Stuart Herbert

Like many before me, I’ve swapped my Dell Inspiron laptop with a nice shiny MacBook Pro. For the money, they’re the best Intel-based laptops around - and I must say that the reviews you may have read online do not do them justice.

The next step is to switch all my photography and music apps over from Windows. Music was easy enough - Logic Express will do me just fine. I wish I’d picked up a copy of the Rhythm Jam Pack at the time, but I can pop into Cardiff next week and put that right.

Photography … that’s a bit more of a challenge. I’ve started playing with the Lightroom beta, and whilst I can see the attraction, there’s a couple of tricks I rely on in Photoshop that I haven’t figured out how to reproduce in Lightroom yet. I don’t want to buy Photoshop until CS3 is out, so for now I might be better off buying a copy of Photoshop Elements, and upgrading to CS3 if I feel the need next year.

The other thing I need to do over the Christmas holidays is either upgrade or replace b2evo, the blogging engine I’ve been using this past year. Unfortunately, Safari doesn’t get on with the admin interface, and Firefox continues to be too much of a memory hog for me to want to stick with it as my main browser.

Just in case anyone is reading this and getting worried that I’ll be completely turning my back on Linux … that isn’t going to happen. Linux on the desktop has always been my preferred development platform, and that isn’t going to change. All I’m doing is switching my preferred creative platform from Windows XP to Mac OS X.