After almost three years and two MacOSX upgrades, my MacBook Pro finally came to the point where I needed to do a re-install. Too many installs and uninstalls of programs and all these upgrades had left the Pro unstable with frequent hangs-ups.
Being no stranger to re-installs (e.g., every year my XP systems get re-installed), I expected better than XP and got positively surprised. After doing one backup in addition to my regular Time Machine and Chronosync backups, I formatted the hard drive and did a fresh Snow Leopard install. During the install, I used the Migration Assistant to restore from Time Machine all of my user settings and data except for the program (since I had many that I did not need any longer).
The results were spectacular. After 2 hours, my MacBook Pro was ready, with all the Apple apps installed and all data present. Once click on mail.app and all my mail was back. Ditto with Safari – everything was preserved. I started to re-install one third-party app after another — for every app, it had retained the licensing info and they all worked again from the very first start after finishing the installation. The only exceptions were Adobe’s apps (Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3). Despite deactivating the Photoshop license, but not the Dreamweaver license, before erasing the disk, both apps did not run after the re-install. Everything else worked immediately and flawlessly.
Way better than any Windows re-built that I’ve ever done! I’m a happy camper today…
According to John Nack at Adobe, Infotrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America and found that more than four times more photographers use Lightroom to process RAW images than Aperture. Even on the Mac, Lightroom users outnumbered Aperture users by a factor of almost 2:1.
Why is Lightroom so much more popular than Aperture? I don’t know for sure, but I see four reasons:
- Many photographers already use Photoshop. Photographers might have given the initial nod to Lightroom simply due to familiarity with Photoshop and the Adobe brand.
- At its heart, Apple is a hardware company. While it has had a pretty good track record with its pro applications, Apple might be perceived as more likely to abandon them than Adobe, given that Adobe is purely a software company. Of course, Apple has deeper pockets than Adobe, but software is playing a second fiddle there. Maybe even a third fiddle these days given the success of the iPhone.
- Adobe is the custodian of many de-facto public domain photo formats, including TIFF and DNG. There is simply trust in Adobe to keep continuing this role and thus keep continuing to be focused laser-sharp on the photography market.
- Adobe has many existing relationships with camera manufacturers, thus they are able to provide support for new camera models very quickly. Of course, a number of the camera manufacturers are afraid of Adobe’s market power, but then, so are they of Apple’s, let alone Apple’s track record of not really caring that much about its ecosystem.
Personally, I’m not a professional photographer, but there were two more reasons why I ended up in the Lightroom camp: I got my Lightroom 1.0 license for free as part of Adobe’s acquisition of Pixmantec, the developer of Raw Shooter Pro, which I used before. Plus, I keep continuing to travel with a Windows laptop, thus I need Lightroom on both the PC and the Mac. And that rules out Aperture.
Why do you use Lightroom or Aperture?
It’s Fall – this means it’s time for the Mac bundles again. First off the starting line this year is the MacFriendly bundle.
I’ve learned about it while investigating MacSnapper for a potential project that I might be working on during the Fall. At $49.99, the MacFriendly bundle is a mere 99 cents more than the MacSnapper app, so there is no question what I will do should the project come through and I decide I will need MacSnapper.
Of the other bundled apps, Cocktail is a staple of my Mac house-keeping and highly recommended. I also have a copy of MacJournal, but do not use it. Similarly, there are a few apps in the bundle that I might never install, since I have other, competing products that I like and want to keep.
As a photographer, I’m very intrigued by 3D Image Commander, since it looks much easier than Photoshop to apply 3D effects. Iris might also be of interest as a quick photo fixer, if I don’t want to break out Photoshop for a small task.
The good thing – you can download trial versions of all of these apps, so feel free to try them before committing to a purchase. Sorry, Mac only.
Price: $49.99 from MacFriendly.
A new study by CFI Group titled CFI Group Smartphone Satisfaction Study 2009 confirmed what many of us already knew or at least suspected: We love our iPhones and hate AT&T.
But we are an enduring bunch: Despite AT&T’s woes and its last place in customer satisfaction, we are not willing to give up the iPhone. Sure, if another carrier would offer it in the U.S., half of us would bolt – especially if that other carrier were Verizon, since they are seen as having a rock-solid network, but no cool smartphones.
Also not surprisingly to us iPhone users, applications are what really differentiates the older smartphones from the new breed, which utilize apps to offer more than simple vanilla email, calendar and address book functions…
For more details, the study is worth a read!
