Macadoodledo's Blog

Duh!!…of the week.

macadoodledo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:11:19 +0000

Duh of the week goes to OnOne Software.

I am not a major Photoshop user, ain’t enough hours in the day…so am proud to call myself an Elements man. More in, grab the loot and out again, fast car waiting.

I was on Elements 6 and decided recently to go for the new version 8. The Essentials I had, 2, doesn’t work on Elements 8. So I thought I would write to OnOne. “Why don’t you upgrade” was their reply.

Hmmm…not quite the answer I was looking for.

Snow leopard. Love me, love me not, love me…

macadoodledo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:59:07 +0000

Okay so I am back in love with Snow Leopard. It hasn’t been the best of fortnight’s for a variety of reasons, many of which are nothing to do with Apple. But in all that chaos Macadoodledo had issues.

Problems seemed to revolve around Snow Leopard. I do regret diving in to the new OS in a foolhardy sense but then Apple marketing does that to you.

All I can say is, all that I can recommend to anyone is you can’t beat a good old clean install. I have done three over the last week. One each on our iBook, Macbook and finally this weekend the mothership, my 24″ iMac. I feel deeply cleansed and have cleaned a lot of bits and bobs from my hard drive, you know all that stuff you chuck here and there before you get your head properly sorted and decide where you actually want to organise all of your files.

Clean installs are funny things. Very scary before you do your first one. But once you have done one you wonder what all the fuss is about. That said you do need a thorough back up and/or Time Machine strategy in place…can’t tell you how important that is generally. Clean install also gives you a great review process and comparing against your time machine saves provides an opportunity to decide what you want to have on Mia Nouveau Mac.

So I am back in with Snow Leopard, we are on talking terms again. It is, I guess good, but here is the thing that maybe the Apple masterplan. You don’t really know what the advantage of it is, you just believe that it is. I signed up to 10.6 for no other reason than the Exchange support and now never use that. As I have blogged elsewhere I find Entourage still my preferred choice for the way I operate, (even though that has it’s issues). I suspect the benefits of the 64 bit will happen in the future and I probably won’t even notice and just take them in my stride.

I am interested though to hear others views on Snow Leopard.

Press ‘dem words

macadoodledo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:51:36 +0000

Hurrah, manage to find the import button and have now migrated from Blogger to WordPress. Small thing that mean a lot to me as WP is vastly superior to Blogger. Just moved in so a bit chaotic at the moment, come back soon and hear some of my Mac rants…and raves such as “How I loved, lost and learnt to relove Snow Leopard”, “Clean install is the great detox” and other right riveting reads.

3 beeps and you are out.

macadoodledo — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:47:00 +0000

My first ever Mac hell started a few weeks ago when I was in the middle of a webinar presentation. My Macbook screen went a bit Mr Cholmney-Warner and then everything shut down.

The big symptom was 3 beeps going off and on…maybe it is some Apple morse thing that translates to “LOL” I don’t know.

Nightmare…I can handle problems, I just can’t handle the ones that I don’t understand.

I took it in to Ge-Tech, my local(ish) Certified Apple repairer but they were pretty useless, confirmed when the crash happened again. They had said that they could find nothing…but Macs do not just crash.

The problem for me though is that I use my Macbook exclusively for presentations so crashes are strictly verboten.

Through a weird twist of fate my wife picked up a job at the same place I worked so it seemed reasonable that she use my broken Macbook and I get a new Macbook Pro, (good deal from Mac Warehouse by the way..oh and I went for the Apple Protection Plan…I will always now recommend the Apple Protection Plan).

You may say that was a bit tough on my wife but she is working remotely booking my webinars so can fall back on pen and paper. Not ideal I grant you but I cannot draw pretty pictures for my webinar audience.

Anyhow back to my 3 beeps.

I harnessed Twitter and was fortunate to come across the white knight calle d @hammyhavoc I need to raise a glass to this chappie…he knows his Mac stuff for sure.

He suggested a new HD so I picked up a 320gb internal from Play.com inserted, partitioned and started the reinstall. Everything was fine, then the problem happened again, the three beeps.

