Apple | Mac
OS X Yosemite has been out for a while now, and I’m enjoying the heck out of using it. It’s probably the most full-featured OS release Apple has offered us in quite a while. While you’ve probably read plenty about the hero features, it’s still worth reading John Siracusa’s full review. At 25 pages in length, it’s about as in-depth as you can get.
Apple | Mac
I first reviewed SmoothCursor last November, and it immediately found a permanent home on my Mac because it allowed me to adjust the tracking speed of my mouse and Magic Trackpad independently. Unlike most 3rd-party drivers I had tried in the past, SmoothCursor actually worked perfectly for me.
Since then, Troikalabs has updated SmoothCursor to version 2.0.5. Read more “This is your cursor on drugs…”
Apple | Mac
If you manage a group of five or more Macs, OS X Server may be worth the time to invest in. Exploring the Server App in OS X Server is a lengthy look at Mac OS X Server.
Adobe Illustrator
In part one of The iMac 27″ for graphic designers, I covered the reasons for choosing the late 2012 iMac 27” to replace my 2006 Mac Pro. As a graphic designer who works in Adobe Creative Suite apps all day long, with file sizes pushing the 1GB range, power is important. But as I found out with my MacBook Air, the Mac Pro just isn’t necessary anymore. Not only does the iMac have all the power you need, but it’s a much more elegant hardware solution, and significantly easier on the pocketbook. I also listed some of the pros and cons of the iMac.
Now I’m going to talk a bit about my experience actually using the iMac for the last two months.
Read more “The iMac 27″ for graphic designers: part 2”
Apple | Mac
After six years of using the original Mac Pro as my main workhorse, I finally took the plunge this past Christmas and upgraded to Apple’s latest 27” iMac. It’s the first Mac I’ve owned since the Quadra 650 back in the mid 90s that wasn’t a tower model. It was a scary decision for me, but one I’ve been delighted with so far.
The first thing I had to come to grips with is the revelation that I don’t NEED all the expansion that the Mac Pro has to offer. In the distant past, the days when a 16GB stick of RAM took you a year or so to save-up for, the Mac tower models were the only way to go for pro designers. The desktop models simply weren’t made for people like us.
But times have changed. With NO exception, every Mac model available today can easily be used by the most demanding print and web designers—this includes the MacBook Air and the MacMini. If you think you NEED more, you’re most likely overestimating your needs. Today’s Macs are powerful enough for working with Gigabyte sized files with as little as 8GB of RAM.
Now I didn’t say that every Mac model is a perfect fit, far from it. And that’s where my decision got difficult. Read more “The iMac 27″ for graphic designers: part 1”
General
Extensis has released Suitcase Fusion 4, and brought with it a few new features that designers will love. In doing so, Extensis has raised the bar for other font managers when it comes to integrating fonts in the print and web world.
For years (long before the OS X days) my font manager of choice has always been Extensis Suitcase. It’s always been reliable and worked as smoothly as can be expected. But when Fusion 3 was released, I began noticing problems. Nothing major, but it took forever to load, and the Fusion Core System Preference began to forget to launch quite often. It could have been my system and not Fusion, but I never found out. Overall it just wasn’t a smooth experience, so I switched to Font Explorer X and all was well… for a while. When Apple released Lion, however, Font Explorer began exhibiting all sorts of issues for me. As luck would have it, Extensis just released Suitcase Fusion 4. Within hours, it became my preferred font manager. Again.
At first glance, Suitcase Fusion 4 doesn’t appear to have changed much beyond the new icon (part of their new corporate re-branding). But use it for an hour or so and you begin to see they’ve changed much more than just its icon.
For starters, the problems I was having with slow load times of Suitcase, as well as Adobe InDesign with the auto-activation plugin installed, have gone away completely. Suitcase and InDesign both launch quickly and continued to run smoothly over the last two weeks. And because the Fusion Core is part of the app itself, there’s no System Preference amnesia to deal with anymore.
