iPhoto 2 brings lots of little improvements to the program and of course the big much needed one: speed. At first I didn’t think that it was much faster that its predecessor, but then after a little while (presumably to let it catch up on its caches) the speed ups were noticeable. On my G4/867 PowerBook (with Radeon 9000 graphics), scrolling through 1000 or so images was manageable with only a few hiccups. Much better than the previous achingly slow behavior. And window resizes happen in something approaching real time. It’s still jerky, but at least it’s not like before where you had to wait two or three or more seconds. The Cocoa programmer in me knows that they could make this lots better if they’d check to see if they were in a live resize before doing all the crunching to resize the image browser. Ah well, maybe next time.

The new One Touch Enhance feature is great. I’ve been telling people for a long time that digital pictures are not finished products when they come out of the camera. They need a bit of, in image processing parlance, levels and curves adjustment. In Photoshop, my first action is to always hit "Auto Levels" and see how it goes. Most of the time doing this results in something near what it should be. Only occasionally does it miss and go too far. The One Touch Enhance feature in iPhoto is performs exactly the same behavior. And most of the time, on most images, it does wonders. And for anybody who’s not a photo editing expert, it’s just the ticket. That said, I have two wishes for One Touch Enhance:

• It shouldn’t let you enhance a picture more than once. The way it’s set up now, you can "enhance" a picture until it goes intensely posterized. It shouldn’t let you do this. Most users will forget if they’ve enhanced a picture and hit the button again. Do this a few times and you’ve trashed an image instead of enhancing it.
• There should be an optional slider of how much enhancement you want to do. In essence controlling how aggressive the auto-leveling is or isn’t. This should be a property that’s kept with the photo’s meta information and which you can tweak later if you want.

The new way of dealing with keywords is a bit odd. It’s much more extensible now as the separate panel allows a long vertical list instead of the constraint of it being in the main user interface. But I had to search a bit and eventually found out how to open the Keywords panel using the Menu. I’d have expected this to show up somewhere in the UI when I’m in Organize mode. There’s a lot more that could be done with keywords in iPhoto. A lot.

Having the Album data in XML format is wonderful. I hate XML (as many longtime readers will know), but it’s better than most of the alternatives. The album data in XML form will let other programs easily determine the structure of your iPhoto collection and do something meaningful with it. Comments are there as well as pointers to the thumbnails. The one piece of information that I’d like to see there that’s not is the keyword data.

My other nits with iPhoto are:

• Why can’t I rotate an image in anything other than 90 degree increments? Everyone takes pictures that are skewed. iPhoto should have something really easy to help correct this.
• When exporting pictures, such as the one I showed in my iCurve blog entry, why do jaggy artifacts come up? The picture in my blog entry came from Photoshop. Exported from iPhoto, there are jaggys along the edges of the straight diagonal lines. And where did the Export button in the toolbar go? This was another thing I had to hunt through the menus to find in order to export to a file.
• Sharpening. They’ve fixed the problem of not having auto-levels. Now, they need to address the other major thing that you should do to images: Sharpen them for the device that you are going to output them onto. Prints need a different amount of sharpening than web images. Maybe the printing algorithms do some sharpening (I haven’t dug in there yet), but I know that the web export ones don’t. Yes, this would be a hard UI to manage, but surely its possible to do somewhat of a "One Touch Sharpen for Web" on images being uploaded to the web.
• When running on a multi-desktop machine, I can only set the desktop picture of the main desktop, not the secondary one.
• Why can’t you use small icons in the toolbar? The ones there are huge. And I keep activating them when I think that I’m just clicking on the background to bring the window to the front.

Ok, you get the drift. iPhoto is tons better, but there’s still more that they could do. Overall, it’s a great effort for 2.0. iTunes got better from 1.0 to 2.0, but still wasn’t a replacement for other MP3 players till it got to 3.0. As well, iMovie looks like it’s now reaching the way totally kick-ass stage with 3.0 (though I haven’t played with it any today). I’m hoping the same process happens with iPhoto on its path to 3.0. And until then, I’m going to get busy trying to find some ways of writing my own tools to help patch over the bumps that I see.

What do you think about the new iPhoto?

Apple released iPhoto 2.0 for download today, and I’ve had a chance to run it through a few preliminary tests. I’ve been receiving lots of questions about its new data structure. Hopefully this blog will provide you with a few top of mind answers.

First of all, this upgrade seems like mostly good news. iPhoto 2.0 has a hefty list of new features and improvements such as the Enhance and Retouch tools. They are very intuitive, and you’ll be up-to-speed in no time. But we already knew about those goodies, right?

