Category: Missives

I hate glossy displays.

I really do. Life has gotten a little harder ever since Apple’s attack on matte displays.

I have been using both the glossy and non-glossy displays for quite some time (over two years). At home, I choose to use older Cinema Displays (30″ and 23″) that are matte-coated, however, at work I am forced to use newer iMacs with glossy displays. I find that with the glossy display, I tend to have more eye-strain and difficulty matching colors. While it is true that I can “tune-out” some of the reflection and glare, it is still a nuisance, and I find much more comfort and joy using my matte displays at home.

I also own a black MacBook with the glossy display (albeit not glass like the new ones) and I can feel a difference when I use it versus a traditional matte display. Just recently, I was using a MacBook Pro with the matte display BTO option, and it was much easier for me to focus and read text on it, as well as match colors for a project.

Glossy is certainly great in certain circumstances, such as working outside in the sunlight, watching videos as a consumer, cleaning the screen after kids with dirty hands have touched it, etc., but the overly saturated colors, reflections, and eye-straining contrast are going to prevent me from buying an iMac or new Cinema Displays for doing any “pro” work. I do believe the iMac with the glass-fronted screen would be very convenient in a family oriented or “consumer” setting. It is certainly something I would buy for my family to use.

Part of me feels that with Apple’s new-found popularity amongst the young and trendy population, they have begun to ignore their “pro-users” who use these machines for design, video editing, photography, and the like. Lets just hope that someday Apple will make more displays for pro-users to use to prevent us from having to turn to a 3rd party manufacturer…

I switch between browsers all the time. For some reason, each one seems to have its own unique flaw that renders it unusable to me which leads me to abandon it in favor of another which cycle keeps me going through browsers over and over.

Safari

Pros: Safari is a good looking, fast, light browser. I trust the company that makes it, which is always a plus.

Cons: Although Safari has many good points, it has issues that drive me away from it constantly. One thing that I feel is a con as far as behavior is the fact that as soon as a link is clicked on a page, the page dies which means no last minute link-clicking while waiting for the page to load. I wouldn’t think that was a big deal just on description alone, bug that very situation seems to happen to me more often than I’d like to admit. Safari also handles tabs in an inferior way compared to other browsers. When you open a link in a new tab, the new tab is always the furthest right instead of opening next to the tab where you currently are; a feature I have come to love on other browsers. Also, when you have a large number of tabs, it becomes cumbersome because the only means of navigation is through the pull-down menu or through keyboard shortcuts. When you browse primarily with a mouse, I find it to be very frustrating to go back and forth between tabs.

The deal-breaker: Safari doesn’t act multi-threaded. That is to say that if one tab is busy rendering, loading, or sunning some java or flash, the others tabs all become unresponsive. Secondly, there is no option to search from the URL bar. It may seem like a small thing, but it is a behavior that I have come to love in Firefox and Chromium, It seems silly to me that the program is not smart enough to differentiate a query from a URL.

Firefox

Pros: Firefox has been my browser of choice more often than not. It’s flexible, standards compliant, robust, etc. Firefox 4 especially has been a delight as far as speed and stability. Firefox handles tabs the way I would expect. Firefox also gives me the voice to eliminate the search-box, and search straight from the URL bar.

Cons: Firefox takes a little longer to start up than some of the other browsers. It’s not as light weight and therefore doesn’t feel as snappy. Firefox also is not fully written in Cocoa which detracts from some of the Mac interface; specifically many UNIX shortcuts don’t work which sometimes slow me down.

The deal-breaker: The biggest thing dissuading me from using Firefox all the time is the fact that it interferes with Adobe Illustrator by randomly causing its modifier keys to become non-functional and therefore renders the program impossible to use.

Chrome/Chromium

Pros: Chromium is a browser that I have enjoyed using a lot. It is snappy, small and pretty. It too handles tabs in a smart and efficient way, and since each tab represents its own process, they never affected each other when hung or loading.

Cons: One downside in my eyes is the fact that Google is so involved with the browser. They may not “be evil,” but I don’t trust their data collecting fetish. It makes me paranoid to give so much information and power to one single company. I prefer to use the Chromium builds over Chrome for this reason.

The deal-breaker: For all of the good things about the browser, it has one fatal flaw. When you click in the URL bar, it selects all the text. This is very much a non-mac behavior, and very annoying. I’ve been lobbying to get this changed, but to no avail. The behavior actually has it’s roots in Internet Explorer. Furthermore, Many users have taken the time to complain about this and the developers are unwilling to change this or even allow there to be a setting to control the behavior.

Opera

Pros: Opera hasn’t really gotten a fair shake. I haven’t had used it solidly for any real length of time, however when I have used it, I found it to be very fast and light-weight as well as very stands-compliant. It also looks pretty snazzy on the Mac.

Cons: Opera doesn’t present too many cons. It doesn’t place newly opened tabs to the right of the current tab as Firefox and Chromium does, but that’s not a huge deal.

The deal-breaker: Opera too sufferers from the non-Mac behavior of selecting all on click. This is just something I can not abide despite its many good characteristics.

Stainless

Pros: Stainless is a small browser that was originally started as a test that some people have taken quite a shine to. It’s extremely lightweight, and like Chromium, each tab runs as an independent process preventing one tab from freezing the entire browser.

Cons: It doesn’t have a full time development team and doesn’t have any method of employing plugins or customizations.

The deal-breaker: Although Stainless is fully functional, it is really not a fully-featured browser, and does not appear to be under active development any longer.

