Apple Updates Professional Video Lineup 380
BlueGecko writes "Amid surprisingly little fanfare, Apple today updated their entire professional video lineup, including DVD Studio Pro 2 (including a greatly improved menu editor and improved compression abilities), Final Cut Pro 4 (enhanced real-time editing, more customizable workflow, and an improved titling interface), and Shake 3--the first version of Shake to be Mac OS X-only and now sporting enhanced rotoscoping tools and the ability to work directly with Photoshop layers. Combine this with Logic and you've got an entire professional movie studio on your Mac."
Not OS X Only (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not OS X Only (Score:4, Insightful)
Go on, tell me Apple isn't a hardware company. Someone tell me that Apple is destined to release Mac OS X for beige x86 boxes!
Re:Not OS X Only (Score:2)
So, the prices dont seem too bad. But we are talking high performance workstations, right?
Re:Not OS X Only (Score:2, Informative)
Shake 3 NOT OSX-only (Score:5, Insightful)
Only Windows 2000/XP support has been dropped.
Re:Shake 3 NOT OSX-only (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shake 3 NOT OSX-only (Score:5, Informative)
No. There was never (and will never be) a Carbon or Classic version of Shake. It's been OSX-only from the get-go.
Re:Shake 3 NOT OSX-only (Score:5, Informative)
A hefty price difference. Makes ditiching the Linux machine a more tempting proposal if you really need Shake!
Re:Shake 3 NOT OSX-only (Score:5, Funny)
* MacOS X
* Linux
* Irix
Only Windows 2000/XP support has been dropped.
Ahh the sweet smell of irony
Re:Shake 3 NOT OSX-only (Score:2)
Hah! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, real men edit movies using text editors under the command console!
Re:Hah! (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, real men edit movies the same way they write software -- by manipulating the bits directly with a hex editor.
Steve
Re:Hah! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hah! (Score:4, Funny)
Bah, you're spoiled. (Score:2)
Re:Bah, you're spoiled. (Score:2)
Re:Hah! (Score:2)
Using something as complicated and newfangled as sending signals over, say, an IDE interface, is for the wimps who can't stomach doing things the traditional way.
Re:Hah! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hah! (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading somewhere that a lot of video production houses use iMovie for "video storyboards". Rather than drawing cartoon style storyboards, they go out with a cheap digial videocam and film the basic scenes they want and assemble them in iMovie to show customers what they have in mind.
When they film the final product, they use Final Cut Pro.
Re:Hah! (Score:4, Funny)
It's sad (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone know the exact cutoff date?
Also, we need to get open support for the digidesign stuff, as well as the presonus firestation and the motu stuff.
Re:It's sad (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a friend who bought a PC last year and a copy of Logic Audio and it
Final Cut Pro (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:4, Insightful)
Thatr may be true of FCP2 and FCP3, but did you even read the list of what's included with FCP4?
I didn't think so, Mr. Lost-My-Train-Of-Thought-While-Rambling-Barely-Co
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:2)
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:2)
From the pr:
Packed with more than 300 new features, Final Cut Pro 4 introduces RT Extreme, for real-time compositing and effects, powerful new interface customization tools, new high-quality 8- and 10-bit uncompressed formats and for the first time in an editing system costing less than $100,000, full 32-bit floating point per channel video processing. Final Cut Pro 4 also includes three completely new integrated applications--Live
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:2)
OTOH, it does look like DVD Studio Pro 2 is a major advance; building DVDs in 1.5 is a tedious job, especially in menu editing, and it looks like that's where the improvements are. I just hope that I can use FCP 3 to produce input to DVDSP 2; if not, that will drive up the upgrade price.
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:2)
Wrong. FCP is presumably a Carbon application, and the Carbon API is not available on any other platform - only Mac OS X and I believe Mac OS 8.5 and later (with CarbonLib). Porting the application to another API would require mostly rewriting it. That might be even harder than porting Carbon to other platforms, which Apple definitely isn't going to do.
