Wayne Priestley

I would suggest reading the post below this one-first to familiarise yourself with the story so far.

As I was saying, I had decided to get myself a new MBP and give my Son the one I have now.

I was happy with this decision until I saw a few tweets from @Gazmaz about his predicament, he considering a iMac buy then started considering the idea of a Mac mini and a 24″ Apple display.

So this got me thinking once more, shall i get the cheaper 15″ MBP and a 24″ Apple display to give me way more real estate along with duel monitor set-up…

Then along came @DonMcAllister with his explanation of how he went from deciding to buy a Mac mini and ended up ordering a Mac pro…

So, so far I’ve gone from a Mac Mini to a iMac for my son.

Then to a new 17″ MBP for me, and giving my Son my old 17″ MBP.

Then to a new 15″ MBP and an Apple 24″ LED display.

But it didn’t stop there however, I use my MBP to make home movies with Final Cut Express, and organise my pictures with Aperture 2, and I’m starting to use pixelmator and a few other apps more often that require some serious hardware to get the best out of them.

So getting the 17″ MBP with 4GB of Ram as standard would be the way to go as it gives me the option to upgrade to 8GB and put in a SSD in the future.



Now this along with the 24″ display, Apple keyboard and AppleCare is going to cost a little more than I have available at present to invest.

So my plan is that in a few more months, I shall take another look at the 17″ MBP along with the 24″ Display and see how the finances are….

You can be sure that I’ll be posting my final decision once the time comes

My decision was simple.

Wait until the Mac Mini was updated by Apple and buy one for my Son who is using an old desktop PC with windows XP Pro installed.

The PC is about 5 years old and over the last 12 months it’s started to show signs of its age, and as I want to eventually switch all the family over to using Mac’s I don’t see any point in spending money upgrading the PC.

So when Apple finally updated the Mac Mini I was all ready to buy, until that is I had reason to visit the Apple Store in Liverpool to have a repair done on my daughters Macbook.



I took the chance to get a good look at all the new Apple hardware on display and have a bit of a play.

I was immediately impressed with the 24″ Apple LED displays.
With the LED backlight the images on the screen seemed to pop out at you, and the size…. Well, a bit overwhelming after sitting in front of the 17″ display on my Macbook Pro.

Even though the spec’s of the Mac Mini were given a serious rev, I still wasn’t sure how long my Son would get full use out of it as he likes his games on the PC, and for this reason XP will be getting installed on his Mac.

Because of the price increase in the Mac mini I started the think that after a few upgrades to the basic Mini, that the iMac was starting to look a pretty good deal.
And this is how the whole process started to get out of control, but more on that later.

I was so impressed by the service I received from the guys at the Apple store, even though the Macbook was out of warranty, I left the store and made my way home feeling quite good.

It was on the drive home when I started thinking about my options and how best to address the need of my Son and his new Mac.

At present I have a 2007 MBP with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 3GB of RAM installed.

It’s an extremely powerful machine and way out performs his current desktop PC as you could imagine.

So that got me thinking.
Why not get myself one of those new MBP’s and pass my current MBP along to my Son.

Good idea, I decided I would do this.

To be continued……….

Found some nice FREE Wallpaper for my Mac from Minimamente.

They’ve got all the most common resolutions available:

1280 × 1042
1600 × 1200
2560 × 1600

There are 8 color variations in total so finding one you like shouldn’t be difficult.
Mine is set to change the Wallpaper every 15 minutes.

Here is the direct download link from the Apple website.

A few weeks ago I received my copy of iLife 09, included in the iLife suite is the movie editing application iMovie.


After first using iMovie HD in 2007, then moving on to iMovie 08 which in my opinion Apple made a bit of a mess of, I decided to move to Final Cut Express because of the advanced editing features.

I was quite happy with FCE, despite it being slightly overkill for what I needed if truth be told.

After installing iMovie 09 I decided to edit some footage just to see hoe it compared to iMovie HD and FCE.

After turning on the advanced editing features and setting the preferences to how I wanted them I started editing away for all I was worth…

The improvements over iMovie 08 were immediately obvious from the start, everything I wanted to do could be found in iMovie 09, better editing, transitions and effects were easy to find, add and manipulate.

