Non-macaddicts, skip this entry.

I’ve finally figured out why photos I edit in LightRoom look crap on Firefox – Firefox (and Internet Explorer for that matter) ignore embedded colour profiles and assume everything has been created in an sRGB colour space. Thus whilst my photos exported with other colour profiles look great on most of my mac apps (including Safari, which can read the colour profile metadata), when they’re displayed in apps that don’t support those profiles they look dull and washed out. The answer is either to use Safari (which I’m not a fan of due to the lack of plugins) or export everything in sRGB.

Myself and a Macuser friend tried out Screen Sharing today – it is FANTASTIC! Anyone who’s used the remote assistance tool in Windows will know how excruciatingly unresponsive and jumpy it can be – it feels like one is jabbing at the remote computer with a floppy stick in the vague hope of moving the mouse in the right direction. But Leopard’s new Screen Sharing is just red hot – and so easy to set up. Both mac users just log into iChat (have to use your .mac / AIM account, not Gmail etc via Jabber), then click on screen sharing. Accept the invite, and bang! There you are. Full direct control of that person’s Mac. You can switch back to your own at any point by just clicking on your mini-screen bottom right, it swings back into full screen mode with all the sexy moves of a chilli pepper on roller skates.

And I’m still stunned by the speed. Anyone with a Macbook with under 2GB’s of RAM – if you’re a Photoshop user, upgrade now! It makes a huge difference – today I had PS, DW, Bridge, LightRoom AND iPhoto open at the same time – with not a sound from the fan! Using Dreamweaver used to be excruciating, both on Windows and on my MacBook, but now, it’s a breeze.

Oh, you can put Time Machine in the menu bar if you get annoyed with having it in the Dock – although this fix is not perfect, the “last backup” will always display as the time the icon was run (i.e. on startup). I also noted that Time Machine will not backup unless you’re plugged into the mains.

Another feature I’m really enjoying is Spaces (it’s like having 4 screens on my Mac) – although I’ve found that unless I assign apps to launch in specific Spaces it’s easy to forget I have them. It’s so handy though: Mail is always top left, Firefox top right, Dreamweaver bottom left, image editing software bottom right. No clutter, everything where you know you can find it. I tried it with 6 windows, but it kind of gets confusing then!

Spotlight is very usable now. I used to avoid it like the plague, and even went so far as to try Google Desktop. Now, it’s instantaneous. It’s a shame there’s no option to make it search system files.

The Japanese dictionary is ma-ma. It is handy to have is as an option, but it’s pretty pathetic when compared with JEDICT (which uses Jim Breen’s database).

The spinning beachball of doom has made very few appearances this week, despite my really hammering the processor.

So, the verdict one week on is, ‘bloomin’ marvelous’ (and it’ll be even better when fixes for Skype, LightRoom, Pathfinder and Super Duper have been released).