Trivia: when Apple ported QuickTime to Windows, they decided
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:2)
Replace 'old' with 'new' and you're right. Everything from QT3 onwards on Windows is basically built on top of QTML, the QuickTime Meta Layer, which is a close-to-complete version of the Classic Mac Toolbox.
It was actually complete enough that you could get code to run by changing less than 5%. (For example, (Mac call) InvalRect doesn't work, so you had to translate your coordinates into Windows coordinates and
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:2)
Re:Final Cut Pro (Score:3, Informative)
the desktops might be lagging, but as far as portables go, apple products seem to set the standard.
Hmm, whats this? (Score:4, Funny)
-Apple
http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/texteffects.ht
three-button mouse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One button mouse = RISC mouse. (Score:2)
logic (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically that means that lots of home studio people who can't afford proprietary MAC hardware are out of luck if they want to get any updates for logic audio.
It seems apple's strategy might be to FORCE us to switch... Sounds almost like something MS would do.
Re:logic (Score:3, Insightful)
C'mon, Apple bought the company, if they force you to use a mac, so be it... I have to use Windows for stuff that microsoft doesn't port (cough cough... Access)...
As long as Apple adds value and develops the software, then users are better off upgrading anyway... just because a
Re:logic (Score:2)
I'm thinking if you can't afford a Mac, you can't afford this software anyway. Have you seen the pricing?
Re:logic (Score:2, Informative)
oh please. people who are running audio studios, whether at home or at work, are spending serious jack on their systems. audio hardware is inherently expensive. you don't run a studio on a $500 Dell. MOTU cards, high-bandwidth HD arrays, the actual audio hardware... these things are not exactly cheap.
Re:logic (Score:2)
Ah, but switch to a Mac, or switch to another audio program?
I'd go for the latter. Screwing over a large part of a customer base you just aquired does not bode well for the future, and VST really isn't that bad.
Re:logic (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:logic (Score:2, Insightful)
VST works fine for crap reverbs and fx, but when you try to do some tight percussive parts on a virtual synth and then multiply that by the number of parts in your track then VST sucks. Latency sucks, VST Sucks.
If the hoary promise of cramming all of those old 80's synths and drum machines and virtual samplers into a laptop is ever going to be true then VST should go.
As expensive, proprietary as Macs you can do a bunch of mulimedia shit on them without replacing drivers
Re: (Score:2)
Re:logic (Score:2)
$$$? Nevair! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, not for me! My friends Blackbeard, Long John, and Jean Lafite will see to that!
Fifteen men on a p2p node,
Yo ho ho, an illegal download!
Rendezvous Clustering (Score:5, Informative)
The really cool feature Apple introduced with Shake 3 is automatic clustering with Rendezvous. From Apple's Shake page [apple.com]:
Point and click clustering, courtesy of Apple. Looks like a good way to sell Apple's new XServe Cluster Node [slashdot.org] config.
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:5, Informative)
Very worthy to point this out. I'm working on a new lab for a visual effects pipeline. In the arsenal are a handful of dual athlon linux workstations, a terabyte fileserver, and licenses for Maya Unlimited, Shake, and Renderman. We have a bucketload of licenses for the last two, and plans to use them on a 128-node athlon cluster (also running Linux) to experiment with real-time Renderman work, etc.
We are at the stage where the workstations are up and running and we are getting ready to tackle clustering.
Props to Apple for adding these features for their platform - Just like Final Cut Pro brought Avid-level power to the masses, Shake might be bringing this type of previously studio-tech level compositing to smaller effects houses as well.
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:5, Informative)
It should be fully functional (ie, not a "demo' version) although somewhat limited in terms of number of tracks. But no watermarks or anything. More info here [creativepro.com].
As anyone who has used both Avid and FCP can attest, Avid's GUI is far superior. Or at least was, as I haven't used FCP since 2.0.