The Upgrade Process

The burning question has been how 2.0 restructures your iPhoto Library, and what will break as a result. Before I get into those details, let me quickly outline the procedure you should follow for this upgrade.

• Before you do anything, back up your iPhoto Library (or libraries) located in the Pictures folder in your Home directory. I used the iPod for this since I keep it with me in my backpack.
• If you have multiple iPhoto Libraries, select the smallest one for testing 2.0. You may even want to create a test library just to be super safe.
• Download version 2.0 from Apple’s iPhoto page. It’s a 32 MB transfer, but the Apple servers seem to be in good shape, and it only took a few minutes (if you have bandwidth to begin with). You can also use Software Update for both iPhoto 2.0 and iMovie 3.0.
• Check out the documentation in the Read Before You Install folder, then double-click the iPhoto.pkg installer.
• After the installer has updated your existing iPhoto app, launch iPhoto. It will notify you that it has to update your existing Library. Click OK.
• Check your preferences to make sure they’re set correctly, and start enjoying the new iPhoto!

Library Folder Structure and iPhoto Library Manager

The first thing I did after the install and Library update, was go to my Pictures folder and see what 2.0 did to my iPhoto Library. On the surface it appears that everything is the same. Apparently all the changes are internal.

I then decided to test iPhoto Library Manager 1.0. If everything was the same on the outside (file names, folder structure, etc.), then why wouldn’t the existing version of iPhoto Library Manager work?

Lo and behold, Library Manager allowed me to quit iPhoto, switch libraries, then launch iPhoto again — just as always. (Note here: Be sure to QUIT iPhoto before switching libraries. No Exceptions!)

BetterHTMLExport 1.6.4 Didn’t Fare as Well

Unfortunately, when I tried to create a web page using my favorite plug-in, BetterHTMLExport 1.6.4, it didn’t work. And in fact, having it in the iPhoto 2.0 plug-ins folder seemed to disturb the default web page generator, so I recommend that you pull BetterHTMLExport 1.6.4 out for the time being. Once I removed it, the default generator seemed to work much better.

Conclusions

I’ll continue to test iPhoto 2.0 over the next few days (and get to working on the update for iPhoto: The Missing Manual). But if you carefully back up your data, you should be able to upgrade to iPhoto 2.0 right now and begin enjoying its benefits, including still using iPhoto Library Manager. The exception is, if you need the BetterHTML plug-in, then you might want to hold off until an update for that package is available.

I want to stress that these are only preliminary findings. Please use the TalkBacks below to share new information as we discover it.

Related link: https://porting.openoffice.org/mac/

I recently set about installing and configuring the X11 Final Beta of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite. Inspired by the recent release of Apple’s X11 package, I downloaded the 160MB image and ran the various installers. Thus far I’m fairly satisfied.

I’ve been using Microsoft Office for years; since back in the days when Microsoft actually used version numbers to differentiate releases and not years or letters. It’s easily the standard for businesses around the world and has been for many years now. Let’s face it, MS Office is an excellent product. Since it’s such a great product, pretty much every business uses it. Businesses now rely so much on MS Office that they won’t even consider shifting to another platform unless it has a version of MS Office available.

While Mac OS X has the advantage of having a port of Microsoft Office (and a better one than the Windows version IMO), it also has the advantage of having access to the wonderful world of open source software. Mac OS X has mastered perching atop this fine line of open v. closed and it’s great to see so many software choices. One of these choices is the OpenOffice.org productivity suite.

OpenOffice.org is an open source project based upon Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice. Essentially, it is an office productivity suite with all the usual culprits: a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation app. While not as polished and featureful as Microsoft’s offering, OpenOffice includes most of the features you’ve come to expect from such a suite, with the added advantage of costing, well, nothing.

OpenOffice has been ported to many different platforms, the most recent of which is Mac OS X. The Mac OS X porting team is working on porting the whole suite (which is about 2GB of code resulting in 160MB of binaries) in stages. First up is getting it to run in X11, next will be rendering with Quartz and finally, a full-blown Aqua version. The beta I downloaded recently is the final beta for the X11 version. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and have yet to find any major issues.

OpenOffice was able to open all of my Microsoft Office documents with minimal loss. For example: I first opened up a spreadsheet I keep around which contains my home budget. It has some basic formatting (bolds, cell borders) and formulas (averaging, SUMs). OpenOffice opened the file and rendered it much the same way I’d expect it to in Microsoft’s Excel. The next file I checked out was a letter I recently sent out. It again contained some basic formatting (bolds and italics this time), but also contained some bulleting. Here OpenOffice became a bit confused. It could tell it needed to have an unordered list, but it didn’t use the exact same graphic that Microsoft’s Word did. This was quickly remedied when I chose Numbering/Bullets from the Format menu.

