LiewCF Tech Blog

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I’m a 7 month old Mac user but the satisfaction it gives me makes me hate being Windows user for more than 1 decade. I personally think it’s pretty fair why Mac machines or Apple product are slight more expensive than the rest. For long run sake and user experience, they are really worth it. I personally own iPod touches, iPhone, Macbook and several Apple accessories I have to say they pretty much communicates (sync and connects) with each other very well and let’s not forget the nice and sleek designs.

As a blogger, Mac has efficiently help me in may ways. I’ll sum them up in 10 reasons why you should be blogging with Mac. Full list after jump.

Terminal

Terminals are great tool and they comes with Mac OS. This light SSH application helps you easily connect to your blog web account, doing tasks like backups, reboot server, edit files. It even does FTP so you don’t need an extra FTP application.

Group and view by application type

In Windows you can group applications of the same kind together in toobar but it just gives you a list view when you click over it. In Mac, you don’t have to group them manually. On any active application window, just hit "F10" and it will show you all application-of-the-same-kind. For example if you have 3 images opened in Photoshop, just go to one and hit F10, you’ll see the all 3 as overall. Simple click on any and that will make it the current-active. Pretty convenient if you swap from files to files.

Print Screens

Mac by default comes with 2 types of screen capturing function. Shift + Command + 3 print screen the entire page, Shift + Command + 4 allows you to select a specific region. As for windows, there’s only a whole page screen capture or you’ll to depend on third party softwares.

The Invert Mode

Sometimes I work in the dark, but the way the LCD screen glares irritate and hurt the eyes. Mac has got this inverting function, Control + Command + Alt + 8 to invert the screen. That’s more comfortable for the eyes in the dark.

Spotlight Fast Indexing

Windows does support files and keywords indexing for the convenience of searching, but Mac makes it a whole lot more faster and efficient. It also search through your Mail client, and if you are reading feeds with Newsfire, it’ll index that too. If you are blogging on a specific topic, type in a keyword in Mac’s Spotlight and results are grab from your HDD files, Mails contents, RSS, etc. You can even configure it to fetch results from your chat histories.

Parallels

You are on Mac, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need a Windows anymore. I test Windows softwares so I can review and share them on my blog. I also test my web design XHTML/CSS compatibility in Internet Explorer 6. Parallels is a great Mac apps that allows you to run Windows within Mac. It opens up the entire Windows OS like a Mac application, or you can even go full screen. Imagine dragging files from Windows directly into your Mac desktop, vice versa.

Safari Browser

Safari is another reason why you should be on Mac. We know there is a Safari for Windows, but trust me the original on Mac is way better. Firefox is a great browser for developers as it’s rich in plug-ins but in terms of surfing and stability, Safari is no doubt the better. Did your Firefox browser recently hung on you? Well, the ratio of Firefox and Safari browser hangs on my experience is 9:1. Safari almost never hangs.

Blue Screen of Death

Hands up who hasn’t seen this on your Windows. It might not be the #1 reason you should go for Mac, but at least Mac don’t hang for no reason.

Spaces for better working environment

Spaces is a new function that comes with Mac OSX Leopard. Linux has similar function. It basically allows you to create more working desktops and conviniently swap from each other. Organize different applications into different spaces, and that will not eat up much resources. And resources is what Windows need

Typography

Last but not least, the Mac’s typography. Mac uses Lucida and Myriad Pro fonts in most displays, no more pixelated fonts anywhere.

Tags: blog, blogging, mac

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