Daily Brad, the blog

It’s true, I’ve got a foot in the Apple world and the PC world. Because I’ve worked as an in-house graphic designer for tech companies over the past 6+ years, I’ve spent most of time using a PC to do graphic design work. I’ve found that companies who have a small design staff require their designers to adapt to PC’s so they can interface with the rest of the organization (Microsoft Outlook for meetings is a big one), and so the network guys don’t have to go out of their way to give anyone special treatment.

But now that I’m working from home I have a PC running a AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+ 2.4Ghz, 2GB of RAM and Microsoft Windows XP Professional version 2002, and a Apple G4 Dual 1 GHz PowerPC with 1.5 GB RAM running Mac OS 10.4.7. And you know what? I think I prefer the PC. (Big gasp here)

Perhaps it’s my history with Apple which all started with the upgrade I made to my G3 (the pretty blue one). I needed all sorts of attachments to hook my former printers and scanners because their abandonment of Apple Talk. Then when I upgraded to my current G4, Apple switched rebuilt their system completely and I had to replace all my software with OSX compliant software to avoid that nasty “Classic” loader thing that took forever. And now, I’m ready to upgrade design software again, and found the whole “Intel Processor” issue with my Adobe Suite. While I appreciate Apple trying to stay ahead of the game, it seems that it might be worth my money to switch to PC.

Or perhaps it’s just a feeling… the way the clicks work, the keyboard, the mouse… the interface… perhaps it’s only a matter of personal preference? Now Apple allows you to run Windows, which is old news, but it even confuses the issue further in the ongoing MAC vs. PC debate.

So what I’m curious about, is how many graphic designers chose PC as their computer by choice? I know there is this passionate debate about MAC vs. PC, but when you put all the feelings aside, is one better than the other for specific tasks? And what about graphic design tasks, which computer to you prefer? In my opinion, it seems that the PC has caught up in the graphic design world, and now it’s a matter of preference. What are your thoughts?

Dock Porn

Originally uploaded by The Iconfactory.

So I was browsing the blog of my favorite icon geniuses, the iconfactory, and ran across a posting that read

Our Chief Typist, quite by accident, discovered that the icons in his dock spelled out ”$eXy” and wondered what other words he could make from all the various app icons on his HD.

so I went over and checked out the flickr page they created to add more of these little jewels. There’s only 20 there right now, but you’re welcome to add your own.

So it wasn’t until a couple months ago, that I began to hear about the whole concept of “Social Bookmarking”. I’ve even mentioned it to a couple of my friends, and they always pose the question “what ARE you talking about?”

Even though I understand how social bookmarking works now (well, not completely, but learning), I tend to still say “hu?”. Social bookmarking is a web-based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. These sites generally organize their content using tags (a keyword or term to classify content). Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags. But HOW do they make money?

(more…)

So I happened upon a few YouTube commercials for the Commodore 64, my first computer. Here’s one of them:

I was 11 or 12 when we first got my Commodore. My mom had saved for months to purchase it and then still ended up putting it on a payment plan from a local department store. I seem to remember that with everything included, it cost just over $1,200. We had a monitor, keyboard and a large floppy drive (I mean large AND floppy). I enjoyed playing with Print Shop and making all sorts of banners or greeting cards on our dot-matrix printer. I got my first chance at creating computer art using a Koala drawing pad which amazed me (huge upgrade from my etch-a-sketch), and used different programs to make pixel-based graphics (a skill which I still use when I’m doing icon design). I remember typing in code that I found in a magazine to make a little monster jump across the screen. (I spent over 4 hours doing this as a kid - even now that baffles me.)

Computers have come a long way, and yet they still improve all the time. The Commodore 64 was an amazing machine… they could do so much with so little. 64K? If only they would match that proportion of functionality to computer size today - just think how much more amazing computers would be?

Just a little tid-bit of nostalgia for you. I know the company filed bankruptcy in 1994, but whatever happened to the Commodore 64?

Now the news is old news, Apple has switched to an Intel Platform. I don’t really know the technical implications of what that means, other than the marketing mombo-jombo that I’ve been fed. And that’s fine. I’m not “techy” enough to have to know all the details why it’s better than IBM’s Power PC processors they used previously.

But where it does become an issue, is how it works with software… particularly the Adobe graphic design software I use all the time: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. To begin with, it was already pretty darn irritating when I upgraded my computer to Apple’s System 10, and all of a sudden all my applications had to be booted up in the older clunky system version that I always seemed to have trouble with. (QuarkXpress especially still doesn’t want to work right). And thus the need to pay to upgrade to the all new software - again.

Okay, so I’m in the market for a new computer. I’m also in the market to get the latest and greatest version’s of Adobe’s Creative Suite (which includes Illustrator, Photoshop, etc in case you didn’t know). I’m ready to plunk down $3K on the computer and another $2K on software. But now I find out, that the Adobe’s newest software actually runs slower on the latest and greatest Intel-Mac than it does on my current PowerPC-based Apple Computer. Hu?

According to Adobe’s Press release on the subject, they put out some marketing stuff about “being dedicated for 20 years to the support of Apple Products” and that their normal life-cycle for developing software to work on something new is 18-24 months. It also seems by the release that the whole Intel switch was a surprise to them, and “now that it has been released” they’ll begin designing for it. Is this really Adobe saying this? Does a company as large as Adobe really wait until something is released to start making a plan to design for it?

So other than my strong thoughts on going to a PC at home (I’ve worked on a PC at work for years, and actually don’t really have a preference PC or Apple at this point other than what I’m use to), I just sit on my hands and wait. Since Adobe does NOT offer an upgrade from the software I buy today (which runs slower on the Intel-Based Macs) to the software I’d like to have later (which runs like it should on the Intel-Based Macs) what am I suppose to do?

I guess I’ll just deal with what I got, and keep my little investment in Microsoft stock.