So...why exactly are Macs good for editing?

Nearly every single time I hear/read a Mac vs PC argument the Mac party refers to Macs being good at “creative stuff” such as image manipulation and video/sound editing. What astounds me is that a lot of PC users seem OK with Macheads (different to a Mac User, who will generally shut the hell up about using a Mac and get on with his or her life) making this argument. PC users need to stand up for themselves.

For this article I'm going to set aside any prejudices I have towards either Apple or Microsoft, OS X and Windows. For the purposes of the argument I will also be defining a PC as a computer running a version of Microsoft Windows – simply because that's what Macheads seem to think a PC is. I'll also disregard the fact a Mac is just a brand of computer much like a Dell or an Acer. 

Point
Macs are good at editing due to having software such as Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere and Flash available for them. Adobe products are industry-standard and are capable of producing extremely professional quality work. 

Counterpoint 

The same software is available for Windows. I'll go out on a limb and assume that most of the time when a user is referring to the professional editing software available for Mac they are referring to Adobe products. Love it or hate it you can't deny that Adobe products are amazing at doing what they do (personally I'd choose The GIMP any day but this is unbiased). However they work identically on a PC and a Mac so there's really no difference is there?

Be that as it may sometimes a Machead isn't referring to professional level editing but rather how a Mac allows the home user to be more creative with software such as iMovie and GarageBand. Which leads me to my next point. 

Point
iMovie is made of pure magical awesome and MovieMaker is absolutely dire. Garageband can make even the most tonedeaf band sound like Metallica and Microsoft have Sound Recorder. 

Counterpoint
MovieMaker is free. Ok it's not going to make the next blockbuster but if you simply wish to string together clips of your first-born into something your parents know how to play on a DVD player then it's more than capable. Apart from all of the crashes. 

Having never really experienced GarageBand I'll not embarrass myself by saying something that is completely and utterly wrong. I'll just point out how a copy of iMovie is only included with iLife and costs $49.00. To be fair that's not a lot for what the software apears to offer but considering MovieMaker is free then I believe that claiming a Mac is better for editing due to iMovie is just absurd. I also spotted these reviews for iLife 11 on the Apple website whilst doing research

That's just what's visible on the front of the reviews section. I didn't bother to delve much deeper. Notice how there are complaints listed at the top of both the Most Recent and the Most Helpful reviews.



Point
A Mac “just works” with things such as Digital Cameras and related equipment. Also Firewire. 

Counterpoint

I actually nearly agree with this one. I still don't fully understand how Windows needs to install a driver for every damn memory pen it has plugged in whilst OS X and Linux mount them without complaint (providing they have FAT and NTFS-3g installed). 

My counterpoint to Firewire being amazing at everything though is that USB 3.0 is faster and Apple dropped the Firewire port from their Macs. Hahaha.

So...where'd this rumour come from?
My best guess is to say that Photoshop used to be exclusive to the Mac and was originally developed for the platform. It was ported to Windows in Version 2.5 I believe (If anyone has any contradicting knowledge post it in a comment and I'll edit the post) but for some reason the association with Macs has stuck. Go figure. 

My humble opinion
Here's my input. The only reason I can think of that would make a Mac better for editing is that the UNIX-like nature of OS X would lead to less system crashes than a Windows system. However if anything goes wrong with a single piece of your hardware (e.g. a video card) then you're having to ship the damned thing off to Apple for repairs. At least with a PC you can swap out individual components cheaply.

Keeping Your Firefox Data Synced

Have you ever had that experience where you really want to show a friend this cool bookmark and then found it's on your other partition, or other computer?

I triple-boot my laptop, which is nice for having a bit of variety but not so much for my Firefox bookmarks and such, as sometimes I forget which OS I had site X bookmarked on and I lose time rebooting and finding it. But luckily I stumbled across a post which told me how to sync my Ubuntu and Windows Firefox profiles, it was a little out of date but I gave it a shot and hey presto it worked! Not only did it work it allowed me to do the same thing with my Hackintosh partition too. Brilliant.

The common denominator here was Windows, or at least an NTFS partition that can be written to and read from by everything you want synced. FAT would work fine though. Get yourself one of these, a Windows partition will work great.

Step 1 – You need to figure out what exactly you want synced. Is it separate systems on a single machine or is it to be spread across machines? If it's separate systems on a single machine you will want to make sure you use a Windows partition or create a new NTFS or FAT partition for the purpose, and that this is mounted automatically by whatever other system you'll be using. I believe OS X will do this on a Mac by default and Linux can be set to automatically mount it at startup. If you'll be syncing data across machines I suggest using something that will ALWAYS be available – Network drives will work best, but what happens if you take your laptop elsewhere? A thumbdrive would work but would be rather faffy, so I would recommend using a Dropbox account to sync the data if you're to be doing this across a laptop and a Desktop.

Step 2 – You need to access the Firefox profile manager to create a new profile, unless you can move your current profile to somewhere universally available. To access profile manager make sure that Firefox is completely shut down. If you'e not sure use killall or an equivalent command. (Ctrl+Q or Cmd+Q). Then:

Linux - Enter a terminal then type firefox -profilemanager (bear in mind if you installed Firefox via a tarball in /opt/ you will need to change this to /opt/firefox/firefox-bin -profilemanager)

OS X – Again enter a terminal and, presuming Firefox is in the Applications folder type /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager

Windows – Start>Run then type firefox.exe -profilemanager (or firefox.exe -p)

Step 3 – Create a new profile. Firefox will guide you through this dead easily so there's no need for a screenshot. Where it states the location of the new profile you want to choose your own folder, then browse for it. Choose whatever medium you're going to be using, a Network share, a Dropbox, whatever. Then create it, select it and check “Don't ask a start-up” to ensure Firefox will use this by default.

Step 4 – Repeat steps 2 and 3 on the subsequent system(s) you want to share the data. Except this time when you create a new profile you should browse to where you create the profile last time, and go into it. There will be all the different files and folders that Firefox uses to do the profile thing, just OK it and boot Firefox as normal using this profile. Everything should be there.

There you have it, Firefox is all synced up. This should work fine for other Mozilla products too, such as Thunderbird and Seamonkey. I have no idea if it works on Sunbird. Any questions or if you think this post needs screenshots just comment below.