Designmudd Ramblings on mostly Web Design & Development - Print too.

I bought the macbook (black) maybe 2 months ago with the idea of using it for all my email, calendar, contacts, and for “emergency work” while i’m not in the office. The idea was that if Im in the office, my desktop is better because the cinema display is huge and keyboard is easier to man etc. BUT, then you start to get all comfortable on one machine.. so I began using the macbook pretty exclusively, launching all of creative suite, downloading new apps, etc. I pretty much pushed the keyboard on the G5 directly under the monitor as if never to be used again. I’ll tell you what though… you can’t work on these things. I still need the cheesegrater.

Why can’t you design on a macbook? Because. Not because of the screen, keys, not even because of memory or speed… well sort of. The reason you can’t is because of the intel chip inside. The Emulation is just really painful. The macbook with intel chip is fast, the catch is you really need to be working in universal apps if you want to keep the swearing down to a minimum. Not only are the emulated apps slow, the entire system freezes up or crawls when you’ve got emulated apps running. 1 app is doable, but beyong that forget about it. ..And I’m one of those people that absolutely cannot launch one app at a time.. I jump around like an animal. I need to be able to launch photoshop, acrobat and dreamweaver simoultaneuosly - is that really so much to ask for? or Photoshop, illustrator and word.

So who are we waiting on to make macbook exclusive? Well.. adobe is the big one, I need Creative Suite, and I need Macromedia Studio (assuming they keep it, at least dreamweaver). Microsoft Office … I have entourage running all day long, i think that kills my little blackie. I actually like word’s notebook view and spend alot of time there

So for now, i think it’s safe to say, design on an intel macbook is damn near impossible …. there’s just too much waiting around until they universalize these apps. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it will all be fast and good when they do… I run Bias Peak on here without a hitch to alter large audio files. I’ve putzed around with other universals like the adobe lightroom beta which has to be demanding on the cpu… it ran perfect. It’s the emulation, it sucks and I’ve experienced it firsthand. So my advice to my fellow designers is, stay at your desk, keep grating that cheese until adobe and microsoft say you no longer have to.

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