The final document I tested out was the most complex. It’s my resume, which was done in Word and contains all kinds of formatting (bolds, italics, underlines, different font points, font faces, bullets, and alignment). I’m happy to report that the only problems I encountered were once again with the bullet graphics. This was quickly fixed the same way as above. Overall I’m quite satisfied with OpenOffice and I recommend it to anyone that either can’t afford Microsoft’s Office or is perhaps considering it for a corporate deployment. It doesn’t have all of the features of Microsoft’s suite, so if you’re a power Excel user your mileage may vary, but for the average user it has all of the features you’re used to.

The X11 Final Beta is not an Aqua application. To use it, you must install an X11 server and then OpenOffice. If you’re a novice, this is probably a 4 on the difficulty scale. For experienced users, well, you probably already have an X11 server installed :) You can find instructions for installing Apple’s X11 server at the URL listed above. When you go to the download page for OpenOffice.org’s X11 beta, you’ll find instructions for making it work with Apple’s X11.

Do you or would you use OpenOffice?

I’ve been following the DVD-R vs. the DVD+RW competition rather closely. I became more interested after accidently buying the wrong format for my SuperDrive at Office Max. (And still haven’t had the time to get back there for a refund.) I hate that …

Another informative article on the subject surfaced this morning over at Insanely Great Mac that points out that many DVD manufacturers are now leaning toward a “multi-format” recorders tentatively dubbed as Real DVD. My top of mind response is: “This is a good idea.”

At the moment Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), Pioneer, and Apple are producing equipment using the DVD-R/RW format. Microsoft, Sony, and a host of others are behind the DVD+RW format, although Sony seems to be hedging its bets by showing support for DVD-R also. Depending on whose facts your believe, DVD-R and DVD+RW seem to be in a real horse race for popularity among consumers. In the end, I think DVD-R would prevail, but I don’t want it to come to that.

Just as a casual observation, it’s amazing to me that a company so bright as Sony — in some ways I consider them the Apple of the PC world — could end up on the wrong side of the format fence so many times. Both Betamax and MiniDisc are cool technologies, but ultimately lost pace with rivals. The Memory Stick is doggedly hanging in there (as is the MiniDisc for that matter), but it’s only a matter of time until Memory Sticks meet the same proprietary fate as Sony’s other “we’re the only ones using these” formats. For example, I already see the new xD memory card gaining ground, in part due to multi-company support.

Right now, nothing would please me more (technologically speaking that is) than to see Sony throw all of its support toward an universal DVD format alongside other major manufacturers.

I like Sony products. This is why I really want to see Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Matsushita, Pioneer, and Apple all producing equipment with the same format. The Recordable DVD Council appears to be working in this direction. It’s only logical to settle on a standard disc.

In the meantime, I best get my tail over to Office Max for a refund while those DVD+RWs are still popular …

Related link: https://www.apple.com/ilife

Tomorrow the updated versions of Apple’s iApps will be released. Officially branded as iLife, the suite is composed of iDVD 3, iMovie 3, iPhoto 2 and iTunes 3. While the last of these is currently available, the other three have been updated with a host of new features and given the “full number upgrade.” iDVD has been updated to include new themes; iPhoto has gained one-click picture enhancement and a cloning brush; and iMovie now comes with new effects, transitions, and chapters.

The real beauty of iLife, however, doesn’t come in the form of these new items, but instead comes from the tight integration between the components. Exporting your home movie from iMovie to iDVD is quick and simple. Want a still photo in your movie? Just add it from iPhoto with a few clicks. Need a soundtrack for your masterpiece? Choose from your iTunes library right in iMovie. The seamless communication between the components of iLife brings working with digital media to a whole new level of convenience.

The buzz before the Keynote was full of rumors of a $50 charge for the upgrades. Users were in an uproar at the prospect of having to pay for the newest versions. Even though Apple has charged for iApp updates in the past, Jobs decided to offer the iMovie and iPhoto updates for free. Acording to the rumor site Think Secret, this was a last minute decision after the negative feedback seen in the Mac community. I would guess that the majority of Mac users do not have SuperDrives, so they are not concerned with the iDVD update. They will want the iMovie and iPhoto updates the most. By deciding to give away the iMovie and iPhoto updates, Apple has lowered the potential income of the iLife suite considerably.

