Geek-Speak Recycled: Mactab by Yann Le Coroller

December 10, 2008 By
Mactab by Yann le Coroller

Creativity is a gift, and discovering someone with a creative flair is a joy. I guess that’s part of why I like Macs so much; they look so good. Well, Yann le Coroller is a person with a knack for coming up with improvements to make the Mac (among other things) even better.

The pic is of one of his designs called the Mactab, an ultra-portable tablet Mac. The wireless keyboard protects the screen while in transit by clipping on using magnets. The tablet/screen has a stand built-in to allow you to orient it more like a traditional monitor (i.e. upright).

This is an absolutely gorgeous design – I really wish it was actually in production. With the advent of the Macbook Air, super-thin Macs aren’t fantasy any more, and the Modbook already provides for the tablet Mac market, so you never know… perhaps one day.

Check out Yann’s site, and his designs – especially the myBook, a small, semi-ruggedised Macbook that I also wish were actually available.

A very big thanks to Yann, not only for letting me use one of his images here, but for uploading a new version of his renderings for me! This article was originally posted in April 2008.

Filed Under: Art and Design Tagged With: , , ,

Geek-Speak Recycled: Mac vs PC

October 1, 2008 By

This post first appeared on Geek-Speak in March 2008. It has had minor updates to bring it up to date.

Cat fight!

Xbox vs Playstation…
Linux vs Windows…
Mac vs PC…
There are so many battles going on in geekland that it’s hard to keep up! Fanboys abound on all sides, and if you spend long in any forum devoted to a particular make of equipment, you’ll soon find someone pointing out that it “sux” and that “xyz” is the only way to go. I once read a quote, though, that made me laugh. It was just before the xbox360 came out (and I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember it exactly):

Let’s forget all the rubbish about which will be better: xbox360 or Playstation3, because we all know that if you had the money, you’d buy both of them!

So, with that attitude in mind, I want to tell about when I switched from PC to Mac, what I like about the Mac, and what I miss from my PC days.

I switched about two years ago because I’m attracted to shiny things. Oh, and because my PC was dying… I bought a Mac-Mini for £500 and I love it. It’s so small and quiet (my PC sounded like an aircraft was trying to take off under my desk). So what do I really like about being a Mac user?

  • Visuals: The computer itself is a delightful white box, about the size of a box of hankies. It just looks nice. But when I switched it on the visual treat continued. Shiny menus… the dock… even the desktop wallpaper all had a lovely clean look to them that sucked me right in. I’ve done a bit of study on NLP, and found that I’m a very visual person, so it’s no surprise that the visual niceties of MAC OS X and of the computer itself had such an effect on me. I know that I could have re-skinned Windows XP (and I did that a few times), but I liked MAC OS X’s look better!
  • Security – some say this is because nobody would bother writing a virus for a computer with such a small user-base. I don’t care, there aren’t many viruses for Macs and I don’t mind why that is! There have been some recent cases of Mac viruses being discovered, but they aren’t widespread. Still, it pays to be careful, so I have Clam AV on my Mac and I use the built-in firewall.
  • Simplicity – I used to call Macs, “PCs for people who don’t want to think”. Admittedly, not a very catchy put-down, but I honestly thought that’s all Macs were. I actually value the simplicity, though, because it means that many of the programs living on my computer work the same way… that’s not brain-dead, it’s good interface design! I’m also impressed that the OS does a good job of hiding many of the tasks and processes pretty well, so you only need to dive into the complex stuff if you really want to.
  • Simplicity again – I couldn’t think of a better title for this one… when you buy a Mac, you know you’re getting standardised hardware. Everything comes ready to go, and you know you won’t have any driver issues due to non-compliant hardware being installed in the base-unit. There’s a trade-off there, though.
  • Cheap software – iWork and MAC OS X itself are pretty cheap compared to MS Office and Windows. For a Scot like me, that’s important! No, seriously, I was surprised to discover that iWork was so cheap, especially given that it’s a great piece of software. I realise that high-end pieces of software like Aperture and Final Cut Pro are still exceptionally expensive, but for a home-user like me (who will never use those applications) the apps I want represent pretty good value.

