A few months back, I blogged about how I was switching from Microsoft to Apple. At the time, I purchased a MacBook Pro and was so impressed I went on to purchase a Mac desktop. It’s now been quite a few months and I can report I am more impressed with the MacBook than when I first bought it. It’s been stable and the start-up time is so fast, it’s probably paid for itself already.
As for the desktop, I really like it but I find the high-resolution screen has given me a couple of problems:
- The high resolution makes everything look good as well as very sharp. It seems to hide problems that would otherwise be identified when viewing on my PC. There has been occasion where I have finished editing an image, only to move it to my PC (which has a 1080 HD resolution) and find it’s not actually sharp.
- If I record a screencast or edit video on the Mac, its ends up being 10 – 20 times the size of a recording on the PC. This makes the file sizes too large to upload over traditional broadband (I can’t get fibre where I live).
I’m sure there are ways around these if I search hard enough, but I don’t yet have time.
One other problem I came across (and fixed) is when I plugged my Drobo into the Mac. Currently I have two Drobo units which store my back catalogue of images; literally hundreds of thousands of files. When I tried to access the images from the Mac, I found I could only read them and that I wasn’t able to write any changes or new images back to the storage.
After some research, I found this is because the disks were formatted by my PC to use Ntfs storage. The only way I could change this is by formatting the drives in the Drobo and starting again. That may sound simple until you realise there are several terabytes of images involved and where can you put them whilst you do the work. Even just trying to copy the data could take weeks.
Eventually I found a great piece of software from Paragon Software called NTFS for Mac. Once installed this will allow you to read and write to NTFS disks. It works seamlessly in the background and you don’t even realise it’s there. I think it cost me around £12 for a license but checking just now the price is £16.99.
If you move to a Mac and you have images on large external drives, you will probably run into this problem. NTFS for Mac is a very neat, cost effective solution.
