I HATE APPLE

I haven't checked, but is it easier to wipe stuff off glossy? I'm good at setting down drinks and getting droplets on the screen, sneezing in the vicinity, leaving it open and getting dust all over. Matte wipes off fine but I'm always worried about pushing too hard and wrecking the thing.

Yes, glossy is much more resistant to that kind of thing. If you use any kind of solvent -- e.g., Windex -- you can damage the screen. With glossy, you are a bit less limited.

what about price vs specs? are those "deals"?

my powerbook g4 is sort of on it's last legs, mechanically and performance-wise. i'm definitely going to upgrade in the next year. these prices are student-only specials through the computer dept at my school and they're much better than the educational pricing i'll be able to get next year as a teacher.

are these prices too good to pass up or are they just pushing outmoded stuff that's not worth the savings?

i mean it *seems* like a good deal, right? a good $200 cheaper than apple store prices for refurbished laptops ...

looks pretty awesome but then everything looks pretty awesome to me, given what i'm using now

it's nice that you won't need to buy more RAM for it (unless you want to)

i'm amazed they can make 7200rpm laptop drives, tbh - i'm amazed at everything, though, so i'm a biased observer

hmm well they sold out of the two models upthread already but they've still got this available

15" glossy LED
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB / 160 GB HD @ 7200 rpm
$1749

I find glossy to be mildly annoying.

Hi dere, thank you. I used to find it mildly annoying that everyone had (has) an LCD monitor, so designing for the screen had to become a much less subtle affair color-wise. Like, #eee is not a useful color anymore, thanks to those monitors, and the very poor color-handling of Windows XP. It's frickin' green.

At least, it is if you don't calibrate your monitor, but web design obviously also means designing for the folx who will never do such things. My Dad, I was appalled to find, had not even aligned his screen since he bought it... he had a black bar down one side and chopped-off icons on the other. The fix for this? Pressing a single button, right on the front of the monitor. My dad is not a dumb guy, he's just not... how do you say... saavy. I'm certain he's used carbon paper recently. He's, um, old. I wish I didn't have to keep him in mind when I design anything, because it would be so much easier, but I do. I digress.

Anyway, yeah... the glossy screens aren't *bad*, not at all. I've found Mac screens to consistently have the most satisfying color, if not the truest. They figured out this much: people like blue. And calibrated likewise. But for what it's worth (nothing, btw), I do resent that there's one more thin layer between the intended color and the end user.

And as long as the ol' girl lives, I'll still always check everything on my 95-pound (you probably think I'm kidding) Philips CRT 21" monitor from a bygone age, because it is the last monitor that I may ever see render color correctly.

Different Gamma for Mac and windows, innit. I hate adjusting my photos on the mac and finding that they don't look nearly as rich in Windows, yes I could switch my Mac into washed out windows mode but I don't want to.

windows gamma used to be much darker - did that change at some point?

render color correctly

I get what you're saying, but this last bit is pretty meaningless.

for web design maybe, but not meaningless for print

Not what I was getting at. There is no absolute measure of the human perception of colour. You can do what you like to calibrate every device in the chain (paper, ink, screen, ambient lighting conditions), but you're never going to be able to define "correct" because everyone's eyes are different.

Is there any absolute measure of the human perception of anything?

folks, just wanted to chime in that i have changed my mind. safari blows & i hate apple.

caek i don't understand - even if i'm color-blind, a puce green on a calibrated CRT is going match the output of a calibrated printer better than an LCD will, even if i see that color as "red"

new version of itunes sucks ass and the gui keeps redrawing wrong (no scrollbars)

How do I know that what I see as "orange" doesn't look bright green to you? Answer: irrelevant. That's what color profiles are all about -- yannow, like when Photoshop starts bugging you about that and you hit cancel a buncha times. (I do too.) "US Web Coated (SWOP) v2" is trying to compare the color against what, to the best of its knowledge, printed material will look like coming out of a printing press made by the U.S. Web company (confusing name), on coated paper, using a standard ink set known as SWOP. Version two. I guess.

So in a way, you're totally right: your monitor color doesn't mean a thing.

But Tracer otm: it's not meaningless. The difference is in the contrast and the blackness of the black, which kinda has everything to do with the rest of the color, relatively. Check out what your LCD monitor right now thinks is the blackest black it's got, and then imagine you're the best man at a wedding, and that's the color tie you have to wear with your tux.

Different Gamma for Mac and windows, innit.

