Trying to figure out what programs I will use if I move from Mac to PC

I have been talking about it for ages, and have used Apple Computers since I was 7 and got an Apple IIC. I love my Mac, but it getting old, and the next macOS Sierra has end of lifed my 4,1 MacPro. Luckily I can hack it to become a 5,1 with a simple firmware hack, so I can install Sierra, but it is likely the last Mac OS my computer will run. And big Adobe updates usually require the latest Mac OS. And the new “MacPro”, the trashcan is a joke that has not been upgraded since it’s release in 2013. It isn’t upgradeable, nor can it have more than one harddrive internally, so it isn’t pro. And it’s use of a Xeon processor is not a boon. Xeon’s are usually a few generations behind on technology, the big difference is that Xeon’s don’t have an integrated graphics processor (which doesn’t affect you if you us a high end graphics card) and they 2 processors! But the trashcan can only use one! And yes it can have 12 cores (for an insane price), but i7’s have now reached 8 or 10 cores and are newer tech, so why not use those if you are only using one processor. I really don’t get it!

And yes I could build a Hackintosh, but I have been using a Quo at work,mand while it is great, upgrades are never too fun, and you must disable security features to even install El Capitan.
So it is looking like my next computer is a PC, cause I can put an NVIDIA Geforce 1080, but I need to figure out moving away from many of my current programs.
I know I can move iTunes to PC, though I hear it doesn’t work as well on the PC, but my library and ratings will make it over.
I can export and move my mailboxes, browsers and the like pretty easily. There is nothing to easily move my Photos library to Windows, but I can import my Library into Adobe Lightroom and it will take my Keywords, then move to PC so it will work there. Pages and the whole iWorks suite is a pain as I need to open each file and save it out to word (hopefully I can automate it).
Making my web sites is more of a pain. I have used many programs over time, starting with Net Objects Fusion before it went Windows only, and I have even used Dreamweaver, though my HTML skills have gone to hell, and I don’t want to code anymore. So currently I use Rapidweaver, which makes it easy and I have 2 different web sites for me and my mom’s web site, which can link to much web site content. Now I am starting to look at Adobe Muse as an alternative, but I am not sure it will easily plug into all the content I currently use, from YouTube, Vimeo, 500px, or Flickr, so sites you can easily upload things and have them automatically show up on your web site. And it looks like there is no way to embed my blogger blog into muse, as I have done with Rapidweaver. Might be able to do my self hosted wordpress, but not my blogger blogs. Damn!
Then I will of course have to figure out a bunch of other programs, and especially system tweaking, and a new backup system, as I can’t use time machine anymore.
It is surprising to me how little info there is online for moving from Mac to PC. Any info or even programs to help seem to be made to go the other way.
Oh well, when it happens I will likely be running both machines for a while, until I am sure everything is moved over.
And I am sure I will miss my Mac in many ways as I have Windows 10 in parallels and bootcamp on my mac, but it works, and honestly is a more pro system nowdays.

Still fixing my iTunes Library after disasterous update to El Capitan

After my disasterous update to El Capitan which tanked my iTunes Library, I am still working on cleaning it up!

I have fixed the music, and re-rated all my tracks, and only lost about 20 tracks out of my 40,000 plus itunes library, but now I am working on video and that is such a mess. So many tracks have been randomly renamed! I have to go through and watch some of them and figure out what they are and rename them!

All I can say is never move your iTunes library to an external Synology as it just ruined my iTunes library completely!

More fun with Xmarks and Safari

So I am still having major xmarks issues. On my Mac on El Capitan 10.11.5 I am running Firefox 47.01 and Xmarks 4.3.19, and I am running Safari 9.1.1 and Safari Technology Preview 9.1.2 (which was recently updated, and maybe the issue) and Xmarks for Safari 2.0.19.

