New computing setup: Apple + Google

A Mac book enters my daily routine and brings about a major change of my software habits.


People who know me know that I have been a long time Linux user (since 1995, more or less). But when my faithful Linux PC started showing signs of aging (with some upgrades, I had been using the same machine for 5 years) I decided to expand the search to other platforms. The major problems with Linux were related to speeding up my photographic workflow and managing a growing collection of pictures, the trouble in handling moderately exotic hardware such as my digitizing tablet, the lack of key software like desktop search. Linux handles poorly each of these tasks. Moreover, I wanted to get a laptop, and the only way to avoid paying for a useless copy of Windows seemed to be buying an apple machine. Linux laptops are overpriced and switching to windows was not an option. Apple laptops have excellent design, but are little pricey and not record-setting on battery life. Moreover they offer decent backward compatibility with my old computing environment being based on a Unix-like core. Finally, they come with a good photo management program, iphoto, beautifully executed desktop search (spotlight) and, as I found only after the fact, can make the most of my digitizing table.

So I settled for a refurbished 15' Mac book pro Core Duo with 1GB of RAM and 92 GB disk. From my old setup, I recovered a 22" CRT monitor (a wonderful IBM p260 with a trinitron core, the mac doesn't like it too much as far as color calibration is concerned) a couple of USB hubs and card readers, a BenQ projector and a Wacom graphire digitizing tablet. I also added a free wireless router from Fon. The digitizing tablet can be used as an alternative pointing device but also to enter sketches and even text in many applications.

Iphoto proved to be a blessing, augmented with the Gimp for more advanced editing work and Google/picasaweb for photo sharing. Journler has become the choice for taking quick notes and documenting ideas and projects, because of its ability to accept different media like equations from latexit and sketches from the built in OS X ink sketchpad and the tagging features and integration with spotlight search. Latexit is a blessing because it allows me to edit equations in the latex language I am familiar with and use to write paper. The equations are exported in pdf, which makes several applications able to accept them, but the pdf can be pasted back into latexit for further editing thanks to some incantation I can not explain. This brings to the next point, since the open source Impress showed to be way too buggy to be usable, so i forked the money for Apple's keynote, which not only accepts said equations as well, but also uses the dual monitor features in a very valuable way. Moving equations seamlessly between my notes, papers and presentations is my personal version of the squaring of the circle. Itunes handles music and podcasts satisfactorily, which beforehand had been off limits for my desktop machine. I use Apple Mail sporadically, preferring gmail, and likewise I use google reader reserving Vienna only for long stretches of offline reading. Too much has been said of gmail and reader, but I'd like to point out the availability on the laptop and on my PDA/phone, a treo 650, which allows to have a consistent view of one's data from either device (which means that I have to mark a message read only once). The browser is firefox but after adding too many interesting extensions I think the speed and stability is not what it should be. The open source Calc is good enough for my spreadsheet needs. Missing sync provides good integration between the treo and Apple application like Addressbook and calendar, and also moves a bunch of pictures and podcasts to the telephone's card. Emacs, Vlc, Google Earth and Google Video Player complete the picture, at least for this post. Maybe I will provide more details later.

The Googlification of my computing environment was already a strong trend before but has been furthered by the choice of picasaweb, which is very nice and plays well with iphoto, and the use of video chat in iChat, using google as a server. All in all, I think the switch to the Mac allowed me to get more out of my machine while simplifying other tasks, and I am so far happy with the choice. Google is also consistently providing the best web apps for me, and when it is not the integration with the rest and reliability win the day.