Be Excellent To Each Other

Not if you view the scrollbar as part of the container for the content.

Like you'd know anything about UI design. Wait.

I wouldn't be surprised if iMacs and non-Air MacBooks lost their optical drives soon, if this is a precedent.

(No Lion for me today, BTW. Just in case it's wobbly with MS Office 2011.)

No wobblies here yet, but i've done bugger all with Office 2011 today really

Fuckers have discontinued the white MacBook, if you look at the Apple Store. Just as my g.f. was just about to buy a new one too. Oh well.

Also, it's opposite of any other mouse on any other OS, so god forbid if you use anything else as well!

There will still be a ton of them left in the channel, probably going for lower prices now, too.

Nothing would surprise me any more which is yet another reason switching to Adobe makes sense as I can leap back to Windows at some future date if my prediction that Apple are only interested in the iThing market comes true.

To be honest I think DVD writers being exclusively external drives and niche add ons is coming to all OS laptops pretty soon.

Yes, but they will be around for a while. And besides the Apple laptops are used by creatives on the move that need to burn DVD's. Although it will be telling if Apple update DVD Studio or are dropping it. Their lack of enthusiasm for Blu-Ray has been a real pisser.

Meanwhile a list of newer Adobe stuff that breaks if you install Lion:

#main_Product_Specific_Issues___" class="postlink">http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/905/cpsid_90508.html#main_Product_Specific_Issues___

liking the new accent ios inspired method..

(didn't download lion yet though, can wait and have to back up first, as craign was reminding us all off constantly this week...

rick

I don't think that's entirely true. Apple's still innovating in the laptop space, and the MacBook Air is evidence of that. The high-end (Mac Pro) has certainly stalled though. (I wouldn't say the same of the iMac, purely because that machine seems really optimal, and so bar internal changes I can't really see how it can be improved on.)

But Jobs has stated that he considers PCs 'trucks' of the computing space, and that's where Apple's vision lies. It'll still create Macs for years, but they'll become increasingly niche as consumers move towards tablet devices (which will increase in scope and power—after all, look at some of the art and music apps for the iPad).

On the optical media front, the response on my Twitter feed has been really divisive. Some are insanely happy that Apple's nuked as many moving parts as possible from the MacBook Air, also reducing its weight. Most say they never use optical media at all anyway these days. Some are angry, but mostly they sound like the people who were bitching about Apple removing the floppy drive from the original iMac.

From my point of view, I'm a little torn, but I very rarely use my iMac's drive. I got a CD for my birthday, which I ripped, but I'd not used the drive before that in months. I used to back-up to DVDR, but am now considering just buying USB hard-drives to archive work on, because they're faster and more reliable. My conclusion is that Apple's early with ditching the drives, but not out of its tree. Also, it'll be at least a year before they're gone from MacBook Pros and iMacs, by which point the media climate will have moved on substantially again.


Heh. Well, that article in a couple of days has already got nearly as much traffic as the Rob Janoff interview I put up a while back, so it was worth doing. Writing for Mac publications, you see how often people lose data. Too often I hear about people's HDDs dying, and they're practically begging for help, because that drive contains their only copies of their kid's baby photos (or whatever); and techies aren't much better, because many of them don't back-up, under the misguided notion that they'd know if something's wrong. Absolute minimum people should be doing is Time Machine or a daily clone; but I rather like Christopher Phin's advice in the latest MacFormat, reducing risk with multiple layers of back-ups—Time Machine + SuperDuper! + off-site/online. For some, this is overkill, but if you rely on your data for work, it makes a lot of sense.

DVD is still a good secondary backup as is Blu-Ray. All my projects get copied to disk, but DVD's in the cupboard are a good secondary backup and in theory can be left for a long time without needing to be spun up from time to time.

Also people might want to watch those shiny things seen in shops and install their own software as I did yesterday. Although obviously Jobs would prefer it if I used his crippled software from his walled garden.

One of the reasons I have a tower is that I can run mirrored RAID. Gives that extra layer of protection alongside the backups.

Optical media is clearly going to die at some point though, and not in the wildly distant future. And as long as you can get hold of external optical drives, those outliers that need to carry on using it can continue to do so.

I can count on the fingers of one hand, the amount of times I have used an optical drive in the past 3 years or so, most have them have been OS installs.

I accept that as an internet nerd and working in software development I am not the average user, but I doubt it will be long before the average user is the same.

There's a world of difference between "not having an optical drive in my laptop" and "not having an optical drive in my house". I'm comfortable with the former but not the latter. I wrote about this for TUAW.

