Our Cookie Break gal, Ginger Carlson appreciates her Mac. I've prodded her to tell how she uses Mac, and this is her report:
My Mac creds go back to sometime in the 80s (Jobs was barely out of his garage) when a friend let me use an extra Mac he had. I don't remember what it was called but the monitor had to be maybe 6 x 6 inches or so, (David probably still has one) and, to me, that was the most magical thing I'd ever got my hot little hands on! Way better than the typewriter I had at the time that let me see the the first two lines of type in a little window that I actually could make corrections on before committing it to paper. And for me, not being a typist, and having a very close relationship with Whiteout (remember Whiteout?) when I did have to type something that, too, was magical. But being able to scroll up and down on that first little Mac and see a WHOLE PAGE, well, it couldn't get any better than that!
Fast forward to 2008, and I still think my Mac is magical. It allows me to do what it took several people many days to do BC (before computers). In those days everything had to be designed by sitting down at a drawing board and actually drawing it out (that's what I did) whether it was an ad, a billboard, a booklet, a sign, whatever. There were copy writers, type setters, printers (for whom color percentages had to be specified), artists, paste up people, go-fers, etc. and then someone (me) had to coordinate it all. Today I can just sit down at my magical Mac (an iMac G5 with Leopard) and zip something out!
So what do I do now on the computer besides email and surfing the Web? Well, I do a volunteer newsletter for YRMC that goes out to over 900 people (and other hospitals). And with Dan's help and iWeb, about a third of those folks now get their newsletter on line, which saves the hospital a ton on paper, postage and printing. We publish a newsletter approximately every quarter and they range from 12 to 16 pages. I use Adobe's InDesign and now that Photoshop Elements has come out with a decent Mac version, I'll be buying and using that, too.
Doing the newsletter is interesting and fun to do, and allows me, in a small way, to keep my hand in the print business which I still find enormously satisfying.