Computer
Just a little note about the computers we got from the school:
14” Apple iBook G4, 1.2 GHz, with 256 MB RAM.
Office Pro Mac X
Acrobat
Photoshop 7
Illustrator 10
Premier 6.5
InDesign 2.0
Freehand MX 2004
Dreamweaver MX 2004
Flash MX 2004
Fireworks MX 2004
Director MX
Rumor has it we’ll be getting more RAM, but if that doesn’t materialize, RAM prices are relatively reasonable (512MB for ~$100), so I may look into getting more on my own dime.
I don’t have much experience with the Macromedia products, so I shall have to spend some time getting up to speed with the technology. I’m particularly interested in Flash. Marcos Weskamp is one of the students in my year (you may know him from newsmap), and he’s done some pretty cool things utilizing Flash. I don’t know when I’m going to find the time to fool around with the software, but I’m sure I’ll manage. It’s hard not to be inspired and pushed by my fellow students. It’ll probably take me a long time before I can do anything like what Marcos is doing, but I gotta start somewhere!
The only other comment of note for the moment is that the keyboard on the iBook is all strange (at least to me). The layout is not the same as the layout on my old iBook. I’m not sure if it’s an international keyboard or if it’s specific to Europe. It’s taking me some time to get used to the key positions, particularly because you can set the keyboard to behave as if it were laid out as described (i.e.: each key does what it’s supposed to do) or you can set it to another language. So right now I have it set to the US, which means that although on this keyboard the 8 and 9 keys are shown to produce the left and right parentheses when holding down shift, on the US keyboard layout the 9 and 0 keys are the parentheses. So I have to type on this keyboard while ignoring the actual symbols on the keys. It’s sort of strange at times, and I’m glad I’m used to pseudo-touch-typing, because otherwise I’d be completely lost.
Anyways, here’s a shot…