W
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:2)
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:2)
Avid's "tired ass interface" has evolved over 10 years of active development w/professional editors. Yes, it uses the film cutting table model, but so does FCP. ("bins", "clips", "cuts"). Guess what, a computer keyboard is based on a typewrit
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:5, Insightful)
PRO
P r o f e s s i o n a l
PROFESSIONAL audio/video tech, could you guys who are still running Linux on a 286 give us all a break? These are cheap, cheap, cheap everyday tools by every measurable standard in our industry, and they are top-quality and they actually work, and they work for a living. They pay for themselves very quickly.
I hardly ever rent out studio time anymore because my demo studio just got better and better until it turned into a project studio, primarily thanks to Apple and a handful of other brilliant companies in the pro audio market. We used to have to go to hundreds of dollars an hour to get the quality and utility I get now from two Macs and maybe $10,000 to $15,000 in additional instruments/hardware/software that I can even admin and run myself (I'm a singer for chrissakes), and we don't count the studio hours anymore except to say that it's Wednesday so we might want to take a break and sleep a bit.
"Masses" is very much appropriate, because this really is about the workers owning the means of production. Fuck the rhetoric and think about what that really means: the tools go away and there is just communication, art, culture, business, etc. I don't have to become an indentured servant in order to make art.
Others have talked and talked because our industry is sort of sexy, but decades later it is still Apple doing it for us in 1000 ways. The promises have only been fulfilled by Apple.
AND, if you are not a pro and would like to get your feet wet in media creation, you can get an iMac and you are DONE. And that is also from Apple. They are anything but the elitists that Bill Gates and Michael Dell would like you to believe that they are because they want to sell you something that looks like a Mac but is still really just a typewriter. Audio and video are full of people who glow when they get close to an Apple logo because they did their first album or movie 5 years earlier than they would have otherwise simply because Apple made it affordable for them to have their own systems.
If I sound emotional about it, it's because I am. I don't think I can stand to hear from another teenager about how their fucking MS Windows is crashing and how to we handle that in a real studio? "Get a Mac."
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:2)
But does it actually work though? A lot of Apple (particularly network I've noticed) stuff looks great in black and white but simply screws up all the time in practice. ARD and Mac Manager for example.
Re:Rendezvous Clustering (Score:4, Insightful)
If I had a penny for every time some bullshit PC Magazine nerd reviewed a Mac and dismissed Gigabit Ethernet as an irrelevant feature (along with FireWire) and then proceeded to compare with some Dell that's good for MS Office (maybe) and has probably long-since been retired
I have an old Power Mac G3 from early 1999 that is now an iTunes jukebox in my house. It is 4.5 years old but it has a flat-panel display, FireWire, 1.5GB RAM, and runs iTunes/Mac OS X like a champ. Even the Mac OS X was free because we had an extra license in a multiple pack. Every day we use this Power Mac G3 (people LOVE it at parties) is all gravy
Performer 4 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Performer 4 (Score:2)
SGI CXFS (SAN XFS) coming soon for OS X (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/a
An Honest Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Processor:
Apple - 1 Ghz G4
Dell - 2 Ghz P4
Winner = debatable but I'll give it to Dell
RAM: Apple and Dell both 512 MB, tie
Hard Drive: 60 GB for both, tie
CD/DVD Drive:
Apple - CD-R/DVD-R
Dell - CD-R/DVD
Winner: Apple
Wired Networking:
Apple - 10/100/1000
Dell - 10/100
Winner: Apple
Wireless Networking:
Apple - builtin card and antennas
Dell - PC card can be added for extra
Winner: Apple
Graphics Card:
Apple - 64 MB Nvidia GeForce 4 440 Go
Dell - 64 MB Nvidia Geforce 4 4200
About the same performance = tie
Screen:
Apple - 17 in. widescreen
Dell - 15.4 in widescreen
Winner: Apple
Battery: Apple claims 4 hours, Dell claims 3
Winner: Performance is probably close but Apple might have a marginal lead
Warranty: both one year = tie
Software:
Apple - Mac OS X, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, Image Capture, iCal, iChat, Mail, IE 5,
Dell - Windows XP Pro, Dell Jukebox Premium, Dell Picture Studio, Dell Movie Studio Essentials, Outlook Express, IE 6
Winner: most definitely Apple
Thickness and weight:
Apple - 1 in. 6.8 lbs.
