Advice for Buying a Mac

(Originally posted Tuesday, August 22, 2017)

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You might be thinking about buying a Mac at home for doing work similar to what we do in class. I wrote this article a year ago with my general advice for buying a Mac:

http://hotfootspin.blogspot.com/2015/09/my-advice-for-buying-mac.html

For the purposes of this class, keep this additional advice in mind:

Get at least 8 GB of RAM.

The very small "Mac Book" from 2015 that has only one USB-C port is underpowered and  quite slow. The 2016 version is better. A Mac Book Air might be a better choice, especially if you can upgrade the RAM.

You'll need at least 256 GB of disk space if you want to install Xcode and possibly the Adobe suite (Photoshop and Illustrator). My laptop has 256 GB and it barely holds all my work. Adobe software is big.

Adobe software also costs a lot of money, but you can get a student discount of about $20 per month for a year, for a total of $240. If you're going to spend $1000 on a computer, you can afford to spend another $240 for Adobe if you really want to create some nice art.

You can get by with a refurbished Mac Mini in the $500 range if you already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse you can attach to it.

Hungry

If you are hungry because you are not being fed at home or because there is no time for you to get lunch before you come here to SVCTE, please talk to me privately.

Goals of Graphic Design

Three goals of the graphic design process:

1. To communicate information effectively and efficiently.
• Examples: medical, scientific.
2. To persuade an audience to buy a product, use a serivce, believe a proposition, or feel a particular way.
• Examples: political, health, games.
3. To solve a problem.
• Examples: cloud storage, music streaming.

Palo Alto teen builds an app for finding odd jobs

A new iPhone app built by Gunn High School senior Anand Chandra banks on teens who want to do chores.

Chorely, which Chandra describes as a “community-based chore app,” connects residents who need chores done with youths looking for odd jobs.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/25/palo-alto-teens-app-takes-chore-out-of-finding-a-side-gig/

Serifs on Letters

This YouTube video is entertaining and mesmerizing, and it will help you understand what we mean when we talk about serifs on letters.

Typing the Command Key (Cloverleaf) symbol

In an HTML document (web page), you can type the cloverleaf symbol by adding this string to your code:

⌘

It should look like this:

⌘

Make sure you include the ampersand, the hash (pound or sharp sign), and the semicolon at the end.

In a word processing document, such as Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, you need to go to the symbol insert function, and look for "point of interest" symbol. It is unfortunately not called the cloverleaf symbol, and you can't search for it within a word processing document that way.

In a pinch, you can always just search Google for cloverleaf symbol to get this information.

Templates for HTML Code

Here is a template for the minimal complete HTML page. If your page doesn't have all these elements, you should edit your page to include all of them. When you start a new page, you can copy and paste this code to get started.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <!--
    YOUR NAME HERE, date, project name, class, etc.
    -->
    <meta charset='utf-8' />
    <title>My Web Page</title>
    <style type='text/css'>
    /* styles go here */

    </style>
</head>

<body>
    <h1>My Web Page</h1>
    <!-- page content will go here -->

    <script type='text/javascript'>
    // scripts will go here

    </script>
</body>
</html>

Add this line in the <head> section if you use responsive design:

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" /> 

Here is the code for a bullet list:

<ul>
    <li>Mission College
    <li>Ohlone College
    <li>West Valley College
    <li>Foothill College
</ul>

Here is the code for a table:

<table>
    <tr>
        <th>Key</th>
        <th>Command</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Cmd-Space</td>
        <td>Spotlight</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Cmd-S</td>
        <td>Save</td>
    </tr>
</table>

Here is an excellent tutorial on HTML tables (thank you to the student who linked this to your page):

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp