Posts Tagged: Mac

8
Mar 09

Photo Management

Apple — Comments

Since moving to the Mac managing most data has been fairly easy. My doc’s are all straightened out, music is in iTunes capable hands and photo’s are thrown into iPhoto and it’s easy to sync and publish from the one app. Lightroom has changed all that.

I started using Lightroom at Christmas and I love the finer control I get on my photo’s. However all my photo’s prior to Christmas are managed in iPhoto. The only way to get the photo’s from Lightroom into iPhoto would be to export from Lightroom into iPhoto and keep two separate sets of the same photo. Grrr. I hate duplication and I hate over complicating processes.

iPhoto’s most annoying feature is that it moves photo’s into it’s own library. I would love to have it create a library of images from across my drives but leave them in their location just like Picasa does. I tried Picasa when it came out for the Mac but iPhoto was by far the better tool for me.

So that leaves me with two photo libraries at the moment and none of my new photo’s on the iPhone as I didn’t want to create duplicates. There’s a couple of options in iPhoto for changing the editor which is a bit clunky in practice and for copying items into library but all that does is change the import from a move to a copy. I just hope iPhoto 10 has the options to manage files out with the library. That would be an update worth paying for. I guess there’s nothing for it but to export and duplicate the files I want to view on the iPhone into iPhoto. At least then I can take advantage of the new face tagging features as well. Or is there another option that I’m missing?

3
Mar 09

Apple Updates

Apple — Comments

It’s Tuesday, there’s been loads of rumours so it makes sense that there are hardware updates from Apple. Nice bump’s across all the desktop range, especially on the iMac where extra RAM and HD size makes for a very nice product. Of most interest though was the Mac Mini. It’s been 18 months to 2 years since it’s last spec update and I’ve always toyed with the idea of using one as a media device attached to the TV. That’s despite the 360 (too noisy), the PS3 (great for Blu-ray but not fully codec compliant) and Sky HD (great for HD TV and Films but not great as a library). Apple TV doesn’t cut it for me and the Mac Mini looked to be best mixture of performance and flexibility that I wanted.

Two things have stopped me from buying one. It’s price and it’s spec which was starting to feel old. Today’s update has certainly sorted out the spec and it’s looking to be an excellent media device for under the TV. However I still have pricing issues.

Firstly, it’s price went up today in the UK. The cheapest Mac Mini before today was £391. Cheapest now is £499. Ouch. £499 feels expensive for what you get. I’ve always felt Apple overpriced in the UK when compared to dollar price so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the weak pound has lead to a price increase. Annoyingly the £499 priced Mini would be fine except it comes with only 1GB of ram. Surely that should have been 2GB by default?

Second is the comparison with Mac Mini and iMac prices. If I select the higher spec Mac Mini and bump up processor, memory and add I get the following spec:

# 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2×2GB
# 320GB Serial ATA Drive
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# None
# Apple Wireless Keyboard & Wireless Mighty Mouse
# User’s Guide (English)

That cost’s £928.02.

A 20 inch iMac with the same hard drive and memory but faster processor only costs just over £100 more at £1043. A 24 inch iMac with double the hard disk and a faster processor costs £1,199. With a gorgeous 24 inch monitor. The pricing just doesn’t add up for me. Will this be the last Mac Mini update? I can’t see these selling well with the iMac so keenly priced in comparison.

So I’ll still not be buying a Mac Mini. Probably. As I think through it more I do have a Denon DVD player that cost me around £500 and the Mac Mini would do a lot more than the Denon ever could or would. The Denon at the time didn’t seem expensive. It does now!!!

11
Jan 09

Roundup

Personal — Comments

Busy weekend that was mainly indoors due to the quite lovely weather outside. Give me cold and dry any day over this wet and windy nonsense. It did get off to a great start when four parcels arrived Friday/Saturday. While not quite as good as the instant gratification of buying form a shop the fact I’d saved some cash with these purchases made it all seem a little sweeter.

First parcels were the rest of my hill walking gear. That’s me pretty well set now for the first walk 2 weeks today, a 6 mile jaunt to break everything in. The following weekend is a 12 mile walk which will be slightly more challenging. I can’t wait! Really looking forward to getting out and about. To help I’ve also picked up a couple of books including a cracking little pocket book of 40 walks close to Glasgow.

A new piece of tech was also in one of the parcels – a Bamboo Fun graphics tablet. One of my work colleagues has used one for years and I’d always been tempted. Seeing Shakeel use one over Christmas convinced me of their value. I’ve been using it today to process my London Eye photo’s in Lightroom and it is so much easier, offering far more precision than the mouse. While not essential I’m really pleased with the purchase.

Windows 7

More tech geekery – I’ve switched back to Windows 7. Can’t believe how much improvement over Vista and XP this is. So much so I…..nah – I won’t be switching back ;-) But I was impressed with it once I had it installed using Parallels 4. Quick to boot and shutdown compared to XP never mind Vista. It also looks pretty sweet. Not done to much more with it but will probably remove my XP virtual machine and use this instead.