Dell: 1.52 in. 6.9 lbs
Winner: Apple
Looks: Apple again, obviously
Price:
Apple - $3299
Dell - $2640
Winner: Dell
In summary, while the PC is a little bit cheaper and the processor a little faster, in virtually every other area the Mac comes out ahead. With a Mac, you get what you pay for. Sure the processor may be a little bit slower, but it isn't a dramatic difference and the overall value of the product is just as good as a PC.
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:2)
1) In the PC world you can buy cheapo stuff and get a lot of power very inexpensively providing you are willing to be annoyed some
2) Apple CPUs suck for desktop use.
Hopefully the 970s will kill issue (2). I don't think Apple has any intention of doing much about issue (1).
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:2)
Define "some."
2) Apple CPUs suck for desktop use.
Dude, seriously... put down the bong.
eMachines (Score:2)
Re:eMachines (Score:2)
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:2)
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:3, Informative)
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:3, Informative)
Dave
Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:2)
Sadly, the Toshiba (P4 2.4ghz) smokes... smoke isn't even the word... kills my G4(s) in terms of performance. Speed-wise there is no comparison whatsoever.
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:2, Insightful)
You do realise that practically nowhere offers gigabit ethernet plugin at the wall, not even at work? It's mostly for wiring up server farms etc. I seriously doubt your computer can consistantly give a gigabit of throughput anyway - this is like when they bumped the ram up to DDR, who cares that the CPU couldn't actually use it, it made the specs look better!
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if you could only do 2x the throughput of standard 100Mbit, it's still 2x faster. For those of us that have enough machines with gigabit ethernet to warrant having a 10/100/1000 switch, well... that extra speed is pretty fucking sweet.
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:3, Insightful)
Dell: everything
Apple: little
Err, what are you saying here? That I can't go out and buy a hard drive and hook it up to my Mac? I can - an IDE one that would also (last time I looked) work with a PC too.
Anything with a USB connector - works on both Mac and PC
Anything with a firewire (1394/iLink) connector - works with Mac out of the box, might need firewire card on a PC, but will work.
Anything that conforms to memory standards (DDR, PC133 etc, depending on motherboard) - will work on
Bzzzzzt! Do you research. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Processor:
Apple - 1 Ghz G4
Dell - 2 Ghz P4
Winner = debatable but I'll give it to Dell"
Bzzzzt! You're joking right? Debatable? No, it is not in any way debatable. A 2Ghz P4 smokes a 1Ghz G4. You are two years behind the times if you still buy into the myth propagated by Apple that Mhz don't matter.
"Wired Networking:
Apple - 10/100/1000
Dell - 10/100
Winner: Apple"
If you are
Re:Bzzzzzt! Do you research. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bzzzzzt! Do you research. (Score:4, Informative)
FWIW, you can also get a 3 year warranty (+ 3 years telephone support) on the Powerbook. That doesn't cost a small amount however, though I don't know how the cost compares to that from Dell.
Re:Bzzzzzt! Do you research. (Score:3, Informative)
MX vs. 4200 (Score:3, Informative)
The GF4MX series (including the Go) play today's 3D software fine, but are mostly useless for tomorrow's stuff (like Doom3). The GF4 series is almost absurdly overpowered for today's software, and is ready for tomorrow's. (and this doesn't e
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:An Honest Comparison (Score:2)
That was fast!! (Score:2, Funny)
Shake 3 GUI (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, this is probably not a priority in a production tool like this, but Shake looks really out of place on a Mac OS X system.
New Apps.... (Score:5, Informative)
FINAL CUT PRO 4
Non Linear Editor. Now works with DV, DV-Pro(more bandwidth, better resolution/quality), film, and aparently anything in between. Other things to note are a new Title generator, audio mixer, and lots of tools (color correction, various video analizers). If you dont work in video production, the reasons for choosing an Avid over FCP might not seem readily apparent, especially considering the potential cost difference, but it mostly has to do with what you can do in real time(rendering effects and dissolves in software can get tedius with hi rez footage)
SHAKE 3
Compositing software. NOT a direct competitor to combustion or after effects. They all have their place in the workflow, and it would do a potential buyer well to know which tool will fulfill the requirements of their project. It is not for special effects so much (by itself, though you would composite them in on it), and dos not have the 3d support of combustion. It does however work very well for film resolutions, and has a very powerfull workflow.
DVD STUDIO 2
DVD Studio offered the most accessable way to profession DVD authoring I had found (compared to the products for windows, which had potentially more power, but were messy at best to work with). Looks as though ver.2 will up the flexibility while improving the workflow. Also, big tools that were missing from ver.1 are better compressors with more granular control, timline for integrating various video, audio, and subtitles, and better integration with final cut pro.
All in all, Apple is offering a very compelling set of tools for a wide subset of motion media production. Ugg dont want to sound like an ad, but do yourself a favor and look in to an apple solution if your going to buy tools to work in video.
Tie? (Score:2, Insightful)
You didn't mention what type of memory it is. If the Dell had DDR and the Apple had SD 133 I'm pretty sure they advantage goes to dell.
Software:
Apple - Mac OS X, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, Image Capture, iCal, iChat, Mail, IE 5,
Dell - Windows XP Pro, Dell Jukebox Premium, Dell Picture Studio, Dell Movie Studio Essentials, Outlook Express, IE 6
Winner: most definitely Apple
For most desktop users only the IE and iTunes/Jukebox would be used very much. IE 5 is nothin
Re:Tie? (Score:2)
The Apple memory is DDR.
Excellent! (Score:2)
Re:Two contradictory paragraphs. (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:3, Funny)
You're seeing double, it's not a dupe.
You're seeing double, it's not a dupe.
Re:Where's the pro OSS bent, people? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can get a Mac and the software, plug it in, install the programs, and be making video in two hours. Try that with OSS.
Intelligent minds aren't opposed to spending money if the result is making them more productive. If the goal is to be a computer geek, use Linux and open source software. If the goal is to make serious video, then even $10K for a set of tools tou can plug in and run right away with no hacking needed is well worth it.
OSS has its place, even when productivity counts (Score:2)
The only way to achieve this in the current economic climate is by going for low-cost solutions. This means using either 1) low cost or free commercial software, which is usually very limiting (e.g., single track, poor effects control, etc.),
Re:OSS has its place, even when productivity count (Score:4, Insightful)
> In some ways this is a good thing - there is nothing
> wrong with high schoolers coming away with a little
> technical knowledge.
By technical here, you mean CS-technical, computer-technical.
Video is a technical field, but students who want to make movies or TV have their own universe of technical details to master. Like cameras, lenses, light, colors, composition, DV, MPEG-4, audio sampling rates and bit depths, color depths, narrative, storytelling, dialogue, theme. Go to an Apple Store and just look at Final Cut and imagine that all the things you don't understand about its dials and buttons and meters and functions were a penalty you had to pay just to program a computer.
The attitude that it's "good" for students, in addition to the subject their studying, to also get a castor-oil like lump of computer science medicine is really, really educationally damaging. When a kid who lives and breathes MOVIES shows up at a VIDEO LAB, do not teach them CS. Do not require them to jump CS hurdles. You didn't start programming by being force-fed movie-making so why should they know UNIX to make movies. iMovie is free and it runs on a UNIX that doesn't require any admin.
There is a ridiculous bigotry amongst CS-types that somehow the computer is the only technical thing in the world and everyone has to get a taste of it. It completely ignores that a doctor or lawyer or architect or movie maker has their own technical world to master. Just because a computer is general purpose and can be used to instantiate a video-editing system at will, that doesn't mean that video editors will want to learn to work a command line. Maybe they will, maybe they won't
Re:FCP3 = 5uX0R, I think not... (Score:5, Informative)
Lemme tell you...
1. Horrible Media Management
The FCP2/3 Media Manager works ok with simple projects (i.e. no nested timelines), but once you get even a tiny bit more complex than that, the thing just stupids out and completely disregards references to subclips, nests, etc. This basically makes it worthless for media consolidation, which sucks ass when you need to free up a large chunk of diskspace for more clips or projects. Another annoying thing is that once you drop a clip from the bin into the timeline, it totally loses all relationship with the master clip in the bin. This problem is ostensibly because FCP3 lacks any sort of internal clip database system, as is standard on Avid systems. The FCP4 feature list on the Apple site appears to give no indication that these problems have been resolved, but the addition of XML interchange is a nice touch. Although the damn thing should support the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) natively, it appears that it didn't make this release :(
2. "RealTime" performance was a joke
All my smug Apple-fanatic friends sent me countless emails regarding FCP3's supposed software-only "realtime" support back when it was first released. Well, anyone who uses FCP3 professionally knows very well that the its "realtime" capabilities are nothing more than PR hype. Realtime dissolves work nicely, but do anything more complex than that, and it's "Command-R time" (i.e. Render....Render...Render).
It's even more irritating how the most insignificant change to an effected clip's attributes will force you to rerender the whole damned clip, even if the change only affects a few frames of it.
It must have been very embarrassing for Apple when just a few months after the release of FCP3, Avid released XpressDV 3.0, which completely blew away FCP away as far as native realtime effects were concerned. Seeing XDV 3.0 perform a chroma-key with titles, color-correction and a superimposed 2nd clip--all simultaneously in realtime gave me an extremely large erection when I demo'ed it.
FCP3 also did not have the ability to perform realtime effects output to NTSC through the Firewire port, unlike Sonic Foundry Vegas, on Windows. Then again, to be fair, almost nobody's products except for Sonic Foundry offered this ability either.
3. 8 bit-per-channel color processing
Simply put, color correction and compositing in 8-bpc sucks ass. 10-bpc is quickly becoming a required feature in all professional video and compositing apps. In very happy that FCP4 now supports float space...this will definitely expand the product's acceptance in high-end circles.
4. Extremely poor audio features
FCP4's new 24-channel output is great fucking news. Up until now, people using FCP had to lay off multi-channel audio masters in multiple passes...that is so 1990's.
5. Lame-ola MPEG2 export
FCP3's MPEG-2 export used the native Quicktime MPEG-2 plugin, which works okay for simple stuff, but offered hardly any control over compression parameters at all. The new FCP4 export features will hopefully obviate the need for annoying and slow compression sessions using Cleaner6
6. No clip-context in the 3-way color corrector tool
The 3-way color correction in FCP3 was a great addition, but it still lacked the clip context features that are standard in the color-correction tools found in systems like Avid XpressDV 3.5 and Symphony. It's really difficult to color match a show from shot to shot without a side-by-side reference.
7. No time-remapping
Creating that annoying, herky jerky stop-start, MTV "Cribs" speedramp effect is a pain in the ass in FCP3. There's no builtin feature for remapping time, like in Adobe AfterEffects.
8. No user-definable keyboard shortcuts
Self explanatory. Some of FCP3's keyboard shortcuts are really dumb (the shortcuts for
Re:FCP3 = 5uX0R, I think not... (Score:2)
Long taken for granted among Avid editors, dupe detection is incredibly helpful, especially when cutting longform documentaries and music videos.
Would that they could port this "dupe detection" to Slashcode, maybe it could prevent them posting the same story twice in a row.
