Mark Poppen

I’m not the guy that likes to experiment with an OS too much, especially if my work depends on it. It’s a reason why I chose Mac. Hassle free and easy to use. Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard a while ago, but I wasn’t too keen on jumping right into upgrading, especially because I read some reviews on upgrades going bad.

After the first update came out, I was more confident in upgrading, so I bought the software from the Apple Canada store and got it delivered within a week (which is fast for rural living). Since I had quite a few projects lined up, the DVD stayed in the box for about a week, but tonight I did it. I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and Apple reassured me again, why I made the right choice to switch to Mac. A painless upgrade without having to answer tonnes of questions or formatting hard drives. Just pop the DVD in, hit install, accept the license agreement and wait.

Ok, it didn’t go flawless. After about half an hour of installation, OSX spit out the DVD, rebooted and it was right back to where I started: 10.5.8. After reading the installation guide (RTFM *hum*) I found out you should unhook all external drives. I had my Time machine backup drive left on, which interfered with the installation.

Without that glitch, the installation took about an hour, including the first update. So I’m running 10.6.1 right now, and so far, everything seems to run faster, but that might very well be wishful thinking and a mind-game.

A while ago I entered a “Comment to win” on Andy Sowards’ blog. The assignment was: post the best comment on “Why you should win the Canvas or Business cards”. UPrinting supported the contest by giving away 1000 business cards or a 24″ x 18″ printed canvas.

I posted this comment:

I already have a stack of business cards, so I’d got for the canvas.
I think it will look pretty professional if I have a canvas on the wall of my office with my company logo on it. I’ll add a little tag with the text “brought to you by @andysowards”, like they have in art galleries.. but without a price

Andy thought that was worth the canvas, so a few weeks later I got in this gorgeous print, provided by the awesome UPrinting

Image 1 to 3: how the canvas was wrapped (good job guys!)
4th image: The canvas!
The 5th image is to illustrate how big it is. The dot in the middle is a Canadian 2 dollar coin.
The last image is to show that I kept my promise.

The other day I thought it was a good idea to check “Always use … to subscribe to feeds”, when I opened a feed-link in Firefox, but then I got a shortened tweet with a direct link to a feed, which I had to copy and paste. Since TinyURL was hiding the actual link, and Firefox opened the live bookmars right away, I couldn’t see what the actual link was.

Now, I though that was a pain in the butt, so I wanted to change that. I scratched myself behind the ear, asking myself “where in hell am I going to find that?”. After looking around in Firefox, clicking every wrong tab, going through all the menu’s, all the options, I found it in the spot where I least expected it. But now that I think of it: It’s a very logical place to put it. For the ones with the same problem, here’s the answer:

Preferences > Applications > Web feed.

On your head, you perv!

I’m interested on what kind of ballcaps, toques or bandana’s you guys wear. Show me and tell me about it, like brands, funny stories or whatever you like.

Here are mine. I’m not a real headwear kinda guy, but I like to wear caps every once in a while.

My wife gave me the red OCC one a few months back. It’s a Flexfit cap and it’s really comfortable.

My Nike hat I got years back, I’m talking like 10 years orso. I got it when I was doing some random shopping with a friend. It went through a lot. From rain to oil-stains and accidental dips in the river when it was in the box of a quad that tipped over. I still love it

Show me yours!

A few things happened since my last post about workspaces, so I thought I’d update you a little on the situation

When I got my Mac, I had to re-arrange my desk. I made my Windows pc into a media center, so I didn’t really need the keyboard on my desk anymore, which cleared an area for my Mac and tablet next to each other. I ditched the phonebooks as a monitor stand for something which is supposed to be made for holding a monitor, but I’m missing my phonebooks, so they might come back.

Here’s what it looks like now. Please post a link in the comments to your workspace/desktop. A link to this post is appreciated of course

A DJ on the radio asked the traffic-jam-reader-guy what his job was before he started working for the radio. He answered he used to be in IT, which is quite a career-move if you ask me..

I thought it would be interesting to know what you guys were doing before you turned to (web) design. Me? Oh, I used to be a salesman in an electronics store. I got to play with the new iPods, cell phones, digital camera’s, laptops etc. It was a fun job, but I didn’t see a real career in it for myself. So I decided to started freelancing my web design services.

