It’s Day 4 and the PC is angry, it’s coming after me and wants to re-enslave me! Well not really but PC is very sad. My original plan when purchasing the new MacBook Pro was to maintain the PC for media and data work. The more I work with the Mac I realize the many ways I may not need the old PC. This helps to explain the YouTube video above, there’s a better explanation below.

Today’s MacBook adventure started with a phone call to my friend Jeff of 10 Volt Media. When I visited him in Chicago two years ago he was telling me the wonders of Mac and how awesome they have become. His words exactly. I knew he had answers to questions and issues that that surrounded my new Mac experience.

Boot Camp or Virtualization

The major question I had centered around replacing the PC, in some cases I’m forced to use the Windows environment, especially with web development; Internet Explorer is not available on Mac. In thinking of replacing the PC, I needed an alternative while keeping the Mac relatively Windows free (no offense Microsoft). My question was, what are my best options for running a Windows environment? Should I install boot camp or use virtualization? While boot camp provides the best performance, it partitions a portion of your hard drive for Windows. You’ll never see that space again! With virtualization, you can create Windows instances that after being used, disappear and free up the resources it was using, but you’ll take a performance hit. With boot camp you have to restart your machine, but with virtualization machines you run them within OS X.

In my case, I won’t be using Windows for many time intensive tasks. I’ll be utilizing one or two programs and not a lot of space. In my current situation, virtualization is the best option. If I were playing graphic intensive games, boot camp would be the way to go (more about me and games in a later Mac Life post). After deciding on the method of using windows, Jeff pointed me towards VirtualBox, a free virtualization machine he likes better than Parellel or VMware. He also pointed me towards and a screen cast he created to demonstrate how to use VirtualBox to preview websites in Internet Explorer. For any Mac based web dev, this video is a great resource to use!

Writing to NTFS Drives (or how to use your old external Windows based hard drives)

In my quest to replace the PC, I found a way to manage the USB hard drives that were formatted in NTFS, the Windows file format. I’ve mentioned problems writing to external hard drives previously formatted in Windows Vista. The solution is to install MacFuse with the NTFS-3G driver, which gives Mac the ability to read and write to these drives. After a simple installation process, a restart, I had complete access to my old hard drives. Happiness ensued!

More fun with iMovie

On the creative side, I decided to play around with iMovie a bit more (evident by the YouTube video at the beginning of this post). I really wanted to test out the iSight camera to see how great it was, this gave me an opportunity to have fun with one of Mac’s neat features. In a world where video conferencing, video casting, and video is becoming more important, I believe the iSight camera has become a necessity opposed to a “cool” add on.

After filming myself with the camera (a really simple process), I wanted to play around with iMovie’s video effects. While simple, these effects change the tone of a video, I found it hard to find them at first, but once I did applying and adjusting them were a piece of cake! In order to use the video effects, double click on the video footage you want to apply an effect to, and then click on “effects”. The current list of effects are great, but limited, I wish there was a way to add more (is there?) Another great feature of iMovie is the ability to add voiceovers, or providing voice to already filmed footage. This was an easy, simple and enjoyable (my ad-libs, not so much.)

Although iMovie is great, three problems keep reoccurring:

1. iMovie does not support .gif’s
2. Images aren’t resized to fit the viewing area, when placed in a movie they are centered and slowly zoomed out (I think I’m doing something wrong and have to investigate this).
3. Uploading to my YouTube account does not work properly (I believe it has to do something with tying my YouTube account to my Google account.)

More fun with Photobooth

While the iSight camera is great for video, I wanted to see how well it did with still photography. Photoboth, a picture taking program, utilized the iSight camera in a very cool way. While you can take regular still photos with it, you are able to apply cool effects to the photo’s as well. While it is a bit gimmicky, and definitely one of the “cool” Mac features.

Here, have a picture!

Naming the Mac

I hate calling the new laptop “The MacBook Pro”, it’s like calling a pet cat, cat unless it’s name is Cat. I’ve been thinking of a few names, and going to choose one shortly, currently they are:

1. Avalon
2. Maccy
3. Awesome Sauce
4. LC (My first Mac was a Macintosh LC)
5. BSOD (Hey, some geek humor!)

I would love to hear your suggestions for a computer name!