Personally, I have mixed feelings on this. I plan to buy iLife for the $50 regardless, because I want to support a company that I hope continues to stay in business. Plus it is easier to drive 15 minutes to the mall and buy it at my local Apple store than setting my Macs up to download the large iMovie and iPhoto updates. My only gripe is that iDVD doesn’t support external DVD burners, so I won’t be able to burn movies on my September-new PowerBook. Maybe Apple will start selling a self branded FW SuperDrive that comes bundled with iLife. More likely I’ll buy another PowerBook come Seybold :)

Do you plan to buy iLife?

In my world of online shopping, there are three gold standards: Amazon.com, Apple.com, and B&H Photo.com. Over the years these sites have provided me with a good browsing experience, offered fair prices, kept me posted about the status of my order, and delivered the goods I requested. With these positives under my belt, why would I consider buying anywhere else?

It’s those darn ads. Every time I research an article, read a photo column, look up a camera review, they’re lurking there in the side nav bar. “Hey buddy, don’t pay full price for that new digital camera. I’ll sell you the same one for 30 percent less.” Like a kid coming home from via the back alley I know to avoid, I usually just say no to the tempting voices.

Am I crazy? What if these other operations are just more efficient? Why should I throw away good money? I decided to do a little informal test. I was looking to buy a new Olympus C-5050 digital camera (an amazing piece of equipment), but did not feel like spending the $799 asking price advertised at the brick and motars.

First I checked my favorite online vendor for photo equipment: B&H. They had a much improved price tag of $699. Fantastic! They knocked a hundred bucks right off the top, and I know I can trust them. I just had to get a few more bucks together, then I could order it.

But, as I was doing a little more technical research on the camera I saw one of those ads offering the camera — with USA warranty, all accessories, and unopened box — for $545 from DirectSource.us. How could they do that?

I went to the site, and it was very nice with all the bells and whistles and lots of “protected by” the usual suspects. So I decided to test the water. I ordered the camera from their slick e-commerce site.

The next day I received an email stating that I had to call them to “verify my order.” I know this ploy. What they really want to do is sell me more stuff at a premium price to make up for the loss leader they had sold me. I called, said I didn’t need any accessories (How about this? How about that? No! No! No!), and the gruff voice on the other end of the line said the camera would ship within a while. I asked “what’s a while?” The answer was, “a week or so.” Click.

The next day, I receive a back order notice from DirectSource stating that my camera shipment will be delayed 3-4 weeks because the manufacturer has delayed its shipment. Funny thing, it’s still posted as “in stock” on their very sophisticated site. More monkey business. I promptly cancelled my order.

I tried another site, BuyDigitalDirect.com. This one with a 3-star rating on c|net, for a still great price of $629 with free shipping. But then the next day I received the dreaded email from them too, asking me to call to verify my order. “Oh darn!” I thought.

I called, and they actually asked for my 3-digit credit card security number and my billing address. Then the voice inquired about any additional accessories I might need. I said I didn’t need any, and the voice replied that my order would be shipped right away. So far, no back order notice. Hmmmm. This one might actually go through.

I’ll see if the camera arrives as promised, with USA warranty and all accessories. But in the meantime, I think I’ll save the super discount sites for those times I can afford to be hassled, delayed, and somewhat in doubt. Maybe they can be my thrill-seeking substitute for a trip to Las Vegas. The old adage, “You get what you pay for,” seems to apply to peace of mind as well as merchandise.

What are your thoughts and experiences in the world of online discount shopping?

Rendezvous is a great technology. It intelligently extends portions of existing protocols and standards to create something that is not only easy to implement, but is pretty simple in its construction. Simple is a good thing when we’re talking about network things. Complexity in a network is an administrator’s worst nightmare. Services like DHCP and DNS are there to make the administrator’s job easier. Unfortunately services like DHCP and DNS are beyond the grasp of most users. Rendezvous steps in and makes it so the average person can get a functional network in place quickly and easily.

Rendezvous isn’t the only protocol around working to make networking easier; UPnP is another system designed for easy home networking. Right now it’s strongly backed by Microsoft and Intel. However it is a heavier system and doesn’t build as much upon existing protocols as Rendezvous does. Rendezvous also has the advantage that you can get real products, right now that are working examples of the technology.

With this in mind it’s great to see Apple make another product that makes use of Rendezvous. I’m of course talking about the Safari browser Apple just recently released as a Public Beta. Though you might not have heard much about it during the Keynote at MacWorld San Francisco, this browser is packing Rendezvous. Now Safari isn’t the only browser that has a working implementation of Rendezvous. The Chimera browser has Rendezvous support as well (and has had it longer even).

