Fade to Play

On Friday I decided to take a trip to Apple Store Vancouver to get my macbookpro fixed. The problem was the the screen would sometimes flicker for 10 seconds or 30 seconds every so often. It was a minor inconvenience and I wanted to get it fixed.

I felt I could be without my mbp for a day or two and began to get a little anxious as the days ticketed by without hearing from the Apple Store. On Wednesday I received a call from a mac genius named Trellawny asking how I was doing and I told her that I was sad because I missed Shoshanna (my mbp).

She offered to brighten my spirits by giving me a new mbp as it was taking a while to get parts for the old one. As I had my mbp from July 2007, I thought this was very cool and generous of Apple. Apparently, this was one of the benefits of the AppleCare protection plan I have.

Thank you AppleCare!

So, thank you Apple for making my day. I still need to come up with a name. Below I will share some of my memories with Shoshanna (cue Boys II Men).

Day One - July 2007

Day Two - My Favourite picture with Shoshanna

Our first Flight together

At 10am on Saturday the Apple Store will be officially open in Pacific Centre in Vancouver. I think I may camp out. This is a big moment for Vancouver. I have had a macbookpro since last August and I have loved every minute of my life since then. Thank you Steve Jobs!

Vancouver just got a little bit cooler.

I would like to share with you some of the apps that help me with my day-to-day use on my macbookpro. I have found that reading blogs and tweets from members of the apple community has been useful in enhancing my productivity as a grad student. In addition, advice gleaned from these communication sources has provided me with relevant knowledge for getting greater value out of my laptop.

Today I will focus on Web Snapper from TastyApps.com which I first heard about on a tweet last month from Chris Messina. If is only available for Mac OS X 10.4 or better (sorry non-mac users).

It is one of my favourite tools and I use it almost daily as it captures complete webpages as a pdf which is especially useful for anyone researching social media as you would be able to easily capture changes in digital environments over time (e.g. new features on Facebook). I paid $8 for the download on Tastyapps and it is the best $8 I have spent in a while.

Basically you drag and drop the url into the Web Snapper popup box and then click the down arrow so that you can choose where to save the entire page (regardless of length) as a pdf. To view it, once it is done saving, you just click on the magnifying glass and the pdf will open in the location where it has been saved.

It is now also available for download on the Apple download page. I used Web Snapper to capture the Apple Canada page below as an example.

Relevance: Just another reason why I love my macbookpro - cool mac apps.

w00t. As predicted we can now download tv shows from iTunes in Canada.

I’m excited. I wonder what I will download first. Thanks SJ, now where is our iPhone?

Yesterday I received my copy of iWork ‘08 in the mail that I had ordered on Black Friday from the Apple Store online. It was my first Black Friday purchase.

I successfully installed it shortly after midnight and I am looking forward to designing my next presentation with Keynote. Thanks to Retrocactus for the advice about Keynote.

Relevance: I love my macbookpro and I am happy to have iWork now.

On Monday I bought a MacBook Pro. This is my first blog post from it and earlier tonight I made my first Skype call using my Mac. I love every minute I am on it and the moments I am away from my Mac are filled with sadness. I named her Shoshanna and she is fast becoming my BFF. It is such a different experience figuring out how to do something as simple as downloading an application or realising that my favourite radio station online I can no longer listen to as I don’t use windows.

However, I feel closer now to my friends in the Web2.0 and digital media world who all have MacBook Pro except me. The reason why I chose this Mac so because I want to improve on my photography skills with Photoshop. As some of my friends are excellent photographers I can get tips and learn from them. I will also be getting into video editing so I will be using Adobe CS3 to become more creative and enhance on my expertise.

If anyone has any suggestions on applications I should download or tips on becoming a better MacBook Pro user, please leave a comment. Goodbye Microsoft, hello Steve Jobs. Sorry it took so long to join your family, but I am here for good and never looking back. All we need is an Apple store in Vancouver so I can camp out for Leopard.