My other column, Dr. Mac, runs every Tuesday in the Houston Chronicle. Writing for the newspaper is a lot different from writing for The Mac Observer (TMO). The newspaper column is the same length-roughly 500 words-every week; TMO columns can be as long or as short as the subject requires. Newspaper columns don’t have screen…
Articles by Bob LeVitus
Dr. Mac: Rants & Raves - Good Software, Cheap
Great software doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Great-but-expensive programs-like Final Cut, Photoshop, Logic, Dreamweaver, InDesign, FileMaker Pro, and many others-are (excuse the pun) a dime a dozen. Cheap but crappy programs are ubiquitous and worth a penny a pound or less. My favorite programs are the hardest to find: Inexpensive, well-designed…
Dr. Mac: Rants & Raves - Drum Machines on Your Mac: Not for Drummers Only
When it comes to creating drum tracks, GarageBand kinda sucks. Sure you can use loops and many of them sound fantastic, but if you want to record drum tracks from scratch, your choices are as follows: Record real drums one track at a time, which is both difficult and tedious. Record Software Instrument drums using…
Dr. Mac: Rants & Raves - How Safe Is YOUR Data?
By now I’m sure you’ve heard that external FireWire 800 drives using the Oxford 922 chip-set may lose data when you connect them to a Mac running Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. If you haven’t, Apple offers an information page at http://www.apple.com/macosx/firewire800specialmessage.html: A special message for FireWire 800 disk drive users Apple has identified an…