The easy of use over FCE was also apparent from the beginning, which I did expect. One thing to think about if you are considering FCE is that it’s not an application you can open every few months and get straight back into, less than regular use will result in you having to go through a bit of a learning curve whenever it’s re-opened.

I did however still spend about 6 hours making my iMovie 09 project.

I added a picture slide show in at the beginning, then some video along with many transitions and effects to get it to look just how I wanted.

After exporting and watching the final movie on my Plasma screen I was more than happy with what I had achieved on my first attempt.

Obviously I could have done a little more advanced editing with FCE, but after recently opening it up to do some work I found myself wanting to be back in iMovie 09.

So I’ve decided that I’ll be switching back to iMovie 09 for the time being, or at least until what I need a movie editor for changes from simple home movies to something a little more professional looking.

I’m sure that when I get a little time to go back to FCE and learn what I’ve forgotten I may decide to switch back.

Pipette is a handy utility for digital artists and web designers.
It allows you to quickly and easily grab the colour of any pixel on the screen and copy it in hex format, as used in CSS files, or in paint programs, such as Adobe Photoshop.

Pipette is a very easy to use, lightweight application – in keeping with Unix philosophy it does one thing and does it well.

And best of all, Pipette is completely FREE!

I’ve been using this app for a couple of days now and finding it very handy, if your doing any sort of design download, it and give it a try.

After a thread started by Western on the ScreenCastsOnline forum listing the app’s he had installed on his Mac and asking others what they had installed, I thought I’d share the contents of my application folder with you.

Full Size image Here

Out of this list there are a few app’s that I used every day and couldn’t do without:

• 1Password This is the ultimate password manager application.

• Aperture 2 Apples premier Photo management application.

• DropBox Free online storage and sync application.

• iTunes Music player and orginizer.

• iWork 09 Apples office applications, Pages, Numbers, Keynote.

• iLife 09 Apples Photo, Movie, DVD creation and web design tools.

• LaunchBar Indespensible application launcher packed with features.

• Liquid CD CD and DVD burning made easy.

• Mail Apples Mail application.

• Picturesque Add shadows, reflections and more to images.

• Scribblet Menu bar note taking application.

• ShoveBox Another menu bar note taking application.

• Skitch Screen capture application.

• Speed Download Download manager.

• Spotify Online music application.

• TextExpander Use shortcut keys to save typing those repetitive words.

• Things Organize your life.

• Twitterrific Twitter Mac client.

• You Control iTunes Control iTunes from your menu bar.

Most of the other apps I would use weekly and the rest are used only when whatever I’m doing requires them to be open.

Today Sunday 8th March 09 I visited the Liverpool One Apple Store.

It was a 3½ hour drive from my home, not the closest Apple Store but only an extra 30 minutes drive and I hadn’t been there before so I thought for the sake of 30 minutes I would visit a store I’d never been to before.

The reason for the visit was to have my daughters Mac Book looked at by an Apple Genius as she had a power problem.

Her battery was not charging and when the power cable was pulled out the Mac Book would instantly turn off.

It was an interesting drive, we experienced all weather conditions from blazing sun to snow blizzards.

When we got there we headed for Starbucks for a drink as I had about an hour to kill before my 3 pm appointment.

Once I got to see the Genius that afternoon I spent a few minutes telling him about the problem, I explained that the Mac Book was no longer covered under the 12 month warranty and I did not have Applecare for it.

The Genius swapped out the battery for one of their own and it instantly started charging so we knew it was a battery issue.

He plugged in a iPod Nano which he said had a battery diagnostic program on it and booted up the Mac Book.

A few seconds later a graphic appeared on the Mac Book screen with all the information about the battery.

My eyes were drawn straight to the bit that said “Battery BAD”…

All the graphics were red and reading through the rest of the information it was clear that there was to be no hope of a fix.

At the bottom of all the information displayed on the screen was a code number generated by the diagnostic program.

The Genius took this number and told me he was going to look up a few things and see if there was anything he could do.

