In six months with this MacBook Pro, I think I have acclimated pretty well to this other way of doing things. But there was one particular action or behavior that I hated. One reason that the package that is a MacBook wasn't as complete as the competition, specifically a Thinkpad. That one action was the method for clicking and dragging.

On the Thinkpad, there is the Track Stick, Pointing Stick, whatever its called. Most people don't spend the time required to get used to it, but once you do, it seems to be the most perfect pointing device. In fact, given the choice of an external mouse or the pointing stick, I will dump the mouse any day. It is so much more precise, quick, and useful that nothing else really could compare. The fact that I could have my index finger on the stick and my thumb on the mouse buttons allowed me to make intricate masks in Photoshop, drag and drop with ease, and select just the text I needed without any overlap.

Move over to the Mac, and that simple integration of man with machine was broken. Clicking and dragging became a chore. I had to either dumb myself down in Photoshop, or start carrying an external mouse. My knuckles were aching from pushing down that massive trackpad and dragging to grab a short piece of text. I was thinking I might have to get one of those external Thinkpad keyboards to get that efficiency back with the Mac.

But then a month or so ago, Apple changed the game. With a single feature that most people probably didn't think twice about. Three Finger Dragging makes my one big complaint about this hardware just disappear. And I didn't even pay attention to it until just a few minutes ago. I had been using it since the day the update was released and it came so natural. Its really incredible!!

Last night, I painted with a brush in Photoshop. With three fingers swirling around the Trackpad, I covered the area I needed just perfectly. Changing brush sizes with the keyboard shortcuts and back to dragging and I got exactly what I intended. Selecting text to copy into emails and documents works the first time with no sore knuckles. I was dragging files between folders in a Windows RDP session so effortlessly that I wasn't missing that track stick at all.

Of course, now I wish the TrackPad was a little bit bigger, but the fact that I can leave the three fingers on the pad, then use the index finger of the other hand to continue the behavior means that the trackpad really has an infinite width and height. It has turned a pretty good piece of technology into what could be the most perfect pointing device ever, all with a single, mostly ignored software update.

MacBook Pro, I think I love you.

Now Apple, if you could just add the three finger tap to give me a middle click without having to use add-ons, I will be over the moon.

I absolutely adore developers who realize that their platform isn't the only platform. Developers who know there is something else out there and are OK with it. A lot of devs think their platform is the best, and that if the customer doesn't feel that way, well they just don't get it. That's true on both the Windows side and the Mac side. But when the dev goes a bit further and enables the opposite platform to integrate, well that's just perfect.

SimpleNote is just one such application. I guess it started with the iPhone app. And if they ended it there, I would know nothing about it since I don't own an iPhone. But they also have a web app at https://simple-note.appspot.com/index.html (shown here). I am not a huge fan of working in the cloud: having the content up there is fine, as long as I can edit on the platform I care about. So if they ended it there, I would still probably not know anything about it. But the magic came when they opened up that web app for other developers to integrate in with.

What got me interested was Notational Velocity. And I am not really sure why I got interested. After all, the Notational Velocity website is terrible. After reading the page, I had no idea what it did. But for some reason I ran it on my Mac and I got it: a text-based non-relational database with a query interface so frickin easy that anyone can use it. Just start typing. If there is a note with that text, the title will show in the list. Keep typing to narrow the search. Arrow down to select your note, or just press enter to start a new one. Give it 30 seconds and it will totally click.

At that point I checked out the web client. It worked pretty much the same way and now I really saw the value of having it up there. This is probably the right time to check out the Extras page at SimpleNote. There are Windows-based apps that work with it as well. So I installed ResophNotes.

While it doesn't have quite the same level of ease of use as Notational Velocity, I was quickly able to get the sync going and see all my notes there as well. I edit on Windows, see the notes on Mac, make some changes on the web site, see them on Windows. It just works, and it works on most of the platforms I care about. If there was a Blackberry app as well, I would be in heaven.

Now you might look at this and wonder why I would get excited over a simple notepad app. After all, Evernote does all of this and more, right? While its true that Evernote is an amazing application, it never sucked me in quite as well as this. I personally feel that Evernote is trying to do too much, at least for me. SimpleNote and its derivations are just what I need when I want to make a quick note of something, and then find it easily where ever I am right now.

One of the blogs I read on a regular basis is that of Scott Kelby over at scottkelby.com. Usually he has interesting things to say about taking better pictures. But occasionally he says something...misguided....but true. Yesterday's post was an example of one of these less than accurate articles. He was talking about standard frame sizes and why the 8x12 frame size should replace the more acceptable 8x10.

I agree. I agree wholeheartedly that the 8x10 frame size should disappear in favor of 8x12. Actually, I would suggest going further and join the rest of the world by going to a 210x297 mm size instead. All of my commercial prints in the last 5 years have been the 20x30cm standard size and frames (over here) are very easy to come by.

But Scott's reasoning is completely flawed. I assume he was just having a bad day. He said its because digital is replacing 35mm film for the standard type of camera people own today. But where this is screwed up is that 35mm film and most common digital sensors have roughly the same aspect ratio. So he should have said 8x12 should be the standard size since 35mm has replaced 8x10 glass plates as the most popular image capture format.

In most books that you will find about Cocoa on the Mac, there is a brief blurb about its beginnings with NeXT. NeXT was that company that Jobs ran before coming back to Apple which made ridiculously cool looking computers. I have never touched a NeXT Cube, but I wanted to from the first time I saw one. In fact, it was one of my goal for the first job I ever had. When I turned 16 I was able to get a job at the local camera shop, Bristol's Camera on Key Biscayne near Miami. This job allowed me to fund my photography habit: buying chemicals for my darkroom, getting new lenses at cost, and more.

After graduation from high school, I went on to college at FSU, but every time I came home for holidays and breaks, I would go back to work at the camera shop. At that time I started saving the money I earned. Some of it would go towards buying CDs at Vinyl Fever in Tallahassee, but what I didn't spend on music got saved away for a much bigger, more expensive item. That item was a special computer that became available the year I left high school. The NeXT. Ahhh. I only saw pictures of it in magazines. Looking back, I am not exactly sure why I wanted one. Maybe it was this article in Byte magazine. It was the top object of my desire.

My big disappointment came however, when I was approaching enough savings to buy one: they got out of the hardware business. The same year, I graduated from Florida State and got a real job at PC Docs. I drifted away from the idea of getting involved with NeXT and its not until the last few months that I return. I wonder how things might have been different had I a little more money back when I was 20. I wonder what would have happened had I bought that Cube, way back when.