I am seriously leaning toward buying a refurbished M1 Mac Mini w/ 16 GB of RAM from Apple direct.
Previously, I had an agreement with a local business office that gave me a partially-subsidized subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (ACC), which gave me access to InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, etc. on my aging Intel iMac.
I will not immediately be in a position to resume an ACC subscription whenI get the new Mac Mini. It will take time to build up some money. My long-term goal is to get a full ACC subscription so I can do graphics work. (Not my primary work, but very useful for several projects I do every year.)
I'm wondering what kind of low-cost (or freeware) solutions are available for the tasks I want to do. Here are some of the basic tasks that will be needed in the coming weeks and months:
Previously, I had an agreement with a local business office that gave me a partially-subsidized subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (ACC), which gave me access to InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, etc. on my aging Intel iMac.
I will not immediately be in a position to resume an ACC subscription whenI get the new Mac Mini. It will take time to build up some money. My long-term goal is to get a full ACC subscription so I can do graphics work. (Not my primary work, but very useful for several projects I do every year.)
I'm wondering what kind of low-cost (or freeware) solutions are available for the tasks I want to do. Here are some of the basic tasks that will be needed in the coming weeks and months:
- I need to generate memes and slides of a few memes to promote upcoming events and activities. Said memes will be for use on Instagram and Facebook primarily, maybe for Twitter. Memes may be simple, with just a simple background (or maybe a faded and color-shaded photo) with text announcing the event/activity on top. Is there a way to set up Keynote to generate meme images as slides, then save the slides as JPEGs, and use the JPEGs as "photos" for social media? What are best pixel dimensions (or proportions) for IG and Facebook memes?
- I will probably use Apple Pages and Microsoft Word to generate basic flyers and posters. That would be simple, no frills desktop publishing. I have both Pages and Office 365.
- Do you need any special software to post multiple photos to a basic Instagram account's feed?
- Currently, I have no access to Acrobat Pro. Therefore, I cannot do any "reduce file size" operations or re-arranging of pages in PDF files. Is there any cheap PDF improvement software available for Apple Silicon Macs?
- Solutions should probably be Apple Silicon-friendly software, if new software is needed.