Old Mac, New Mac: Getting Wired for Music

Talk about timing—I was sitting in the tenth row at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference when Steve Jobs announced that Macs were switching to Intel chips. As the collective gasp from thousands of developers sucked the air out of the auditorium, I thought numbly of the new G5 FedExing its way to my home.

To put this in perspective, I squeeze a lot of use out of my computers, so I wanted to make sure I’d made the right choice. The last time I’d bought a Mac was in 1998, when Monika Lewinsky was frolicking around the White House and people still called MP3s “MPEGs.” I’d upgraded almost every possible component on that old beige beast (referring to the computer here, not the concubine), but it was definitely holding me back.

However, one thing it still did that no modern Mac can do is run a Korg OASYS PCI card. That way-overengineered board (original price, $2,300) is a combination synthesizer, multieffects processor, and 24-bit audio interface with terrific sound. The free 2.0 software upgrade gave it the samples from a Korg Triton as well.

So after I calmed down and realized I’d get plenty of great stuff out of my new computer, I started thinking about how to integrate it with my old one and a few choice pieces of MIDI gear. That’s when I discovered that Apple had pre-installed a slick diagramming program called OmniGraffle on my hard drive.

OmniGraffle lets you draw boxes and connect them with lines that snap into place “magnetically.” As you drag items around the screen, guidelines pop up to let you know when the items are aligned. It’s really easy and fast.

I plan to use it to design Website maps from now on, especially because each box can have an automatic drop shadow—something I’ve been adding manually to the site maps I produce for client proposals. There’s something about that little shadow that makes a boring “org chart” look so elegant that clients feel comfortable with it right away. I think drop shadow is the graphic artist’s version of digital reverb.

Speaking of music, here’s my very first OmniGraffle drawing, which helped a lot as I was wiring everything up:

The icons are photos I downloaded with the handy Google Image Search Widget from Anomaly Industries. This clever freebie bypasses Google’s annoying framed interface so that one click on an image takes you right to the full-size one online:

Placing the image in OmniGraffle takes one click as well. You just check the Image box in the Image Inspector window, and the program opens a file browser for you. Hit Enter to select the image you want, drag a slider to scale it, and you’re in business. You can export your drawing in a variety of formats, including vector-based ones. Positively presidential.

If drop shadow is the visual equivalent of reverb, what’s embossing?