Switching from Windows to Macintosh - Chapter 6

Howdy, Friends;

This evening I prepared to make a slide show on DVD to show at my wife's birthday in a few days. I planned to use digital photos taken over the last several years, as well as a great many old photos which I would have to scan on my Microtek scanner. I was in a hurry; because of other things going on, I only had about an hour to scan 40 or 50 pictures.

Because I haven't had time to work with the scanner directly with the Mac, and all the needed software to acquire the pictures was already on my XP machine, I figured I would scan the pictures on the XP machine and then transfer them to the Mac via flashdrive or the network. So I logged into XP, fired up the scanner, and got started scanning pictures into Photoshop Elements. I was doing this by invoking Microtek's scanning software using the import function in Elements. I would prescan a sheet full of photos, window each one, and scan it into Elements. This worked as expected.

Then, because of text on the Microtek software page that made me think this would work, I tried holding down the shift key and making multiple selections before invoking the scan button. Bad idea. The Microtek software locked up. Elements locked up. After doing the usual 'Die, Die, Die' functions to kill the frozen programs, and telling the system that no, I don't want to send info to Microsoft, thankyouverymuch, twice, I tried logging off and logging back on, hoping that would let me proceed. Remember, I was in a blinding hurry. After logging back in, the system still wouldn't let me run Elements. Shut it all down and restart the machine, and wait, wait, wait for it to reboot. Login again and wait for everything to load. Why the heck is it even possible to make multiple selections in a situation where the program can't handle it? Stupid, stupid design.

Didn't make that mistake again. I finished scanning the pictures, one at at time. Moved pictures to USB flashdrive, then plugged that into the MacBook Pro. Used iPhoto to import the 90 plus photos. Using the default selection set (the pictures I just imported) I told iPhoto to make a slideshow (one button). I watched it cycle through once, then told it to burn a DVD. It sent the slideshow over to iDVD where I picked a theme, changed the title, and told it to make a DVD, which it did. I made two copies. Tested one of them, worked fine.

Notice the irony here. I've been using Windows since version 3.0 on top of DOS. That's a long time, friend. Many, many hours learning how to make Windows go. And in this scenario, just completed, Windows XP and Windows software gave me major hassles just to scan some pictures. The complicated part of the process, producing the slide show, worked flawlessly the first time on the Mac. On a system I've used for just a few weeks. Using software I was pretty unfamiliar with. Using iDVD for the very first time ever. Amazing - again!

At this point, I'm pretty much convinced that I am not going back to Windows except as necessary to do my job. Unfortunately, to do what I do, I will have to be intimately familiar with Vista, as I am already well versed on XP. But I am now pretty well convinced that OS X is the way to go. It's not perfect - but so far it sure is a lot less painful than XP. And Vista is built on top of an XP foundation, so this type of problem isn't likeley to go away in Vista. On the other hand, realistically, sooner or later I'm going to have problems with OS X - but I haven't yet.

Y'all have a good evening!
-Pop