Macbook Pro to Macbook Air: A designer’s perspective

I’ve seen a lot of benchmarks and reviews of the Macbook Air, but that’s not what I’m going to write about.

I’ve read a number of writers’ opinions on how they were able to replace their larger laptops with the Air. As a designer, my work’s a bit more intensive than just word processing, so I never felt their reviews accurately applied to me.

No, I hope to address the lack of reviews by designers on using the Macbook Air as a replacement to the Macbook Pro.

I’ve been using a 15” Mac laptop since the Titanium Powerbook and just replaced my circa 2008 15″ MBP with a 13″ Air (i7 processor, 256GB HD). I work primarily in Microsoft Office, the Adobe Web Premium Suite, and do some dabbling in Xcode. The most processing-intensive stuff I do is the occasional Photoshop filter or H.264 encoding.

Monitor.

The Air’s 1440×990 monitor resolution matches my last Macbook Pro’s screen. Granted, it’s physically smaller, but I was surprised that the smaller screen didn’t bother me that much. I’ll confess that, had there been a 15” option, I’d have gotten it instead, but the smaller screen really wasn’t an issue.

There’s no antiglare option, however, the Air’s LCD screen isn’t nearly as bad as the glossy glass screen that’s standard on all of Apple’s products. Gamut options are pretty limited, as Adobe RGB and sRGB don’t hold a candle to the default Color LCD option. I have two other monitors on my desk, and probably wouldn’t rely entirely on my Air for photographic color correction.

Keyboard.

I was holding out for the backlit keyboard, and am glad I did. The keys feel a bit more springy than my MBP’s, but ultimately they feel more solid once you get accustomed to them.

One really nice touch is that the monitor doesn’t touch the keyboard when closed, meaning I don’t see a greasy grid of keys on the monitor.

Speed.

The biggest selling point for me was the solid state drive. Fortunately for me, I lucked out with one of the faster Samsung SSDs, and it rocks. Firing up applications is fast, as are accessing files. I don’t think I can ever go back…

Audio Quality.

The Air boasts two stereo speakers, though they’re not nearly as profound as the ones on the MBP. They’re not bad, but I always edit audio with headphones, anyway (Shouldn’t everyone?), so it’s not a big selling point.

Ports and lack of disc drive.

It’s got a Thunderbolt port, though with the industry’s lack of peripherals, I don’t see myself using it for much more than for my external monitor (miniDV).

I definitely like having USB ports on both sides, as opposed to the MBP’s two ports strictly on the left.

Regarding the most obvious exclusion, Apple will likely remove disc drives from all of its other products to reinforce downloadable sales off the iTunes store as–well as distance itself further from  Sony’s Blu-ray technology. I don’t like the exclusion of a disc drive for these reasons, however, I can’t ignore the fact that I just don’t use DVDs or CDs much anymore. I can’t afford to go completely cold turkey, but I have enough other computers with disc drives to support this laptop.

Speaking of other disc drives, using the Air’s remote disc option (where you borrow a nearby computer’s disc drive) was a complete nightmare. Trying to install CS5 from my MBP and Mac Pro took forever. Watching DVDs remotely isn’t something they advertise on the box for good reason, either (it just kept stalling).

Portability.

I don’t really need to sell the Air on it’s weight. Suffice to say I was running around in New York last week and definitely appreciated the lighter laptop bag.

Bottom Line.

I’m pretty happy with the transition. I definitely wouldn’t have made the move without accessibility to another monitor (for color correction) or a disc drive, but for day-to-day work, I’m definitely happy with it.

Adobe Edge Test Drive

Well, I’m sitting in on Adobe’s HTML5 camp in New York and I figure it’s the ideal time to chime in on Adobe Edge, their JQuery animation tool released in beta last Sunday.

For some background, part of why I downloaded Edge was to find a suitable compliment to Flash for the interactive media course I teach in the spring. While the course has traditionally been taught with Flash (and I think it’d be a mistake to exclude it entirely), I’ve been striving to make the class more software agnostic.

Edge is pretty simple. The menus are sparse, and there are few panels. Of course, if the history of web design software teaches anything, it’s that designers insist on more and more features, and what begins as a simple software ultimately becomes a feature behemoth that can’t be dramatically modified for fear of alienating those one or two individuals of the software’s user base.

All that said, I would assume that Adobe Edge’s audience will be Flash designers. It’s for that reason that it surprises me that Edge’s interface doesn’t more closely mimic Flash. The timeline seems to more closely match After Effects (or Flash’s motion editor, to be fair), and there’s no symbol library.  The property menu is in the same neighborhood as Flash’s, however, there’s no code view.

It’s pretty easy to create a simple animation on the fly. What’s also cool is that you can open existing HTML files and output a revised version. I tested this on some of my designs with mixed results–pages with existing JQuery animations/plugins seemed to have conflicts.

Edge’s output includes a predictable HTML file, a few Adobe-written javascript files, JQuery, JQuery easing, and a *.edge authoring file.  Anyhow, onto my wish list:

Code Editor--it's coming.

• Allow for code view. It only helps developers understand their trade more when you can see what’s generated under the hood. (UPDATE: Adobe confirms it’s coming. there’s a disabled “Editor” option under the Window menu).
• The Save window allows for the option of saving as *.html or *.htm. Move this option into preferences.
• Allow for interaction. Currently, the tool only allows for linear animation. (UPDATE: Coming in a future build).
• Create an option to simplify the CSS. I’m nitpicking here, but it’d be nice if there was an option to round off values (some of my sample animations included values like 101.2539px) and mini-fy the code (I write my CSS class definitions on one line to allow for faster downloading).
• Allow for embedded fonts. Adobe’s included a broad set of standard system fonts, but some option should be made available for embedded fonts (UPDATE: Adobe confirms this is coming in a future build).
• Upgrade JQuery. Why is JQuery 1.4.2 used instead of the latest (1.6.2 as of this writing)?
• Masks (UPDATE: coming).

I’ll probably submit my feedback to Adobe. Edge definitely feels like the direction in which Adobe needs to go, but it’ll be much more interesting to try this tool once they add a code editor and interactivity.