Yeah. You can do like I do, though -- set the gamma to PC standard, turn down the brightness, and sit in the dark enjoying the warm reddish glow of PC-like pixels. (Really, with a mac and a pc monitor sitting next to each other, it's easy to see that the mac color is way too "cool.")

SWOP = Standard Web Offset Press

Yeah, whatever, print boy. ;)

Careful Kenan, us print boys have better weapons than you do. (folders, cutters, stitchers, etc)

Hydraulic Guillotines

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2357/2415630877_6ec2aa1f20_o.png

^

You use your full real name for your iPod? I change mine like the name of a non-beloved cat. Right now it's "Loverboy Hercules."

you have a smart playlist for that kompakt 100 comp?

and he wastes valuable space with unused "TV Shows" and "Movies" playlists! ha! indeed, ha ha!

wtf is going on with yr Quicktime install that the system can't open Tiffs any more?

probably didn't reboot after the itunes/quicktime update, they're serious about that shit sometimes

I did reboot :D

just saying, because I had about four updates to do yesterday and I picked all but quicktime since it'd take a reboot, then when I reopened iTunes it was all like "Man, some stuff is just not going to work since you haven't updated QuickTime yet" but I had no issues.

sonned by quicktime in a tiff

today my powerbook g4 told me that i didn't have a soundcard installed at all, err OK

i rebooted and guess what, it had forgotten all about it! aw bless

how do you remove the "movies" and "tv shows" playlist things?

I second that question. I just googled it and got a million and one results for making your movie playlists way more awesome. Uh huh.

uh, i think i just hit "delete"?? i have an old version of itunes though

Yeah the latest update calls your mother and tells her you've been bad if you try that.

it's in preferences or view prefs or something....you can totally modify the source list.

ugh. Yeah, I'm an idiot. It's a frickin' checkbox under Preferences, first tab that pops up. However, I only noticed this after I had wasted 30 minutes combing through the most LOL HUEG plist file that man or beast hath ever laid eyes on, surely a work of the devil himself, only to suffer humiliating defeat and THEN discover the checkbox, which I am beginning to suspect was not there before, but appeared only to laugh and point at me and say "Haha, way to go there, Mister poweruser!"

I'm awesome.

wow @ ical / leopard mail integration ... i just figured this out

prefs -> general -> show -> uncheck 'tv shows' (useless) and 'movies' (useless)

czn: if you don't use the movies playlist, how are you getting movies on to your iPhone/touch (can't remember which you have)? sure, you could drag 'em on manually, but ... i dunno, i quite like the automaticity of it.

(although: most of the things that live in my "movies" playlist are actually episodes of "the wire", so ... go figure.)

visual hub + sync selected movies... I haven't synced since I (just) removed the movies playlist... will I have difficulties then?

ach, not really. if you did, it'd be nothing you couldn't work around in a minute.

wow @ ical / leopard mail integration ... i just figured this out

Seriously cool shit!

In other news I just traded in my practically new iMac for a new MacBook due to travel/portability reasons. I am feeling very happy about it so far. There was always something about that iMac that was too ... big, or too much like a real computer. I love being back in Lego computer land.

i got a macbook pro today - discontinued 2.6 ghz 15" w/ 4gb ram ($2000). i'm not too concerned about the multi-touch trackpad but it's a shame that i'm only getting 256 mb VRAM and a 4 mb L2 cache. so much for "hardcore gaming".

Anyone who has been missing tunneling/forwarding in 10.5 should download this:

http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~nissler/tuntap/

and install OpenSSH 5.0. Seems to have fixed my issues, at least.

OMFG somebody please tell me why when I try to change the name of a file in the finder it times out on me, like it thinks I hit return and am finished? WHY? I tried messing with the key repeat rate but that's not it. Is there a preference for this? Is this a bug?

Also Mail keeps quitting.

Other than those things I love Leopard.

Guess it's high time to check software updates for protools and the ilk.

I've only really experienced two bugs

1) sometimes it's very slow to wake up. when it does wake up, the trackpad is jerky. like i move my finger and it responds 2-3 seconds late. if i open the airport control the whole thing crashes. from what i gather it's a well-known but not explained issue, like the 10.4 bug where the speaker balance moved hard-left for no reason after hibernating.

2) all of my mail (in all of my mail folders) disappears for no reason at all.

btw i am super happy w/ this new 15" laptop. can't really imagine it being any faster w/ a bigger l2 cache or another 256 on the video card. who uses that stuff anyway?