Now… what do I miss from my PC days?

  • Cheap hardware! – There’s no denying that Macs are expensive. I know Apple say that they’re no more expensive than a high-end PC but, come on, for £500 I could have got a desktop PC with a 3d graphics card and a bit more memory than my Mac-Mini. Actually, yesterday, I saw a Vista laptop for under £500 with 3d graphics…
  • Easy upgrades – in the olden days, I would regularly open up my PC and swap out a component with a new item. That’s not so easy now, because the Mac-Mini is essentially a sealed unit. I realise you can upgrade the high-end Macs (like the pro), but I couldn’t afford one!
    A small update to this one – I did upgrade the memory in my Mac-Mini, but it wasn’t exactly easy. It involved popping the case open and dismantling the computer’s innards to gain access to the memory slots… it’s definitely easier to do this with a PC!
  • Software – Actually, this one is becoming less and less of an issue as time goes on. When I first switched, I struggled to find software for many of the tasks I’d been able to do on my PC. It’s still the case that I have to search a bit more for Mac programs, but they are there… it’s just that many more programs are written for PC than for Mac (supply and demand, though, isn’t it? There are more PC users so there will be more stuff written for them). My main bug-bear is that my dad has a more advanced version of Skype than me, simply because the PC version is further on than the Mac one.
  • Understanding – I used to understand the inner workings of the PC and Windows pretty well, while I find that I’ve never even seen the insides of my Mac and I’m having to re-learn about Unix while learning about Mac OS X. I could just let Mac OS take care of everything for me and I wouldn’t have to touch Unix, but I really want to know how things work under the hood so I couldn’t go down that route :)

The thing is, there are pros and cons to both platforms (and I could have thought of more for each). I’m happy with my decision to switch, but there are things I’m having to get used to, and things I miss about my PC. I guess it’s like anything else, really, there are always gains and losses in each decision (man, that’s getting a bit deep!).

Have you switched from one OS to another lately? What did you think? I’ve completely missed out Linux because I don’t have much experience of it… any Linux users out there want to chip in?

Image by audreym, used under Creative Commons License.

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Creating mindmaps with Mindnode

July 23, 2008 By

This final piece of software is Mac only – if you just want to read the conclusion of our mindmap series, click here

OK, so we’re onto the final piece of software for mindmapping; a rather nifty Mac utility called Mindnode. What’s it like?

Unlike Freemind and Mind42.com, Mindnode has been built specifically for the Mac. Whilst that does restrict its target audience a bit, it also means that it actually looks and feels like a Mac application. But is it easy to use?

One thing I have noticed whilst looking at the various options for mindmapping is that each has different keyboard shortcuts. Once again, Mindnode is a bit different with Return creating a new sibling node, and Apple-Return creating a new child. Interestingly, Shift-Return actually creates a new root node, meaning you can have several mindmaps on the page at the same time.

Dodgy layout on iPhone mindmap

The layout didn’t quite work properly
Click to enlarge

Once you’re used to adding nodes there’s not much else to this program. It does what it says in the tin: lets you create mindmaps. There is the option to recolour nodes and fiddle with fonts, but in the end all you really need it to do is draw a mindmap… and that’s what it does! I did find that the node positioning was a bit funny when just left to the default: it didn’t seem to realise that nodes were overlapping and just left them to it.

Some manual adjustments fixed the problem, but it is annoying. In the author’s defence, he is one man building what looks like a very polished application. The layout bug has been submitted, and I trust we will see a fix at some point. Other than this, though, Mindnode functions well, and even does that whole preview thing where the icon on your saved mindmaps is a tiny representation of the map you created.

Mindnode - iPhone3G

Mindnode – nice face, shame about the bugs
Yes, another test map – click to enlarge

I think Mindnode produces the best looking maps so far, but it does suffer from having to manually adjust the placement of the nodes. Generally a decent piece of software, and easy to use, but needs a bug-fix soon.

Download Mindnode here.


