And now the continuing saga of one man’s battle to ride the tide of change. The Intel change, that is. And the battle is going pretty well. All those lovely Rosetta-marked icons are slowly fading from my DragThing palettes. Adobe’s Design and Web Standard packages have upgraded all my Adobe and previously Macromedia products all at once (for some $700 or so). Add to that, Apple’s Final Cut Express HD and associated apps (discussed last week) as well as Filemaker Pro. My Quicken update was not a Universal Binary, dang it, so I’ll have to spend money on yet another upgrade sometime. BBEdit was also another converted app. If you need a text editor, try BareBones’ TextWrangler – it’s free.
The ones I am holding out on are QuarkXPress 7, OmniPage X and Fontographer. Not sure if Fontographer will be (or needs to be) updated, OmniPage X hasn’t been updated in a while (besides my scanner does not have an Intel driver – shame on Epson, and VueScan also does OCR) and QuarkXPress 7 has some issues and most people are staying on the 6.5.2 version, including printers.
So all-in-all, not too bad an upgrade process. Results? Yes, I notice that apps are snappier to load and some processes are faster. Many of the updates include enhanced or new features, either because of the age of my previous version or because with the Intel chips they can do more stuff, so that is cool, too. And using Parallels Desktop has been great for running Windows XP without partitioning my drive or having to reboot. And it’s fast!
Weird stuff? Yeah, I got some of that. Like Apple’s Mail taking 30 seconds to open a Reply window, or the Adobe Suites initial screens to load. Had to re-import my letterhead graphic into FileMaker Pro to get it to look right. My system has frozen up about 6 times in the past month of owning it which is more times than my G5 did in two years. That, I do not like. But like with any change, there is an adjustment period. I’ll keep you posted and let you know when things have settled down or if I need to make radical adjustments.