Nontrivial Exercises

I’m Now MacBook Pro-ified

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After seeing the MacBook Pro introduced over a year ago at the 2006 MacWorld, I knew right away that I wanted one. The cost was prohibitive for me, though. At the end of May, 2006, I was finally able to get a MacBook and then officially took the ranks of a Mac Switcher.

Going from a PC to a Mac was a quantum leap of effectiveness and productivity for me. It gave me an entirely new perspective on how I use a computer. Though I had been interested in photography for several years, it was after I began using a Mac that I was inspired to do more and get more serious about it.

Was it just because I was using a Mac? Not entirely, but the creative aura that surrounds the whole Mac experience really kind of got to me. I thought “I have a tool that a lot of creative professionals use” (or at least a tool related to the pro tools - the MacBook skimps on the video card and screen size) and so why couldn’t I try to do some of the same things? It was as if I had joined a creative community and therefore was inspired to be more creative myself.

I soon discovered, though, that the MacBook’s anemic video card, the Intel GMA 950 with its 64M of video RAM, just caved under the demands of image editing in Aperture. Adjusting colors, cropping, showing the loupe, adjusting levels would send both cores to 100% and I would get the spinning beach ball while it did its work. Aperture moves a lot of the processing to the GPU to offload the CPU, so it accentuates the shortcomings of any video card even more.

The 13 inch screen, while making the form factor of the laptop very nice for carrying around, limits the amount of stuff you can put on the screen at any one time.

It had gotten to a point that I was really slowed down in editing my photos and doing anything with them. It also just soured the entire Mac experience of power and elegance by having to wait so much for anything to work.

So, after more than a year of waiting, after making the switch to a Mac on a MacBook, I’ve taken the next quantum leap and upgraded to a MacBook Pro. I did a lot of watching the market on eBay, Craigslist and some other locations for used MacBook Pro’s - this took a lot of time and really distracted me from writing or doing much photographically over the past 3 weeks.

I finally found what I consider a good deal on a 15 inch, 2.16 GHz core duo with 256M of VRAM great condition MacBook Pro. I’m writing this on it now as my first post from it and I’m ecstatic.

Today I worked just a little bit with Aperture - importing images from my camera, searching for photos via metadata search, scrolling through photos in the just the browser and with the viewer visible. Wow, it just sings. It’s like I just got in a sports car after driving a 1993 Corolla around town - on strictly the graphics performance anyway. Overall the entire experience on the MacBook Pro seems smoother, faster, more responsive, but the main difference is on graphics-intensive items.

And, the backlit keyboard is very cool!

As a side note, I used the Migration Assistant for the first time in transferring my info from my MacBook to my new MacBook Pro - that is a sleek utility. It transfers everything - every setting, every preference, browser history, all items in the Library, every application, etc. I don’t think switching data between 2 computers could be any easier! Score another one for Apple and usability.

My Path to Aperture

Chris has added forums to his cool MyAppleStuff site, and I’m helping him out as a moderator there. One of the forums is for photography and I was writing a post today in response to Wayne’s earlier decision to buy Apple’s Aperture photo editing and management app, and thought I’d share it as a brief overview of how I came to be an Aperture user.

I bought Aperture about 2 months ago and haven’t regretted it one bit. I used iPhoto previously, and then tried Adobe Lightroom when it was in the beta 4 release for about a month.
I really liked Lightroom - it was like a giant leap forward from iPhoto in terms of organization / DAM and color toning. It was like a whole new level of organizing and editing for me.

I didn’t (and still don’t) have Photoshop and had been using Gimp as needed beyond iPhoto. I had used Picasa on the PC before I got my Mac mid-last year.

I then decided to try Aperture. I put off trying it because I was afraid that once I started using the trial that I’d find that I “couldn’t” live without it, and I didn’t have $300 in the budget.

But, I finally gave in and got the 30 day trial. Sure enough, it fit like a glove into what I wanted to do. I got to the end of the trial and ended up buying it.

The one complaint I have at the moment is the lack of vignetting functionality. Lightroom has this. Obviously you can do this in Photoshop but I still don’t have that. You can export from Aperture to an external editor easily, like Gimp. The problem is that Gimp only supports 8 bit TIFF, not 16 bit TIFFs.

You’ll probably never notice the difference of 8 bit vs. 16 bit color in small prints or small online pics, but I just don’t like to lose info / data that I already have in an image, so I don’t use it.