Dupe detection (Score:2)
Long taken for granted among Avid editors, dupe detection is incredibly helpful, especially when cutting longform documentaries and music videos.
When editing film on a computer (for conforming back to film), you can't use the same piece of film negative more than once. That is, unless you want to have to create extra copies of the negatives every time you reuse footage.
Since FCP now supports film projects, dupe detection is essential. In fact, for 16mm film, yo
Re:Hey, I just bought a Mac, let me tell ya... (Score:5, Informative)
And a wheel mouse is extremely nice. (Had to load osx drivers off m$ site to get it to work, yes osx drivers...) Not all features are supported or work right from app to app. Some standards would be nice. (Most programs are dumbed down to 1 mouse it seems also.)
Almost every app provides context menu support for commonly used commands, as well as wheel support (even though they don't ship 2button+wheel mice). Third buttons and beyond have no defined purpose, and are available for customization (which is what MS's mouse drivers do). The 2buttons+wheel should Just Work for every app for any USB mouse. I'm unsure about how the microsoft mice work, but if you needed drivers to get that basic functionality (and I would be suprised if you do), then that would be the fault of Microsoft rather than Apple, because that would imply their mouse doesn't conform to the defined USB mouse protocol.
Cut/paste/select all is annoying as hell, no standard like windows, or even KDE/Icewm/CDE.\
No standard for cut/paste/select all? Um, perhaps you should check the logo on that box and make sure it's a mac. It's cmd+c/cmd+x/cmd+v/cmd+a for copy/cut/paste/selectall, and it's been that way at least since I've been using macs (~1992). I can't recall using an app that didn't conform to these.
This is in contrast to the Linux box (running gome) I was using this afternoon and ran into no less than 3 different keyboard shortcuts for copy in various apps.
Cant even hit home/end to move the cursor on some apps command line.
home/end on the mac goes to the top or bottom of the file. To go to the begining or end of the line, cmd+left arrow or cmd+right arrow. About the only app I know of that doens't follow this is Terminal, which falls back to the unix standard of control-a and control-e
Alt-tab doesnt work, grabbed a 3rd party app to fix that.
You're right, it doesn't work. If you're pressing alt. To switch between apps, you use cmd+tab. This brings every window of a particular app forward. Then, to switch between individual windows, cmd+~. It seems you would prefer to have to work your way through x many windows in one app before even getting to work your way through the next app's windows. And to find software: versiontracker.comRe:Hey, I just bought a Mac, let me tell ya... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hey, I just bought a Mac, let me tell ya... (Score:2)
Kind of amusing don't you think? When Microsoft did Windows 95 it's like they tried to rip off the MacOS GUI but reverse everything: toolbar on the bottom not top; icons set to left, not right. Finally, they steal the copy/paste keys, and flip it from alt (where the option key would be on a Mac) to control. I guess it brings a new meaning to the phrase "ass backward."
MS Mouse works on OS X with no drivers (Score:2)
yes, apple's default terminal app sucks (Score:2, Informative)
That's why there's iTerm [sourceforge.net]. Has most everything you would expect from a real terminal emulator, including tabs (yay!)
I was impressed with some aspects of OS X, but overall it doesn't offer much to me over linux, aside from a new UNIX to learn. Some things just plain irked me, like the fact that chsh is included with the OS, yet it does nothing. This is because apple decided all user information should be controlled by NetInfo Manager. Glad they told me. Anyway, despite minor problems (which are present in
Re:yes, apple's default terminal app sucks (Score:2)
Of course they're going to try to repair it first, and only if it's really knackered give you another one.
You were unlucky to get a broken one. Give them another chance with a new one.
You know, sometimes they're nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I'm not sure that 'I bought this software that will work fine for me just before it was upgraded and I want the new version for free' is a serious issue. After all, what exactly is it about the new versions that you *have* to have, and why did you buy the old versions if they wouldn't do what you needed them to?
-fred
Re:How about some SAN software? (Score:2)