Archive for the ‘Apple Mac’ Category

I was chatting with Damien a couple of days ago about Aperture and photography in general. One of his comments about Aperture referred to the loading notice you get whenever you switch view to a new image in the viewer. I have been playing with this and although it is still quick to change, it can get a bit bogged down if you have a lot of images to skip through. I then experimented with the Quick Preview mode… what an amazing difference it made to browsing.

Press ‘p’ whilst in the Aperture browser and you will find that ‘Quick Preview’ is displayed underneath the picture.

With this on, try skipping through pictures and check the speed difference. As soon as you want to slow down again and begin working on the images, press ‘p’ to toggle quick preview mode off.

My copy of Aperture 2 arrived this week-end and it has been installed and the sample projects imported.

I downloaded the demo about 2 minutes after it was released and not being one for impulse decisions, about 2 minutes later I decided that I will move my workflow from Lightroom to Aperture! Within those 2 minutes I discovered that the performance, tools, integration and overall feature set will suit me more. Lightroom is a great application and I have nothing but respect for it but when I used Aperture to very quickly add images to my gallery then access the photos from Pages, I realised I had already saved a lot of time compared to the equivalent Adobe workflow. A few more tests along these lines and I was confident that Aperture is the way forward!

When I have finished ruining the sample photos, I am going to look at importing my 8,000 images as referenced files. I plan to keep all the original images on my external drive and the library file on my Macbook Pro. This gives the benefit of being able to access the library when travelling but also saves HDD space which is starting to get quite low! When I originally moved to Lightroom, I lost all the keywording I had done on the PC but luckily I manage the files in a logical way which helps me find the images I need. I know there are a lot of rubbish images in my library so I may take this opportunity to tidy things up a bit. From there I will decide if I am going to keyword everything again. At some stage in the near future, Aidy and I are going to design a keyword tree for the images on Encaptured. I will recreate this tree in Aperture and ensure that I use it as I go so that when I get round to uploading images, everything is cohesive.

I’ll report on my progress as I get round to each part of the transition as I am sure there will be other users out there that may make the same move. With any luck, my experiences will provide some guidance!

Just a few days after installing Leopard I have been going through my system and updating various bits of software. One of the apps I updated was MAMP, the excellent server I use for local testing. My document root is outside the main directory so I didn’t think about the mysql databases that are still held within the directory. Needless to say after updating the app, all of the existing databases were lost. After a few seconds of panic I thought about Time Machine. Navigating to the mysql root in the new directory and hitting the TM button brought me into the past where I found all of the db’s… one multi select later and they are all back in the present. I don’t care about the other 299 improvements, Time Machine alone is worth the cost of the upgrade! I’ve become such an Apple fanboy it scares me!

It seems that Apple has gone absolutely mad with new product releases. New iMac… check out how slick and silver it is! New Mac Minis for the media centre. I am quite impressed with the new keyboards though they do not have a full width wireless option at this stage. If I am at my desk I prefer the number pad to be there!

Finally, iLife 08 and iWork08 have been released. I have iWork 07 and it is an excellent suite so I iwll certainly be upgrading soon. With the introduction of an Apple spreadsheet app and Microsoft Office compatibility, it’s a bit of a no brainer!

I have a number of network based drives that I access quite a lot on my home network. One of the problems I have experienced with “OS X Tiger” is when browsing these shares. It seems that the auto refresh does not always detect changes and/or new files. One great solution I have discovered is ‘Refresh Finder 1.1′ by S�derhavet

Very cool and tidy todo app from http://www.carpeaqua.com/software/checkoff/

This may be obvious to every other Mac user out there, but as a new switcher, I need all the help I can get to try and memorise all the new things I learn about the platform.

My task for today was moving all of my 250GB of files from my old Windows backup onto a new HDD so that I could reformat the old drive for the MAC. Sounds easy but each time I tried to do the 16 hour Firewire->USB2 transfer, it would stop with an error. I have now manually copied across the files and folders but to ensure nothing was lost I needed to find a way of comparing the two directories.

Filemerge – Small app… big help

I was very lucky to be hunting around the computer and come across this great application that I think was installed with the Apple Xcode tools. It very easily allows you to compare two text documents and luckily…even two directories. What a gem! You get two lists that are colour coded showing the differences.

Icing on the cake

I found another great addition use for this tool, it can actually merge the two directories or files together. This very simple tool has a lot of power which is why I have made a note here for myself in he future!

Apple are at it again! It seems that as soon as I let my impulses cool… a few weeks later I want to spend money on their website again. After the recent announcements of new iPods and an amazing new iMac, there are now new Powerbooks and PowerMacs.

As soon as I saw the new iMac G5 last week, it was very tempting to actually go ahead and buy one, after all, it does everything and a lot more. For a regular use computer, there would be no additional accessories required (well… maybe a TV tuner!). The specs and features are way above anything that the usual programming and web browsing might throw at it. The all in one design and new software make it very desirable. The built in iSight and remote control are just extra bonuses on top of an already well presented bit of kit. It seemed that it would be the ideal stop-gap before the Intel PowerMacs were released…. until today! I mean… who wouldn’t want a PowerMac with 4 processor cores running? The processing power of the new PowerMacs is nearly pornographic in it’s appeal. For the rest of the year, I will have to walk around telling myself to believe myself about not wanting one just yet… but I do! I cant imagine how the Intel based Macs could top the performance of these beasts. It can only be described as REAL power.

