My 2009 17" MacBook Pro

I recently switched from an 8-core Mac Pro desktop system to a new 17" MacBook Pro and I'm loving it.

Video Toe-To-Toe Against the Mac Pro

My first concern making this switch was, would the MacBook Pro offer enough power to get my toughest work done. The answer so far has been yes.

Though I've been doing less video work — one of the changes that led me to this switch — I actually did get a fairly involved video project to work on for a friend. The project involved a good deal of compositing in Final Cut Pro, so it was a fairly resource-intensive affair. The MacBook Pro handled it with aplomb. I never once felt like I was working on an underpowered system. Final Cut performed just as well — which is to say sluggishly — as it did on my 8-core. Sure, rendering took a bit longer, but not as much as I'd expected, and not in any way that was a ever problem.

The 17" MacBook Pro's amazing screen really helped a lot too. What was even better, though, was hooking the MacBook Pro up to my secondary Cinema Display and working with dual-monitors. In this way, the MacBook Pro was actually a step up.

So, in a face off with my 8-core tower doing my toughest work, the new system passed with flying colors.

Size Matters

Another concern I had was whether or not I would really like the 17" model. I've always felt that the 15" was the ideal balance between usability and portability, but I opted for the 17" because I wouldn't be taking it out much and would be using it more as desktop replacement.

I'm rather surprised at how happy I am with the size. It certainly doesn't feel significantly heavier or bulkier than my old 15" PowerBook. A little, but not much. And it's fantastic around the house. Perfectly portable for moving between rooms.

Having the extra screen real estate is also wonderful, though the 1920x1200 resolution can get a bit tiresome on my aging eyes. This is more than made up for in brightness, however, which can be blinding (I had to turn it down for the photos). I'm also very happy I got the anti-glare screen. The treatment doesn't reduce the depth of the blacks nearly as much as I thought it would.

Overall the monitor is amazing, and I'm very happy with the size of the machine as a whole.

On Its Own Merits

In addition to being able to hold its own against my desktop system, and against my prior laptop experiences, there's a lot to love about the MacBook Pro in and of itself.

For one, I'm loving the new trackpad. There are things about this trackpad that I actually prefer over mousing, in particular, two-finger scrolling and the many other gestures that multi-touch offers. I sometimes miss those features now when I'm stuck using a standard mouse at work. This is one reason I'm so excited to try the Magic Mouse.

The battery life is quite good as reported. Like most folks I've read, I get about four straight hours of solid use, which is usually plenty. Any more than that and I should probably go sit at my desk anyway.

Now that I've set up my 802.11n wireless network, I'm quite happy with the general network speed of the machine. It's a huge improvement over 802.11g.

The uni-body construction really feels solid. In some ways it feels more solid than my tower, and certainly lacks the creakiness of the old PowerBook.

It also stays remarkably cool. My legs are loving it.

The keyboard is also great, as good as my tower's.

Odds And Ends

I bought my MacBook Pro with the DVI-to-Display Port adaptor offered by Apple. When you order this with your computer on Apple's site it comes in the sealed computer box as though it were an included item, not in a separate box of its own.

I actually rather like the Mini Display port. It's small and space-efficient, and much easier to handle and plug in than a DVI plug, believe it or not. And for the record, it's powering an ancient 23" plastic, easel-style Cinema Display hooked up to a ADC-to-DVI converter. Fun! And it works like a charm.

The monitors on these new-gen MacBooks no longer leave imprints on the screen. I can't tell you (or maybe I can) how annoying it was to have to have a screen protector at all times with my old PowerBook. So lame! A rubber grommet around the edge of the screen and problem solved!

The system came with a full install disc of Snow Leopard. Now I have three!

There Will Be Beefs

As close as this one comes, no system is perfect. There are always beefs.

I've mentioned the occasional difficulty with the monitor resolution, but my biggest beef is probably the fact that the keyboard is so far from the front edge of the computer. This, coupled with my second-biggest complaint, the fact that the unibody edges are so sharp, makes for some less-then-perfect text input. That sharp edge tends to cut at my wrists when I'm typing. Yes, it's a very minor quibble. And it's really the only one that's bothered me enough to write down.