The first thing I noticed was that Extensis’ WebINK technology is fully baked-in to Fusion. Your purchased WebINK fonts show up right in Fusion’s font source list, as well as approximately 4,600 other available fonts for purchase and use on your websites. I actually use WebINK for the fonts you see here on The Graphic Mac – so it’s nice to have access to them right in Suitcase. But Extensis didn’t stop there.
You also have Google’s Web Fonts available at your disposal for use in any application. Google Web Fonts show up in the source list as a separate library as well, so there’s no confusion as to where a font came from.
All the past and expected features such as auto-activation in Adobe CS apps, font smart sets, and identification/keyword tools are available in Suitcase Fusion. The ability to leave fonts in place or add them to the Fusion Vault is still there (I prefer to use the Vault to prevent corruption and make backups easier), but a few more goodies are really what makes Fusion 4 a great upgrade.
Fusion 4 introduces an independent font panel into Adobe Creative Suite apps that not only allows you to preview fonts, but create customized font digests for specific projects. The panel requires CS 5 or higher to work.
On the maintenance front, you can now check for font corruption and clear font caches right from within Fusion – avoiding the need for other 3rd party utilities. But the new feature that really made my day was QuickMatch.
Selecting an available font from your installed fonts list and clicking on the new Quick Match icon displays a list of other fonts in your library that closely resemble the selected font.
OH HELL YEAH!!!
QuickMatch offers a slider to adjust the relevance of the matched results. You can also tick a checkbox to limit the results by font style or classification, making the task of finding just the right font quite simple.
To me, Quick Match is the killer feature that every designer will absolutely love!
And how’s this for cool… you can load an existing website (right from the web) and apply any font in your collection to the site to see what it will look like. Awesome! This is particularly useful if you plan on using the WebINK or Google Web Fonts technology I mentioned above.
Suitcase Fusion 4 is available for Mac OS X 10.5.8 and higher on an Intel Mac, and works with Adobe Creative Suite 3 and higher (I’m sure a CS6 plugin update will arrive shortly after Adobe releases CS6 to the public). The full version costs just $99.95, and upgrades from Fusion 2 or 3 cost just $49.95. A demo is available to see if Suitcase Fusion 4 is right for your preferred workflow.
With this latest updated, Extensis has cemented its dominant lead in the font management market, in my opinion. And it has certainly earned its place back in the Dock of my Mac Pro and MacBook Air.
If you’re in the market for a new font manager, or feel the need to use one for the first time, I HIGHLY recommend giving Suitcase Fusion 4 a try.
General
I recently got to use one for a day of design work, web surfing, and general computing, and got my answer. The Magic Mouse is compact, and glides smoothly on your desk. The cursor was very responsive, and not the least bit “jumpy” on any surface I tried it on, including my lap. But that’s pretty much where the love affair ended for me. 
With the exception of Apple’s iMac hockey-puck mouse years ago, I can’t recall ever using a more uncomfortable mouse in my 20-plus years of computing.
The very thing that makes it so stunning to look at also makes it so uncomfortable to use. After about an hour of working in Photoshop and InDesign, my hand was cramped from squeezing it. It’s just too low-profile for long-term use. I felt like I had to work too hard to keep control of it. While the touch clicking and scrolling was easy enough, using the limited gestures available was virtually impossible for me. I simply couldn’t hold the mouse and swipe at the same time without contorting my hand to the point of causing more cramps in my fingers. The amount of time wasted trying to get the gestures to work could be accomplished the old-fashioned way. Of course, nobody says you MUST use the Magic Mouse for your daily computing needs. Due to its compact size and Bluetooth connection, the Magic Mouse makes a great compliment to your MacBook Pro when you’re on the road. It’s also fine for users who may not require a lot of mousing around, such as writers or anyone who makes extensive use of the keyboard vs. the mouse. At $69 though, the Magic Mouse is awfully expensive for a “backup” mouse.
