Well, it was an interesting weekend. I followed my own advice Saturday night and
upgraded my main production Mac
to Mojave (macOS 10.14.1) because the dot one upgrade was out. (As an important side-note, a few days prior to doing the Mojave upgrade, I also upgraded all my Adobe apps to their 2019 versions.)
The upgrade process took a couple of hours, but only a few minutes of my time to answer a few dialogs. But, when I started testing things Sunday morning, I discovered two things: 1. None of the new Adobe apps would launch. They all hung after displaying the start-up screen. 2. My favorite and trusty screen capture utility (
Snapz Pro) no longer worked. Deep sigh...
You may have read an article from
MacWorld.co.uk about changing the Security preferences, but that only affects early versions of Photoshop. Now what to do?
After restarting my system, doing a Safe Boot clean-up and repairing preferences (
here's how to do all that), I discovered an old Adobe Application Manager in my Utilities folder from 2015. When I trashed that and restarted, all the Adobe apps starting working again. Since I haven't found anything on the web about this fix, I wanted to share it with you here.
Now that all my Adobe apps are working, whew!, I want to share a small eulogy for
Ambrosia Software's Snapz Pro. I've known that Ambrosia has had problems for a while. Snapz hasn't been updated since 2016 and they last updated their website in 2017. So, it was only a matter of time until things would wind down. But Snapz was unique in screen capture utilities. It not only captured any part of the screen you needed and remembered the size of your last capture, but also included the cursor and any open menus without any problems. It was fast, easy and I relied on it daily for more than a decade. It is very sad to let it go.
This weekend, I replaced it with two utilities:
ScreenShot FX and
SnapNDrag Pro. Neither equals what Snapz Pro could do, but, together, they come close. So, if you are looking for still image screen captures for your system, check into those.
Another note, when I upgraded to Mojave, it converted my internal Fusion drive to APFS and, at the same time, fixed a variety of problems it was having with HFS+. However, and this may be due to resetting the internal SSD section of the Fusion drive, I noticed that all my applications were taking a LOT longer to open. Mojave, at least initially, feels slower than High Sierra. (
Here's more on APFS.)
Thinking of upgrades, Apple's big news last week was the launch of a new
MacBook Air, new
iPads and a new
Mac Mini. While the iPads are very impressive, the REAL star of the show, for me, was the Mac Mini. It's been more than four years since Apple last updated it. And the new version is a powerhouse. So, I wanted to find out whether this new unit could be
used for video editing. And the answer is... YES! My
lead article this week discusses what you need to know to best configure a Mac Mini for editing.
My second article is a fun look at how to create
interesting motion graphic backgrounds using Motion. If you, like me, have no design skills whatsoever this article shows you how to create amazing visuals easily. I enjoyed writing this and, even if you don't use Motion, take a look at what you can do with it. Very cool.
Webinars are on hiatus again this week. Frankly, I've run out of ideas. With over 260 webinars currently online, I don't want to repeat a subject if there's no new news I can share with you. So, I need your help in suggesting subjects. Send me an email and let me know what you'd like to learn. (
Email me here.)
What we ARE doing, though, is beefing up the
news and business coverage on the
Digital Production Buzz. I want to use Webinars for training and The Buzz for covering the industry. And last week's show was a doozy! We talked with the
principle product managers for Adobe
Premiere Pro,
Premiere Rush, Adobe
Stock and
Audition on the show. These folks are determining the strategic direction of Adobe's products for the next several years. We not only talked about the new stuff, but where they wanted to take their products in the future. This was a fascinating show - especially if you use Adobe and want to know where things are headed.
Listen to it here!
Recently, I was able to spec out purchasing new cameras for our school - so, in coming weeks, I'm planning reports on new
JVC,
Panasonic and
Blackmagic Design cameras, as well as more new software as it releases. As always, keep sending me emails with comments and questions. I enjoy hearing from you.
Until next Monday,
edit well
.
