OxCreative
2009
A couple of days ago (31st January 2009) I received a birthday gift from my wonderful girlfriend -  a 320 gb seagate freeagent go (silver). Now whilst I work on a Mac, I  suggested for her to get me the standard one as opposed to the 320gb seagate freeagent go for mac (silver) which is approximiately $60 more for very little difference.
So after picking it up from the postal office after initially missing the delivery, I was excited to open it and try it out. I ripped open the packaging and plugged it into my macbook pro and waited… and waited and, to my utter disappointment after 10 minutes, still nothing happened.
I quickly went to the seagate website to find out what was wrong. Apparently, some macbooks and macbook pro’s have low usb power and not enough to support a 2.5″ drive. Seagate suggested I would need a usb Y-cable (which draws power from one port and power and data on the other).
As usual my impatience got the better of me and I went to good old reliable Google to scour the wondrous world of forums filled with people’s problems for mac usb power issues.
However, every link I clicked in Google, was flagged up as potentially containing malware and being harmful. My first thought was that I had some sort of hijacking malware on my mac which was affecting my browser and causing the issue.
Google's self discipline
I spent a further 30 minutes looking into anti-malware and spyware removers for Mac before I had the idea to test Google on another computer. Low and behold – Google was wrong!
Due to the usual reliability and problem-free searches I have with Google, the most logical answer to my problem was the last one that I thought of.
It just goes to show that just because something is usually reliable doesn’t mean it always will be.
2008
After just a month of getting nowhere with some pretty bad customer service at Adobe, Design Premium CS4 has finally arrived!
Photoshop CS4 extended , Illustrator CS4 and my Wacom are the most important things for me to be able to do my job and I was hoping there would be some great upgrades from CS3.
I have only had a few days using the products but it is already clear to see what is good and what is bad.
Illustrator CS4 has a cool alignment tool which flashes up guides helping you line up to other objects on the page. It also highlights individual elements as you roll over them making it easy to see where everything is – this has been really useful for more accurate vector work.
Photoshop CS4 extended on the other hand has had some rather questionable upgrades.
In Photoshop CS4 extended,  the addition of OpenGL gives, according to adobe, the following benefits:
- Smooth Display at ALL Zoom Levels
- Animated Zoom Tool
- Animated Transitions when doing a One Stop Zoom
- Hand Toss Image
- Birdseye View
- Rotate Canvas
- Smooth Display of Non Square Pixel Images
- Pixel Grid
- Move Color Matching to the GPU
- Draw Brush Tip Editing Feedback via GPU
- 3D GPU features include:
- 3D Acceleration
- 3D Axis
- 3D Lights Widget
- Accelerated 3D Interaction via Direct To Screen
Now this sounds great and I thought I am running both a high end Macbook pro (2.5ghz dual core, 4GB FB 1066mhz RAM and Nvidia 9600M GT 512mb Graphics) and Mac pro workstation (2x 2.8ghz quad-core xeons, 6GB FB RAM, ATI Radeon HD Graphics) this should be great and then I realise… they don’t support OpenGL!
Now, considering that Apple machines are supposedly the best for design and Adobe’s Creative Suite are also in the top running in their field, do you not think they would get together to discuss things such as support of a major feature within the most successful and popular image editing and graphic design software applications.
It’s not the end of the world, but it has been a major nuisance as it took forever to work out why the cursor was displaying about 15 pixels above where the actual cursor position was – so every time I clicked, it would select something 15 pixels below what I wanted!
Design Premium CS4 has some nice features and Illustrator CS4 has been vastly improved. I am hoping that OpenGL support will eventually become available so I can use Phtoshop CS4 to its full potential.