Camino

Pros: Camino, Like Firefox, uses the Gecko rendering engine. It is small fast and simple. It is however compiled in Cocoa unlike Firefox which helps it behave more Mac-Like. Camino allows searching from the URL bar, and also doesn’t select-on-click.

Cons: Although it resembles Firefox in many aspects, it is not nearly as customizable as its bigger brother. This means altering things such as appearance or behavior are not built, in making it a little harder. It also scores rather low on the Acid3 test, unlike Firefox 4 and Safari. The nightly build scores better, but still isn’t 100 percent. Camino also hasn’t yet implemented the smarter tab behavior, nor tabs-on top, which I have come to like in both Firefox and Chromium.

The deal-breaker: I actually can’t think of any. Shocker!

Internet Explorer

Pros: None.

Cons: The venerable browser that claims to have influenced many web standards seems to not mind ignoring them. IE is responsible for many of the poor web experiences we have on the web, as well as the method of transmittal of many viruses. No good can come of it. It is also no longer cross-platform compatible.

The deal-breaker: It’s Internet Explorer.

Of all the software I have been excited for in the past years, Adobe Creative Suite 5 has been one the one that I have anticipated the most. Ever since the switch to Intel, I have been hoping for a creative suite that would take advantage of the processing power. Prior to CS5, none of the Creative Suites were written in Cocoa. This created some restrictions. First of all, they were only 32 bit, could only address 4 gigs of ram, and were generally sluggish, but usable.

What I Don’t Like About CS5

CS5’s big claim was that every application had been rewritten in Cocoa instead of Carbon. This would allow them to take full advantage of the computer’s processing power. First of all, not all the applications have been written to support 64-bit processors. Only a few have been, namely Photoshop and Flash. I stand with Apple on the uselessness of Flash, so that means nothing to me, and I rarely use Photoshop. As a designer, I spend 90% of my time in Illustrator, and I feel that I have been severely left out by not having it be 64-bit. When working with complex designs that get themselves to more than 500 megs, it begins to show, and the application slows down even though my processors are not being fully taxed. In fact, the over all feel on CS5 is a bit sluggish, even more so than CS3, and even simple things like panning and zooming seemed snappier in CS3 oddly enough.

The new features presented in CS5 are also less than compelling. Adobe has been really advertising their content-aware fill. I’ve played with it a little bit to see how well it works, and it does an amazing job… for a computer. For any serious work, it creates a good starting point, but still leaves a lot to be done by the designer, and I admit that it can take hours of work off of someone’s work flow if they are in the retouching business. The rarity of me performing such tasks makes this a neat but not necessary feature. I first tested Content-Aware Fills on a panoramic picture that I had taken a while back. I wanted to fill in the edges where the pictures merged. The file was a mere 28,000 x 2750 px image with rough edges that I wanted to try filling instead of cropping off. Once I got everything all ready to go, and tried the feature, it ran for a few minutes before stopping with the error: “Ran out of memory.” I would normally not find this too hard to believe, however my activity monitor showed that I had 13 gigabytes of ram currently free! Well, I ended up doing it in portions. And the results weren’t as great as they made it seem in all the demos. I suppose nothing is ever as good as when the salesman presents it.

As for Illustrator, the features I most look forward to are some which were introduced in CS4 (namely multiple artboards). CS5 offers a new feature called “Perspective Drawing.” It seems like an interesting idea, and I’ll bet this is going to make some designers very happy, but for me, I have never had the desire to draw building perspectives, etc. Its the big new selling feature, and it really does nothing for me.

This may be petty, but the new icons are ugly, and apparently Photoshop thinks it’s too good for the standard beachball cursor, and replaced it with its own inconsistent waiting cursor.

And you know what was the only thing about the entire suite that actually infuriated me? The fact that Adobe installed Growl automatically without asking me. I hate growl. I hate having everything I do pop up on the corner of the screen and obscure my desktop, icons, and work. Yes, it was easily removed, but it still annoyed me that Adobe would assume that I would want it…

What I Like About CS5

Over the past months of using CS5, I have come across some new features as well as non-advertised features that I really come to appreciate.

As I stated before, I really love having multiple art boards as introduced in CS4. This is also accompanied by many other features Introduced in CS4 that I never knew since I am leapfrogging from CS3 such as the improved gradient tool, alpha channel support in gradients, and other assorted goodness.

Though Illustrator is still a 32 bit application, certain rendering processes feel faster even though the interface still suffers from some basic sluggishness.

Photoshop can now handle having more files opened at once. CS4 and prior versions had a limitation of 99 documents being opened at a time. Though it is rare for me to need to have that many files opened at once, it is nice knowing I can do well over 200 in CS5.

Photoshop is noticeably faster in many regards, especially in applying filters. The rewrite into Cocoa shows a considerable improvement.

Overall, this suite has seemed very stable. I have had no crashing errors for the most part which seem to have been abundant in CS4 from my limited time using it at work. CS5 feels solid and I have been very happy with it.

The Bottom Line

I held off buying CS4 because it was still Carbon, not Cocoa. I felt that CS4 was a waste of money for only a few features and little performance improvement. CS5 may not have all of the upgrades I had originally desired, however it does bring many features to the table, and various performance improvements that I find valuable. I have been very happy that I upgraded, and hope that Adobe finishes the job by extending all the benefits of Cocoa to each application in its entirety.

Don’t think that since I have more to say about what I don’t like that it makes CS5 not a good improvement. It’s much easier to criticize the things that bother me rather than give accolades for the things that I take for granted since they just work. Overall, I have been extremely satisfied with CS5; more so than I ever expected going into it!