Tips From Tony Blog

It’s now common and easy to hook the newest, “Digital” generation of guitars to your Mac and use them with Garageband. Cheap USB-equipped models are now commonly found at Target. (You can listen to a sample, here).

Higher-quality USB-equipped guitars and basses cost around $1,095 plus $200 for the USB upgrade. I predict that the upgrade price will drop as time goes by.

If you have an extra $4,000-$8,000 lying around, Gibson has finally started shipping its new (Ethernet-based) digital guitar at the beginning of December 2006, after around four years of promising, but not delivering. They have a high-end, classy website explaining why it was worth the wait.

I suspect that the Gibson ultra-guitars will be natively Mac-compatible at some point (at the moment, the software that ships with them is for Windows-only), given the fact that so many professional musicians use Mac laptops onstage.

The problem with recording guitars on Garageband is that it’s a purely analog sort of experience - You CAN add spacey effects if you have the right adapters to connect your Mac to your older, non-digital guitar. It’s nice, but barely one step beyond pure analog.

To go one step further than that, why not play a guitar and have Garageband transform your playing into the sound of a xylophone, tuned bongo drums or thousands of other instruments under your direct control? All that you need is a special translator-box (and $395).

I got my first taste of using all of our household computers as one, five-processor supercomputer. I suspect that it won’t be my last. I also suspect that YOU’LL be able to harness all of that idle horsepower in your building too, once the new Photoshop ships.

If you are using OS X 10.4 Tiger, there is a wonderful, built-in option that nobody uses except for big universities. If you pull down the blue Apple menu, and go to System preferences, and then click on “Sharing”, there is an “Xgrid” option. Don’t turn it on or anything, because there’s not much point, so far. I just wanted to point it out.

I finally found a way to get some practical use out of it myself, though - It works very well indeed. I have a zillion movie files stored all over the place, and the majority of them are NOT Video iPod-compatible. I just downloaded and purchased VisualHub, which allows you to use every Mac in the building to do the hard work of converting movies to another format.

I have every existing episode of the TV series LOST (without commercials), and I wanted to be able to watch them on a video iPod. I did the conversion once, using my MacBook Pro, and the process took around fifteen hours. Then, I decided to take advantage of Visualhub’s Xgrid option. It couldn’t be simpler to set up, and sure enough, a test run showed that conversion happened more than twice as quickly (I’m guesstimating, by the way).

The MacBook upstairs and my own MacBook Pro were cranking away hard, with fans blasting. I had included my son’s G4 iBook in the mix, but it didn’t help much, just as I had been warned in the VisualHub manual. Non-G5 PowerPC Macs are just not fast enough to help very much.

I don’t expect to do a lot of this sort of work, but I can see a glimmer of excitement for all of those folks with networks of Macs running Adobe products.

PREDICTING THE FUTURE

I can see this topic becoming VERY important to folks using Photoshop, once everybody has shifted to Intel Macs (and a faster network). I have cursed Adobe for a year now, for refusing to come out with an Intel-optimized version of its products. What’s the use of all of that lovely, high-end hardware if you can’t get decent speed out of it? By the way… if you are running Photoshop CS2 on an Intel Mac, make SURE that you are running the 10.4.8 update. Apple evidently put a lot of Photoshop-specific speedups into that version of the operating system.

Based on preliminary reports, Photoshop CS3 beta is able to make use of ALL of the processors that you might have available. This is triple-groovy, folks. Up to this point, every program worth mentioning has behaved in the same, old, worn-out way when confronted with multiple processors. One program can’t get much use out of more than two processors. In fact, those experimental eight-processor Mac Pro towers that folks are playing with aren’t much faster than a four-processor Mac Pro when used in the real world (as opposed to pie-in-the-sky benchmark programs). Up to now, real-world software runs out of steam long before the hardware does.

The missing piece is “multithreading”. I hear that it’s hard work to write a program that makes full use out of all available processors simultaneously, but the benefits are huge. For whatever reason, the folks at Adobe made the decision to concentrate ALL of their efforts on re-writing everything from the ground up. The long-term benefits will be really incredible… for Adobe, for Apple’s sales of big, expensive Macs, and for the folks who use Photoshop as a money-pump for their business.

I will be in San Francisco January 8-12, 2007 for Macworld Expo. I FULLY EXPECT to be able to mess around with Photoshop CS3 on a new, eight–processor Mac tower that I expect Apple to announce that weekend. I also predict that Creative Suite CS3 will eventually support Xgrid, which will be even simpler to use once OS X 10.5 (Leopard) comes out. I’m basing this on the fact that the numbers of processors are going up, and once a program is written to take advantage of multithreading, then it’s staggeringly obvious that more processors are better, and why not use the secretary’s idle iMac down the hall to help with the heavy lifting during lunch, or overnight?

Well, I’ve downloaded and installed the Public Beta version of Photoshop CS3 (which also includes Adobe Bridge CS3). Better than that, I’ve also downloaded the FREE video tutorial for Photoshop CS3 Beta, which taught me one thing, very, very clearly:

Adobe really HATES the idea of Apple taking business away from them.

A while back, six programmers at Adobe jumped ship and started working for Apple, and created Aperture, which is one of my favorite programs. It’s optimized for professional photographers, and it’s hard to learn (because it uses such advanced new concepts), but it’s really fast and easy to use, once learned. I took some classes, and I love it. It does not compete with Photoshop in any way.

Adobe DESPISES it, though - They want all of that pro-photographer business for themselves. Right around the same time that Apple announced Aperture 1.0, Adobe announced Lightroom, which directly competes with Aperture.

