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Photography on a Mac

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

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?

Posted in Photography, Post, Software, adobe lightroom, apple aperture, apple iphoto, iphoto, mac os x, management, windows xp | Comments

Wallet loosening Macs

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

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.

Posted in Apple, Mac, Microsoft, Post, Software, Windows, applications, mac os x, synergy | Comments

Disk Inventory X

Monday, February 19th, 2007

Disk Inventory X is a handy app for Mac OS X that gives you a useful view of what is taking up space on your disk. I was running low on disk space and thought I’d use it to find out what was up. Turns out I had nearly 3gb of iGarage and iDVD files that I never, ever use. So those are gone. I also cleared up some other unused files and am thinking I need to host my Parallels VM partitions somewhere else. All in all I’ve managed to clear about 5gb of files I didn’t use, a nice saving.

Posted in Application, Post, Software, app, disk, disk inventory x, files, hd, space | Comments

Parallels RC3 Coherence Mode

Friday, February 16th, 2007

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.

Posted in Application, Parallels, Post, Software, Windows, app, bootcamp, coherence, mac os x, virtual machine, vmware, windows xp | Comments

Getting Joosted

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

(Apparently we are allowed to blog about Joost, just no screenshots as of yet. If I got that wrong then tell me and I’ll yank this down.)

I got a beta invite to try Joost out today and was pretty stoked. Finaly, I’d get to see what the hype was about.

I downloaded the 9mb file to a Windows XP VM in Parallels on Mac OS X. The installation was pretty good, even doing a system requirements check which the VM passed. The app installed but when I tried to run it it said it could not access the 3D hardware. Fair enough, nothing can do that in Parallels yet.

So I booted into Windows Vista Ultimate, downloaded it again and installed it. Running it though gave me a nice big error message. Fair enough I guess, it does say Windows XP with SP2 only (though there are apparently ways of getting Joost to work on Vista. I am just not going to bollocks about with that.)

So I grabbed my girlfriend’s laptop which had Windows XP SP2, installed the app and… you guessed it, it didn’t work. No dedicated 3D hardware in her work laptop. OK.

So I grabbed her other laptop, an Acer with a 256mb 3D graphics card. It installed and to my delight it ran. The screen went dark and then the strange but oddly cool Joost crystals whirled about the screen. Pretty.

I like the interface, clean and simple though I do worry about the average computer user being able to figure it out. Some of the icons are not intuitive.

So, what about the video?

It didn’t work.

I could list the channels, view the item entries, see the thumbnails, do searches, install plugins, check out the chat forums and everything else, except watch video. Sometimes Joost would tell me it couldn’t load the video but most of the time the crystals just whirred and nothing played.

Is my home broadband not fast enough? Joost says it will average about 320mb per hour download and 120mb upload per hour. I’ve downloaded 1gig files in about 45minutes and uploaded a few hundred mb in an hour.

I suspect something is up with the bandwidth but I wish Joost was a bit more informative about what was happening.

I’ll find a Windows XP machine at work (which has mega-bandwidth) tomorrow and see if it works better.

Posted in AAA, Application, Software, TV, bandwidth, joost, video | Comments

TextMate tip

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

I normally launch TextMate through a terminal window with “mate *” in the project directory. That brings up TextMate with the folder list showing all folders and files in the project directory. It works nicely but often there are directories in your project that you don’t need to edit but which are cluttering the view.

So just the other day I learnt that instead of “mate *” you can type “mate dir1 dir2 dir5″ and TextMate will load with just those folders shown. e.g. in a Ruby on Rails app you generally only need to edit the app, config and public folders, ignoring the log, vendor, test etc. folders until you need them later. So you can type “mate app public” for a Rails project.

Very uncluttered and useful. Good one TextMate!

Posted in AAA, Application, Software, Tip, coding, directories, folders, programming, projects, text editor, textmate | Comments

Shutdown Vista

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Reading Joel’s long piece on the Windows Vista shutdown menu, which took 48 people a year to implement, had me thinking; the answer is pretty simple. It is three choices. Sleep, Restart and Shutdown. ala Mac OS X.