Adobe Illustrator
That is, unless you want two of the most sought-after features that Illustrator users have been begging for since at least version 8.Adobe Illustrator CS4 brings those two huge features and a whole lot of existing feature enhancements to Illustrator users who’ve been patiently waiting. Multiple Artboards: Think of multiple Artboards as essentially multi-page documents, much like a page layout program, except that it allows you to have different size artboards within your document. So what’s the big deal you ask? Read on… Read more “Don’t upgrade to Adobe Illustrator CS4!”
General
I am assuming readers of The Graphic Mac are aware of Apple’s Font Book that ships with OS X (and is pretty robust in 10.5), and are also aware of the limitations of Font Book, as well as the need for a graphics professional to use a third-party font management application. And I know what you’re thinking: “Don’t we already have enough pro font management apps?”. Suitcase Fusion 2, FontAgent Pro 4 and of course the formerly free FontExplorer X Pro have been around for some time and each is pretty well established. So why a new font manager? Read more “Fontcase: Elegant font management”
General
Somewhere on the Web I came across an offer for a free issue of Inside Adobe InDesign, a monthly newsletter for ID users, and took advantage of the offer. You’ve seen these offers, get your free issue, no obligation, cancel at any time, blah, blah, blah. About three weeks (give or take) after I signed up, I received an invoice for $147 from Eli Journals (the publisher), stating that they haven’t received payment for my subscription yet. To be quite honest, I didn’t even remember what it was they were invoicing me for since I hadn’t received anything yet, so I tossed the invoice. About a week or two after receiving the invoice, I finally got my copy of IAID. It’s a 16 page, 8.5 x 11 glossy, full color newsletter which was pre-punched for a 3-ring binder. Nothing overly fancy about the design of the newsletter, but hey – I’m paying for the content, right?! Oh, by the way, I also got another invoice. I guess I’m spoiled with my subscription to Layers Magazine, which by the way costs 1/3 the amount and averages over 120 pages. The content of IAID fell WAY SHORT of what I was expecting, though maybe that’s my fault for expecting anything useful. Inside I was treated to the following content:
That’s it. $12.25 of my subscription for one issue, and not a single valuable piece of information as a pro-user, and about a page and a half of useful info for beginners. Perhaps I just received an older issue (it was Volume 4, Number 6 for whatever that’s worth) and the content has gotten better. Or maybe when you get the “free issue” you only get a portion of a full issue. Either way, I wasn’t impressed at all. This is definitely not something I consider worth the investment. Needless to say, I won’t be subscribing. Oh, by the way, I received another invoice a few days after receiving the free issue… I give them an “A” for persistence.
Apple | Mac
Every once in a while, you come across an application or utility that does very little, so little in fact that most people overlook it as trivial. But I like apps that do very little. It usually means they do them extremely well – it also means they tend to be affordable, if not outright cheap! 
I found myself in need of a “To-Do List” app for OSX. Now obviously I could just use stickies, but really, it’s more trouble than it’s worth and isn’t very handy. I also tried some To-Do-List type apps, but found that they were so far overkill that I got dizzy just looking at them. Entourage is a no-go because I don’t use it. Konfabulator has a nice simple To-Do list widget, unfortunately it not only costs $25 to use, but you’re stuck running a memory hog of a program just to have the list. iCal has one, but again, it’s a lot of effort. Enter Check Off. Check Off from Carpeaqua Software is a menu bar application that lists To-Do items in a drop down list, including a check box for when you finish the job. As you can see by the snapshot at the right, you can color items, create folders to group items and also type a brief description of each item if you wish. The list box automatically rolls back up into the menu when you click on any other app including the Finder. The preferences are slim, the ability to launch at startup and expand the list menu to fit all items in view are about the only options, but it really doesn’t need anything else. You can also print and export your list as a text file or HTML. The best part is, it’s 100% FREE. I can’t believe that I’ve never heard of this app before, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to see a small Macintosh developer not get caught up in feature-bloat syndrome. If you’re interested in a To-Do List application that knows how to stay out of your way, yet still do its job, I urge you to give this one a shot!