It’s great being back into term time. Summer is cool in that the workshops are lots of fun, but it’s nice to get all the new ideas into action. One project I’m working on at the moment is a book of lesson plans for all the GE themes. All the content is on the site, the problem is getting a cool A4 layout. Word is useless with its massive fonts and silly editing, Flash is cool but difficult to make master changes, and I’ve been looking for ages for a simple to use DTP package that has easy to use templates that look stunning.

Today I found it, “Pages”. 9,000 yen, very cheap ( Adobe is 100,000 yen!). The only problem? It’s Mac only!

As I was in town I popped into Bic Camera to ask if they had anything suitable for Windows. They showed me to the Microsoft rep, who was very nice and showed me lots of things, but ended up with “No, we don’t have anything as good as the Apple software”. Ah.

My laptop is getting a bit old now. It certainly looks it and is on the verge of melting through overheating nearly every day. So soon I’ll have to replace it. The new Mac laptops do have excellent specs these days ( until last year they were so slow). So I asked Bic Camera if they had any Windows machines that could match the specs of the top of the range 17″ Macbook Pro. We went round every manufacturer in the store, and they didn’t even have a machine that was more powerful than the one I’m using now, which is two years old!!! Some came close, and were half the price of the Mac, but even a ten percent speed increase or battery life has a massive impact when you spend 13 plus hours a day on the thing.

So after being disappointed with the PC side of things, I figured a trip along to the flagship Mac store in the Ginza was in order. The idea being to total up how much a new system would cost. After all the glossy “Mac cures everything” style website and brochures, with all their talk of “genius bars” and things, I was expecting to walk in there, tell them what I needed and if they happened to come up with an ideal package there was the possibility I would buy the set up there and then ( I need to get this new project started!). But the people in the store were lackluster to say the least. Isn’t the whole point of sales to listen to what the customer wants, find a product and make them super happy to walk away with it? Not here, it was “well, you can do this, or maybe this” and I’m like, “No, that’s not what I want”. “Hmm, well I’m not sure then”. They have the stuff I need, I’ve found it on the machines myself, but they instilled absolutely no confidence whatsoever in buying a machine from them.

So I left a bit fed up, looked a bit more on the web and found a free Windows DTP package.