*cough*cough* RAID is not a backup. But you know that, I know.

Ripping CDs because I like to use lossless audio. Ripping DVDs to format shift them to the iPad. Watching DVDs directly on a laptop whilst travelling.

Oh indeed, same here, I wouldn't be without access to one at all.



Music is all itunes for me these days.
Video on the ipad is TV shows from usenet.
Films are blu-rays on a dedicated blu-ray player.

Pretty happy to lump both you and Chinny in the 'outliers' bucket, Doc.

I haven't needed to use an optical drive since some dick sent me a CD last week. Before that, it was just to reinstall Windows.

Crippled software? What are you talking about? Man, I hate being able to download stuff and legally install it on all of my computers, rather than having a single key that means I can only install something on one machine. With movies, I'd agree (especially the rentals, which lack subtitles), but for software the Mac App Store is fantastic. And you can bet with Photoshop Elements being on there, it's not out of the realms of possibility for the entire CS suite to be on the way at some point. (As for Office—the other major hold-out—Microsoft must be looking at iWork and weeping.)


Quite. Apple's always gone down this route, in aggressively ditching stuff and having people complain, but those users who require optical media access can always grab an external DVDR for 25 quid or so.


I keep meaning to rerip all our CDs, but I never really seem to get around to it.


I keep meaning to rerip all our DVDs, but I never really seem to get around to it.

I suspect the audience is split between these two things—people who can be arsed to format-shift and those who no longer give a crap and just grab digital. From what I see, the former were in the majority a couple of years back, things are even now, but in a couple of years optical media buyers will be in the minority.

Damn straight. But I think my use cases aren't quite as rare as some [url=-http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/25/os-x-lion-death-of-cd/]forward-looking tech writers[/url] are arguing. My parents rip CDs.

Basically, I think it makes perfect sense to drop the optical drive in a laptop today, were you have one less thing drawing power, taking up room in the case, and (in the case of Apple's Superdrives) failing on an alarmingly regular basis. But in an iMac, where the cost of parts for a basic optical drive is cheap, you don't care about space, and users will still be looking to watch DVDs from time to time (the 27" model makes a credible second TV for occasional use), I think the optical drive will probably hang around for a good while yet.

I did my CDs, because I don't own that many (250 or so), many of my rips were middling quality mp3 I've been carrying around for years, and it's super easy to set iTunes to "rip on insert" and "eject when finished". And you listen to CDs over and over. I've never systematically ripped DVDs, I do it on an ad hoc basis when I know I've got a trip coming up and want half a dozen films to hand. I'll be doing another round of that this week in fact.

My TV-shows-from-Usenet are all HD and mkv, so they won't play on the iPad. And for the trip I've got coming up, I want to get a digital AV adaptor and I've been unable to find a solid app that'll handle AVI and video out on an iPad 1. So I'm thinking I'll just rip to iTunes-friendly MP4.

I do what you do for your DVDs, I handbrake a selection of mkv files whenever I want to fill up the iPad, or am about to go on a trip. Then delete them after watching.

Did you miss the Final Cut Pro X (or iMovie Pro as it's been nicknamed) debacle? The whole reason and a load of my colleagues are handing over Adobe 800 quid a head so we can continue to use fully features professional software? Adobe incidentally were happy to send me a DVD set for 25 quid extra.

And yes, obviously RAID is not a backup but it's a line of defence. If a drive goes down you won't need to be rushing to restore the system from a backup. But you still need backups and as I say I use USB hard disks with Blu-Ray/DVD as a secondary backup.

In fact by the time the project is finished the master footage will end up back up to 2 hard drives and 2 sets of Blu Rays/DVD's.

Aye. I didn't really write that response for you but for others reading it (I seem to meet a lot of people who think that because they have RAID they are fully protected, so I go out of my way to combat that misunderstanding wherever I can).

Why not save them as avi or whatever and save your battery life and luggage space?

Lack of forward planning, usually

Doh speaking of Macs,

Installed the Quadro 4000. Machine refused to boot. Looking online it says you need to install the driver before you put the card in.

Now where did it say that in with the packaging? Nope, not even on the provided DVD.

Heh, that's downright crap. That's exactly the kind of thing that needs to be written on the sealing sticker you need to break to get into the antistatic bag.

All done now. Card in.

I eagerly ran Xbench to see the improvement only to see a 20% drop!

Googling reveals XBench isn't an up to date test thankfully and the card should still be umpteen times faster for what I want to do.

Phew.

I agree, although many argue that since this is often your only machine, it should have a drive. I'd say: just get an external.


Maybe, but you know what Apple's like. You could argue the same about the Mac mini, but that no longer has a drive.


Debacle? Crippled software? What you mean is Apple's reworked one product, pissed off a small number of pros and opened the market to a fuck-load of people. I sympathise, but this is what Apple does. I wouldn't call Final Cut Pro X 'crippled' though, nor is it indicative of Apple's software as a whole.

As for Adobe, there's a company that causes more bitching in my Twitter feed than any other. And while I'm sure it's reaping short-term rewards, its two-year plus turnaround on major products, software bloat and not-giving-a-shit about the Mac only really bodes well for Windows users. Plus you know full well Final Cut Pro X will do the same as iWork and other apps that started out basic but rapidly got new features.

Still, the fact Apple didn't run both versions simultaneously and didn't provide transition options is, frankly, stupid.

Indeed, a USB unit (at handsome markup for those buying the official Apple one) does the job for those folk.

Tru dat. We'll see, I guess.

You presumably move in the same circles I do, so there's likely a heavy selection bias at work behind that sentence

Quite. Why on earth the "X" doesn't stand for "Xpress"? Thus signifying a new prosumer option and overall product direction; pros still get FCPv7 and then move to FCP XI once it's baked. Seems to be a completely unnecessary blunder to me.

I frankly cheer any company that is at the front of shaking off legacy support (as long as there are nice, simple routes to get around it, like plugging in an external drive).

What the bystanders fail to realise as they point and say there isn't a problem is that FCP-X is broken in fundamental ways. No multi camera support? Seriously? That's all you need to know, the entire thing is aimed at kids shooting on a iPhone.

No option to import old projects? Apple say no, yet Adobe can manage to import FCP XML into their totally different package? In fact I've been importing earlier today. Sure the filters go missing in the translation, but there my projects is up and running in Premiere. Clearly Adobe have invested time in getting these things right. Even Motion projects slot right in without needing to be rendered. Again, another nice touch.

Final Cut Studio was on a 2 year turnaround so that kind if thing isn't a big deal, especially since the last upgrade was little more than a patch with some new filters.

And how long before FCP-X is usable? 2 years? More? Ever?

It must be galling for the die hards but I and other editors are refusing to drink the Kool Aid. We know our business, we know our workflow and Adobe made us an offer that was too good to turn down. They are in the business of selling software to professionals. Apple aren't any more. Forget the days of receiving glossy brochures showing how Heartbeat was edited on FCP using Apple servers and all the gubbins.

And this small market arguement is a bit odd as it was a premium product selling at premium prices. Did it sell MS Office numbers? No. But I bet the figures were better than any other of the professional apps otherwise they would have dropped it as well. Instead they wanted to have their cake and eat it and people are simply moving on.

Why on earth none of this was spotted earlier on is beyond me. Why hold events courting professionals (which I thought were light on detail) when they wanted to abandon the market?

The answer is that it's a huge cock up.

And the competitors smell blood. Avid has 60% off and Adobe have 50% off for people switching.

Why Adobe for me? Well I used Premiere before and it worked well. The suite of software looks good and I get my beloved Cooledit/Audition in the Mac workspace instead of having to run Parallels. I can also run a desktop and a laptop at the same time which Avid doesn't allow without inserting a dongle.

I don't see much bloat so far. OK there's software in the package I will probably never touch but it might be handy to learn Flash etc.

And if FCP-X improves then I can hop on the bandwagon fairly easily. No big deal as I'd still have all those great Adobe packages and FCP-X is cheap. But it at least needs some kind of import facility and multicam first. It's just a fucking useless toy without those things.

It baffles me how there doesn't seem to be a decent alternative to Illustrator. I'd jump ship in a second to get away from Adobe's bloated, buggy pieces of backwards shite, expanded and expanded without ever looking into the core. Few days pass where I don't want to punch my screen at how infuriating Adobe's software is.

For the record, I'm not disagreeing with you for the most part, chinnyhill10. I think Apple handled this badly and it should also have enabled transitions, where possible, from old to new. But my point earlier was more general about Apple's handling of software through the MAS.

@Malabelm: There are lots of indie vector tools on the Mac, but it depends what sort of thing you do as to whether you could jump ship. Most of them are probably a little basic, although some are nicely focussed (such as on UI design or free-flowing illustration). The problem is I bet you'd miss the power of Illustrator. I know I'm like that with Photoshop, despite wanting to jump, where possible, to the likes of Acorn. That said, Office is dead to me now. I don't even have it installed on my new Mac.

[looks around nervously]

The App store is a good idea, but I disagree with their stance over the larger apps and the OS because of the size of the files. Although the USB stick option sounds promising.

I was reading a forum earlier where the usual kind of fanboys were berating people for being "backwards" for not having fast broadband. You might not get a choice. There's plenty of places BT have stuck aluminium in the circuits as a cheaper alternative to copper. Turns out my home connection is one instantly halving the speed. BT's attitude? They don't care.

I don't like the idea that people might become 2nd class computer users because their connectivity isn't great. At least a DVD or memory stick in the post makes your options easier for those large downloads

It's worse than that. From what I've heard (which is second hand but from genuine sources), at many of the behind-closed-doors feedback sessions and demo sessions that drove FCPX development, Apple heard all the criticisms you are making... and it pushed ahead anyway.

I fucking love Illustrator.

Still only using CS3 version though.

It's for vector artwork, Chinny.

Friend of mine is a certified trainer and has contacts in both camps. The fact Premiere has a working import facility is no chance development but even Adobe were said to be shocked at how far FCP-X had gone and the strong reaction from editors. FCP editors often combine Apple fanboyism with the kind of territorialism reserved for the 8 bit wars so the fact people are switching to "the enemy" is telling.

And the import facility is very surprising. Sure all your filters go walkies, but all the transitions seem to go through and any Motion projects are still there on the timeline and can be rendered from within Premiere. The Motion integration is abit of a giveaway that Adobe have been polishing this all up in anticipation as in the past there would have simply been no need for it. If you use Premiere then you use After Effects. Motion is what the FCP crowd use. To see Motion projects on a Premiere timeline is akin to the first time I saw a Speccy emulator running on my A1200. It just seemed wrong but instantly useful!

And that means I can continue to use Motion. After Effects is a stunning fully featured effects package. But it can be like driving an F1 car. Lots of controls which need a lot of practice and not the most practical thing to drive to the shops in. Motion is a little Nissan runaround designed to go to the newsagents (or knock up nice looking titles and captions). For those kind of things it's quicker and easier and I want to stay using it if I can.

What I don't get, and this is a genuine question, is if you were happy to work on FCP 7 before X was released, why that still isn't an option now and you had immediately go out and buy Adobe?

Simple, half price offer.

And when half price offer = £750 off, you take note.

Of course I'm still using FCP 7 and the suite of software that comes with it. But now I have a transition plan and a foot in the "other" camp.

Even without Premiere, the rest of the suite is extremely attractive to me at half price. Having After Effects again will be nice for the more complex work (as I said, Motion is fantastic but it only does 90mph as opposed to 190mph). I also weep in joy of not having to boot Parallels to use Cooledit because I now have Audition on the Mac (which is a 9 year newer version of Cooledit).

Photoshop is useful for sure and being Adobe I now have proper Flash video encoding support rather than using pig slow 3rd party plug-ins.

In short even without Premiere it's a useful suite.

And of course now I have the Quadro 4000, I get realtime preview rendering for many things in Premiere and a blistering kick up the arse for final rendering times. FCP-X can't yet do that and when it can the cards to do it will be far more expensive.

One thing OSX Lion hasn't done, is fix the random "I'm going to try and access an external drive at random and make you wait till it spins up" for no reason. I just had it happen when going back a page in my browser FFS!
iTunes always spins up my Drobo, which takes a while as it has 4 drives in it, even though all music and the iTunes database is on the main hard disk.

??




You mean logos and shit? Or hand drawing stuff?

I've had people send me Illustrator files before but I just send them back and ask for a flattened image.

Both.

I know you don't mean what I think you mean. But this does conjure up a pleasing image of you sat at an Archie.

I will mark this package down for investigation this weekend.

If only Adobe gave me printed manuals with it.

When I got FCP Studio 2 in 2008 Apple sent me a huge box with manuals and a free introduction DVD that walked you through all the packages. Sadly that kind of thing has gone out of fashion. I know it's all on Youtube but it was pleasing to sit in front of the TV with a glass of wine watching the DVD.

BTW have put the 50% off code in the bargains thread. Hey it's still not cheap but 50% may be useful for someone.

I use it for everything, from layouts for web sites and interfaces, to print works and drawings from simple to complex. And that's where everything else has fallen. I need (and love) the power of Illustrator, but it's the little things that've been wrong for years that get me down, and Adobe seem intent on pushing features few people were asking for, every couple of years, and for several hundred pounds at a time.

It's a love-hate relationship, but the hate definitely sours any love. I just want to put my skills into the digital world without having to fight with barriers all day long.