May 21

I recently saw a post on Inside Aperture where the author showed a photo of his setup. As you can see, he had his workflow set up on the laptop screen and had a full screen preview on the extra screen. I thought I would do the same, then post a tutorial on how to do it. So without further adieu…

Dual Screen Setup

Detect Displays

The first thing you have to do when you plug an extra monitor into your computer is detect displays. You do this inside the System Preferences under the Displays section. You might also need to set the resolution of the extra monitor.

Aperture Settings

Open Aperture and select a photo.
In the bottom right hand corner of your workflow, you should see a little icon that looks like a computer monitor. When you click on it you should see a list of view options.
Choose Show Multiple for the Primary Viewer, and choose Mirror for the Secondary Viewer.
You should now see a full screen version of your selected photo on your secondary monitor.

This is extremely useful because you can see the changes that you are making up close and full screen. It also helps when comparing photos.
Try switching the view modes around to achieve different results.

May 16

It arrived today. Earlier than I thought it would really. The supplier told me it would arrive on the 20th.

I’m really happy with it so far. It’s soooo fast!

Stay tuned for a 101 post on Setting up your Mac.

May 14

I’ve always run my MacMini’s internet via Ethernet. I just always figured that it would be faster than using the Airport.
I used to use Airport only on my Powerbook, and thought that it was slow. But I now realize that this was probably because my Powerbook was only 500mhz.

Airport - Freedom Built In

I decided to give my room a bit of a clean up yesterday, and decided that there were too many wires going across the back of my desk. So I thought I would get rid of one and start using the Airport in my MacMini. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the results.

Setup

As I expected, there was no setting up to do. I don’t have any security running on my router as I believe in sharing my internet, and I’m pretty sure none of my neighbors know what a wireless network is anyway. I simply turned on the Airport in my MacMini and away I went.

Performance

Wow… I thought that my Internet would be a little bit slower using the Airport instead of the Ethernet connection, but to be honest with you, after using it like this for a couple of days, I haven’t noticed any drop in speed at all. Everything seems to be running as normal.

I thought it was too good to be true, so I decided to start streaming the March 08 keynote from Apple’s website. Not one single glitch the whole time. Amazing…

I haven’t had a chance to test out copying of files over the network as yet, because I’m still waiting on my new MacBook Pro to arrive, but I’ll update this post when I can.

Closing Comments

I should of done this sooner. I know for sure that when I’m setting up networks for friends from now on, I’m going to make them throw out their Ethernet cables!