gets too crowded and difficult to read. This is especially true when rendering in two dimensions. Adam came up with a way to take your timeline to 3 dimensions by virtually tilting it on your screen.

Once you drop your timeline into presentation mode you can press the spacebar that essentially tilts the timeline at an angle in a perspective view. You can then see much further down the page. It all looks very impressive, like something right out of CNN. You can then manually move forward or backward down the timeline and it advances the page and three dimensionally pops out the current event of focus.
These very advanced effects are stunning. Just a few years ago, this would have required some serious programming mojo. Using Timeline 3d, you just press the space bar.
Timeline 3D also will export your timeline to Keynote. It doesn’t draw out the animations but does allow you to snap between each step in your three dimensional timeline. I haven’t had an opportunity use this in the trenches yet but I’m thinking I’ll probably just leave the timeline active in Timeline 3D and command tab to it from Keynote when necessary. I like the more fluid transition and the ability to easily go backward and forward.
Timeline 3D can be found at beedocuments.com and is sold as a separate product from the standard Timeline application. You can download a trial and, if you have use for this sort of thing, I strongly recommend you give it a try. The standard edition costs $40 while the 3D version costs $65. There also is an excellent video at the BeeDocs website explaining how he came up with the idea for Timeline 3D on the Beedocs blog.

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Comic Life Magiq Review

You may be familiar with Plasq. They’ve brought us applications like Skitch and Doozla. But before those applications existed they had a very successful application called “Comic Life”. The first iteration of Comic Life gave you comic book formatted pages in which you could drop your pictures or artwork and add talking bubbles. In essence, it allowed you to produce your own electronic comic books. I first heard of it when it shipped on my daughter’s iMac.
Plasq has now reinvented Comic Life with the recent release of Comic Life Magiq. This new release represents a significant interface and feature upgrade over the original Comic Life. Booting up Comic Life Magiq, you are presented with a series of potential themes. Of note here is that these themes are not all comic book related. They have themes like “road trip”, “memories”, and “birthday”. In other words, the folks at Plasq figured out what we were all using the application for and have embraced it. Of course, if you don’t want a ready-made theme, you can make your own. It will be curious to see if web sites start sprouting up devoted to sharing Magiq themes.
Once you load up your theme, there is an updated but somewhat familiar Comic Life interface that allows you to start dropping your pictures and artwork into the template. One nice feature is that in addition to your iSight camera and iPhoto album, Comic Life Magiq can browse your Aperture library. It is all very easy to comprehend and without cracking the manual you’ll find yourself changing the layout and otherwise modifying pages an options in no time. The text effects are also fun with a variety of comic friendly and not-so-comic-friendly fonts to choose from that can be dropped into any one of several included bubbles or simply drawn across the page.
While these features represent a welcome update to a very fine application, the most notable new feature in Magiq is the image editor. Plasq has joined a growing list of OS X developers dabbling image editing. Actually the term “dabbling” really doesn’t do this effort justice. The Magiq image editor is quite powerful with different layers, each of which can be easily reset.
The Color layer gives a variety of common photo editing tools such as sharpen, exposure, hue, and crop. The next layer has a very easy set of tools to do a more than average job of removing an image from a background. The method, which requires two sets of rough outlines on the area to be removed and the area to be kept is very intuitive and consumer friendly. As an example, my eleven year old probably has no interest in learning photoshop, but in Comic Book Magiq she was all over this tool. The next layer allows you to warp objects with a variety of familiar tools from the OS X core image assets such as pinch, bulge, twirl, and squeeze. If that isn’t enough there are additional layers to allow you to put an overlay on the image and filter the effects, such as blur on the image. Finally, there is a paint brush that allows you to draw in what could not be accomplished in prior layers. While most of these tools were intuitive to lear, others took some experimentation to figure out. I think some degree of complexity is inevitable with this many tools.
Once your masterpiece is done you print or export it in a variety of formats including FLickr, HTML, PDF, and iWeb.
Comic Life Magiq requires Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard and reliant on some of the Leopard tricks. Strangely, Magiq can not read older Comic Life files. I hope the developer releases a conversion tool or adds this functionality to a later release.
The inclusion of the robust photo editor really transforms Comic Life Magiq into a significant upgrade over its predecessor. It gives you one application to create the layout and do the photo edits. This seems to be just one more example of convergence in OS X software. There are videos and a trial download at Plasq.com. If you are looking for a fun way to present photos, go take a look. Comic Life Magiq can be purchased from Plasq directly for $44.95 for a full version or $29.95 for a cross-grade from Comic Life. They also have a limited time introductory $5 discount for the early adopters.