Until more recently, the Rendezvous features in the browser have been stagnant, but now Eric Seidel has written an Apache module named mod_rendezvous which enables your Mac’s web service to appear in that Rendezvous menu. It’s pretty easy to install and works very well. Also, if you’re using Apple’s FTP sharing, it will appear in Chimera’s Rendezvous list. Not only that, but expect products like routers and printers to come with built-in, Rendezvous advertising web servers. Setting up your next home NAT router could be as easy as plugging in a cable and opening the configuration site from your browser’s Rendezvous menu.

Keep an eye on this one folks. I predict Rendezvous making it real big in our industry, especially in the home and small office markets.

What do you think will use Rendezvous next?

When I read the pre-Macworld reports that Apple was going to charge for the entire suite of iApps, I got that familiar Apple feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Oh boy, here we go again.”

Aim gun downward; shoot twice.

Then, what really irritated me was Joe Wilcox’s c|net article, Apple preparing new upgrade fees where he spelled out the iApps fee plan before Steve Jobs had even taken the stage. My view is that the news should actually happen before journalists write about it. It’s one thing to say what you think might happen, it’s another to write what will happen.

After reading the c|net report, I said to my editorial director, “Damn, I sure hope Apple changes its mind at the last minute and serves these guys a big plate of crow.”

Apparently, that’s what happened. In this morning’s report from thinksecret.com, “Steve Jobs decided some four days before his keynote address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco to give away two software applications for free, company sources have confirmed.” Later in the article, more evidence surfaces: “In addition, there is clear public evidence through an excerpt of a soon-to-be-released book about iLife products that Apple has planned on charging for the complete iApp bundle for some time.” I can’t confirm thinksecret’s report, but it’s consistent with what I’ve observed.

By now, everyone knows what really happened at the keynote. Jobs announced a smart, fair approach to the iApp upgrades. If you have the bandwidth, you’ll be able to download the new versions of iPhoto and iMovie. Or, you can purchase them all on CD, including iDVD for $50.

That is a reasonable business proposal. I know it costs money to develop these applications. They’re darn good. But, the iApps are also a powerful motivator to move to Mac OS X, and last time I checked, there are still a few people who haven’t switched … yet. By keeping a primary incentive in place, and offering a paying alternative to those who want the convenience, Apple has put the gun back in the holster.

As for reporting the news before it happens … The last guy I would ever be so bold as to predict his behavior is Steve Jobs, especially when he gets in his zone and starts listening to that little voice inside.

Apple’s handling of the iApps is just another indicator that this company is ready for serious business in 2003 — and that Steve Jobs is definitely still in charge.

By now we’ve all seen the comparison numbers and most likely have played with the Safari browser on our own computers. And true to the promise, this is one fast browser.

Who says speed doesn’t matter? Well, not me. I work online everyday, and having Web pages quickly snap on to my screen definitely makes work more enjoyable. I’m using it right now to write this weblog using our Web-based publishing system.

During his Macworld keynote address, Steve Jobs illustrates the page load speed of Apple’s new Web browser, Safari.

I also like the look of the interface. It’s clean and the typography is attractive. The SnapBack feature is very useful. When I first land at a top-level page, knowing that I’m going to be drilling down into the site, I choose “Mark Page for SnapBack.” Then no matter how far I meander, I just have to hit the orange arrow in the URL pane of the browser to return to the marked page.

Speaking of the URL pane, the aqua blue status indicator that moves from left to right as the page loads is quite creative, and attractive.

Safari automatically imports your IE bookmarks for you. To access them, simply go to “Show All Bookmarks,” then open the “Imported IE Favorites” folder. They’re all there waiting for you.

I’ve arranged them in folders by topic, then dragged the folders up to Bookmarks Bar. The title of the folder appears with a “down arrow” beside it. Just click on the arrow, and all the bookmarks in that folder appear as a drop down menu. Very nice.

I’m also very happy to have built-in spell checking (for online writing such as this weblog). Go to Edit –> Spelling and choose Check Spelling as You Type.”

The Google integration is a good addition. And I love that the text automatically wraps within the window when I select “View Source.”

I’ve noticed that Safari does have a problem when I’m adding information to certain types of text fields, depending on how the page is designed, and because bug reports are so easy to file, I haven’t hesitated to let the Apple engineers know.

Overall, I think the beta version of Safari is strong. If Apple continues to show the intelligence and discipline with this software that they have so far, I think it will become the primary browser for many Mac users.