Beyond that, I've had some system freezes on the new machine, but they seem to have mostly dissipated since installing the Performance Update from earlier this month.

And I guess I'd like to see more gesture programmability someday. But now I'm just grasping at straws.

Final Analysis

In case you can't tell. I'm quite enamored of my new 17" MacBook Pro. It's pretty much everything I want a computer to be: space-efficient yet powerful, comfortable and reliable. It's hard to imagine a better computer for someone like me.

The thing I like best about it, though, is that I can have everything — all my main rig data and all my laptop data — right there on a single system that is both portable and powerful. I can take it around with me everywhere I go and there it is. But plug it into the desktop monitor and hook up a couple firewire drives and I have a very functional, dual-monitor desktop rig that's just as comfortable and appropriate for video work as my desktop system ever was. It's like having all the power of a tower anywhere in the house.

The versatility of this system is what makes special, and I've been nothing but impressed. If you're ever thinking of making a similar switch, and your processing needs can handle it, I highly recommend the 17" MacBook Pro. It's everything you want in both a laptop and a desktop system.

And it's made me a much happier computer user.

Brilliant

I have no time to write right now, but I just had to acknowledge a couple of the new Apple products quietly released yesterday.

First off, for the server nerds in the house, Apple now officially sanctions using Minis as workgroup servers.

We've all been doing this for a while now, of course, so it's nice to see Apple finally offering a bundle. Small, cool, headless and powerful enough for most tasks, the Mini is, for many purposes, an excellent server platform. And, with the client license restrictions removed, Mac OS X Server is a flat $499, making the bundle clock in at just under a grand, so they're cheap too.

And, of course, this Magic Mouse is simply brilliant.

It brings together everything I love about my trackpad and my mouse in one device and solves a bunch of input device problems (like left- or right-handedness, and gunked-up moving parts), all in one fell swoop. I can't wait to get my sweaty mitts on one.

I have to say, I find these surprise product announcements much more thrilling than the usual over-hyped events. I hope to see more of them in the future. This is exciting stuff.

Create a Dual-Format Drive for Mac and Windows

It's just come to my attention that it's now fairly trivial to split a drive into two differently formatted partitions, one of which could be used for the Mac while the other could be used for Windows. This is not necessarily new, but there are a number of things that make it of particular interest to me. Before I detail the process of creating this dual-platform drive, I want to talk a bit about some of the reasons you might want to do this and some of the challenges I've faced over the years with regards to the issue of cross-platform drives.

Some History

In the very cross-platform lab where I used to work we were continually on the hunt for the best filesystem solution for users of multiple platforms when they were using external firewire or USB drives. That is, some folks wanted their drives to be accessible from both the Mac OS and Windows. On the surface this can seem like an easy problem to solve — Fat32 (or "MS-DOS" as it's called in Disk Utility) is readable and writable on both platforms. But it's not so cut and dry.

The biggest problem for me was video. See, I taught — and continue to teach — a video class in that very same department. We use Final Cut Pro as our editing software, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I prefer to work on the Mac. I require my students to have a firewire drive appropriate to showing in-progress video work in class. But Fat32 has a 4GB file size limit, and video captures can often exceed that limit. What happens when this limit is exceeded is interesting from a systems standpoint, but devastating from a user standpoint.

Video and Fat32

When capturing video in Final Cut Pro to a Fat32 volume, what happens is that the video file gets segmented. That is, the capture file gets written in 4GB chunks. Initially, Final Cut will see these chunks and understand what they are. But after saving the project and quitting the app Final Cut will no longer be able to locate the captured media because it's in multiple files with different names. The path to the media that FCP relies on is now, essentially, broken. This actually happened to a student of mine some time ago, and we were able to use the cat command to reconstruct the single movie file onto an HFS+ volume and then point FCP at the reconstructed file. Boy was that fun.