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ScreenFlow Review

I’ve been producing screencasts now for almost a year. While I cannot claim to have the superhuman skills of my friend Don McAllister, I do want them to look nice. Up until a few months ago I accomplished this through a byzantine series of steps in multiple applications that was both time intensive and spectacularly underwhelming in its result.
Well this all changed a few months ago when ScreenFlow came on to the stage. ScreenFlow is the screencasting application for the rest of us. It gives you one application to capture video and audio and perform sophisticated editing. So let me break this down a bit.
First there is the capture. By this I mean you turn it on and the little invisible camera over your shoulder starts taking pictures of the screen. At least that is how I think of it. ScreenFlow does a dandy job of capturing your various clicks, drags, and actions on your screen. It also will record audio from either your built in microphone or your own plug-in microphone. I use a Blue Snowball for this purpose and while it is not perfect, it does an acceptable job. You can also elect to record or ignore your system sounds and, if you are really brave, your iSight feed so people can look at your mug while you record your screencast. I tried this but ultimately decided, as the old line goes, I have a face for radio.
You can capture multiple takes into one project so you can break larger projects into small bite-sized chunks. Now for most Screencasting applications, that is where the story ends. You then are required to submit those clips into iMovie or Final Cut for editing and processing.
ScreenFlow, however, is different. This application includes its own editor. So once you have your screencapture completed you can arrange them in ScreenFlow’s handy editor. This editor reminds me of the old iMovie. It is timeline based but not quite so intimidating as Final Cut. Despite the simple interface, however, there are some powerful tools.
Using ScreenFlow I can select portions of a clip and resize the screen, call out the front window and blur the background, zoom up and zoom down, and just about any other fancy trick within reason to make it easier on your viewer. I’ve done some of these effects in prior screencasts using Final Cut. In fact, you can do just about any screen effect with Final Cut and Motion. The trouble is, unless you are very proficient in those applications it will involve a lot of time and, most likely, a few tears. With ScreenFlow things are much easier. I still do some transition work and introductions and closings in Final Cut but with ScreenFlow, all the complicated stuff is already done for me.
The list of features in the edit process is long but just to point out a few of my favorites I like the way you can spotlight the mouse with a circle the size of your own choosing and feather the edges. I also like the way you can easily resize the image and, if you are feeling really spunky, add a reflection. You can also have it automatically display key presses but I’m not a fan of the way it zooms your keypresses across the screen. I hope they add some more options in future releases turning down the dazzle and up the functionality of this feature. For the time being, I’m continuing to use a great freeware application called Keycastr to handle keyboard display duty.
In addition to doing a fine job recording audio, ScreenFlow gives you some other audio tweaks such as the ability to add a keyclick sound. I can definitely see where this feature would be useful.
The biggest improvement to ScreenFlow with the latest version 1.1 is the addition of presets for lossless video and AppleTV. They have made huge strides on the output side and, for me, transformed the application from merely interesting to essential. ScreenFlow is like chocolate cake with ice cream and frosting blended in. One big pile of sugary screencasting fun. For ScreenFlow’s competitors, the bar has been set high.
I think we really are at the very beginning of mainstream screencasting. More and more people are making them. Not just to sell software but also to teach friends. In addition to my MacSparky screencasts, I use screencasting in my day job to drop little helpful movies into presentations. This is interesting because the developers at Vara Software actually started ScreenFlow with the idea of being able to record keynote presentations for the internent. Using ScreenFlow my production time has gone down and quality has gone up. This comes at a price however. A license for ScreenFlow will set you back $99. At this price point you probably need more than a passing interest in screencasting to justify the purchase but when you consider what a license for Final Cut Studio or Express costs, this really isn’t that bad. If you are serious about screencasting, you really should take a look.

