Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Hip Hop Voices 2: Chip…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Really, that's f**king outrageous. Not only did Murray essentially give the band a recording career (although Pagan did the first EP) but also supported them financially.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Sacha,
though for what is one of the most well-made and successful digital tools ever?
Sure.
However the full suite is close to NZ$4k and incremental upgrades (you can now only upgrade from the last version - that's a pricey change this year) are over a grand each.
Much of what is in the box (or download) is merely an interface update each time.
I suspect they have long since recovered any costs, made a voluminous profit and are in the black until Cs25 - and mostly the pricing now is simply that they can get away with it.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I've become a tad meh about Pshop's added features.
Given that most of the suite is mostly CS2 tweaked over and over, the price Adobe charges for it is simply outrageous. Still, as long as people pay.....
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Apart from the addition of layers and multiple levels of undo, Photoshop, like most flagship desktop apps, hasn't changed essentially in the 22 years that it's dominated its market.
What it has added in CS5 and vastly improved on in CS6 is the magical Content Aware. How it works I don't know, but it's freaking amazing - and it chews resources as it does so. Mostly I have to accept that Windows simply won't do it unless I head down to the pub, have a couple and wander back hoping that the box hasn't just frozen. Mac does it in a flash.
The other recent toy is the Adaptive Wide Angle - another CS6 wunder moment. It's ridiculously clever in working out what curves are natural and what are not. Never tried it on a PC.
Where I work, we actually installed generic DDR3 laptop memory in a MacBook 2010 model, and it didn’t like it so we had to order in some Mac-specific RAM.
The 17" MBP has six gigs of ram. It came with two (yikes) and I threw in a generic 2gb and a 4gb stick, which is 2 over the supposed maximum. It's run perfectly on that for 2 years (until Lion, but that's the graphics issue that has spread over 120 pages in the Apple communities thread on it last time I looked, plus acres of non-Apple web forums - they seem not to care).
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Even after all these years I suspect that the design community's apparent Mac bias is a legacy thing from that brief heyday when Adobe was a Mac-only developer.
The one thing that stands out with Photoshop is the instantness of everything. I use PS on both a PC (CS5) and a Mac (CS6) and the waiting time on the MS box just kills me - so mostly I don't. What is instant or close to it on the Apple machine grinds forever on the PC - and has a nasty habit of just crashing after a wait that seems to overwhelm it.
The Mac has Lion (and I wish I'd not - Snow Leopard is a much more stable OS graphically) and the PC has Win 7.
The other thing I prefer is the print quality. Same printer but the Mac's output is way more precise for some reason.
With Dreamweaver I like the screen render - what you get in DW's Live option on the Mac seems to be a reliably better refection of what you see when you look at it in the browser. As well it seems to FTP large files far more quickly than the windows version.
I also much prefer the windows management flexibility in both on the Mac targeted versions.
TBH I rarely use the Windows version of either these days.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to kiwicmc,
One thing Apple have disappointed me with is the non-upgradeable (or repairable) Retina Pro Mac book, essentially this beautiful piece of kit is a throw away after 4 years...
And the demise of the 17". I need every part of my screen plus some.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Must be SEA. No idea why.
Edit: maybe somebody in NZ said something mean about Lee Kwan Yu or the Thai king????
My blog was blocked by an algorithm here last year for a day or two.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Russell Brown,
I fully accept that Macs don’t meet your particular needs. But they work really well for ordinary folks.
And loads of folks who do kinda professional things with them. Every graphic artist I work with and pretty much every product designer I know uses Macs. I'd much rather use Photoshop and Dreamweaver on this MacBook Pro (with an added screen) than the PC box upstairs running Win 7.
I hate Apple's closed architecture and I'm throughly uncomfortable with what I see as a corporate culture as nasty as any of the other hardware suppliers, but they really do make much better computers than just about anyone else (although the continually dying airport - needs a reboot each time - on this machine is doing my head in today. Happened before but self-resolved so hopefully...).
PS: Much of NZ (nobody else) seems to be offline to Asia at the moment - I'm getting this via a proxy.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Gareth Ward,
Or you could conclude that HTC/Android (whole thing seems to be a proxy war against Google) ripped off the design work Apple did in both hardware and software.
I remember standing in an IT mall in Malaysia about a year before the iPhone arrived looking at new HTCs on offer - big glossy touch screens with buttons you touched to launch what we would now call apps. The screens scrolled and we all went wow...
That Apple invented the smartphone and gave us the design concept seems to have been handily absorbed into 21st Century mythology but the truth may be a little more complex.
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Against The Flow from UHP was the first NZ music I bought myself
That's a pretty decent claim :)
I loved that album when it first arrived (and still do). Stormy Weather had top ten written all over it - but it wasn't to be sadly.
We're finally coming to understand how important (and simply great) much of the early urban noise was despite the fact it was ignored by the mainstream media. At the time only the street press wanted to know about UHP and, at least in Auckland, even B-net radio was sparse.
Wicked piece, thanks Chip