Nerd alert.
I thought I’d give Millifeed a run in the Firefox 3 build that has native Mac OS X control support. Mostly it rendered fine but the native control bit went a bit haywire as you can see below with the file control:
Firefox 3
Firefox 2
(And please don’t mention the 660 HTML warnings. Believe me, I know. That is what you get for allowing RSS content into your HTML.)
Sticky Windows is a nifty little app. that allows you to create little tabs on the edges of your screen that are attached to windows. Click a tab and the window is brought to the front, click it again and the window disappears. It is simple and useful, especially for the many terminal windows I often have cluttering my desktop all day long.
I’ve written before on how Mac OS X has the ability to loosen my wallet. Synergy was a $5 app. that I had no problem buying. Now Sticky Windows is also useful and to my eyes is also a utility app. Certainly the coding behind it is more complicated than Synergy but that isn’t how we should price apps. Sadly Sticky Windows is too expensive. At $15.95 (come on guys, make it $16) I just can’t justify the expense.
At $5 I would buy it without thinking.
At $10 I’d think about it but probably buy it.
At $15 I think about it and decide not to buy it.
Strange situation I find myself in on Mac OS X. Photographic management was, of all things, what I thought Mac OS X would be better at than Windows XP. But it isn’t. At least not for my situation.
iPhoto is proving to be largely useless (as you can see above) for what I want while Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom are too expensive and too complicated. Finder fails to beat even Windows Explorer.
My situation is that I use a Canon EOS 20D to produce RAW files which I use Adobe Photoshop to edit. I store my photographs on an external hard-drive in my own folder structure. I have close to 500gb of photos now from several years of photography.
The camera is great, Photoshop is still brilliant and my folder structure works well for me.
Where I am having problems is when I want to choose what photos I want to edit. Windows Explorer on Windows XP with the RAW plugin was strangely good. It loads directories of files quickly, caches thumbnails intelligently and lets me send a RAW file to Photoshop with two clicks. It provides both thumbnails and full-screen previews for finer detail.
Finder on the other hand provides thumbnails but when you want to do full screen previews it loads the Preview app. which is dog slow with RAW files. It takes a few seconds to flip between two files and doesn’t cache meaning a flip is always slow, not just slow the first time.
iPhoto on the other hand does cache and does it well. The new compare feature in the full-screen view is excellent. iPhoto handles 9000 files with ease.
But it has two major problems. To send a file to Photoshop you have to exit the full-screen view, back into the normal app view and right-click and Edit in External Editor. Why not just right-click in the full-screen view?
The other is that the cache is static and is stored on your local disc. A thumbnail cache of 500 gigs of photos is itself large, about 20gb.
iPhoto made that cache on import but I thought that if the cache was deleted it would repopulate it as you loaded photos. But no. It doesn’t. Once you delete the cache iPhoto just sits there showing a view like above and doesn’t regenerate thumbnails or full-screen previews. It does go off and fetch a preview of the file you are viewing in the full-screen view but it doesn’t cache that preview, making flipping useless.
iPhoto is obviously for much smaller photo libraries though I can’t see it remaining like this with people totting 10 megapixel pocket cameras.
Aperture and Lightroom are brilliant applicatons except they try too organise your files too much. I found far too much data was stored in Lightroom and it was a chore getting it out. That makes it a poor choice for long-term photo management. Aperture is just too expensive.
So I am left with no workable way of going through a few hundred photos I may have taken in a day.
All I want is a fast, intelligent RAW previewer app. Something that doesn’t try to tell me how to arrange my photos and makes sending files to Photoshop easy. Too much to ask?
Mozy is backup made easy. Create an account, download the client, select the directories you want backed up and then just leave it in the background. On a fast line I had my 2gb free account filled up in a few hours. Restoring files is easy; just request a package of files you want restored and a few minutes later you are emailed a link to download the package.
The unlimited version is $4.95 per-month which is peanuts really.
One thing to note is that this isn’t an Amazon S3 competitor. I can’t share my Mozy backed-up files with anyone else, I can’t even view a file “hosted” by Mozy. It is a backup service, nothing more and nothing less. For this it is much cheaper than Amazon S3.
One missing feature in the beta Mac OS X client I am using is external HD support. It is available in the Windows client but is “a few months away rough guess” in the Mac OS X client. Most of the files I want to backup are on an external HD so I will just have to wait. But the test I did with 2gb worked very nicely so I am confident the 150gb on my external HD will work fine too.