After creating my clean bookmarks in Firefox and making a clean backup of them I kept uploading them and overwriting the xmarks servers, but when I uses Xmark for Safari it has been seemingly just wiping out all my Xmarks in both Safari’s, but leaving my completly messed up bookmarks on both my iPhone and iPad. So this time I turned off iCloud Sync for Safari on both iPad and iPhone and deleted the bookmarks then overwrote the Safari bookmarks on my mac with the clean bookmarks from Xmarks, and it left Safari empty of bookmarks once again. Weird. So I let it sit overnight with no bookmarks in Safari on my Mac, iPhone or iPad, but when I woke up that was no longer the case. Once again Safari had messed up bookmarks on my Mac (though nothing on iPhone and iPad sync iCloud is off completely) and the server copy on Xmarks is messed up again too!

Great! So now I have also turned off iCloud on my Mac and have re-installed my good backup bookmarks into Firefox and re-uploaded them to Xmarks, and redownloaded them with Xmarks for Safari (which I have also uninstalled and re-installed) and once again I have no bookmarks in Safari. Maybe having iCloud though on all my devices it will eventually clear the bookmarsk in iCloud which are obviously totally messed up, though eventually I do want it to sync to my iPhone and iPad.

I have contacted Xmarks support to see if they will do anything.

I am thinking after this I may just need to kill Xmarks for Safari and just work from an exported bookmarks from Firefox and put them into Safari, as for sure something is not working with Xmarks!

More fun with Xmarks on Mac, huzzah for Xmarks for Safari (if only it worked)

So I finally got X-marks to sync, but it was a total pain in the arse. In fact I had to wipe my whole Firefox profile, and use Firefox Sync to get all my plug ins back and then re-log into everything, and then import my clean bookmarks backup and use that to Upload over the Xmarks server. I then did the same at work where I have a portable Firefox setup, though after checking my x-marks bookmarks online they were still old, so I synced again this morning and the server ones finally seem to match.

Now is where the real fun begins! So I went to Xmarks for Safari and told it to Download my bookmarks, as it’s bookmarks were by far the most messed up. The first attempt seemed to merge my server bookmarks and Safari ones so they were an even bigger mess, so I tried downloading again, and now I have no safari bookmarks at all! YIPPEE!!!!

So in Xmarks for Safari I did a Reset Xmarks and relogged in and told it to keep data on server, and discard data on this computer (of which there is none). And Nothing. ABSOLUTELY NO BOOKMARKS IN SAFARI, nor in Safari Tech Preview. Good job Xmarks!

So finally my bookmarks are clean on the server, but I have absolutely no bookmarks in Safari, and my iPad and iPhone each still have the really messed up bookmarks from the strange merging of my clean bookmarks and my clean bookmarks, and they all have iCloud sync turned on.

And it looks like the solution I have used in the past is no longer viable. I used to boot into Bootcamp and let Apple’s iCloud Sync Extension work to sync my Safari boomarks, but posts online I am looking at seem to imply that the extension no longer functions with the latest Firefox and the plug in has been pulled. Thanks a lot Apple. Really appreciate the help!

Can’t Apple make a damn syncing plug in for Bookmarks for those of us that don’t use Safari on the mac, since we are forced to use Safari on our iOS devices?

Anyone else have major problems with XMARKS on Mac?

So I am a Mac user, but I do not use Safari as my browser of choice, but I still want my bookmarks to sync between browsers and get to my ipad and iphone. And my browser of choice is still Firefox (I used Chrome for a while but missed all the plug ins with Firefox) as I like it expansion abilities (and yes I know in the near future it will lose them and start using Chrome extensions, and I will likely re-evaluate then).

So to keep my Bookmarks synced for a long time I have been a user of Xmarks. It works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and nominally Safari. On PC Apple has released a bookmark sync plug in for iCloud that works very well, but they have never released it for mac. So I use XMARKS.

The problem is I think with Xmarks Safari, which is finicky at best, and often if I am not paying attention to my bookmarks, they all get mixed up and unorganized. Things get pulled out of folders and moved all over, and yes in XMARKS you can go see old sets of bookmarks, but it isn’t exactly a quick or easy process, and often to find a clean set of bookmarks I need to go back far enough that I lose any recent bookmarks that I have added, so I end up just re-organizing my bookmarks once again.

