It has been over three months since I sold my 17″ PowerBook and bought a second-generation 12″ one. I have been nothing but pleased by the deal—in fact, I may have found my perfect setup.

I haven’t made any “Mac” entries in my ‘blog for a while, but I’ve been following the old adage “no news is good news”.

I have to admit that I think I’ve found the perfect, sweet Mac setup that works exactly the way I want it to. I cannot see myself buying any new Mac system for the foreseeable future, barring some radical new technological development (like a tablet mac—hint, hint…).

First of all, it took virtually no time at all to get used to the smaller screen real estate of the 12″ while on the go. I typically only use 1 or 2 apps at a time, and the “crowded screen syndrome” has been virtually eliminated thanks to Panther’s Exposé feature. Just hit F9 and select what I want to bring forward—cool as hell. The smaller form factor is an absolute joy to carry with me whilst traveling or just out and about. Airport Extreme means I’m easily kept in touch and I’ve even used my GSM Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone flawlessly as a wireless modem. Ubiquitous computing is now my reality.

When I get home, I connect 4 cables to the Mac (AC power, sound out to my powered speakers and the Video and USB cables to the ADC box) and turn it on. BANG! I’ve got an ideal workstation with my 17″ Apple LCD display coupled with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. PLENTY of screen room there to spread out when doing web design, video editing, or anything else where more “elbow room” means more convenience. Externally powered subwoofer and speakers goose up my sound quotient and I’m ready with my Canon self-powered USB scanner, external FireWire HD, iSight camera, iPod and whatever else I need. It’s a beautiful thing…

All that may sound geeky, but I truly don’t feel like a geek. The Mac’s strength—as it always has been—is that you needn’t be a geek at all; simply plug everything in and it works. No wires to keyboard or mouse; no wires to connect to the internet; no wires to print even—I’ve got an HP DeskJet 5550 hooked up to my Airport Extreme base station for wireless, full-color, duplexed printing from anywhere in the house.

Computing peace has finally arrived, and good things DO come in small packages…

This may be blatantly commercial and self-serving, but this IS my blog…

Last night I posted my 17″ PowerBook for sale on eBay. You can go check out the ad by clicking right here.

Considering what you’re getting for the money and its excellent condition, I’ve started the bidding at $2699.00 with a “Buy It Now” price of $3K. The auction is set to run for 7 days, the exact ending time being: Oct-15-03 21:15:26 PDT

As I prepare to say farewell to all that screen real estate, I have some minor pangs of sadness. However, I’m lovin’ my 12″ a whole lot—and who wouldn’t love their own 12″?

I received my much-anticipated 12″ PowerBook yesterday, and I’m already loving it. Except…

After a one-week delay from the projected ship date, I finally received my new 12″ PB direct from the Taiwan factory via FedEx. There’s something special—almost sensual—about opening up a brand-new mac, smelling that “new computer” smell, carefully un-plasticing the various parts, leafing through the manual. I promised myself I’d only take a quick glance at work and save the setup for home.

I took some time to search the Apple website to find the easiest way of transferring my data and user account/preferences from my 17″ PB, and there was a wonderful support article that talked about how to do it. It was also my first time dealing with the root user and command line in OS X, but it turned out to be painless—as well as incredibly fast—to get everything squared away. After following the procedure, everything worked just as it had on my 17. I didn’t have to poke around all over everywhere redoing preferences and such. Pretty cool! All I had to do was reinstall my applications, which was not really that onerous. I completed everything in a couple of hours.

My only “except” is that it will take a bit more getting used to the smaller screen real estate. Once I finally get the Apple ADC/DVI adapter (the last piece missing from my order and not due to ship until early November), I’ll be able to plug into the 17″ flat panel monitor I bought which should fix things for me when I’m at home.

I’m still glad I did it, because the 12″ is a much more convenient form factor for the kinds of things that I do with my computer. I’m going to list the 17 on eBay within the next couple of days.

I just unpacked my brand-new Apple wireless mouse and keyboard. They work like a dream!

This is so freakin’ awesome!

At last, there is no more need to be tethered to my computer by input devices. The keyboard is beautifully designed, not very heavy and performs flawlessly. The mouse is a work of art. The best thing of all is that unlike my wireless mouse attached to my PC at work, I don’t have any extraneous dongles to plug in either—it just pairs up with my PowerBook via Bluetooth. A whole new era in convenience has just been opened up to me. My next hope is that Apple—or perhaps a third party—will now come up with an equally elegant Bluetooth wireless graphics tablet. Imagine drawing and handwriting recognition flying through space from an untethered tablet…

What greater compliment can I give Steve Jobs and the boys than this: Apple Rocks!