Now I have had problems with Crucial memory before, (twice now in the last 3 months), so I removed my 2x2gb chips and decided to try again with one at a time in the full knowledge that if I put the damaged one in then I would have to start again with the other. Can you imagine how hacked off I would have been if they both failed?

Everything is working fine @anjeebaby has a super fast Macbook. I have a superfast Macbook Pro and next I will be training my guns on the iMac mothership to clean install and take out a few glitches.

I know this is boring but please remember to get a back up strategy in place. I have a Time Machine running, a Macintosh HD bootable copy regularly updated by Carbon Cloner and the same for my home folder in to a 500gb LaCie. Obsessive? when you have had the week I have you would do the same.

If you get the three beeps, go check your memory.

Oh in case you haven’t worked it out…I ain’t buying memory from Crucial anymore.

Snow Leopard

macadoodledo — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:45:00 +0000

The other reason for my absence has been all the grief I have had from Snow Leopard for the past few weeks.

I currently have a Macbook in rehab and for my iMac I have had to set up a new administrator to resolve a string of irritations.

My conclusion…do not upgrade to a new itteration of an OS until some other monkey has gone through the teething pains. For £20 odd quid I feel like taking Apple to court to claim back my lost time!!

The major problems have revolved around attachments, any attachment really , PDF, .doc, .jpeg, Snow Leopard is not precious. And in my line of work attachments are important.

Safari crashes the most, Word for Mac regularly and yousendit does it frequently.

So I have binned Safari for now…being pretty is one thing, being able to hold a conversation is far more important.

As you know I have given up on Mail as it is not built for power.

The bottom line is I have had to go through the irritation of setting up a new administrator account and all the pain of resetting my settings and permissions. Looking at things in glass half full mode though that has been an interesting learning curve.

With Windows 7 starting to catch up to Mac OS Apple needs to really pick up its game.

Back again

macadoodledo — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:26:00 +0000

So it has been a while since my last blog update…my apologies.

In another place I have been utilising social networking more in an enterprise sense than my usual chit chat. Very interesting experience.

My job entails implementing innovative and dynamic Web 2.0 tech in to a fairly conservative market, the UK legal sector, in other words solicitors. Think Direct Line for law firms and you are kinda on the right track.

I decided, a few months back, to experiment with Linkedin and Twitter, (I bypassed Facebook as I do have a day job), specifically targeting legal professionals with an interest in technology and innovation. I have to say it has opened a whole world of ‘tuned in’ people.

I have my doubts around the way services such as Twitter are currently positioned and all that silliness over Stephen Fry’s ‘will he quit’ debate.

The real power of social networking is in banding together people with common professional interests. It becomes completely powerful when you start to link things together such as my favourite three, Twitter, WordPress and Linkedin. This is where you can create the momentum dynamic.

From a small and nervy start I now find myself on a speaking circuit discussing future changes in the legal services market.

Whether it is Twitter, Linkedin or whoever the market, as always, adapts and develops and if you are a small tech company like ours these tools are incredibly powerful.

ps you may be thinking that if I lke WordPress so much what am I doing on Blogger? I have the macadoodledo.com domain set up on Blogger. If there was an easy way to transfer it to WP that would be fine. But as Maca is my tech and Jon rant my WP site is more business like and I try to keep the two very separate.

Entourage…for now.

macadoodledo — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:29:00 +0000

I am not prepared to fault Mail as it is a fine email client but for me it is not quite there yet. Whilst Entourage is a little clunky its big ‘+’ versus Mail is the all-in-one solution. I am just not that content using Mail, AB and iCal.

Some of the formatting issues on Mail have been surprisingly difficult and the crashes I am getting on attachments are really hacking me off. As I have said in a previous post the tiny almost insignificant functionality of a calendar drop down when amending an event date is really annoying when it is not there. It is not there.

To be honest, and yes this is a subjective thing, iCal and AB are plain ugly.

The truth is that I also do not like working on work and personal stuff in the same mail client. The capacity for me to type something totally compromising to a client when it should have gone to a friend is the sort of thing that may make me sit up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

I did experiment with Entourage for Web Services but that caused me all sorts of problems..to the point where I had to uninstall and re-install my Office for Mac.

