[Mark Palmos]

you are on Tiger, right?

[Mark Palmos]

LOL
well thanks for the input.
a lot of what you say, ie its just what i am used to… is a very common reply.

i could scratch my back by getting off this chair, walking outside to a tree, removing my shirt and rubbing my back against the tree… and if one did not have arms, that might be a common way of doing it! Im sure osx does potentially have these arms (seems to have plenty of power in some regards that windows does not) but mac users, having got used to doing without those particular arms, will usually say, its just what you are used to! 😉
I will reply specifically to john’s detailed reply in a while… so thanks again for the response.
mark.

[Mark Palmos]

thanks very much guys, john, im in a hotel in scotland at the moment, so will read your juicy reply on the plane back…
thanks again.

btw, i am working on my macbook pro, very nice, but no DELETE KEY??? so i cannot delete the letter in front of the cursor. Also no Right Hand OPT key so i can quickly move to the start of the next/previous word when typing fast and making changes… I wonder why Apple chose NOT to use the CMD-arrow keys to do this, its so fast and useful.

catch you later
thanks again
mark.

[Mark Palmos]

hi there
my 5c on this is that no matter how big your drives, they will fill up, and there is little difference between a full big drive and a full smaller drive! – except that a full big drive is much harder to back up.

and thats what i would suggest, especially with students – spend a little less on storage size and fork out for a good backup system, tapes, or even hot swappable hard drives.

mark.

[Mark Palmos]

oops
In case anybody else wants to use it and doesnt know how, you RH mouse click on the first drop zone and then CLONE LAYER. This means whatever size, shape, position, filters whatever, it will show up as one drop zone for all Clones in FCP… nice!

mark.

[Mark Palmos]

[Jeff Carpenter] “2) On a Mac, if I’m in a Finder window and see a file I want to open, I drag the file onto that program on the Dock. I don’t see how copying it and then going to “Open” and pasting it there is anything but a waste of time. “

I have just gone to finder, dragged a jpeg image to the dock icon for FCP (which is open), and nothing happens… so this work around might work in some circumstances, for some applications, but it is far from a viable alternative as it does not work in FCP.

[Jeff Carpenter] “3) Type ‘Flower’ in Spotlight and then pick “Show All” right underneath it. You get a Finder window with your search inside it. In the upper right you see a ‘+’ button. This gives you more ways to narrow the search. Pick “Kind Is” and then “Image” and then “JPEG.” “

I just changed back to Tiger because leopard is making Motion crash all the time (known issue) but in tiger there is no + sign in spotlight, and no way to sort by image type.

Also once you have gone to an app from the spotlight finder thing, you cannot cmd-tab back to it, it does not show up as an icon to alt tab back to…

tx
Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

14/ i like the way in xp you can rh mouse click on the desktop or in any folder and make a text file or another type of file, and you can customise what shows up on the RH mouse click.

15/ i havent found the osx way to choose which application opens what file type… but im sure this must be possible?

Now its sunday and im off to the office to restore my system image to Tiger – too many problems on Leopard with FCP… despite no warning from Apple about the major problems.

thanks again for the input Jeff,
all the best
Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

lol
Thanks for your patience and good reply jeff.

i guess i had 3 points, but some contained more than one point – so i should be more specific…

OSX:
1/ cannot see file size in file open or save as requesters

2/ cannot open a finder to go to the directory you see in file open/save as (which one may want to do if there is a problem or orgainisational change one wants to make

3/ copy and pasting a path is extremely useful, say you drag and drop your one file to the dock icon, close Finder and return to Final Cut. You are working away and want more. XP would allow you to press CTRL-O, paste the path, and go to the directory immediately. Or you open an application which is NOT in your dock and do the paste path trick. It really is very useful.

4/ change names in file open or save as requester is very useful if you happen to see you named something incorrectly, or you want to import something but would like to alter its name without having to first navigate manually in finder first… so here again a RHmouse click to show in finder would be very handy.

5/ when i get to work i will try the finder + thing, thanks, but its pretty annoyingly dumbed down before you do any mousing around. Pity a preference isnt avail to have all the details there in collumns as in windows.

new ones:
6/ no cut and paste of files to manage. In 15 years of pc use, ive never lost a file by cutting and pasting to a new location. I really dislike the way osx treats users like dummies, so you have to copy files, navigate to paste them, navigate back to delete the originals… messy and irritating.

7/ shrink a window by clicking on the little button then alt-tab does not bring it back. Consistently annoying behaviour, when you shrink a window in xp, then alt tab to it, it immediately pops up as it should! why else would you be alt-tabbing to it if not to see it!

8/ windows within programmes cannot be alt-tabbed to. Often at work i use entourage to do emails. When writing an email, a separate window pops up and i write. Then I need to reference something in FCP, so i alt tab to FCP. The alt tab back to entourage and what do you know, the new message window is gone. Alt tab some more, still gone! It is not gone, but hidden behind the application. In xp you can alt tab separately to the app and the new message window in the app. Also can alt tab to separate iterations of, say, microsoft word, or adobe acrobat etc.

9/ osx seems to only have one level of undo!? ouch!

10/ in writing any text in windows, pressing CTRL-Right arrow takes you to the start of the next word. For some very strange reason, mac have assigned the opt key to do ths same thing. Problem is the opt key is not right next to the arrow keys, so you have to look down from your typing to find the opt key… not what a touch typer wants. I’d LOVE to hack/change this one.

11/ one menu bar for all applicatons – if you have dual screens and different apps on different screens in different positions, having to rotate your head so far, and move your mouse huge distances on screen to simply access the menu bar is really one of the most awful things about mac. If you click on the desktop by mistake you have to then go back to the app you had selected, select it, then navigate back to the menu bar. Really not good. When working on a window, i want all my buttons, tools, menu items, everything i need as close as possible so i can work as quickly as possible… seems pretty obvious.

12/ one of the things i really dislike about Vista (a complete failure of an OS, IMO) is is the way it asks you for a password each time you want to install something or perform some tasks. I think once i have logged on as administrator, i should be able to do anything i want… and dont want to be protected from myself. It reminds me of the morons who run London who have removed the beautiful old double decker red busses because they have a platform and no door at the back,and people might leap off into oncoming traffic. Hell if they are that thick, perhaps they should leap! Having said that, i managed to render my system unuseable by toggling all the disk permissions the wrong way and when i rebooted, no OS was available to me – had to get IT dept to sort it… there was no warning about the gravity of what i was doing, and no indication whether dark or light buttons were selected.

13/ slow. i know im comparing apples and adobes, but running premier pro on a quad core pc with no capture card accelleration, i get a lot more snappiness and real time than fcp on my 8 core… but that might be fcp being sluggish, not osx.

BUT
i do like osx, its stable and ver pretty, and is a whole LOT better than VISTA.

BTW
i bought PathFinder – at least one can copy paths, and has a more powerful intrface than Finder (though leopard’s quick view is bloody gorgeous)

peace out…
Mark

[Mark Palmos]

i guess if its a system keyboard command i may be able to programme it to be something that does not require looking at the keyboard then doing finger gymnastics! – like the little key to the left of the 1 which is ` in the UK.

thanks Dave
till later
Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

hello marcelamp
After making an image of my system drive, I installed Leopard and found Motion worked, so did FCP, but playback of Motion clips in FCP always caused FCP to freeze… so back to Tiger come Monday.
I hope you also imaged your drive first?
Mark.