Despite a tough economy and soft tech market, Macworld SF 2003 was definitely upbeat. Here are five products that made a positive impression on me.

The ExtendAIR directional antenna for the new AirPort Extreme Base Station (Base Station now only $199) earned a Macworld Best of Show, and for good reason. This device can broadcast AirPort transmissions up to 500 feet. Talk about extending the pleasure …

The SciDome Digital Dome Theater had me seeing stars. This “portable” planetarium brings astronomy to more kids than ever before. The software is provided by long time Mac favorites, Starry Night.

Apple’s new 12″ PowerBook is incredible. I watched how people approached this machine in the Apple booth, and the best way to describe their reactions is a mixture of wonder and reverence. The first thing most folks do is pick up the PowerBook and hold it. Then turn it. Then gently place it back on the counter. The specs are good, and this 4.6 pound computer is going to be a winner.

A fun product that I enjoyed investigating was the U.F.O. for the iMac by XtremeMac. This glowing saucer sits beneath the new iMac and provides 4 powered USB and 2 FireWire ports in the front where they are accessible. Very fun, practical, and cool.

Finally, the general category of Amazing Audio brought happiness to my ears. Pro audio had been a little slow coming to Mac OS X, but this show brought some great goodies for audiophiles, including M-Audio Sonica Theater USB Surround Sound Card, and Power Tools for mixing and mastering. Now your Mac can sound as good as it looks.

One last comment … business at the O’Reilly bookstore was fantastic. We’ve had to resupply a number of titles, and we’ve had great turnouts at our in-booth demos. A warm thanks to everyone who stopped by.

If you get to the Expo floor early enough in the morning, you can actually play with the new toys. I decided to give iPhoto 2.0 a complete tour using an iMac G4 (800 MHz) with 512 MB RAM.

First thing I noticed was that the performance was about the same as with iPhoto 1.1.1 — that surprised me a little because I thought that a speed bump would certainly be part of the upgrade. So I’m sticking with my current advice concerning library size: Keep them to 650 MBs, archive them on CD, and use iPhoto Library Manger to switch between libraries. That way you’ll have snappy performance as you dash around the application.

Both the Enhance and Retouch tools work great. You can’t set any parameters with either of them, but you don’t really need to because they’re so effective as is.

One of my favorite features, sending email attachments directly from iPhoto, now allows you to use Entourage, Eudora, and AOL as well as the .Mail client. Good move!

The entire search function, including Keywords, has now been moved to a submenu beneath Edit. At first I didn’t like this, but the new search function is so much more powerful, it won me over.

iPhoto 2.0 has added some new printing templates, including “Sampler” and “N-up,” that are welcome features for those who like to dash off prints from their ink jets. “Sampler” allows you to create those mixed-sized pages like we used to get from the school photographer.

The “Burn” function is a biggie and simplifies the archiving of iPhoto data. And with Jaguar, you can use 3rd party DVD burners as well as SuperDrives. Yaay! CD-Rs work as expected.

Lots of other little improvements, such as easier access to your iTunes library, make iPhoto 2.0 a worthy download. I’m hoping to see a little better performance and a sharpening filter in the next version. But until then, it remains my digital shoebox of choice.

iPhoto will be available as a free download, or part of the iLife shrinkwrap, on Jan. 25th.

Related link: https://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert20031828970109.gif

Let’s hope this is the beginning of a series — if anyone can explain Extreme Programming, it’s Dilbert.

Over time, every conference develops its own personality. Macworld SF is no exception. And its characteristics become even more evident when I’m in the trenches teaching and demoing.

I had three different opportunities to experience this phenomenon today, beginning with the user session, “Everything You Wanted to Know About iPhoto” that Rick Smolan and I facilitated. Happily, our room, Hall 304, was nearly full by the time the session began.

The minute we opened the floor to questions, people raised their hands and chimed right in. The discussions were lively and intelligent. Yes Macworld is a consumer show, but these consumers are pretty darn smart. And they’re curious. For a teacher, this is a great combination.

Next stop was a digital photo demo in the O’Reilly booth. I think these are the most difficult of teaching assignments, and I tip my hat to those who work the Expo floor all day and manage to convey any type of valuable information in the midst of noise and chaos.

Once again there was lots of eye contact, good questions, and a genuine desire to learn something new. Most people even realized that some questions would not be of interest to the general audience, and they saved them for after the presentation when they could ask me one on one. Nice touch indeed!

Last stop for the day was the User Group Lounge. The presentations here are very informal, and the setting is quiet and relaxed. Unlike the previous two stops, I didn’t have the benefit of using an overhead projector and computer.