A few minutes later he returned and told me that the code that was generated was unable to allow him to replace the battery free of charge especially since the Mac Book was out of warranty.

It wasn’t the news I wanted to hear from him, but all was not lost.
He said that because the Mac Book was only a month or so out of warranty that he thought the right thing to do was to replace it free of charge in the interests of customer service.
He would adjust the paper work accordingly.

I was once again a happy chap.

So off I went completely satisfied with Apples customer service in the same way I have read about from so many people in the past.

On the way out of the shop I stopped to have a look at the new 17″ MBP just to see how nice they were in the flesh.

I don’t know if it was just me or the fact that I was in such a good mood about the customer service I received but I decided that I would be buying myself one as soon as Snow Leopard is released.

This is not a selfish act from me, I was planning on buying my son a iMac to replace his PC as it hasn’t got much life left in it.

He wanted a laptop so he could move around the house with it, but for the money I had to spend he would be getting a 13″ screen which he was not looking forward to.

So it got me thinking, the new 17″ MBP, I could put a little extra money into the pot and buy the new 17″ MBP and give my son my 17″ MBP.

It was in some part down to the service and I’m sure if I had walked out empty handed I wouldn’t have stopped to admire the MBP.

So you could say by the Genius giving me a £90 battery for free, Apple will make another £2000.00 from me.

WOW.. is it going to work out as a £2000.00 battery

Here is the second AppleScript I’ve created.

It’s an image manipulation script that will resize an image to 200 pixels in length, keeping the hight in proportion.

How it works:

This file has been saved as a Application bundle Droplet.
You place this application on your desktop or within easy reach of where you work with your images.

The reason for this is that you must drag the image or images (this script has been written to process multiple images) onto the icon and the script will process the images and resize them for you all at once.

WARNING! This script WILL overwrite the images dropped onto it.

Best practice if you want to keep the original image’s would be to duplicate the them and place those duplicates onto the script droplet.

Please feel free to download the script.

You may change it, if you’re not comfortable doing that then mail me and I can modify it to convert images to a different size for you.

Resize to 200.zip

Spotify…

Well what is it?

I can only describe it as the best music service I had had the pleasure of using so far.

I’m using an invite so at present it’s free for me, so I could also describe it as iTunes without the need for a credit or debit card.

It is a streaming service so you’ll need to have a Internet connection to use it.
There is a option to purchase tracks from the various retailers from within Sportify but as of yet I haven’t tried this so have no idea of the cost or DRM etc.
The invite allows you to get the advertised based service, these ad’s are so un-intrusive I have yet to actually see one.

The ad free service is £9.99 a month.

The UI is not unlike iTunes with playlists on the left and a large pane on the right displaying the contents.

You enter your search into the top left search bar and Sportify goes away and finds all it can related to your chosen search.

Within the pane on the right hand side is displayed your results, with Track, Artist, Time and Album categories at the top.

You can create a playlist on the left and drag individual tracks into it or name the playlist with the artist and album then select the album on the right and drag the entire album into your playlist.

If you’d like an invite so that you can use Spotify for free,just leave a comment or mail me and I’ll sort you one out.

Please just check first to make sure you can use it in whatever country you are in.

Trying to have a video conversation with someone on a PC when your on a Mac isn’t as easy as you’d think.

I spent a few hours on this problem to help my daughter talk to her friends on their PC’s from her Mac.

After Googling, and spending a few hours searching through the results and going to links suggested by Twitter users I ended up looking at aMSN, after a recommendation by @SwitchMac.

I was a little confused at first, thinking he was talking about MSN for Mac.
After heading over to their site I downloaded the software and installed it on her Mac.

It’s not the fastest messenger app, nor is it the best looking UI, but it’s not even up to version 1 yet so give it a little time and there should be some nice improvements such as audio conversations.

After a few minutes it was installed and she was up and running.
Starting a video chat was straight forward once she found a friend willing to have a video chat.

I was surprised that aMSN hasn’t been blogged about a little more as it’s a very simple way of Video chatting with Pc users.

It has some plugins available along with some different skins so you can customize the look to the way you like.