Posted in AAA, Mac, Microsoft, OS X, Software, Vista, Windows, Windows Vista, choice, design, joel, menu, shutdown, ui, user, user interface | Comments

Tangerine mood

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Tangerine is a fantastic side-car app to iTunes. Basically it creates a playlist based on the beats per minute of the songs in your iTunes library. So if you want a fast, dancy hour of music just tell Tangerine and it will create it.

Posted in AAA, Music, Software, app, bpm, itunes, tangerine | Comments

FeedDemon’s popularity view

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

FeedDemon’s solution to a tough problem is elegant and simple. The problem is how does one find popular items within the feeds one cares about. Other systems are applying all sorts of voting systems, tagging pools, text analysis and “machine learning” which is all well and good but often doesn’t work quite the way one expects.

FeedDemon says “count the number of referrals and list from highest to lowest.” Simple. That it is applied just to the feeds you are subscribed to makes it so much more powerful. You have already gone to the trouble of selecting the feeds you care about so why throw that out in favour of some complex “blogosphere wide” analysis engine that gets it wrong a good deal of the time.

Posted in AAA, Application, Atom, Beta, Feed, Links, Screenshot, Software, aggregator, app, elegant, feds, feeddemon, popular, referrals, relevant, rss, simple | Comments

The Times Reader

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

The Times Reader is an interesting project between the New York Times and Microsoft. For Microsoft it is a technology demonstration, in this case .NET 3.0 (WinFX really) and for the Times it is an exploration of delivering readable content to screens. The web and even most desktop software makes for a bad reading experience. Low DPI, wide blocks of text, poor fonts and, especially on the web, little if any typograhic control.

The Times Reader aims to make reading on the screen easy on the eyes. Using the Microsoft technology it offers the Times’ fonts, builds in readable columns and uses up all the screen real estate it can to present what looks very much like a print newspaper on your screen.

Here are a few screenshots of it in action though I recommend you download it and give it a go to see the layout technology at work (it is a Windows XP/Windows Vista only app, no Mac or Linux versions.)

When you first load it the app downloads a complete set of articles from the server. It then periodically synchronises allowing you to later use the app and read articles offline. As you can see it mimics a newspaper layout. On the right you will see some articles are just being displayed as headlines. If I made the window bigger the summaries of each would start to be displayed and the layout would change.

Along the top you have the different sections which smoothly flips the view from topic to topic.

Here you can see the front page after I have resized the window to a smaller area.

Clicking a headline/article takes you to the article view:

The article is nicely displayed in columns and flows around the image. You can see an advert in this screenshot but not all articles display an advert. If the full article was too long to fit on this one view then the page control (bottom right) would let me flip to the next page. It is a bit fiddly though as you have to click the little arrows rather than a bigger region.

You can also see the text-size control in the bottom left. As you adjust this the view automatically re-flows itself to fit. Honestly though the sizing is in steps and is quite jumpy. I’d have preffered something smoother.

You can go to the next article using the control near the bottom right. The arrows are once again a bit small but the transition to the next article is quite smooth.

An article has several tools one of which lets you annotate with a pen. Handy if a bit limited (other users can’t see it for instance.)

The search has three views one of which is this fluid diagram that shows an article with its assigned “topics” radiating out from it. Topics are much like tags.

Clicking on a topic takes you to a view which shows all articles tagged with that topic:

The other search view shows a grid layout of all stories that match your search, sorted by relevance (as indicated by the litte filled in dots):

Then onto the News in Pictures view which is very, very simple:

It simply takes all the photos in the paper and displays them one after the other with captions. A gallery would have been ideal and also links back to the originating articles.

I am not convinced of the usefulness of the What’s Read but it is an interesting view. It shows you each section with little squares that on roll-over display an article you have read. I would have liked an indicator next to each article title on any page to show that I have read it (much like links on the web change colour.)

All in all the Times Reader is interesting and works quite well. My main problem with it is that it is a separate, desktop app. bound to one OS. We need to get this technology into the browser.

Posted in .NET, .NET Framework 3.0, AAA, Application, Atom, Microsoft, New York Times, News, Software, Times Reader, Usability, feeds, layout, newspaper, readable, readibility, rss, wpf | Comments

Life is grand