So, the conclusion? Neither is perfect but for now I am coming down on the side of Entourage. The winner of this battle will be down to,

whether Apple takes the enterprise user seriously (50/50)
whether Microsoft delivers on Outlook 2010 (40/60)

I couldn’t say whether either will at this stage and my suggested odds are not exactly tempting.

as a ps many thanks to Nadyne Richmond (@nadyne) for all her helpful Entourage advice.

The Battle for Exchange : update

macadoodledo — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:18:00 +0000

One of the most important things about the macadoodledo blog is that it will not be an Apple puppet and will say what it thinks about products be they Apple based or not.

So I have to say, for my purposes Entourage is actually winning the Exchange email client battle at the moment. Yes I am as shocked as you!!

Yesterday Mail crashed three times when I was attaching a PDF file. On two of the three occasions it restarted with the message saved as a draft. One one occasion it didn’t which left me a bit…well fed up. For my purposes, stability always comes above style.

So far I haven’t yet worked out a way to group messages which is a small but important thing.

Years of Microsoft use seems to have been ingrained in to me and I am not hugely comfortable with not having all my functions, mail, address book, scheduler all in one place. iCal (and Address Book) feel light for the enterprise user. And whilst we are on iCal I don’t like the fact that to change the date in an event is a fairly manual thing, leaving me prone to error.

Next, I can see other co-worker calendars in Entourage, I can’t in Mail. It does offer me the option to do this, but I haven’t got it to work yet.

On the plus side I can read my RSS feeds in Mail but not in Entourage. As an RSS addict this has been a constant irritation of Entourage for me.

Mail, once set up via the ‘log-in’ in the Accounts button you find in system preferences, opens so quickly you best not blink. (But then Entourage opens faster now in Snow Leopard – speed is the new black with SL).

So at the moment for all it’s clunkiness, it is not the prettiest signorina on the street, yet for me Entourage works ably.

Apple have missed a trick here because they could have enhanced their Mail app by some. You may argue so what, makes no odds for home users. But for me the future is about email and web delivery. And if you want to attack the Exchange corporate market then you cannot do it half hearted especially when you have deep set views and opinions already entrenched via Outlook et al. They have done the business with Safari, which is outstanding, but perhaps need to get things sorted in that MS heartland, the mail client.

As an aside I am going to continue using Mail via our Exchange on my Macbook to see how it ticks along and keep myself up to date.

Gotomeeting

macadoodledo — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:59:00 +0000

I am so contrary. I have now come down on the side of Citrix Gotomeeting as opposed to Adobe Connect. The latter is good for internal screen shares but not quite there for me in the webinars that I am planning for work.

I can rave all day about screen share, esp if you have a small sales team, (me and one other), and a vast market, 10,000+ prospects across the nation and you are selling a complex technology solution. The big plus for me is a sharp reduction in back ache from traditionally having to travel and I am feeling so righteous with regard to my carbon footprint.

If you are thinking about Gt2 for your company my top tip is to push them on price…I was staggered by the reduction we got.

My two Mac only gripes are,

the control panel for the Mac appears as a black shadowed box to users…not a good experience so you need to minimise as soon as you share your screen and,
Windows users can share applications only where Mac users have to share the whole screen…looking on the bright side it does show off our beautiful desktops and dock.

MacFormat Podcast

macadoodledo — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:25:00 +0000

I was on a train going to the office last week and enjoyed the latest MacFormat podcast. In the main I do not normally fit MacFormats reader profile as I am more an enterprise than a home user, (although I think I am both). There was an excellent article on networking which you can pick up in the magazine. However if for no other reason the one thing you should listen to on the podcast is the Q&A section with Trevor Middleton…clear, concise and bloody useful advice. After 3 or 5 of the Q&A’s you will be in the groove with your Mac.

What stands out for me though is the sheer quality of the podcast production not just in content but also in the structure. I have listened to a many podcasts, trust me…a lot, in my Mac enthusiasm, and the MacFormat podcast is not just a good Mac podcast…it’s a great podcast full stop.