Now, I’d like a MacBook Pro to go with my Aperture, because it just hammers my MacBook when doing editing or when I move around a lot. The anemic video chip on the MacBooks is quite frustrating when trying to do any graphics-intensive work, but they weren’t really designed to do that. Saving my pennies …

1Passwd - The Best Mac Password Manager Because of Browser Integration

It was sometime last year when I finally figured out that the value of a real password manager. I was using just a few “favorite” passwords for my various logins which were easy for me to remember but not really very secure. I knew that various browsers had integrated functions to store passwords, but I fundamentally don’t trust my passwords to be stored in the same application that sends and receives stuff over the Internet.

That’s when I found Roboform, certainly the best password management utility for PC’s. I started creating long very secure passwords that were different on each site and that were stored securely on my machine.

Once I switched to a Mac, I looked but didn’t find an equivalent password management utility. I even made a pitch to Roboform to create a Mac version, but they weren’t interested.

That’s when I found 1Passwd. Dave Teare and Roustem Karimov, who started AgileWebSolutions, have created the Roboform equivalent - or nearly so - for the Mac. After my initial frustration at the lack of something like Roboform on the Mac, I had intended to write a review of several password management and secure data storage utilities on the Mac, comparing them with each other and with Roboform.

Continue reading ‘1Passwd - The Best Mac Password Manager Because of Browser Integration’

My Pitch to Roboform - Turned Down

One of the PC apps that I grew to depend on was Roboform, certainly the best password manager for the PC. Roboform moved me from having a few passwords that I spread across all my different logins, to having a unique, very secure password for each login. Of course, Roboform managed each of the passwords and logins, stored them securely (encrypted) and would automatically fill in userids and passwords when you went to a site that you had a login for.

When I switched to the Mac, one of my first problems was how to store all my passwords. On Roboform’s website, they specifically say that they don’t support Mac. I understand that if you’re focused on developing PC apps, it’s not easy or even desirable to try to port or rewrite your software for Mac OS X. I give the Roboform team credit for at least making the explicit decision not to have a Mac version.

I thought I would just make a pitch to them, however, of the gap in the market and the opportunity that is just waiting for them. My pitch goes like this.

With the advent of the Intel Macs and the ability to run Windows apps from the Mac - either through Boot Camp or a virtual machine like Parallels - the number of people starting to use Macs for the first time will increase. Many of these people could be existing Roboform customers, but they will have to use an alternate app for the Mac.

The features that would make Roboform stand out on a Mac would be:

• direct browser integration - Safari, Camino, Firefox, OmniWeb just like you have on Windows browsers with Roboform
• a Pass2Go-like app (the lightweight version of Roboform that you can install on a USB thumb drive and take with you to plug in to any computer and instantly have your passwords available) for the Mac that would run on the same USB drive that you use for the Windows version. When you plugged the USB drive into a Windows machine, the Pass2Go app would autorun and you’d have Roboform running with all your passwords. When you plug the USB drive into a Mac, the Mac-equivalent portable Roboform app would run and read the same encrypted password files on the USB drive that the windows version reads. Voila - you have a device that allows you instant but secure access to your password info on a PC or a Mac.

Taking a cursory look at a couple of the Mac password management apps shows:

• Pastor which is DonationWare,
• Passwords Plus which is $30, has a Windows and Mac version, and allows you to (manually) export and import encrypted files which you can transfer between PC and Mac platforms
• Password Wallet which is $18 Shareware.

None of these three Mac apps above appear to have the direct browser integration that Roboform does, but Passwords Plus from Dataviz seems to come closest to the current functionality of Roboform, plus it has a Mac and Windows version. By using FolderShare or some other remote storage capabilities (e.g. Box.net, Foldera), one could pretty easily sync Windows and Mac passwords with Passwords Plus.

You could offer an advantage if you had the Pass2Go-like portable functionality and made the price point for a Windows+Mac solution less than the $60 it would take to get set-up on PasswordsPlus Windows and Mac platforms. Just imagine the marketing - show someone working at a PC, then standing up, pulling out the USB thumbdrive, walking over to a Mac laptop, plugging in the USB drive, then get right on back to work, e.g. banking on-line.

I offered this pitch to Roboform privately and they responded that they have no plans to create a Mac version. So, I offer this now publicly to anyone who would like to fill this gap in the market.

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Note, since I initially put this together, I’ve found 1Passwd, which was born out of the exact predicament that I find myself in now. Dave Teare switched to a Mac last year and eventually created 1Passwd to fill the Roboform-shaped hole on Macs. I’ve just (finally) begun to check it out, Dave, and it looks extremely good so far. I’m going to work with it a bit more then I’ll write my review, but I can already recommend at least trying it out. There is an excellent screencast of 1Passwd in action that Dave has just recently posted on the site.

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