What about you? Leave a comment with your previous job.

I just wanted to make sure I was going to make the right decision by buying a Mac, so, in this post I told you I experienced a little myself, but I also wanted to know why Mac-users are such fanatics and why they will not change back to Windows (in some cases, even if their life was depending on it).

I thought it was a good idea to use my Twitter hyve to answer me this question:

Tell me in 1 tweet WHY a Mac rocks. I will blog the 10 best tweets. Reply to @deluzione and retweet the heck out of this

I received a lot of answers, and I put the 10 best ones in a list. In random order:

• @tommsinclair because they do what they’re told
• @miketighe I can work through a large quantity of data across many applications quickly and cleanly using things like spaces, expose,
• @athenaemily Best user interface. Every detail is too pretty. Mac OS runs smoothly, literally.
• @pixeldeath Designing beautiful work on a beautiful machine is one of the reason why Mac’s rock.
• @nebrow simply put: they just work. (and they are beautiful)
• @3drockz Some of the most complicated things have been handled in the simplest way on a MAC…
• @mayhemstudios having a mac will make you one of the cool kids.
• @ylluminate Aside from UI consistency offered by Cocoa, I much appreciate the stability & recoverability offered by the *nix underpinning.
• @pgbkruit When it comes to Apple (and subsequent to Macs) it’s all about the implementation and not necesaraly the features.
• @AdamKool Mac thinks progessively and doesn’t look back. Snow Leopard is a great example. 16TB RAM support FTW!
• @behoff steamlined integration between apps – you can drag n drop all over the place on a Mac
• @DreamSpeaker Are there other computers besides a MAC?
• @b3designs they rock because they have better design than an ugly old pc

There you have it. 13 things why a Mac rocks, not because Apple says so, but from user-experience (ok, I cheated. I said I would do 10.. I made it 13 ).

My conclusion from this: Macs rock because they’re solid and pretty. I like solid and pretty.. I still want one

My "wooden" shoes.

… oh, here they are

Niki asked designers to submit our shoes to make a blog-post out of it. As I kinda had a feeling where this was going to (colorful designer shoes), I thought I’d submit something different.

When I moved to Canada with my wife, my aunt gave us a little present at the airport, just before boarding the plane. Fluffy slippers in the shape of wooden shoes. Mine has an image of my provincial flag, and my wife got a pair with an image of a Dutch windmill.

Anywho, I made it in another list

iMac, I want one

Right now, I’m running a dual core PC with 4gb of ram on Windows Vista, and I need a change. Not that I hate Vista, and I know, I’m probably the only one in the world who actually likes Vista, but because I need something that will improve my productivity.
I hate waiting for Photoshop/Dreamweaver to start up, and when I’m actually doing “my thing” (design stuff), my memory gets clogged up, because next to my Adobe products, I also like to have Twitter, FTP, music, Skype, Google Talk, Firefox with multiple tabs and a few other things open, just to make my work even more enjoyable..

I’ve done some research on iMacs, and asked fellow web designers that use Macs in their work, and they adore the things, but I’m not going to switch from one to the other because “they say so”. I had to experience myself.
So, today I went to the local Future Shop (sort of a Best Buy for those of you who don’t know) and played around with a 24″ 2,8GHz, 2GB version of the iMac.
The nice part of it all that I was left alone, and I could do pretty much anything on the machine, which I did. I really got a good feeling of how a Mac works.
When I asked a sales-guy to help me out with some questions, I got the answers I wanted to hear, except for the lack 5.1 audio, which totally sucks, because I recently bought a 5.1 set.

I like the speed, but this can be deceiving because there was practically nothing installed on the machine, except the standard programs.
I also got the hang of OSX. I think it’s pretty intuitive, although I couldn’t get the shortcuts for the “spaces” to work, but I probably did something wrong.
The built in speakers sounded pretty good, although obviously, it’s not a Logitech set, but it will do for business purposes.

I didn’t know that programs stay open and active in your dock when you press the little red X in the programs statusbar. You actually have to hit command+q (or something) to exit.

I’ll have to get used to the keyboard and mighty mouse.

So, for $ 1899,- + tax this puppy could be mine. Anyone need me for a project, worth around $ 2000,- ?

Gotta love it:

WYSIWTF

[Via]