NTFS

We've often looked to the ever-popular NTFS file system as a possible future solution. It does not have such small file size limits, and it's readable on Mac and Windows. But the Mac has never been able to write to NTFS. So, in the past, our solution in the lab — our recommendation for users who really needed a dual-format drive with read/write capabilities on Mac and Windows — was to use the HFS+ filesystem on the drive and use MacDrive on Windows to read and write to that drive. Inelegant? Yes. But it mostly worked.

Mac and Windows Partitions

Another potentially attractive alternative to a single, dual-platform volume was the idea of splitting the drive into two partitions and dedicating each partition to a platform/filesystem. This way, even if all your Mac and Windows data wasn't all mushed together in one volume, you could at least keep it all on one device. This solution would likely work for the vast majority of users. Unfortunately, there was never a particularly straightforward way of doing this. Sure, it was doable. But it wasn't easy, and it wasn't something you could tell new students to do. In fact, it was likely to require admin access and command-line heroics, and so just wasn't a viable solution to anyone but the most die-hard user. Until now.

Without too much mucking around, it's now possible to create a dual-format external drive that contains a mac-formatted partition and a Windows-formatted one.

MacFUSE and NTFS for Mac OS X

The first step is the only really tricky part, and it's not even that tricky. If you have need for a dual-format drive, this should be pretty easy for you. You're going to need to install the MacFUSE and NTFS packages. In a nutshell, MacFUSE is an experimental set of tools for doing unsupported things with filesystems like SSH, FTP and, of course, NTFS on your Mac. And, experimental though it may be, I've been using it for quite a while and have not had any problems to speak of. Installing MacFUSE and the NTFS drivers will allow you to mount NTFS volumes with read-write access.

So, if NTFS can be mounted read-write on the Mac with MacFUSE, and it's obviously read-write on Windows, and it doesn't suffer from the file size limitations of Fat32, why not just use NTFS as your über-filesystem and format the whole drive with it? That's a great question, and I'm glad I asked it!

The thing about getting NTFS read-write access on a Mac with MaFUSE is that it's very much a hack. Yes, it works, but it has its problems. First and foremost among them is the fact that Final Cut Pro is really not a fan. In fact, FCP might just be the best barometer of a good cross-platform solution as it seems to be so picky about filesystems. So far, the only filesystem I've seen work consistently well with Final Cut is HFS+. No surprise there. And on NTFS it gets downright crazy. Files sometimes won't open. Sometimes they won't save. It's a scary mess, and I wouldn't trust my FCP data on NTFS for any amount of money.

But, what the MacFUSE NTFS package does get you is a relatively easy way to format your drive with separate Mac and Windows partitions, and this, at least in my tests seems to work just fine.

The easiest way to get everything you need is to go to the NTFS-3G for Mac OS X website and download the latest package. This package will install the most recent non-beta version of MacFUSE as well as the latest NTFS libraries, and contains everything you need. Once you've installed this bundle, you'll need to reboot your system.

Creating the Dual-Partition Drive

After the reboot you'll see a new filesystem option when you go to format drives in Disk Utility.

Moreover, that option will be available to individual partitions of drives that are otherwise formatted. And that's what's new (to me) and what allows the magic to happen. Here's how you do it.

1. First, if you have any data on the drive that you need to preserve, back it up. This process WILL ERASE YOUR HARD DRIVE.
2. Next, select the drive you want to dual-format and choose the Partition tab.
3. Select a Volume Scheme. I'm just doing the simplest, two-partition scheme, with one Mac and one Windows partition, but you can certainly get more Byzantine with it if you'd like.

   

4. Set the Format for the partition you want to use on the Mac to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)," give it a name and a size.

   

5. Set the Format for the partition you want to use on Windows to "Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G)," give it a name and size.

   

6. Under the Options... set the partition scheme to "Master Boot Record." This is needed for Windows to see your drive.

   

7. Finally, hit the Apply button. You'll be warned that everything is about to be deleted. Click through, and after a few seconds you will have completed the formatting process and your dual-format drive will be ready for use on Mac and Windows.