Conclusion

So, over the last few posts we’ve looked at what mindmapping is (taking notes in a visual way by drawing the relationships between terms), and some tools to help you make use of it. Freemind, which works on any platform that has Java, Mind42.com, which lets you work in your browser, and Mindnode, a nifty but slightly flawed Mac app. There are a load more programs, sites, and techniques out there – if you think I have missed anything vital, please post it in the comments.

The real trick with mindmapping is just to see if it works for you. If not, don’t sweat it… find another note-taking technique that does. Even if mindmapping does work for you, you may find that you work best drawing maps by hand. Who knows? I hope that I have given you some starting points to explore this… now go, try it out, and let us know how you get on :)

Other posts in this series:


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Ubuntu: Installation

April 23, 2008 By

Linux is hard to learn, undersupported, and generally a bit sub-standard. Right? Perhaps I came to the Linux game late on, but I can’t really think of a time when that was the case. Even using Linux workstations in the late ’90s, it still seemed fairly stable and good to work with.

Having said that, I’ve never got into using Linux as my main OS – preferring to stick with Windows and, lately, Mac OS X. I needed a free OS for a computer at work, though, and decided to give Ubuntu a shot – I’d heard plenty of people saying that Ubuntu was probably the easiest to install and get running.

Ubuntu logoSo, did it live up to the hype? Well, I visited Ubuntu.com and downloaded the latest CD iso. I popped that into the soon to be ex-Windows PC and rebooted. In just a few minutes (the PC doesn’t have a lot of memory) I was up and running in a Live CD version of Ubuntu. “Great”, I thought, “I can have a poke around before I actually decide to install it”, but in the end I decided to install without playing because I knew I was going to wipe the computer no matter what.

Installation was very easy – the installer guided me through, asking me whether I wanted to use the entire hard disc for Linux or repartition part of it. It asked me to set up a default user and password, and then proceeded to wipe the HDD and install the system. At this point I went away for a cup of tea, and came back an hour later to find that it was all done and just wanted me to take the CD out of the drive before rebooting. I did get a warning that, because I wasn’t connected to the net, some security patches hadn’t been installed, but I’m not too worried since that particular computer will never go online.

I was so pleased with how easy it had been to install Ubuntu on my work PC, I thought I’d give it a go on my Mac, using Boot Camp to let me pick which OS I wanted to use. I followed this guide, so I won’t go through the whole thing, but I will point out a few tricky points:

  • Boot Camp looks slightly different to how it looks in the guide’s screenshots, but the basic process of setting up the Windows partition is still the same.
  • To boot from the Ubuntu Live CD, I held down “C” when starting up the computer, rather than holding down “alt”. I don’t know if “alt” would have worked… but I know “C” did :)
  • You need to select “manual” when you get to the point of repartitioning your HDD, instead of picking any of the guided options. This is fine, but I had a confusing moment when I saw a list of what looked like six partitions on my hard drive. However, I opted to delete the largest FAT32 partition (it matched the size of partition I had set up through Boot Camp) and everything was OK. Not so much an issue, but just something that made me think very hard in case I erased the wrong partition!

From then on it was much the same as installing on the PC – create your default user and let everything install. 45 minutes later I had a working Ubuntu environment on my Mac-Mini. The bluetooth and wireless connections were both detected properly from the beginning, too, which I thought would be an area I’d have some bother with.

To boot into Ubuntu, then, you hold down “alt” when the Mac is booting up, and you’re presented with icons for two hard drives – Mac OS X, and Windows. Ubuntu is installed in the Windows partition, so you just select that and up comes your shiny new Linux system. Of course, you can leave the “alt” key well alone, and you’ll boot into MAC OS X just as before.

One final thing: after rebooting into Ubuntu for the first time, about 200 updates needed to be installed. This took a further hour, but I could have a look around the desktop and play with some of the programs while that was happening.

So that’s it – I installed Ubuntu as the single OS on a PC, and as an alternative on a Boot Camp enabled Mac… both fairly easily, and both without incident. Perhaps Ubuntu really is the simplest Linux distro after all!

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