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BBEdit Review

BBEdit is the 800 pound gorillla of text editors. People have switched to the Mac just to run this program. So what is so special about BBEdit? I’d have to say the answer is a combination of utility and pedigree.
BBEdit goes back System 6. This application is not a word processor but a text editor. While you could write a novel in BBEdit, it is more suited to prepare the web site promoting your novel or, better yet, the video game based on your novel. Put simply, this application is the equivalent of a super powered nail-gun in the tool belt of all code jockies.
BBEdit supports just about every software and internet development language you can think of. Using version 8.7 it support most, if not all, of the major languages including Objective C, Perl and Java just to name a few. Better yet, its plug-in architecture allows the creation of custom modules to support any language.
Getting back to its pedigree, BBEdit is a very mature application. The current version 8.7 has years of improvements and tweaks. Many of the innovations are obvious like code folding using Apple’s familiar disclosure triangles. Just as impressive as the big features however are the little ones that don’t show themselves right away. For instance, when you close BBEdit and then re-open it later, it remembers where you were when you left off and opens the same files in the same places. It even mounts FTP automatically. Additionally, BBEdit allows you to search and work on multiple files at a time and can handle enormous files sizes.
It tracks and allows the merging of changes in a way that is both smart and intuitive for programming. It also has a robust version control system.
One nice feature is the ability to turn down the down feature support. You can actually turn off language specific features for modules you don’t plan to use. BBEdit also includes a variety of Automator actions and Applescript support.
Having gone full circle with this application I began playing with it as a text editor and not a programming tool. Indeed, I wrote this review in BBEdit. It has some very powerful features when used in this capacity. I could particularly see using it when putting together forms with repetitive text strings. For everyday word processing however, I’m still using my concoction of Scrivener, Word, and Pages.
BBEdit actually has registered its logo phrase, “It doesn’t suck” and indeed is does not. I have to admit I was a little intimidated about reviewing BareBones BBEdit. Some people make their living in BBEdit and work in it every day. I thought, however, as a new user it would be interesting to see how easy it was to find these powerful features. Bare Bones did an impressive job of making these very deep features accessible to new users. That is no easy feat.
An individual license for BBEdit license runs $125. If you spend any amount of time in software development or web coding, you owe it to yourself to head over to Bare Bones Software and take a hard look at this application.

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Review iWeb Buddy

When it comes to web development, I’m hardly a power user and I’ve found iWeb to be just fine for most of the web based projects I’m involved with. That being said, there are a few features I do miss in iWeb 08. Zarra Studios comes to the rescue with its $25 add-on for iWeb called iWeb Buddy. Put simply, iWeb Buddy picks up the slack for iWeb.
First, it allows you to manage multiple domains. While iWeb natively supports multiple sites, it does not allow you to separate these sites into multiple domains. iWeb Buddy makes it easy to manage my family site (which publishes through .mac) and some other business sites that are published elsewhere.
Another shortcoming in iWeb is web statistics. Using iWeb Buddy you can enable statistics tracking such as Google Analytics or Mint. iWeb Buddy puts the necessary scripts in and gives you access to all of those great statistics so you can figure out exactly how many people from all over the world are reading your site. As an aside, macsparky.com is huge in Fiji. Go figure.
iWeb Buddy also gives a boost to RSS support. It allows you to get that RSS button off the top of the page and place it where your readers are more likely to notice it and it also allows you to tie your feed into statistical tracking services, like Feed Burner. Finally, you can make your iWeb site friendly to social bookmarking services such as Digg and del.icio.us. You simply click a preference and iWeb Buddy does the rest.
iWeb Buddy is designed around iLife 08 and a license will cost $25. I know some of the functions in iWeb Buddy can be found in other applications. A few of them are even free. However, the benefit of iWeb Buddy is in the combination of these tools all in one place and ease of application. If you are looking to upgrade your iWeb site, iWeb Buddy should scratch the itch. You can find it at zarrastudios.com.

