Video editing is another big area for Adobe. Premier is just one of those big apps. I don’t do a lot of video editing, so I don’t miss it. Surprisingly, I’ve been getting by with just iMovie. If I had to create something extravagant, I’d probably consider Final Cut Pro. Both are available on the Mac App Store. For audio editing, perhaps Adobe Audition could be replaced by Logic Pro – but I just use Audacity for audio editing. Whatever the Mac App Store doesn’t have, there usually is an Open Source alternative…
- Photoshop –> GIMP
- Illustrator –> Inkscape
- InDesign –> Scribus
- Audition –> Audacity
- Dreamweaver –> WordPress / Drupal
- Flash –> Uh, did I mention that I like Hype?
By forcing great Adobe applications into the cloud, and adding a $600 per year subscription fee, I was forced to look for alternatives. With just a few Mac App Store apps, I saved hundreds of dollars when compared to the Adobe Creative Cloud. And if subsequent years are lean years financially, I don’t lose the Mac App Store apps. The copies are mine in perpetuity. Adobe is simply not being logical. Why would I want to rent software at a higher price, when I can own similar tools for less? Adobe, you’re just not making sense.
Aside from being made by Apple, what do an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and an iMac have in common? They all have tiny speakers. Even my Mac Mini has a tiny speaker, but it’s audio out is connect to a monitor – WITH TINY SPEAKERS. All day long, it seems that I’m surrounded by tiny speakers. They have a sound that rattles as if it was emanating from a tin can. Fortunately, there’s a setting to help mitigate that problem.
It looks like Apple is gearing up to take the Apple TV seriously. The price of the device dropped from $99 to $69, HBO Now will be available on Apple TV next month and there are all sorts of neat rumors about Apple TV improvements for later this year. Yet, I realized something about Apple TV features. It doesn’t matter how many channels Apple adds to the Apple TV. Without a working remote, I couldn’t access any of them. The recent Apple TV update was met with frustration.
Today is March 14, 2015. It’s a day that has mathematicians abuzz. In the United States style of writing dates, today is also know as 3/14/15. If you forget about that whole Y2K thing, the date is very similar to the first few digits of Pi. That’s 3.1415. For the extra fanatical, 9:26 AM (or even PM) adds a few digits to the end. However, there are lots of nonterminating decimals in the universe. What’s so special about Pi?
It seems like a silly question to ask. As I type this from an extremely thin and powerful portable computer, do I really have to wonder if I’m living in the future? I can speak to a machine and it will respond to my commands. Run computations… done. Play 80’s music… done. Find the nearest pizzeria… done. Nothing like this has been possible before… or has it? Supposedly, if technology is growing fast now, it should grow even faster in the future. But as I look back at the last two decades of tech, what has really changed?