Quote:
Originally Posted by sylvaticus
I maxed it out (for me) with two Quad-Core Xeons (3.2 GHz), 16 GB of RAM, 2.5 TB for hard drives, and I'm waiting for my two 30" monitors (not Cinema Displays, though).
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Dear God, man, that's quite some system you've built for yourself! Am I safe in assuming from your name and P.S. that you are a Classicist? I too use a Mac Pro with 30-inch display for academic work, but also for photo and video work, which is how I justify the whole thing!
For academic work I use Mellel as my word processor. I have spent some time setting up academic templates which suit my purposes. I originally looked at Mellel because at the time it was the only GUI word processor which supported the advanced features of OpenType fonts, like ligatures and multiple numeral sets. (The alternative was to use some implementation of TeX, which I could never get my head around, but not for want of trying.) The latest version of Pages now handles most OpenType features, though, and I suspect some of the others do too. I now use Pages for anything non-academic.
I really like the way you can type Greek with breathings and accents on OS X. (I’m putting this here because I’m labouring under the assumption that you are in fact a Classicist.) To make it really easy, go to System Preferences > International > Input Menu (tab). Make sure ‘Show input menu in menu bar’ is ticked at the bottom of the window, and in the main panel make sure that ‘Keyboard Viewer’ and ‘Greek Polytonic’ are ticked, as well as whatever your keyboard layout actually is (perhaps ‘U.S.’ or ‘U.S. Extended’, or ‘British’). Then, when (in any application) you want to type Greek, go to the Input menu (represented by a flag in your menu bar) and choose ‘Greek Polytonic’. If you start typing now, your characters will come out as Greek. In order to work out which characters map on to which keys and, more importantly, which accents and breathings map on to which keys, choose ‘Keyboard viewer’ from the same menu. [NB that the font you are using needs to have all the characters for Greek: I think that the common ones on the Mac do. I do my academic work in Adobe Garamond Premier Pro, which I was fortunate to get as a free bonus with CS2, I think.]
I found that I didn’t like Mail/iCal/Address Book at all at first when I first moved from Outlook/Exchange on Windows. For a long time I stuck with Entourage connecting to the Exchange server (which was a hosted Exchange account which I was administering for various family-members and myself). But gradually I began to realize that Entourage is crap in many respects, not least its support for Exchange. So I moved over to Mail etc., and also eventually moved to a simpler (but better-specced, for less money… go figure) IMAP email host. My contacts and calendar information is synced between computers using .Mac, and my email using the IMAP server. I'm very happy with it, but but wouldn't be without the numerous plug-ins I've got installed in Mail. I thoroughly recommend the
Hawk Wings blog for ideas about improving your own experience with Mail. But what I love is the way that Mail (like so many other apps) has hooks for other applications (including OmniFocus) to get data in and out.
I personally couldn't imagine relying on a virtualized environment for day-to-day activities. I use Parallels to do some things (principally now for checking sites in Internet Explorer), but those are highly specific. However, if you think that that will work for you, please let us know how you get on!
As for Omni software, as well as OmniFocus, I use OmniOutliner Pro extensively, and OmniGraffle considerably less (it's evidently a good app, but I have few uses for it right now). I type notes from my reading (often just typing out whole sentences or paragraphs as I read them, ahem) into OmniOutliner. Then I am able to rearrange my notes into something more coherent for whatever I'm writing about, and then I tend write an essay plan
in a separate OOP document. That's been very helpful for me since I started doing it, about eighteen months ago.
Hope some of that helps! Enjoy your new computer…
Richard