Once again, audience members moved to the front of the room, paid close attention, asked intelligent questions, and showed a true sense of humor and enjoyment. Humor is so important at these shows.

As I was walking back to my room to drop off my computer before heading out for dinner, I thought about all the different people I had met today, and I realized that they are the reason why I like working this show so much.

They are truly passionate about computing, but don’t display any of the arrogance that sometimes accompanies a level of technical knowledge. They help each other. And they seem to be more interested in finding answers rather than showing how much they know.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Mac users are the best people in the world of technology … but certainly, they are the nicest.

Well, the Sun has set after a long first day at Macworld San Fransisco, and it’s been a day full of surprises.

By now, you’ve heard all the goodies, so I won’t go into great detail about them, but here’s a quick listing:

• New, bigger and a smaller PowerBooks are coming soon to an Apple Store nearest you (there are 51 of them now, you know).
• New commercials to promote the new PowerBooks.
• AirPort Extreme, which uses 802.11g for faster wireless networking.
• Bluetooth is built into the new PowerBooks (yeah!)
• New versions of iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD (2, 3, and 2, respectively).
• iLife: The above three (iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, and iDVD 2), plus iTunes 3. Now if I can just find MyLife, life would truly be great.
• Final Cut Express: Apple took a lesson from Adobe and beat them at their own game by releasing a watered down verision of Final Cut Pro before Adobe could get out Premiere Express. Nice…
• Safari: A truly kick-ass and wicked-fast browser for the Mac that takes the best from the Open Source community and wraps it up with Cocoa. (So long IE. So long Chimera.)
• Keynote: Presentation software — made for and kick-tested by Jobs — that’ll put an end to Mac users’ reliance on Powerpoint. (Could this be a precursor, or a taste of a much needed upgrade for AppleWorks?)

There were lots of other announcements during the Stevenote, but one thing I clearly heard — as many around me did — was Steve Jobs saying iBitch, when he clearly meant to say i-Bench when talking about the performance of Safari over other browsers for Mac OS X. I’m just glad that we finally have a fast and slick browser for the Mac, I’m just not sure I like the metal interface. But I’m happier to read the message exchange over at KDE.org about Apple’s use of KHTML (or Konqueror) as the basis for Safari, and how they really are contributing back to the Open Source community. By “contributing” it doesn’t mean Apple’s sent the KHTML guys a big fat check, but it does mean that they’ve sent in a huge list of changes, many of which will find their way back into KHTML. For all the naysayers out there, you should checkout the changelog.

But one announcement I clearly missed during the keynote was that Apple has taken a lesson from the streets. Not that I’m a drug user, but to me, it seems like Apple has a man on the street who’s been taking lessons from a crack dealer. You know how it goes:

DD gives UC some crack. Four hours later, UC comes back asking for more. The second hit comes free, too, because DD is a nice guy. UC comes
back four more hours later and asks for more. Now it’s going to cost UC some cash for that hit, and UC is willing to shell out said cash to DD because he really needs that fix.

And so the story goes until UC ends up wasting away, and DD’s DM (Distribution Manager) is happy because they now have another faithful customer who’ll come back for more.

Do you see the connection?

We saw a bit of this back at Macworld New York when Apple announced that it’s iTools service was being renamed .Mac (dot-Mac) and sold as a service with some additional software for $99.95. Mac users were, well, furious to say the least, since many of them were happy having a mac.com email address and some online storage space. By the end of September 2002, Apple had 180,000 subscribers to .Mac, and in January 2003 they have 250,000. That’s 70,000 new .Mac subscribers in three months. Not too bad.

So far, us Mac users have grown accustomed to iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, and some of us, even iDVD. Sure, you can still download updated versions of iMove 3 and iPhoto 2 online after January 25th, if you want them all now as part of iLife, it’ll cost you $49.

You want to edit digital video like a pro, but you don’t want to pay the price for Final Cut Pro? Hey, we’ve got Final Cut Express for $299.

You want a bigger or smaller PowerBook? You know, something to suit your needs? Sure, we have them, too. The Big One with all the bells and whistles will cost you $3299, while the Small One will cost you $1799 (or $1999 with the SuperDrive, or tack on another $99 if want an AirPort Extreme card for 802.11g wireless networking).

Want to do slick presentations without the pain and anguish associated with using Powerpoint? Here you go little buddy, try this Keynote application — it’ll cost you $99 (although those of us attending the keynote for Keynote received a freebie on the way out the door).

