When I say MacOS is a very designer-friendly environment, I don’t just mean that because of the elegant use of chrome on the buttons or the general spiffiness of the GUI. Little design tasks that, on Windows, could only be accomplished via a plugin or third-party utility actually come standard with this operating system. That means less installation and more time spent actually focusing on the the actual work.
The list that follows is a small taste of the stuff the standard MacOS has to offer. In the interest of brevity, I’ll only be mentioning the bits that I’ve had direct experience with and are, of course, relevant to designers.
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Screenshots. Taking screenshots is probably the single most tedious web-design-related task on a PC, due to the fact that you can only either press Print Screen (for the whole desktop) or Alt + Print Screen (for the current window) to do your screen captures. You then need to switch to Photoshop, paste the image in, and remove the windows frames and borders to make your screenie presentable. You have to repeat this process for every screenshot, because the Clipboard only holds one image at a time.
(Once they’ve gotten tired of doing this a couple hundred times, Windows-based designers will probably want to shell out for SnagIt, which is the high watermark for screen capture applications. SnagIt isn’t cheap but it’s got more functions than the average web designer would even conceivably need, and it’s easily the best in its class.)
On MacOS, you can take screenshots several different ways, none of which involve having to buy third-party software. Command + Shift + 3 will capture the entire desktop, and Command + Shift + 4 will allow you to draw a box around the area you want to take a shot of. In either case, your screenshot will be deposited as a nice 24-bit PNG on your desktop. If you’d rather that the screenshot got saved to the Clipboard (Windows-style), you can override that behaviour by pressing Ctrl as you draw the selection box.
There’s also a Timed Screenshot function which will take a shot 10 seconds after you activate it. This is useful for those times when you need to take a screenie of your mouse pointer opening a menu, or selecting text, etc. (which would otherwise be pretty difficult to pull off). For more info, here’s a fairly lengthy essay on all the various screenshot-related shortcuts you can pull off on vanilla OSX.
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System-Wide Zoom. This OSX feature is impressive as hell, especially when you see how smoothly it operates. The system-wide zoom actually enlarges your entire desktop, not just the contents of a window, until you can comfortably see the pixels that make up each element. It even anti-aliases the image as you zoom, so you don’t see ugly jaggies.
If you’ve got a mouse with a scroll-wheel, you can zoom by holding Ctrl and rolling the wheel forward. If you’re on a laptop, you will need to hold Ctrl while placing two fingers on the trackpad. If you want to turn off the anti-aliasing (for example, if you want to check compression artifacts on your web graphics), all you have to do is press Command + Alt + \.
Hardcore PDF Support. Anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time with Adobe Acrobat Reader knows that it is an absolute dog of an application. Suffering from the same feature bloat as its siblings, Acrobat takes a ridiculous amount of time and CPU resources to view even mid-sized PDFs. On Windows, the best third-party PDF viewer is probably FoxIt Reader, which takes a fraction of the memory and CPU time that Adobe’s application does. On MacOS, an all-in-one viewer simply called Preview 3 handles PDFs as well as all the common graphics formats.
What’s really cool about MacOS is that its graphics rendering engine, Quartz 2D, is actually based on the PDF standard. This means that when you view a PDF on OSX, it doesn’t go through an additional layer of processing, it can be handled directly by the display engine. On Windows, a PDF has to be "translated" before it can be properly understood by the renderer and then displayed on Acrobat or Foxit, which naturally introduces some delays in actually showing the document to you.
This same rendering engine is largely responsible for all of the little graphical touches introduced in OSX, such as transparency, shadowing and dynamic icon animation.
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System-wide Search That Works. One of my biggest concerns upon switching to a Mac was the fact that Google Desktop isn’t available on OSX yet. I try really hard to be neat with my filing system, but when each web project has several thousand files and assets, it’s just impossible to remember where everything is. Google Desktop Search gave me some measure of assurance that, even if I filed some stuff away improperly, I’d have a reasonably good chance I’d be able to locate it again in the future.
OSX’s Spotlight took the GDS functionality and supercharged it with as-you-type feedback. You will rarely have to type more than 4 or 5 letters before the item you’re looking for shows up on the results list. If you’re feeling especially brave, you can even just type the file-extension that you’re looking for (for example, ".jpg" or ".avi") and instantly get a list of every single file on your machine that matches it.
The best part is, Spotlight is just a Command + Spacebar keystroke away. And if you’re looking to super-charge Spotlight even more, check out the very excellent Moru, which allows you to use complex Booleans and do searches-within-searches, among other cool additions.
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Font-handling. For print designers, one of the most time-consuming aspects of the job is managing all the hundreds of fonts that you accumulate as you work. Back in Windows 98 or 2k, it was totally possible to crash your system when you hit the upper limit of a thousand installed fonts. Adobe Type Manager does a reasonably good job of managing this problem, by compiling lists of fonts that you can load or unload as necessary. MacOS’s Font Book does essentially the same thing, but the interface is a lot less clunky. You can allegedly maintain several thousand fonts on your machine without any slowdown, although of course I have yet to try this. (Hell, the only fonts I use are Arial and Times New Roman.)
OSX also comes with a very cool Automator action that scans a given document for all the various fonts it uses, then generates a collection of those fonts. InDesign and QuarkXPress already have this functionality built-in, but this allows you to retrieve the font list without having to run a huge application first. Check out the entire Automator library here.
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Color Selection. Here’s another tedious task on Windows that just flies by on MacOS. You know how, everytime you need to know the exact hex value of a particular color on a webpage, you would first need to take a screenshot, paste it into Photoshop, then use the color picker to get the precise RGB value? Because it’s a huge waste of resources to have to fire up a gargantuan application to retrieve a six-character text string, various developers have created little utilities to accomplish this simple task. I personally really liked the ColorZilla plugin for Mozilla Firefox a lot (even though it had the singular disadvantage of only being usable within the browser), and was pretty disappointed when I discovered that it didn’t work on my Intel-Mac. Thankfully, OSX comes with its own built-in color-picker utility, called Digital Color Meter.
In terms of features, it’s fairly spartan. It can output the hex or percentage value of any thing you point to on screen, and typing Command + Shift + C will copy the text string to the clipboard. From there you just paste it directly into whatever application you want. It can’t save batches of colors, nor does it display hex, percentages and actuals at the same time. But it’s tiny, easy to use and best of all, you don’t need to download or install anything to get the functionality you need!
A Word On the Adobe Family
When the first line of Macbook Pros came out earlier this year, there was a big hubbub about the fact that none of the current generation of design applications from Adobe were compiled for the new Intel-powered processors. In other words, anyone who bought the Intel-Macs were not getting the full benefit of the dual-core CPUs, because the only way the Adobe applications were even working at all was by being routed through an additional layer of interpretation called Rosetta.
8 months and a full processor refresh later, there still aren’t any Adobe products compiled for the Macbooks. The popularity of the new hardware has at least encouraged them to ramp up the release date on Adobe CS3, so we can hopefully expect to be running Rosetta-less Photoshop by March or April 2007 (i.e., if they’re not planning on doing a Vista on us).
The good news is that the Core 2 Duo’s are so fast that you will not really notice the performance hit, especially with 2gbs of memory onboard. I’ve recently worked on two event banners that measured around 5000px by 1500px each with about 50 layers of raster and vector artwork, and only noticed a very minor slowdown. When CS3 comes out, there may be a nice performance boost due to the fact that we no longer have to run Rosetta, especially when coupled with the fact that Photoshop CS3 will supposedly be the first Adobe application to actually leverage the GPU as well as the CPU.
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