On the CD-ROM that came with the October 2003 edition of MacAddict magazine was a 15-day trial of Freeway Express by Softpress. I think I’m in love!

I’m a web tinkerer. My gung-ho-ness comes and goes, depending on how much time I’ve got, what I’m interested in at the moment and whether or not it’s worth it for me to sit down and pound out what I want on the computer.

Our official web authoring suite at my company is Macromedia DreamWeaver, so I went ahead and bought it for my Mac as well. No, I didn’t just buy it, I BOUGHT it—we’re talkin’ the entire StudioMX Suite. It cost quite a bit, but I thought it was worth it.

Well, I love Fireworks—I do all my web graphics prep in there, only occasionally jumping out to Adobe Photoshop Elements. But the rest of the suite has turned out to be disappointing. Not because of the tools, but because of me—the learning curve is just too steep and I’ve got neither the time nor the patience. I think I’ve opened Flash exactly twice, mostly to make sure it installed correctly. Now, Macromedia has seen fit to upgrade everything—for, like, $400.00! That’s way too much for tools I don’t use.

Now imagine my delight at finding Freeway Express by Softpress . I basically installed it and have been intuitively rebuilding my personal website with almost no learning curve. The coolest thing about it vs. DreamWeaver is that all I need to do is drag my stuff onto the page, lay it out the way I want and Freeway Express does all the hard work creating HTML and converting graphics. It’s awesome!

I was able to effortlessly master—yes, you heard me right, effortlessly—rollovers and disjoint rollovers after about 10 minutes of reading the manual and tinkering around. I created my master pages with the navigation items and whatnot, and creating a new page is about as easy as tearing off a new sheet of paper from a notepad. This program really is that good…

So if you’re motivationally or techno-geekically challenged like I am, RUN out now and either get the trial in MacAddict or download it from Softpress’ site (link above). Once my 15-day trial (with full functionality, I might add) wears off, I’m going to immediately plunk down a very reasonable $89.00 for a license.

Sure beats that “bargain” Macromedia upgrade price!

Look for my revised websites soon…

This morning’s email brought me the news I wanted: Apple updated their PowerBook line. I’ve already ordered…

I guess I didn’t really need to go on and on about whether or not the 17″ PowerBook was meeting my needs. I was trying to get some entries in here to get this blog going, though.

Anyway, at the Apple Expo 2003 in Paris, they announced some changes to the PowerBook line. Among them were an all-new Aluminum 15″ model plus the kinds of feature bumps that made the 12″ compelling enough for me to place my order: UBS 2.0, DVI support, 1 GHz processor, bigger HD, RAM expandable up to 1.25 GB.

So what was I to do? I entered my order online this morning and hope to have my new baby within 1-2 weeks (according to the Apple website, anyway). I know that I’m notoriously fickle with my computer purchases, and after January’s Macworld Expo I’ll probably see something new I want, but such is life.

Anybody want to buy a used 17″ with 1 GB RAM, 60 GB HD and 2+ years left on the AppleCare warranty? Plus a cool case and some extras? I’ll be placing a eBay ad shortly…

The other day, I pulled mine out and thought to myself “It’s just TOO BIG”. First time those words have ever proceeded from out of my mouth…

So the other day, after lugging my gorgeous 17″ PowerBook G4 home from work again, I pulled it out to check emails at home. I hoisted it onto my lap and suddenly got this weird feeling: is this really meeting my needs?

Don’t get me wrong: the PB17 is one gorgeous, powerful piece of computing power. The screen—and its huge real estate—is amazing. It was always my dream of the perfect computer with absolutely everything I’d ever need in one, easy-to-carry, stylish package.

But the more I understand the things I actually do with my Mac as opposed to the things I wish I could do with my Mac, the more I realize that for me a 17″-er is overkill. If I were a video editor working with DV all day long, it would be perfect—but I’m not. If I constantly smithed huge spreadsheets with the need to see lots of data at once, it would be ideal—but I’m not. Even if I just was a constant multi-program multi-tasker it would be awesome—I’m (thankfully) not.

So I looked longingly at Eusebio’s 12″ PowerBook. I talked him into letting me borrow it for a couple of days after I’d been playing around with the “build your own”section of the Apple Online Store, and I must admit that it seemed to more adequately fit with what I actually do. I mostly appreciate the smaller, more portable format.

However, once again I’m on the horns of a dilemma: do I eBay the 17 right now and buy a decked-out 12, or do I wait for Macworld Expo in January to see if there’ll be anything groundbreaking? I’ll probably do the latter, though I might be able to do the switch and pocket a few hundred.

Sigh…