Monday, May 23, 2005
Reasons why I love my Mac Mini less
Been playing with my Mini over the weekend, got Tiger installed, done video editing etc. On the whole, it's a very, very nice machine and OS. it's fast, it's responsive, and it's easy to learn. but as I discovered, this chain of usability is only as strong as its weakest link. when one thing breaks, the whole thing seems like a pain, usually because I'm focused on the specific task that has thrown up the problem. I came across a couple of problems that I really didn't expect from an Apple machine, and they highlight the fact that usability is still a delicate ideal.
Firstly, I spent over an hour trying to get 'direct trimming' working in iMovie. with direct trimming, you can shorten clips without actually chopping bits off them - you're just adjusting the in and out markers. should be easy. move pointer to end of clip, pointer changes, click & drag. but the pointer never changed. took me an hour to find a posting on the Apple site (from a user, not Apple) telling me that I needed to disable 2 options for the display of audio waveforms otherwise direct trimming was not available. why??? this is a terrible example of modeful rather than modeless behaviour - I was unaware of what 'mode' the system was in and that there was a contingency between these functions. it might forgive them if they would just put this in the manual, help screen, or have an official help doc that google could find.
On Sunday I discovered that Tiger was unable to support my CD/DVD writer. this is crazy, because it's a built in Apple drive. again, a long search (2 hours) on Google told me that I needed to repair my disk permissions and restart. this seemed to do the trick, but this really did take expert level user behaviour. I'm disappointed that Apple's very latest OS actually broke support for a built-in drive, and that despite this being a widespread problem, there's no official posting about it.
but to finish on a positive, it's all working now, and it does pretty much everything I need. note to anyone considering a Mini - make sure you get the 80GB hard drive, otherwise you'll find yourself running out of space very quickly. 30GB was gone on mine by Saturday, and that's just basic installs...
Been playing with my Mini over the weekend, got Tiger installed, done video editing etc. On the whole, it's a very, very nice machine and OS. it's fast, it's responsive, and it's easy to learn. but as I discovered, this chain of usability is only as strong as its weakest link. when one thing breaks, the whole thing seems like a pain, usually because I'm focused on the specific task that has thrown up the problem. I came across a couple of problems that I really didn't expect from an Apple machine, and they highlight the fact that usability is still a delicate ideal.
Firstly, I spent over an hour trying to get 'direct trimming' working in iMovie. with direct trimming, you can shorten clips without actually chopping bits off them - you're just adjusting the in and out markers. should be easy. move pointer to end of clip, pointer changes, click & drag. but the pointer never changed. took me an hour to find a posting on the Apple site (from a user, not Apple) telling me that I needed to disable 2 options for the display of audio waveforms otherwise direct trimming was not available. why??? this is a terrible example of modeful rather than modeless behaviour - I was unaware of what 'mode' the system was in and that there was a contingency between these functions. it might forgive them if they would just put this in the manual, help screen, or have an official help doc that google could find.
On Sunday I discovered that Tiger was unable to support my CD/DVD writer. this is crazy, because it's a built in Apple drive. again, a long search (2 hours) on Google told me that I needed to repair my disk permissions and restart. this seemed to do the trick, but this really did take expert level user behaviour. I'm disappointed that Apple's very latest OS actually broke support for a built-in drive, and that despite this being a widespread problem, there's no official posting about it.
but to finish on a positive, it's all working now, and it does pretty much everything I need. note to anyone considering a Mini - make sure you get the 80GB hard drive, otherwise you'll find yourself running out of space very quickly. 30GB was gone on mine by Saturday, and that's just basic installs...
Comments:
Thank you! For mentioning the iMovieHD audio options which must be turned off in order to use Direct Trimming. You had it bad finding an obscure reference on Apple's site and I could not find even that. Google brought me to your Mac Mini post and I found my answer there. Thought I was going nuts trying to make DT work. I know it's not covered in the help file or online because I read and re-read them multiple times. You'll probably never even see this comment but if you do, thank you again. How does Apple maintain their "intuitive" image with stuff like this?
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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