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Review – Big Bang Brain Games

I’m what you would call an “old school” gamer which means while I’m generally cannon fodder in Halo, put me on a 25 year old stand-up Tempest game and watch out! So I’ll admit I’m not the most up to date gamer out there but I’m also a parent. When I saw Freeverse’s Big Bang Brain Games I was immediately interested. This looked like something that would be fun for my family to do together.
So we installed Big Bang Brain Games on the iMac and took a crack at it. This software actually includes six games. They are all rendered with 3-D Graphics and have a whimsical sense of humor.
Sudoku is … well … Sudoko. It has over 50,000 puzzles included from “Easy Breazy” to “Diabolical.” I wanted to show my 11 year old some of my Sudoku strategies. Well that was my plan but before long she was showing pity and helping me out.
There is also a MineSweeper clone called NovaSweeper and one called Echo that reminds me of a game I used to play as a kid called Simon. You have these four colored spheres. Each emits a tone in sequence and you have to repeat them. As you get better, the spheres start spinning.
Remembrance gives you a deck of cards with various symbols behind them. You have to flip the cards and look for matches. I used to play this game as a kid with a deck of cards and we called it “concentration.” When I played this game with my kids in Big Bang Brain Games, my six year old beat me. Are we starting to see a trend here?
I thought Reaction was the most innovative game. You have a board full of molecules. The goal is to pop as many as possible with the fewest clicks. If you get it just right you create a chain reaction that clears the whole board. This was much more satisfying to me than it probably should have.
My favorite game, however, was Fallacy, which is a logic based riddle game where an argument is placed on the screen and you have to choose how it logically fails with choices such as “Hasty Generalization”, “Appeal to Fear”, and the “Gambler’s Fallacy.” Well I finally thought I had a game where I could win and then my wife showed up and beat me like an old rug. So I guess it really is back to Tempest for me.
The games tracks your “Brain Usage” which I found a bit intimidating and for those of you who like to brag, it can upload a page of your scores to .Mac. The 3D graphics are very attractive for what are, essentially, 2D games and the dialogue is fun and family friendly. You can download a free trial at freeverse.com. Check it out with your kids but prepare for humiliation.

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Leap Review

Now I know us old guys frequently like to ramble on about how much things have changed since we first started computing with cassette tape backups and old televisions for monitors. However, there are a few things that haven’t changed at all. Remarkably, one of those is the way we organize files. The step from MS-DOS to the original Mac graphical user interface was revolutionary. Well that was a long time ago and things really haven’t changed much since then. If I could go back in time to 1987 and stick my MacBook in front of an original Mac user, he or she would probably be right at home finding my various applications, folders, and documents.
So the question becomes whether we have not really changed much because the system is perfect, or because we are not really trying. Well Ironic Software’s “Leap” is a finder replacement that looks to cause that type of paradigm shift.
When you fist open the Leap window, it looks more like iTunes than a finder. Gone are the hierarchical directories and in its place are a series of filters based on tags and file types.
For instance I can tell Leap I want to see document files tagged with “form” and “contract” and Leap will go and fetch. It will search through my thousands of document files and returning the few that match that criteria. You can then use the loupe tool to scan over the documents or invoke quicklook to find exactly the file you are looking for. You can then copy, move, delete or open the selected files. You can even save the searches to Leap’s toolbar for future access
It doesn’t matter that those forms may be spread out over 15 different folders. Leap doesn’t care where you keep files, it is more interested in what the files are and what reference you’ve given them. In other words, Leap embraces the anarchy of your cluttered drive.
Leap doesn’t just let you search tags, it also lets you create them. Rather than using its own proprietary tagging system, Leap just applies them as spotlight comments. This way the tags are good in any self-respecting OS X engine. Specifically, it works hand-in-glove with Default Folders X. Why doesn’t everybody do this?
In addition to acting as a potential finder replacement, it also can give you a better method of doing spotlight searches.
I’ve been using Leap for a month now and while sometimes I find it very useful, I still find myself going to Quicksilver or the Finder. The problem with tagging is that you must create the tags. Ironic Software is doing a good job of simplifying this process but it still takes work and you can’t get all of the benefits of tagging until it is in place. So at some point you have to excercise some discipline. I will be very interested to see how the folks at Ironic help us to get our tags set up quickly and easily so we can better take advantage of Leap. I think if you are a “tagger” or contemplating becoming a “tagger”, Leap may be just the tool you need. You can get it at IronicSoftware.com and a license will cost $59. If you decide to buy it, I also recommend Ironic’s very useful PDF organizer, “Yep” which costs only $10 when packaged with Leap.

