After the bad news some good ones to try and maintain the balance. (But I’m still really put off, do you hear me Apple?)
Even with a measly 512MB of RAM the G5 already lets me fully experience and enjoy a few things I had given up on on the iBook.
iView Media
One of them is iView Media Pro. I had already tried it and given up on it but with the G5 and lots of disk space it really flies!
I have tried it with some 1000+ photos and it was faster than iPhoto both in importing the photos and later in managing them, managing their meta-info, arranging them and so on. I need the pro version instead of the “light” one because for me Canon RAW support is a must and even managing these behemoth files it is amazingly fast.
A keeper then.
iMovie
Then I tried looking at iMovie again for a pet project of mine.
I don’t do “home videos” or any of that stuff. What I do is take lots of pictures when I’m on vacation.
The kind of pictures I don’t count as “photography” per-se but as vacation pics. You know what I’m talking about.
And after the vacation is over what do I do? I make a selection of them in iPhoto and if any poor soul (most likely family) asks to see the vacation pictures I just put the iBook in front of them (or connect it to the TV) and play the slide-show until they collapse of boredom or the slide show ends (whichever comes first).
Some time ago I had this idea that it could be nice to make a movie with the pictures, put some music in the background and maybe try not to bore people to death (not so much anyway). The thing is that after importing some 20 pictures, some of them with effects (Ken Burns, of course) :-) the iBook started freezing at each mouse click so I abandoned the idea as not practical.
Enter the iMac and whoa!, not only did I make two movies with 7 to 14 minutes duration (and I made them really fast) but I also did a DVD project with them, all really easy and I’m now ready to burn the DVD (which I’d have done had I not spent my entire DVD-R stash making backups of my pictures).
While I’m not going to be a regular user of this kind of applications I’m definitely won by the power and especially the simplicity of them. And yes, I know things like Final Cut are way better then iMovie but for my purposes iMovie still cuts it. If and when I out-grow it I’ll look into Final Cut.
The shell, the shell
This is probably what I do most on any of my computers: program. And for me programming means (for the most part) lots of terminals running vim (often many instances of it, one active and others in the background but hits is not relevant here), so screen real-estate is a big issue for me.
And guess what: I can now have something like 6 terminal windows open, a browser window and some other random things (like iTunes and so on) and see it all at the same time! Now this is programming nirvana.