I keep Logic Pro’s left-click tool set to the Pointer tool. For the Command-click tool, I alternate mainly between the Marquee tool, the Rotate tool and the Slip tool. Logic provides the T keyboard shortcut for changing the left-click tool, and you can set custom keyboard shortcuts to change to a specific tool — but only for the left-click tool. The only way to change the Command-click tool is to use the Command-click tool button.
Last week, I purchased a new Mac mini to replace my 2019 iMac, and I used Migration Assistant for the first time. I learned a few lessons and documented them here in case these tips are helpful to others using Migration Assistant.
I set up all my previous Macs from scratch, but the iMac had been our family’s primary computer for five years, and it had two user accounts, hundreds of gigabytes of data, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 apps that needed to be moved to the Mac mini. Migration Assistant seemed like a better path than trying to do everything from scratch.
Migration Assistant works surprisingly well. Don’t, however, try to do it over a Wi-Fi connection. Connect the old Mac and the new Mac with a Thunderbolt cable. Because I didn’t have a Thunderbolt cable, I started the process over Wi-Fi. After about five hours of waiting, I decided to buy a Thunderbolt cable and start over. Over Thunderbolt, the migration took less than two hours.
My iMac updated itself to macOS 15.1.1 overnight. This morning, it had the wrong wallpaper. Settings showed the correct picture selected in one place, but a solid color in another place, and neither matched the wallpaper that was actually on my screen.
If you use Bunch to launch Logic Pro, using “Logic Pro X” in the Bunch file doesn’t work with Logic Pro 11.1. However, the bundle identifier (com.apple.logic10) consistently launches it (and quickly). “Logic Pro” didn’t work at first, but it started working after I launched it once using the bundle identifier. For some reason, though, it launches noticeably faster using the bundle identifier.
StopTheMadness Pro is an essential Safari extension. It fixes numerous usability issues that you might encounter on websites. I recently found a great use for its custom style feature: flagging links to certain sites that I almost never want to visit, like Twitter/X. I wrote some imperfect but effective CSS that puts a flag at the end of any link that matches the rules.
Sunset on my street, 2024-01-23
One of the part-time jobs I held during college was AutoCAD technician at a small facilities management consulting firm. Our clients (mostly hospitals and universities) would give us blueprints of their buildings’ floor plans. My job was to tape the blueprints to a large digitizing tablet and essentially trace them to produce AutoCAD drawings. A consultant had usually already done a site visit and made notes on each room in the building — the type of room (e.g., an office or a classroom), the type of floor surface, and so forth. In addition to creating the drawings, I had to measure the area of each room and enter it, along with the consultant’s notes, into a database. The database had been integrated with AutoCAD so that you could invoke a popup window to enter new database records and edit existing records without leaving AutoCAD.1
In the summer of 2023, I decided I was no longer serious enough about photography to continue paying for an Adobe subscription. (I still enjoy taking and editing pictures, but some of my other hobbies are just more fulfilling at this point, and the time I spent as a “serious” hobby photographer got shorter and shorter.) It was hard to justify paying $120 a year for software that I wasn’t using that often. Non-subscription photography software has come a long way since I started using Lightroom and Photoshop almost 10 years ago, and some of the alternatives seemed more than capable of meeting the needs of a casual user like me. Lightroom had become very sluggish on my 2019 iMac, which is otherwise working fine. It was also inconvenient being half in the Apple ecosystem and half in the Adobe ecosystem. The photos I took with my iPhone were available everywhere, but the photos I took with my Fuji mirrorless were only on my Mac. I began thinking about how I could move from Lightroom to Apple Photos — or if it was even feasible.
I achieved three of my four running goals for 2023.
My fourth goal was to run twelve races, and I ran seven.
My favorite run of the year was a four-mile run between Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach when I visited California in the spring. There were so many people exercising – yoga, volleyball, running, even a stationary cycling class. It was inspiring, and not something I would ever see when running at home. And it didn’t hurt that I had a view of the Pacific for the entire run.
Thanks to Brett Terpstra’s 2023 favorites post, I learned about MacUpdater. When I read that the Pro version can update audio plugins (or at least tell you when they need to be manually updated), it was an instant purchase. Keeping my Logic Pro plugins updated has always been a struggle, and MacUpdater makes it much easier. I think this feature alone is worth the price, and I highly recommend it to anyone who uses Logic Pro or another DAW.