Bohemian Blog

As you can guess, I’m not all that impressed with CS3.

Photoshop made some great improvements to the Layers Palette

1. You can finally temporarily select multiple layers with the ease of shift or command+click
2. Creating a New Group with several selected layers is Command+G
3. The Move tool can be sensitive to groups if you wish it so. Nice to be able to shift things around without constantly referring to the Layers Palette

I don’t use InDesign or Illustrator enough to say, but the most obvious feature across the CS3 club is that they are even bigger apps than before and they take even longer to startup than before. Oh, and they’re sluggish too. Why is editing slices such a laborious task? CS handled easily.

Then tonight I was setting up my Creative Director’s new 17″ MacBook Pro (I’m a Linux guy and all, but this is still sweet) and discovered that these apps performed much better on the new MacIntel. So maybe it’s more about being on an old Dual Proc 2GHz PowerPC with 2GB of RAM DINOSAUR that’s causing most of my disgust.

On the left is the line-ending definition preference for Notepad2 on Windows and on the right is the line-ending preference for my favorite OSX text editor: Smultron. Pretty funny little detail I have overlooked ’til now. Enjoy.

If you are looking for a great text editor for OSX, check out SMULTRON. It is mostly developed for OSX 10.4, but there are older versions available for 10.3. It has recently been updated and is only getting better and better.

‘Symbolic Links’ in Linux are pretty much the same as ‘alias’ files or ’shortcut’ files in OSX and Windows respectively. And you can create them just as easily in any Linux Gui by right-clicking on a folder or file. However, creating or moving a symbolic link to a location outside of your user folder usually involves being the ’super user’ or using ’sudo’. It’s so simple to do with the Terminal, I can’t see trying to work around within the gui. So, I hope you find this helpful.

I found this info here thanks to a good friend:

http://help.hardhathosting.com/question.php/95

It’s such a good note to keep around that I wanted to have it on my own site.

In the Terminal enter the following:

ln -s [TARGET DIRECTORY OR FILE] [SHORTCUT]

For example:

ln -s /xampp/htdocs/work /Users/username/xamppwork

This points a symbolic link located in your home folder (xamppwork) to “/xampp/htdocs/work”

I am finding this to be very useful for using XAMPP to develop dynamic sites or to work the bugs out of WordPress themes. I have my working folder inside my Documents directory and then place a symbolic link to that folder inside the XAMPP server’s ‘htdocs’ directory. Pretty slick.

The new NeoOffice 2.1 for OSX is a big improvement in optimization. Previously I was seeing a lot of redrawing in the toolbars, especially when the window is resized. Now the toolbar comes back all at once. I upgraded my parents’ 450MHz Dual G4 and noticed a considerable improvement. I’m looking forward to seeing the difference on my fiance’s PowerBook G4 400MHz.

It’s still in the ‘Early Access’ stage, so you will have to give them some money to get it, but it’s a great tool and definitely worth supporting. Here’s the site:

www.neooffice.org