I hated it on Linux and I still hate it on Mac (And I think that Vista does it as well now). Text-smoothing. Or as I prefer to call it: text-blurring.
I think some people like it. I assume that they do, because it would be silly to build an operating system with a feature that no-one, including the designers, like. Actually, come to think about it, that doesn’t really sound that unrealistic…
Anyway, I don’t like it and I can’t make it go away.
A thing that I haven’t been able to solve to m complete satisfaction yet is the fact that Finder blows chunks. Or, as I prefer to put it, It’s just not very good.
True, Windows’ Explorer isn’t great either, but to me it is still ahead on some important points. I like the way Explorer’s tree view works. You have the tree on the left and the files on the right and you can navigate around with the arrows or press the first letter of a name to skip ahead and tap around between the tree and the files.
Finder has something similar but instead f having the files seperate from the folders, they are in the same tree. This means that if I want to go to the bottom of the files, I can’t. It also lists all folders together with the files (as opposed to at the top, like in Explorer) wich means that it is a lot slower to navigate through just folders than in windows.
And since there is no right-click button on the keyboard, I have no way of doing stuff like “open with” without a mouse or without using the brilliantly simple keyboard combination ctrl+f2 then E then arrow down then O then arrow down then arrow left.
I hear coverflow is new to finder in Leopard an while it looks impressive when browsing images, it is pretty useless in every other way.
So that’s why I have turned to third-party Total Commander-like solutions, or more specifically: muCommander. It works pretty much like Total Commander except that I can’t find a “copy in background” feature. This doesn’t sound so bad until you have tried it and then has to live without it.
Also, I haven’t found a batch-rename function, but then again, I haven’t looked that hard. Since iTunes insists on managing it’s own file-structure, I don’t really have that many files to rename yet.
Oh, and iTunes is another program that I haven’t found a good replacement for yet. It is not that iTunes is bad per se, but it’s non-existent handling of wma and ogg files, among other things makes it, again, less that optimal for me.
Lasty, I should mention Spotlight. It is one of those features that I overlooked to begin with because the similar feature in windows is slow and only usefull in certain situations. Because Spotlight is so damn fast however it seems like it might be a lot more useful that that and could be used as a way of navigating to specific files or launching applications. Give it a try, if you are like me and have just recently switched.
This is actually the primary reason why I wanted my blog up and running right now. Two weeks ago I got homw from the US and waiting for me was my new 2.2GHz Macbook Pro. And I want to talk about it. So this is the first in a number of posts about my experiences.
I am a long time windows user. I don’t have a particular religious reationship to my operating system, but I am geek enough to actually use phrases like “my operating system”. I was also getting a little fed up with it and wanted to try something else. I installes Linux a while back but as you can read, it wasn’t a great success.
The it happened that my dad was getting another chance to get a employee-pc from his work and I got offered if I wanted it.
I did.
Long story short: I could only select between 8 preconfigured systems and since I wanted a laptop there were only really 2 choices; the Macbook and a Dell “mobile gaming” machine. I don’t like the screens I have seen on Dell’s recently and in adition that package also came bundled with so much fluf that in the end the Macbook was almost as powerfull as the Dell. So I thought ‘what the hell, I can install XP on it if all else fails’ and I went for it.
First impresions when I got the box were very good. The machine looks good in brushed aluminum and the design is very classy. It also has a lot of slick features to impress a new user, like the automatic dimming of the screen to fit the lighting conditions in your room, the softly lit keys and the remote control.
Of course, It turns out that the light sensor is right where I like to rest my hand when not using the keyboard, rendering the auto dimmer virtually useess. But hey, It was fun when it lasted.
There are also some things that I am less impresed with: There are only 2 USB ports (my old machine had 3 and between a wacom board, 2 external harddrives and various other paraphenelia it wasn’t uncommon for me to use them all). Also, all the connections are at the side of the machine because of the way the screen folds back. I feel it would have been better to put some of it at the back. I like to have my mouse next to my machine. Not a bunch of cables.
There is no flashcard-reader (again, my old machine had one. When I got that I never thought that I would actually use it, but it turned out to be really convenient when emptieng digital cameras.)
The keyboard seems a bit small. I am missing my page up, down, home and end keys and the enter key is also a bit small. Why, for instance, is the Caps Lock key larger than my enter?
The I booted the machine up, and that is when I realized that I had a lot of learning to do.
…to “real” copies in maya 7 can be done with a script that comes with the bonus tools.
It is really bugging me that so many simple things are so difficult to figure out how to do!
Hello. Long time no see and all that fluff.
I have been working on bachelor for a long time now, so time has not been in ample supply.
Apparently, to get the best result with your zdepth layer and depth of fielld, you need to render your images in double the final size and the zdepth layer must not be anti-aliased. I haven’t seen a convincing example of why not yet, but it makes sort of sense so I am willing to play along.
Problem is, we use a custom mentalray shader for DOF and mentalray has not been very happy to refrain from anti-aliasing the zdepth layer. Even setting min and max samples to 0 didn’t do the trick for us.
In the end we found that you also needed to set the filter type to traingle. A width and height of 2 is fine, but you need the triangle filter.
You hear that google? No anti-aliasing in mentalray by using triangle filter with 0/0 samples!
Now to solve that render layer crap.
So I installed Linux (OpenSUSE 10.2 to be exact) on my laptop and have now spend the most part of the evening trying to get it to do the things that my windows machine can do out of the box; like displaying text without mutilating it.
To be fair though I have found some things that Linux does as just as well as windows and I quite like the global spelling check.
But I don’t know how to make a shortcut to display the desktop.
A funny thing is that somehow my files don’t really feel real. I mean, in windows I open explorer and browse to where I want to go and there it is, with the little icon and the little text that tells me what the file is called and the little numbers that computers are so fond of and I think to myself: that’s my file right there alright. Good old file. Linux does all the same things, mind, I just miss the same feeling of actually having the file there.
It’s a bit like the difference between having someone tell you that the really hot chick in the bar has got the hots for you and having her actually come up to you and start kissing you.
But I might grow to like it. Who knows.
(Message from the future me: “I do. You won’t.”)
IE7: The most unstable crap I have ever experienced. Worse even that 3ds max. ARGHH! I can’t wait to get back to my own machine tomorrow…
I just needed to get that out of my system.
Play have always shipped overseas and still do. I figured it out a few days after last post, and now figured I would set my record straight.
I also wanted to say something sarcastic about the new Windows Vista, but then I read up on the subject and found that while it is still ridiculous, it isn’t ridiculous in the way that I was led to believe and I can’t come up with anything now.
I don’t know when it happened but Play.com has apparently stopped taking international orders. This sucks. They were my all time favorite online shop because they were cheap and had free shipping to denmark. They are still cheap but now all that does for me is to make it painfully clear how cheap stuff could have been.
In other news I am in Copenhagen, and like last time that means I don’t want to update the site. Actually I should be home and eating food, but here I am instead.
But not for long. Later.
This ICQ quote made me laugh quite hard:
TheWickerMan: Please learn to read.
TheWickerMan: Before you call anyone else a moron.
RobotG: im not a moren
RobotG: mrono
RobotG: mrone
RobotG: monor
RobotG: mrnor
RobotG: wops
TheWickerMan: swing and a miss.
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