Apart from that I started a nice new project for work that hopefully won’t take too long to finish off and I’ve caught up with the Screenwipe review of the year which was class. 24’s back tomorrow, Battlestar next week, Lost at the end of the month and FX is showing The Wire from Feb 23rd which if you haven’t caught yet should be added to your diary. Unmissable.

Oh, almost forgot. Tried Spotify today. Very impressive. Reminds me of Pandora before it stopped working in the UK.

And finally, I think. Macworld. Kind of quiet but iPhoto and iMovie 09 look to be very good upgrades so I’ll probably be upgrading at the end of the month. DRM free iTunes is good but it’s been a long time coming so doesn’t seem such a big deal. Even the Macbook Pro was fairly tame except for the non replacable battery. If that option plus the matte screen was available for the 15inch Macbook Pro I’d really consider upgrading. Thankfully it’s not!

5
Jan 09

2009 – Products I Can’t Live Without

Technology — Comments

Read this post on Techcrunch describing the app’s that Mike Arrington uses day to day and would be less productive without them. Thought it would be fun to do my own and revisit every year to see what changes. So without further ado and in no particular order:

  • Google Reader – all my regular website/blog reading is done in Google Reader. Quick, feature packed and a great iPhone interface make this a winner.
  • iPhone – it’s become the essential gadget for me. A web browser that works well on a mobile, a touch interface that makes the phone and it’s app’s easy to use and a suite of app’s that extend the usefulness of the phone beyond any other I’ve used before. The positives far out way the negatives and it’s by far the best phone, maybe even the best gadget I’ve yet owned.
  • Firefox – use it at work and at home. Great browser on PC’s and Mac’s and combined with Foxmarks it’s currently unbeatable. Chrome once released on the Mac supporting plugins could change that in the future.
  • Remember The Milk – use it all the time to manage my to-do lists. Great web interface now supplemented by a wonderful app on the iPhone.
  • Wordpress – used on this blog, newly updated and still hard to beat due to the large plugin library and community that surrounds it.
  • Toad – used every day at work for SQL Development. Essential, too many features to mention although UI isn’t the best with powerful features often lost or hidden within a multitude of menu’s and forms.
  • Notepad++ – I finally found this great Windows text editor this year. Great features and free.
  • Evernote – Note management on steroids. Windows client at work, Mac client at home on desktop and laptop, web based interface and iPhone client all in sync with ability to add and edit notes on any of these platforms. Smartest feature is OCR of any image uploaded to server. Can also store PDF’s and files attached to notes. I use the free option and can’t recommend it highly enough.
  • Twitter – can be seen as frivolous but more and more it’s becoming a great platform for communicating and also watching/responding to real world events far quicker than blogs/websites/traditional media can.
  • Tweetie – makes the most of Twitter on the iPhone. Could be my most used iPhone app and is certainly the best iPhone client by quite a margin.
  • iTunes – it has it critics but it works well for me, and it gives me great access to my local content, podcasts and also app’s and music via the store.
  • Mac OS X – while I can happily live without Windows I would be far less productive at home with Mac OS X. Windows 7 looks to be an interesting future release that offers a viable alternative to Mac OS X, something that can’t be said for XP or Vista.
  • Flickr – where I post all my images and where most of my friends post to as well. Still like the look and feel of the site, the features it offers and the community aspects that are hard to find elsewhere.
  • Textmate – used almost daily on the Mac. Similar feature set to Notepad ++ although slightly better laid out and for me quicker in operation.
  • Google Search – used every day. Can’t see anything breaking Google’s hold on the search market.

I use lot’s of other app’s and websites but they could easily be replaced whereas with this list I would be far less productive or have struggled to find a product as good as these. Anything missing – I do use Gmail but to backup my websites. It’s blocked at work so limits it’s use. I could access it on the iPhone but it’s own e-mail client is good enough. I do feel I may be missing some good tricks with Gmail though. I’ve also dabbled with Google Docs and Zoho but yet to settle on one. I’d like to move a few more docs onto these platforms in the coming year.

I’d love to see what others use day to day to see if I’m missing out on anything. Feel free to comment or link to your blog posting.

5
Jan 09

Macworld 2009

Apple — Comments

This is what I want, not expect.

  1. New update to iPhone OS. Copy and Paste, MMS, more screen customisation options, ability to remove stock apps (Stocks, Notes, Weather etc), run background app’s if the user wants to at their own risk with reduced memory and reduced battery life but at least give me the option, wireless sync and the long lost push notifications that were due in Sept. Sept 08. Thanks.
  2. Apple TV scrapped. Replaced with updated Mac Mini which is sold at a far reduced price. More capability, reduced price, new 10 foot interface. Boxee comes pre-installed.
  3. Snow Leopard – free update in Summer 09.
  4. One more thing – Mobile Me – it’s a great service and we’re really sorry about all the issues. Have it for free.

How great would Macworld without Steve Jobs be if those were some of the announcements tomorrow? I guess we’ll need to make do with some iLife news, some Snow Leopard news and predictable Macbook pro and Mac Mini updates. Oh well. Get well soon Steve.

P.S. Is anyone else, like me, expecting Phil Schillers keynote to be more entertaining than Steve Jobs?

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