The new Powerbooks have seen some nice enhancements aswell such as new displays and longer lasting batteries. Perhaps this is to make them better suited for working with Apple’s new software aimed at photographers. Aperture is a completely RAW based workflow, editing and printing tool. Is this software alone enough justification for a new PowerMac quad? Maybe… the recommended system specs are a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 or faster, 2GB of RAM, a powerful graphics card and 5GB of disk space just for the application, templates, and tutorial. I am thinking that it must be good!

Sometimes it is very easy to get confused. For example, this lunchtime I headed off to the local computer shops to try and find a Keyboard and Mouse set to replace the existing Logitech one that I am using on the Mac as the buttons are falling out. From the 10+ products I looked at, only 1 Logitech set was Mac compatible yet all but 1 M$ sets were Mac compatible. Although I am sure you can get the drivers from Logitech, it seems peculiar that 90% of M$ products support Mac right out of the box!! The only one that didn’t was the finger print scanner which I can accept as it is an XP integration… 1 point M$!!

Day 3 proved much easier and quite successful in my quest for Macification. The standard install of PHP in OS X lacks a few of the libraries that I regularly use so rather that figure out how to activate them I did the next best thing; Download an update! Entropy have an excellent ‘one-click update’ for PHP on OS X and it was a painless excercise. Including the download, it took 3 minutes to update to the latest version and activate all of the libraries I need. McDonalds latest advertising cliche ringing in my mind.. ‘Mmm… Lovin’ it!!’

My quest for a code editor was a bit more challenging in that I had found a number of candidates that looked promising. I wanted all of the usual things that people would want in an editor; Syntax highlighting being the most obvious and important. Other features I hoped to find were FTP access to my sites, tabs for each window and support for various filetypes. From the few I tried, the one that immediately had me saying ‘Wow, how much does this cost?’ was jEdit, an open source project!

jEdit supports over 130 filetypes as standard but new ones can be added easily if you need more! Initially it lacked a couple of features I would have liked but I soon discovered the plugin manager where there are hundreds of available upgrades. I installed a tabs plugin, an ftp access plugin, an autocomplete plugin a code beautifier plugin, a plugin that will make a webpage of code from any given selection… all my requirements and more!! At some stage I plan to experiment with the subversion integration it offers. Being a Java application I was initially very skeptical. My past experience tells me that they load and run as fast a fat man in treacle. In this case I was pleasantly surprised. Whether its the Mac platform or just the 7 years of development on jEdit, it ran just like any other application. I would like to test it on my PC (Have to love Java for that!) but I am not allowed to turn it on yet! If it runs ok on there, I will be very happy as that will give some consistency accross my platforms. If you want to see for yourself what jEdit can do, check the Features page on the website. You should probably check the active community site aswell.

The only niggling issue I have at this stage is the highlighting colours… just not what I am used to. Luckily, all I need to do is change the XML file and I can have any colours I want.

I have just about completed my second day of a small task I have set myself that will be in two stages. Part one is to not switch my PC on for a week so that I force myself into using the Mac. This way, I figure, if there are any problems I will have to work through them. Yesterday I managed to get Apache and PHP running properly including a virtual host set up so that I can run different domain names for my sites locally. The second part will be go for a month if all is going well. So far, I couldn’t be happier!!

Yesterdays software search was for an FTP client. I ended up using two that I liked. OneButton FTP and Transmit. OneButton is open source and worked very well, it is lacking recursive operations at this stage so I will keep checking as that feature is on the roadmap. Transmit is $29 so not the end of the world if I decide to buy it… from my initial tests, it is a very well featured application.

Today I downloaded, installed and configured MySQL which was a result. I now have a replica of my blog running locally. Todays great software find was CocoaMySQL. It is quite possibly the best application I have ever used for accessing databases locally and over the net. Open Source aswell so that was sweet!

Tomorrow I am testing out some Editors. I have downloaded a lot to try out and I am really hoping that I can find something similar to Editplus+ I will update about that when I make a choice. All in all, no major problems but a lot of fun!!

Just because it sounds funny and I would like to confuse anyone that has the slightest interest in my Blog, I have decided to call my Mini, Mac after my Mac mini!! Having clarified that point to save any confusion, it would now be appropriate for me to complain again about Mac, he is leaking oil in very small quantities. After all of the problems I have had with him (mainly due to very shoddy work from St Martins Garage), I really feel that soon enough, he will be running great!! It’s not all bad though as I have discovered that he can do about 10 miles on just the smell of petrol… good work Mac, saved me having to push!! As it is related, I should mention that I am also getting on very well with my Mac mini, less problems than the Mini, Mac so far… not hard as I would already have had to give it to the computer garage for 6 weeks so they break the DVD-ROM drive for me.

I am sitting in silence and typing this post. I can hear the wind outside my window which is a novelty for me as I usually only hear the wind blowing from my Coolermaster PC case!! I have spent a day with my new Mac mini and so far I am absolutely stunned with it. The performance out of the box is not too bad at all, it runs silently, the graphics system is surprisingly powerful, it has not crashed once and it looks cool as heck!! I am so very pleased that I spent this small amount of money as I can honestly say I love this computer already… it really is paving the way for a Power Mac. I bought the 1.42Ghz version that has the standard 256MB RAM which I plan to upgrade to 1GB soon!!! So far it has done everything I have asked, playing DVD’s is excellent, the quality of the movies is great but the lack of any discernible noise really makes a lot of difference. I am not even going to start with my comments of the operating system as I am far too pleased with it at the moment and I do not want to be too biased towards the computing platform that I mocked for most of my computing life!! It would seem that I have joined the elitist ranks of Apple ownership and it looks like my theory was correct… Mac’s are cool !!!