Caveats

As I said, so far this has been working really well for my class. You may still want to file it under "experimental" for the time being, at least until you're sure it's working safely. But I'm confident enough in this method to recommend it to my video students who also need some external Windows drive love.

It's also important to keep in mind here that I am not endorsing using the NTFS partition for Mac data of any kind. Doing so is surely unsupported by Apple, and by all reports is fraught with problems.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, unlike with a GUID partition table, you will not be able to resize or split partitions without completely erasing the drive.

Conclusion

Lastly, I realize that this process is hardly new, nor am I the first to discover it. It was pointed out to me by one of my video students, and I have a feeling the new admins at my old job have been using it for some time. But it's new to me. This is the first I've heard of this and it's exciting to me from an academic standpoint, in the context of my old job, in the context of my class, as a new option I can offer to whomever might need it, and as a symbol of progress — however small or kludgy — towards cross-platform filesystem solutions. This is just another of the very cool advances made possible by the existence of the MacFUSE (and the original Linux FUSE) effort. It's very cool to see this sort of thing coming to fruition at last!

Another intriguing extension of the MacFUSE project — and one that I've used a bit myself — is MacFusion, which allows for mounting of data over network protocols such as FTP and SSH. I'm sure there are tons of others. I highly recommend folks — particularly SysAdmins — check out and familiarize themselves with MacFUSE in general, as well. As much as has been done since the last time I looked at it, there is still a ton of future potential in the project, and I see it increasingly becoming a part of the admin's toolbox.

Snow Leopard Scanner Application

It's been widely reported that the Image Capture app in Snow Leopard can now see and scan from many common scanners. This is a huge boon to those of us who are sick and tired of crappy scanner drivers and software. Image Capture is quite a capable scanner app, and fairly Mac-like.

But there's another, more direct way to access your scanner without opening Image Capture.

Just like with printers, adding a scanner (either via Image Capture or directly in your Print & Fax preference pane) will create a scanner application in ~/Library/Printers. This can be dragged directly to your Dock for quick, easy scanner access.

Or, if you open the scanner directly from the Print & Fax prefs, it will appear in the Dock where you can simply right-click it and choose to "Keep in Dock" from the options.

All-in-all native scanning is an extremely handy feature and seems to work well in my tests. Keeping my scanner in my Dock just makes it that much easier to use.

802.11n

Recently a friend was commenting on how much he enjoyed his 802.11n wireless speeds, and with the arrival of my new MacBook Pro I realized I was finally in a position to take advantage of those speeds.

I resolved to buy an 802.11n Airport Base Station.

However, upon further examination of my existing Airport network, it turned out that two of my Airport Expresses were already 802.11n-capable. But they were the Remotes in the network, and the Main — the pipe to the Internet and the controller of the whole network — was an old 802.11g-type unit. Not 802.11n capable!

Setting up an 802.11n network, however, was merely a matter of rearranging the Airport Expresses such that an 802.11n unit was the Main. Doing so was a bit of a pain, as usual. I even tried some of the wizards folks had mentioned with little luck. In the end I used my trusty instructions for wireless network setup and basically started from scratch, resetting all the units. I was saved a bit of time using this option in the Airport Utility wizard:

This allowed me to at least get the new Main set up and running with the old Main's network settings, though I still had to set the replacement unit as the Main on a WDS. Although not all settings transferred, this was still a bit quicker and more convenient than if I'd started over.

I have to say, the speed boost is really nice. When it comes to download speeds, at least, I'd say they're comparable to what I see on my wired system. Very fast! I'm curious to see what file transfers are like on the LAN, but that's for another day. Suffice to say, I'm very pleased with the upgrade. And even happier it was free.

One extra bit of good news: The 802.11n range is better than my old unit, so it looks like I'll be able to take the older Airport out of the mix.

Our household is now fully 802.11n. And loving it!