Now that I’ve taken the free Lynda.com tutorial for Photoshop CS3 Beta, I can see that Adobe is folding everything in Lightroom into the Adobe Bridge software that works with Photoshop CS3. Bridge is identical-identical-identical in operation to Aperture. Other than the shape of the magnifying glass (square vs. round), Bridge CS3 steals Apple’s ideas, down to the very tiniest details. I mean seriously - It’s time for Apple’s famous lawyers to start filing papers in court. I’m boggled - I haven’t seen such a blatant interface-theft case since Windows 1.01.

Other than that, I haven’t done much hard-core evaluating of Photoshop CS3 Beta’s speed. I’ve been letting other folks do the heavy lifting, so far. It seems to work fine on MY MacBook Pro, but I haven’t got any hard jobs to throw at it, so close to the holidays. I’m also aware that it has all sorts of issues, so I’m in no rush to be on the bleeding edge, quite yet.
I’ll keep y’all posted on any progress that I have made, though. Watch this space for further developments.

I’ve finally received my DiskWarrior 4.0 CD-ROM, and it was worth the wait. If you have an older, non-Intel Mac and already HAVE DiskWarrior, then there is no need to upgrade.

For the purposes of DiskWarrior having COMPLETE access to make repairs on any drive, it’s essential to start from a CD, rather than in the usual way.

Basically, running DiskWarrior is transparent, just like always. The same CD starts up my Intel-based MacBook Pro OR my 800-megahertz G4. The program works exactly the same way, with no surprises. It still takes forever to start up from a CD (eighteen minutes from pushing the power-button on the G4 until I had DiskWarrior ready to do some work). This is because there are over 100,000 teensy files in the operating-system, and they all have to load from a s-l-o-w CD drive.

The nicest bonus was how much faster DiskWarrior performed, once either Mac had finally booted up from the CD. It blazes through all of the steps, with no discernible delays. The G4 only took two minutes to entirely diagnose and then rebuild its internal 80-gigabyte drive’s directory. I didn’t time the MacBook, but it was equally, pleasingly zippy when rebuilding all of the big, stonkin’ external drives that are stacked all around my desk.

So, once again, if I had to forsake all other diagnostic & fixin’ programs but one, then I would still choose DiskWarrior with no hesitation at all. It has saved hundreds of people’s bacon during my career, and has NEVER made their lives worse in any way.

If you don’t have DiskWarrior in your tool-bag yet, then I suggest that you buy the CD version and RUN IT EVERY MONTH, without fail. That way, small problems go away before they mutate into big problems.

When I refer to big problems, I’m referring to LOSING ALL OF YOUR DATA because some power-sucking USB device (Epson printers, Zip drives, non-powered USB hubs) cause some derangement when your Mac is writing data. Then, the damage gets worse, invisibly. Finally, by the time that you can perceive your problems, then your Mac is flashing an icon on your screen instead of actually starting up in a pleasing way.

Macs running OS X REALLY CAN be “four nines” dependable (meaning up and running 99.9999% of the time), but they need to be maintained in order for that to happen. Part one is DiskWarrior, and part two is Applejack.

Run them both at the beginning of each month, and you will have a healthy, long-lasting Mac!

I’m writing this on my original-generation 15″ MacBook Pro, that I bought at the end of September 2006 for $2,799 (I tarted it up with extra RAM and a larger hard drive).

You can now buy a refurbished MacBook Pro IDENTICAL to mine, FOR $1,200 LESS, two and a half months later, directly from Apple! I suppose I should be angry or something, but I’m not - I love to see Apple cranking out new generations of hardware as fast as they can. It gives me something to aspire toward.

I suspect that there will be even newer (third-generation, full 64-bit) MacBooks coming out in a month, and Apple is dumping their old stock as fast as they can before the holidays are over.

Do I have any concerns about buying refurbished hardware? NOPE! I’ve recommended refurbs for decades, hundreds and hundreds of people have followed my advice, and I have never gotten back bad feedback as a result. In fact, this laptop is the first Mac that I’ve ever bought that wasn’t refurbished.

So, start thinking about excuses to buy a Mac laptop. If you were thinking about buying a desktop Mac, then I suggest that you re-think your strategy. Sixty percent of all Macs being sold are laptops, and there’s a darned good reason for it - There are NO drawbacks any more. In the old days, laptops were slower, or had limited capability for expansion.

Now, they are pure money-pumps for folks who use their Macs to make a living. I’m thrilled with mine, and never expect to buy a non-laptop for my own purposes, ever again.

So, here’s how it works:

If you go to this s-p-e-c-i-a-l Apple Store link and then scroll down to the lower right corner and click the red “SAVE” tag, then go through the process to buy something, then there is one, special, extra step that I’m requesting:

On the last page, just as you are ready to click the final button to confirm the sale, you will be asked for the Apple Agent Number. Please put in this number:

AA071743

That refers to me. If somebody buys something through that link and supplies that number, I get credit for the sale, and Extra Apple Bonus Points toward dreamy laptops in Tony’s future!

After I wrote this, I was asked about the newer vs. the older MacBook Pro’s:

I would have been a lot more enthused about the Core2 Duo Macs if they weren’t tragically crippled by Intel…Intel makes the motherboards, and the Core2’s have a 64-bit chip on a 32-bit motherboard. They can’t access more than 3 gigs of RAM, forever. The new, full-64-bit motherboards coming this spring will alleviate the problem, allowing up to sixteen exabytes of RAM. That oughta be enough, FINALLY :->

Of course, that’s all theoretical, limited by the amount of cash you’ve got, and how soon those 8-exabyte RAM chips start showing up at the Apple Store!