I just spent the last 2 days doing that gain, and am doing a force overwrite of my server bookmarks, so hopefully all my browsers end up with my nice clean freshly organized bookmarks, but I don’t expect it to work, as old things always pop up and things get completely disorganized.

Plus it makes me nervous that my upload has been doing this for the last half an hour!

Which even though I am doing a forced overwrite of the server, I can bet things will get messed up (and yes I have exported my bookmarks and made a backup from Firefox, as this organization took a long damn time).

And somehow my bookmarks never seem to make it to Safari or my iPad an iPhone correctly no matter what I do. And I often end up manually importing the bookmarks into Safari, but then the sync gets all messed up.

Let’s hope for once this actually works.

(EDIT)

 Yup, well now that I have my clean set of bookmarks, it seems I can’t get them to Force Overwrite on the server! Xmarks just seems stuck at synchronizing. And Firefox keeps locking up so I have to force quite. Yipee. I guess I can manually delete Safari’s bookmarks and import the firefox ones and see how that goes, but I have never had a good experience with that! SHIT!

(EDIT AGAIN)

 Walked both dogs and when I came back the sync was done, but when I checked the bookmarks online, they were the old ones, so it didn’t seem to work. SHIT! This is really annoying!

Adobe has licensed Apple ProRES playback for Wndows

Adobe today announced that they have licensed playback of Apple’s ProRES, so it will be natively supported within Adobe Creative Cloud, without having to use Apple’s Quicktime to do so (since it has been killed for Windows). Now it won’t be able to write out to ProRES (so Window users will need another format), but it will be able to be read, and should be out soon.

They are also adding export support of mov wrapped DNxHD and DNxHR as well as playback of AAC audio and PNG compressed frames, and the native reading and writing of the legacy Animation format.

At least this gives ProRES a lifeline, though it is really too bad that it won’t be able to write it as well, as ProRES is a great format, that looks to be in decline from now on.

I love that Adobe is doing this, but I still can’t wrap my head around Apple’s thoughts on this. Sure it saves them money in development, and in licensing fees, but to have a really pro format it needs to be cross platform!

Honestly with Apple’s history with Pro Products (constantly making them great then killing them), and with the MacPro not being customize-able or upgrade-able at all (and not having been upgraded since it release in 2013), it looks to me like Apple is moving completely out of the high end pro market, and I worry that any of their high end software may not survive either!

Apple has released iTunes 12.4 and made it even more of a pain to use!

And yet another update to iTunes, with version 12.4, and once again Apple has made things harder to do.

Yes the sidebar is back permanently, instead of having to turn it on, but they have made it harder to use. Instead of tabs that were always up, now you pick, music and videos from a drop down menu. which is much slower than individual buttons. And now if you want to listen to your music list by songs, you have to scroll to the top of the playlists, which is obviously much slower than having a dedicated menu to do it (I think the menu was slow, but having to scroll to the top of the playlists to do is just dumb).

And then Playlists. When you create a playlist it puts it in a playlist format, where you can’t change order or see different ways to sort it at all, and there used to be a dedicated drop down to change it to Songs, so you can edit the order, or see if the order is by track or whatever. I hated having to do that, but now you have to go to the view menu, and go to the sort as Drop Down menu! Much harder and slower! And come on apple, lets us pick our default setting for Playlists! The default Playlist setting is useless! You can’t change anything, which is the whole point of playlists! Let us chose our own default choice, especially if you are going to make it even harder to use!

And now to create a new playlist from a selection of your music you used to right click, and select create new playlists, now you have to go to the add to playlist drop down and go to the top and select New Playlist. Additional drop down menus DON’T MAKE THINGS EASIER, THEY MAKE THEM HARDER APPLE!

And the back button. I don’t understand how it works. If I go to a playlist then to teh Songs in the Library and a new Playlist, and hit back, it goes back to the first Playlist, not the Songs that I was just at that I have to scroll all the way to the top of the list to get to. These items should stick to the top!

I do like that when you make a new playlist it is selected and shown on the left (which was gone as of recent versions), but it makes it hard to get back to sorting music by songs, since that is at the top of the sidebar!

