Work replaced my cruddy windows box for a G5 with a 20 inch cinema display. Now this is a design machine! It’s whisper quite, very stable going between Photoshop and Illustrator and just the usual mac gorgeousness encased in aluminium. This machine makes other things possible that my old one had either extreme difficulty or impossibility doing. For instance, right now, I am working on a 14 MB file (not huge), in Photoshop, going between my text editor, (BBedit), FTP client (Rbrowser Lite), Mail, iCal, Safari, IE 5.2 and drumroll… listening to a CD in iTunes! Yep, I couldn’t have the equivalent apps open at once while listening to a CD on my old machine, Photoshop would slow up, screen might not render terribly fast. But not now, I can listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers — Live in Hyde Park (highly reccomended) and go about my usual work stuff no probs!
My other annoyance was the colour, screen, graphics card and their interaction or lack thereof, with graphics apps. Sometimes 1px wide vertical lines would appear as two even though I new this was not so. I couldn’t get the geometry totally right either. Colour calibration was not fun on previous set up, despite having Illustrator and Photoshop set up to use the Adobe 1998 RGB profile. If I had to take screen shots, I had to do this weird song and dance, converting everything from my monitor colour space to what I wanted, to back again! Go figure! Quite often saving for web produced weird results, but resaving it fixed it. Go figure! Didn’t quite help when two geeks from work gave it a shot either. They thought they new a little about colour management. Go figure!
Such a grand screen demands a grand desktop. I haven chosen the puprle spookiness of Ravenswood Manor from pixelhuset.
The screen is gorgeous! It even comes with it’s own aluminium grey coloured cleaning cloth! How cool is that! The clarity and colour is in-fucking-credible! And the wide screen format is equally useful, I can have my psd file with my code window side by side, or a browser window. Or whatever. It’s fan-bloody-tastic! Of course Expose also makes light work of finding the appropriate document.
As I have a snazzy graphics tablet, this means I can use Inkwell to draw or write anywhere on the screen and use it in other apps as I see fit. Nice. I need to play around with it a bit more, but still nice. I haven’t played around with Fontbook as much as I’d like to, but I love what I see so far. A useless but human detail I like is in the login screen, if you enter your details incorrectly it shakes the login panel left to right like it’s saying, uh-uh! Nope!
. Go on all you Panther (10.3.5) users, try it. I’ve been logging in wrong on purpose almost every morning just to see it!
Okay not so crash hot stuff: white mouse and keyboard. I am a grot. It’s already dirty. The tower is heavy I can’t lift it. Alright that’s to be expected.
Now I need some accessories: some speakers, headphones, keyboard cover might be an option. A proper graphics tablet cover would also be nice come to think of it.
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Red Wolf
27 August 2004 at 8.57 pm
It does sounds lovely. Certainly better that the joy of WinXP, which is a piece of excrement.
I think I preferred the previous computer with its hideously old WinNT4 and habit of tossing out the old blue screen of death five or six times a day.
WinXP’s favourite annoying quirk appears to be making the keyboard go wiggy so you’re forced to reboot. It helpfully eats any open files you were working on, even if you had saved them.
That blue iMac on the window sill is starting to look better