An interesting SMS project over in India is proving to be popular with farmers. Twitter is a presence command line, YubNub an internet command line and IM bot systems like IMIS are coming out into the open. I for one spend most of my day between the Mac OS X terminal and a text-editor (which interestingly can run terminal commands.) When I use Gmail or Google Reader I use the keyboard almost exclusively. I wish WordPress had better keyboard support. Even when I am in Photoshop or Fireworks I find learning the keyboard shortcuts to be invaluable though in those two cases it becomes an even faster system of mouse and keyboard movements. Mac OS X with Quicksilver or even Spotlight is a god-send for launching applications and finding files.
Even Windows Vista has made some improvements by putting a search/run/command text-box in the Start menu. Now if only Windows would have a good command line as default (PowerShell requires extra steps, make it the default Microsoft.)
All in all the command line and the keyboard are reclaiming some lost-ground that the mouse ate.
Mac OS X has an amazing ability to loosen the wallets of its users. In all my years of Windows computing I personally bought exactly one application; Winzip. And that purchase was more out of guilt for having used it for years and never paid. Funnily enough I switched to Mac OS X a short month after buying Winzip. Most of the other software I had installed was free or provided by a MSDN subscription.
In the few months I have had a Mac though I have bought TextMate, Omnigraffle, Photoshop, Fireworks and now Synergy.
The initial reaction to this is that Windows is better because “it has more free software for it and so you don’t need to pay” which is technically true. On another level though Mac OS X is better; The level of the computer as a productive tool and not an end in itself.
Synergy proves this out for me. It is a $5 utility app. that controls iTunes. I would never have paid for a Windows equivalent because nothing on Windows comes close to the quality of Synergy. It integrates so beautifully with the Mac OS X menu bar (and system-wide keyboard shortcuts) that after a few days of free use I realised it was worth more than $5.
Synergy feels like it is part of my daily Mac OS X experience. It is there when I need it, out of the way when I don’t and it works as if I had personally told the developer exactly what I wanted and he had gone and made it.
A lot of Mac OS X software is like this.
I can’t think of any Windows software like this. Maybe iTunes on Windows…
If I had read this post a few months ago, when I was still a Windows user, I would have scoffed at it. I would have said it was some air-headed Apple fanboy under the influence of Jobsian spells.
Now I think the reality is that Windows is the one casting spells on its users. Spells of illusion, of forgetfulness and of tolerance for poor quality. More to the point; Windows casts the spell of practicality which pervades enterprise thinking. It is the grey-suited men telling you what is good for you and you sucking it down for your rationalised life.
And before you say it; If I’m going to suck anything down I’d rather suck it down from a black pollo-neck wearing wizard who dares to dream.
Macs and Mac OS X are something you have to use to appreciate. It changes your computing experience, from the frustrating chore that is Windows where you spend more time dealing with a computer than with what you are trying to achieve. With Mac OS X I find I get more done and in a more pleasant manner. That is important, that I enjoy what I am doing while I am doing it.
I don’t expect Windows users to like hearing this or think it is even remotely true. It takes actual sit down time with a Mac and Mac OS X to have the spell lifted.
Remember, I was a Windows user for 14 years. I developed with Microsoft technologies, used Microsoft tools and thought Apple was a high-priced toy that had lost touch with reality. How things change.
Tom Raftery pointed out the new Parallels RC3 release which now has “Coherence” mode. It is strange but very useful seeing Microsoft Windows applications floating on my Mac OS X desktop. They are running in a Parallels VM but have been “detached” from that desktop and allowed onto the host desktop as separate windowed applications. It makes flipping between Internet Explorer 7 and Safari while doing web-development a breeze. The installation was painless and the speed is impressive.
Another interesting feature is that Parallels can now run your Bootcamp partition in a VM. Very useful. Now I can save on VM and partition space.
Checkout all the new features of Parallels RC3.
Sadly there is no GTalk client for Mac OS X. So when I swapped to OS X I switched to Adium which worked great with our internal IM (jabber based), with my old MSN Messenger buddies (you dinosaurs!) and supposedly my new GTalk contacts.
Except GTalk didn’t connect at work because of firewall restrictions. The MSN Messenger connection in Adium has a handy “Connect via HTTP” option which works fine. But the GTalk options don’t have that.
Instead I found this little gem which tells you how to use port 443 (HTTPS, normally open on firewalls) and voila! GTalk now works at work.
Ain’t computers grand?
Daily bits...