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OmniGraffle 5 Review

I think all reviews I do of Omni products should come with a disclaimer. I don’t hold stock in the company or anything like that. Omni does, however, manage to make tools that I find extremely useful in my day job and I’ve come to rely on their releases to make my life easier.
I reviewed OmniGraffle almost a year ago. Since then I’ve used it to make countless charts and diagrams. I was quite pleased with version 4 so the question becomes, should I upgrade to the version 5. After having participated in the Beta and used the final release for a month, the answer is “yes.”
For those of you who missed the original review, OmniGraffle gives you a set of tools to quickly and easily make diagrams, charts, and other things visual. If you talk Microspeak, it is similar to Visio. Using the application’s built in stencil library, it becomes stupid-easy to quickly assemble very attractive charts and diagrams that can be used on their own or exported into documents and presentations.
The new version 5 has a new interface that feels better to me. It is more consistent with the general interface guidelines you see in Leopard applications and gets rid of the drawer that was in Version 4.
Version 5 uses the new “Graphviz layout engine”. Once you set aside the marketing techno-jargon, that means several things as a user. It is faster, more powerful, and easier. Bezier curves are a snap and connecting objects is easier than ever. This is really helpful when you start moving things around.
The toolbars also got some love and now it is much easier to access the most commonly used tasks. An excellent OmniGraffle website that still sits on my RSS list is Graffletopia.com which acts as a clearinghouse for user created stencils. Apparently the folks at Omni are impressed too because you can now pull stencils down from Grafeltopiea from right inside OmniGraffle. One little improvement that I use often is support for Leopard’s “quick look.” I’ve collected quite a few diagrams and this makes searching through them very easy. Exporting is still a breeze and it is quite easy to incorporate the diagrams into your workflow.
OmniGraffle still comes in two flavors. The standard edition and the Professional edition which features better Visio support and other bells and whistles like subgraphs (which allow you to collapse portions of complex diagrams) and shared layers. One of the “Professional” features I’m very interested in is the notes inspector which should, if I understand correctly, allow me to applescript data or spotlight search right out of my file. I’m still working my way through applescript so I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
A lot of the new graphical bells and whistles rely on underlying Leopard technology so if you are still on Tiger, you are going to have to stick with version 4. In addition to a feature bump, OmniGraffle got a price bump. The basic version is $100 and the Professional version is $200. Upgrades from version 4 are $40. You can download a 30 day trial directly from The Omni Group. A lot of time went into making OmniGraffle intuitive and it shows. The only other applications that I think could get results like this are Visio (which does not exist in OS X) and Adobe Illustrator. Both more expensive and, in my opinion, more difficult to use.
The thing that sets OmniGraffle apart in my opinion is the shallow learning curve to quick, professional looking diagrams. The new version with a better graphics engine and a streamlined interface simply puts and exclamation point to an already useful application.

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Audioengine A5 Review

For the past few weeks I’ve been upsetting the Neighbors with a pair of Audioengine A5 speakers. Audioengine is quickly becoming the manufacturer of choice for high end self-powered computer and shelf speakers.
When you open the A5 box, you have have a near-Apple experience. Each speaker is in its own cloth sack with a third sack holding a variety of connectors and wires insuring you will get it connected to something soon. The next thing you will notice after you open the box is that these speakers are heavy. The left speaker (with the built in amp) is 14 lbs and the right is 9. The materials in the speakers is 1″ thick medium density fiberboard and they have a high gloss piano finish that is very attractive. For guts, the A5’s have Kevlar woofers and the silk dome tweeters. Because they are magnetically shielded, you can use them next to your monitor but an iPhone will cause interference unless you put it into “Airplane Mode”.
On the left A5 there are a variety of inputs including AC power, perfect for your airport express, two stereo inputs, and a USB port. The result of all of this is you can charge your iPod while putting audio into the A5’s or you can use Audioengine’s wireless transmitter, the AW1 to beam music into the A5’s from any source. One of the inputs and the USB port is actually on top of the speaker making it very easy to access with your iPod.
In order put them to the test, I plugged in my iPod and listened to a track from Chick Corea’s latest album, New Crystal Silence. It sounded fantastic but as I started to ramp up the volume, I began to hear some compression distortion. The speakers were so good that I could hear some of the compression mushiness. I bought that album from the Amazon service so I hooked up my computer and ran the 256 kb version and it sounded spectacular. Playing music that loud through a MacBook Air felt like delicious overkill. Of course this means I’m going to have to rethink my encoding presets but I can think of worse problems.
There are some very detailed specifications on the A5s at Audioengine’s website. I didn’t have the ability or knowledge to confirm those specifications but I can say that it did a remarkable job of reproducing the music at louder levels than I could ever get away with at the same time my wife is in the house. The highs were clear. the mids were full, and the bass was tight without a lot of that mushy thumping I’ve heard on virtually every other speaker in this price range. I played a variety of music styles through it and they all sounded very good. These speakers are good enough to get a visit from the police at any hour. I can think of no better compliment.
With onboard USB and AC power there are a lot of possibilities. In addition to using them from my computer and iPod, I also put them in the backyard one afternoon while we were barbecuing and streamed wirelessly with the AW1. I also took them with me when I gave a presentation that included some audio and music. They did an excellent job filling the room.
My favorite use for these speakers however is for my music studio. Well, I call it a music studio. Actually, it is a keyboard in my living room with a small table next to it for my Mac. But in my mind it is a music studio. Anyway, up until the A5s, the speaker system in the “studio” was a pair of $50 computer speakers with a small plastic subwoofer. All I can say is not .. any … more. These A5s are such a huge upgrade. It makes playing the piano so much more enjoyable. Also, when I play back with 15 tracks, the A5’s handle everything from the rolling kettle drum to the tinkling triangle.
I wouldn’t call the A5s an impulse buy at $349 but at that price they still are an excellent value. If you are looking for top quality self powered speakers, I wouldn’t think twice about it. They include a three year warranty. Audioengine knows how good their product is because they give a 30-day audition. That means if you don’t like them, you can send them back for a full refund. Once you try them out, however, I can’t really imagine sending them back. You can order them directly and get more information at audioengineusa.com.

