My Digital Tools (Part 1)…
I upgraded to Snow Leopard as soon as I could. And I did my version of upgrading: wipe out everything and start over. It may be a little more tedious to reinstall every little thing I work with, but it beats upgrading a lot of dead weight from my experiments. Plus, installing stuff on new computers is part of my job, so I definitely have gotten good at it.
What I did this time, though, was keep track of all the little things I use on the computer. As a tech admin, I use some tools that most people wouldn’t touch, but then again, I also use lots of tools freely available to accomplish my work.
To start out, I wanted to go through the basic system software for my day to day computing. For hardware, I run 90% of my life through a three year old MacBook from work. It has a 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo, 1gb RAM, and 120gb HD. At home I have an even older iMac that I need to upgrade to Snow Leopard at some point.
The programs in this post:
The operating system for my computer. Following a clean wipe is nice because you can see all the sporty new features as well as the gaps left in the new system. So far, it’s been quite a bit faster than Leopard, particularly in the startup/shutdown department, so I actually do those things more often.
The revised Dock interface is clean, and I like the dark color for the secondary-click window. Also, I love that minimize can go into the application icon. I hated minimizing things because they take up space on my already full Dock. Still, though, my favorite command is hide [command + h], as well as holding [command + option] and clicking on the desktop to hide everything but the Finder.
Primarily, we live off of iPhoto. Have to keep all the cute kid pictures somewhere, right? Since ’09 added in face-recognition, it has been really good at removing red eye exposure. And though it was added before ’09, being able to upload pictures and have them automatically sorted by events makes life infinitely easier.
Another I’ve used more of recently is iMovie. With it, I threw together that beautiful slideshow of my daughter. The interface to put in pictures and change their durations has been greatly improved, finally to the point of being faster than the old iMovie HD (even for us veterans of the old program).
GarageBand I only occasionally play with. Since I’m further removed from the music tech scene than I’d like, I tend to toy with other stuff in the world. Still, for any multi-track recording, it is my go-to program.
Preview has to be one of the most underrated programs I work with. First of all, it reads pdf files flawlessly and far far faster than anything I have ever seen come out of Adobe.
Speaking of pdf files, one thing that is really great about Macs is the built-in ability to ‘print’ a document as a pdf file. I use the feature nearly daily.
Second, this program can convert, crop, rotate, and do most of the quick, very basic level editing that one preparing files for the web need to do. You can also merge pdf files and add and remove pages as needed with just some drag/drop work.
The completely revamped Quicktime X is smooth. Smooth in operation and appearance. I remember having to find a bogus Pro key just to use the full screen mode for old Quicktime versions. Now we’re given the ability to record anything and everything (including screen casts)? It’s just amazing.
My big caveat is that there are no longer preferences to change. I would like more control over formats (particularly audio). For some work we do, students record some audio, usually a story they wrote, then drop the file into GarageBand to add sound effects and music. But recording directly into GarageBand turns into a huge file and a lot of computing power required that we don’t necessarily have. It’d be nice to have the simple audio made separately apart from the editing.
Of course, I use iTunes for all our music, which is extensive. I’ve never had an issue, except when it comes to video. I would love to have it import video as easily as audio, but such is not the case. I never know if something is going to be dumped into a movies category, a video category, or a TV shows category.
More than anything else these days, iTunes is the docking center for our iPhones. The coolest feature in iTunes 9 is the ability to arrange apps in iTunes. I really dig that interface, and it’s about time it arrived.
And as for the genius feature, I have never used it and am not particularly interested in it. Unless it gives me more music on my computer to listen to that I wouldn’t necessarily have or think of (a la Pandora), no thanks. If I want Shostakovich, I’ll listen to Shostakovich.
Dropbox is by far the coolest and most useful tool in my arsenal. It is basically an automatically backing-up documents folder. You create an account and that gets you two gigabytes of space. This space is a copy of a Dropbox folder on your computer. If you change a file in your Dropbox folder on your computer, it automatically updates the file online.
Pretty cool in itself, right? Well, you can install Dropbox on multiple computers, too. The Dropbox folder on my laptop here is the same Dropbox folder on my iMac at home. So I can open up any file here, save it, then open up that same file at home, update it again, and it’ll automatically get changed on my laptop again. Totally slick.
AND it’s cross-platform, so your Windows desktop and Mac laptop can share the same pile of files. AND you can access everything in it through a web browser if you don’t have it installed. AND you can make some files public so you can point a third party to a single file as a URL. AND it’s totally brainless; you don’t have to do squat beyond make an account.
Seriously, it’s an amazing tool. I don’t use my local documents folder on my computer for anything. It’s like keeping a web-based flash drive that securely backs up everything and can’t go through your laundry if you forget about it.
1password is a slick tool that just saves passwords. It also plugs into web browsers to do some automatic logging in with a quick [command + \] keystroke. I do the keystoke, type in the master password, and it fires in the information and logs me in.
Also, through Dropbox, 1password can save its keychain and sync across my computers. If I add a site or change one of the passwords, then it’s added everywhere. Can’t beat that.