Shortly after I bought my Power Mac I decided to move all of my daily computer activity over to the Mac from the PCs I had been using. My most important uses for my computers are maintaining and working with my digital photo collection and creating and maintaining my growing collection of web sites.
Apple bundles the iLife suite with each new Mac, and it includes iPhoto. I did have problems using iPhoto at first because I have tens of thousands of digital photos, and the version of iPhoto in iLife ’05 was not quite up to handling that many photos at once. I was able to work around this problem by splitting my photos up into a few different collections based on the year they were taken.
With the release of iLife ’06 the limitations in iPhoto were greatly improved, and I’m now able to work with my entire photo collection in a single iPhoto library.
For my websites I use Dreamweaver. When Macromedia announced Studio 8 I grabbed a copy for my Macs.
The way that Apple has integrated drag and drop in OS X is just absolutely fantastic. I can be viewing a web page in Safari (the world’s prettiest web browser) see an image I like, and simply drag and drop the image directly from within the browser onto a Dock icon for Fireworks or Photoshop; then suddeenly I’m editing the file.
This is just one of the many reasons it is actually much easier, for me at least, to use OS X.