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Review – MacBook Air

The MacBook Air has now been in the wild for a few months and reviewed by just about every major technology journalist and pundit. So as I sit down to write this review I wonder what I could possibly add to the discussion. Maybe the answer is some perspective by someone who actually paid for it and has been using it, not for review purposes, but as a tool to get through my day.
Lets start with a few well-trodden points. I doubt there is any computer on the market that gives you less bang for the buck than the MacBook Air. For $1,800 you get 1.6 Ghz, 80 MB drive, and a single USB port. This is the least powerful laptop in the entire Apple lineup. In other words, if you choose your computer from a spreadsheet of features, move along, this is not computer you’re looking for. So is it overpriced and underpowered? I think that is a much more relative question than it initially appears.
So what is the point then of the MacBook Air? My answer to that question starts with my penmanship. Very few people have seen my handwriting for a reason. It’s terrible. I type everything. I’ve typed everything since the first time I sat down at a Radio Shack Color computer in 1981. Add to this the fact that I write a lot. Finally, throw into this melting pot of consumerism the fact that I am frequently not at my desk. I have a knack for getting stuck in places like offices, courthouses, airplanes, and hotels just to name a few. As much as I love my 17″ MacBook Pro, it is not the easiest device to bring into these locations. It requires a separate bag and it is heavy. Likewise, I use a computer in most meetings I attend. Again while the 17″ MacBook Pro truly is a desktop replacement, it also creates something akin to the Berlin Wall between me and the person at the other side of the table. I’ve always been aware of these shortcomings at a certain level but never really prepared to do much about them. I’ve never owned more than one computer at a time.
This is what Apple does. They figure out things like this and fill a need. My initial reaction to the MacBook Air was “sexy … but too expensive” That initial impression was based on looking at the feature list and not the utility. Then I started reading the reviews (Curse you John Gruber!) and thinking about the Berlin Wall and my inability easily carry my MacBook Pro on my travels. Well we all know how the story ends. I spent more money than I probably should have and now find myself for the first time ever having two computers I can call my own.
So how am I using this device? For me it is the perfect writer’s machine. A comfortable keyboard, a fantastic screen, and plenty of horsepower to drive things like Scrivener, Word, and the Omni Applications. For that purpose the MacBook Air is ideal. It goes just about anywhere and gives me access to my favorite applications in no time at all.
Knowing its limitations and its advantages, I’m finding it very useful. It fits in my briefcase along with the other detritus I tend to carry around and presents me with near instant access to my files with just a flip of the lid. Add to that other common computer applications like email, browsing, and Keynote and I have everything I need to perform about 70% of what I do at a computer on me at all times.
As a lawyer, I often find myself at the mercy of guys who wear black robes and don’t necessarily care about my inconvenience. As a case in point, I was attending a hearing this week where the Judge suddenly stopped me and explained he had a luncheon and would be back in “around two hours”. With the benefit of this tiny waffle computer in my bag those two hours were not lost. I got myself OmniFocused, returned email, and wrote a contract. So that is fine and dandy you say but couldn’t I have done that on a MacBook and saved myself a lot of money? Well to be honest, yes. But while I’m on the subject of honesty I don’t know if I would be carrying a MacBook at all times in my bag. You can not understate how thin this computer is. If you haven’t got your hands on one, you should. Or perhaps you shouldn’t.
It is engineered like no computer I have ever seen. The profile looks a lot more like something you should attach to to the wing of an airplane rather than use while sitting inside it. Beauty has its costs though. The sole usb port drops down on a self enclosed flap. It kind of reminds me of the door to the Bat Cave. My concern though is that you have to wriggle the usb cord to pull it out and over time that little flap is going to take a beating. Likewise, my friend Allison Sherridan points out that the MagSafe adapter is different from all other Apple laptops. Instead of plugging straight in, it runs up the side of the computer. This is because of that slick airfoil-like profile. The problem is, that from some angles, it doesn’t pop out as easily as the standard MagSafe adapter. In that case, the MacBook Air could actually end up taking flight.
So I told you about how 70 percent of my computing is handled with the MacBook Air. Unfortunately for the other 30 percent, it is completely inadequate. This is not a machine to produce video or music production. It is really not fair comparing the performance issues to my MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air has a slower processor, a slower hard drive, and less RAM. Regardless, I generally find the biggest interruption to my writing process is not missing clock cycles but instead misfiring brain synapsis. Apparently my brain doesn’t always keep up with 1.6 ghz.
I did, however, push Air a bit with my photo rig. I’ve got Aperture and Photoshop installed and while they aren’t as snappy as on my MacBook Pro, it is viable. Another issue with photo editing is I have to keep my library on an external USB drive so there is one more cause for a slowdown. I wouldn’t want it as my only photo machine but in a pinch, it will work. I’m planning on taking it on vacation with me and leaving the MacBook Pro home.
Speaking of the drive, I have strangely not had any problem living with an 80 gigabyte drive. As I write this, I’ve used 40 gigabytes and have 33 remaining. I’m sure I’ll find a use for that additional space but I already have everything I need for what I do on the MacBook Air.
I toyed with the AirDisk function but it was too slow for me. It was going to take hours to install iWork. Instead I pulled a very old USB external DVD drive out of mothballs. This was purchased for a PC several years ago but the MacBook Air recognized it with no difficulty.
In summary, I am loving my new Mac. It is so thin. I can take it anywhere that I can take a pad of paper. As a result, it is often close by and suddenly “dead time” is becoming “productive time”.

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