I don’t know why Apple who is supposed to be all about making things easier thinks they have to change things and make them harder or even remove features with an update! First they took away the ability to open multiple playlists, then they made playlists default to an unchangeable playlist view. And now they have just make everything take more steps and be harder (and there aren’t even keyboard shortcuts to make it easier). What is next?

I really wish someone could come up with an interface to replace iTunes that works with the iTunes back end, and lets you customize it and use it like you want to, instead of being forced to do it how Apple wants, which seems to constantly be a harder and harder method! WTF APPLE!

OneRiver Media on NVIDIA GTX 1080 being death nell of high end Mac Graphics

NVIDIA recently announced the GTX 1080, which is half the price ($699) of it’s Titan, twice as fast and draws less power.

Marco Solorio of OneRiver Media talks about the NVIDIA GTX 1080 being the end of the MacPro as a high end graphics and editing system, since there is no longer a PCI based Mac! I do agree. The old PCI based MacPro will only last so much more, and it is already so far behind on modern technology.

So while I would prefer to run a Mac and OS X, I don’t want the ridiculous Trashcan MacPro, and I want 2 GTX 1080’s for a video card (or theoir version of a Titan), and hell I want the Microosft Surface Book as a laptop. Apple is pushing me away from the computer I love!

Apple has killed Quicktime for Windows, and this could be a big problem for ProRes!

So this is a scary thing, Apple has killed Quicktime for Windows, and it currently has major security flaws in it, so if your computer is attached to the internet you should uninstall it.

The problem is that there are many video formats that require Quicktime to run. This includes all forms of ProRes, which has even become a major camera format, as well as Animation (a major format for After Effects) and DNxHD/HR.

Now Adobe says they are working on it, but will likely have to license components to get these to work, so if it ever does it will take a while.

Overall while this seems like a very Apple thing to do, it makes me once again worry about Apple and it’s future in Video. The thing is even if you are not going to release your software for Windows, you want the video to be able to run for cross compatibility, like AVID always released versions of it’s drivers for people who didn’t own AVID. And ProRES is such a great format that it has become a defacto standard across a lot of the Post Production industry, but with this action ProRES will slowly be relegated to a sidestory, In the future cameras are going to be less likely to support it, and eventually it will be a FCP only format (that is if Apple even keeps developing FCP X in the future). Other than the short term why would Adobe support it, if it is literally only able to work on a Mac, that is less than half it’s market, so why bother.

This just shows me how out of touch Apple really is.

PCWorld on the aging MacPro, which is too positive

PCWorld has an article on the aging 2013 MacPro update, which hasn’t seen a single update since it’s release. Honestly though the article is too psitive on what Apple can do if they a new update with new technology.

The Problem is they made an unupgradeable pro Macintosh, and to make a better machine, you have to but a new one. Many people including me, have an old style MacPro that we have continued to upgrade to make it relevant. And the New MacPro can’t do that. You have on hard drive and two custom video cards and that is it. No upgrade other than RAM and external devices. And they have huge issues with external thunderbolt, like drives being disconected for no reason (See this article on MacPerformanceGuide).
Sure a non upgradeable machine means more money for Apple, but not upgrading the machine in 3 years, and making it much less than most desktop pc’s, means PC’s are much more powerful for less money with much better technology! It means pro users are going to consider leaving Mac altogether!
Seriously, does Apple want to lose Pro users? I have been an Apple user since the Apple IIC, but the non-upgradeable MacPro makes me consider moving to PC! At least if they consistently upgrading the unupgradable MacPro with the latest tech, it would make me consider the MacPro, but a 3 year or longer upgrade cycle is not acceptable! I mean Thunderbolt 3 is out on PC, and the latest NVIDIA graphics cards blow anything out of the water made in 2013, not even considering only having AMD video cards as an option, why are these not available on a Mac! Shit I would be OK with a non Xeon i7 Mac Pro with upgradeability, as it would blow my my MacPro 4,1 out of the water!
Apple is obviously not caring about Pro users, and not minding if they leave, which is scary since they are the people that kept Apple alive when it was the worst in the market. Honestly just admit it and give up on Pro users or actually make upgraded pro machines!