Yeah, we’re sorry that IE sucks on Mac OS X. Here, here’s a free beta for the Safari web browser, built for Mac OS X. But will there be a cost for Safari someday?

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Mac users are being nickle-and-dimed, but we don’t seem to care. Why? Because we love the Mac. Like the dogs on the covers of the O’Reilly Mac books, we’re faithful to our masters.

Apple continues to innovate and develop an OS with some true killer apps to make our lives easier, and to help us share our lives (or would that be iLifes?) with others. And along with that, they continue to innovate on the hardware side by leading the way for new technologies to become mainstream words like USB, Firewire, and now Bluetooth.

Great gear. A killer OS. Useful apps. A big company that gets Open Source. What else could a Mac user want?

Here’s my credit card number. Sign me up. I don’t want to be a dork anymore. (Maybe that could be the new Switcher slogan?)

What’s your take on Apple’s new apps and services? Are they worth it?

Just so you don’t think all I do is kvetch about Apple, let me say up front that I thought today’s keynote was a total gas, and I’ve already fallen head-over-heels for Safari. I think Final Cut Express perfectly fills the gaping maw between iMovie and FCP, I think Keynote is going to be a PowerPoint killer on the Mac, and that the new PowerBooks are right on target. All that said, I’m royally steamed about a glaring omission in the iLife suite.

I’ve got 1GB of memory in my 867MHz PowerMac. But at 15,500 tracks, iTunes is starting to become difficult (not quite impossible) to use. It hums along fine if I don’t touch it. But simply selecting a track can result in 20 seconds of spinning beachball. Editing an ID3 tag can take more than 30 seconds. Dragging tracks to a playlist, same. Trying to use iTunes as the music database it’s designed to be has started to become more chore than fun. I’m not even done encoding all my CDs yet, and already I can tell iTunes is not going to make it to 25,000 tracks, let alone what it might grow to in the future. What kind of digital hub is that? I can run a FileMaker or MySQL database with a million records and they won’t bog my machine down like this - iTunes needs to work on efficiency, period.

iPhoto is even worse. At around 800 images, it started to bog down on me. At 1,000, it started getting confused, and refused to allow me to add more images (or rather, it would add them to the library, but would not create thumbnails). 800? I’ve only had the digital camera for 18 months, and we edit our images down pretty scrupulously, deleting all the deadwood. We were totally hamstrung until we found iPhoto Librarian, but it’s a major pain to have to switch back and forth between libraries, and there’s no easy way to get images from one library into another’s albums.

I’m not steamed because there are bugs. I’m steamed because Apple announced a whole raft of iLife features today — great features, no doubt — but made no mention of addressing the one thing that thwarts the very people who take the digital hub sales pitch seriously. I spent two hours of my Christmas holiday helping Dad clear out his iPhoto library because I knew he’d be hitting the same glass ceiling soon.

So I spoke to an Apple employee about this today and she agreed 100% - it makes no sense to add new features before basic scalability is taken care of. She was steamed too (but asked to remain anonymous), and implored me to tell my friends to use the iPhoto feedback page to register my complaints. Apparently, the feedback really does get read, and cumulative mail amounts to real pressure on developers.

If you’re struggling with quote-unquote “large” iPhoto or iTunes libraries, let Apple know they have to take care of the basics before they can sell us on the fun bits.

The line of Woz fans formed early and snaked through Moscone North well before the panel discussion titled “The Move to Mac OS X” was scheduled to begin.

The moderator was Dave Mark, MacTech Mag editor in chief, was joined by Bob LeVitus, Robin Williams, and Neil Ticktin — a good bunch of folks indeed. But the star of the show was clearly Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, whom the audience gave a standing ovation upon his introduction. Unfortunately, that was the highlight of this event.

For starters, the audio was just terrible. Microphones weren’t working, or they’d cut in and out while the speakers were trying to make a point. The presentation was held in a partitioned-off area on the trade floor itself, so the ambient noise level was high to begin with. Having crappy audio only made the situation worse.

As frustration set in for panelists and audience alike, the pace of the discussion began to disintegrate. The topic was supposed to be “The Move to Mac OS X,” but the only LeVitus and Ticktin seemed truly enthusiastic about Apple’s new operating system. And at times, Wozniak even appeared clearly dissatisfied with the Unix-based OS. Not that I was expecting all love and roses here, but I wasn’t prepared for a platform debate either.

From my perspective, this approach wasn’t very illuminating or inspiring. Some good points were made by panelists, but basically the discussion was a rehash of dozens of discussions I’ve witnessed during the last two years. I think it would have been far more helpful for these seasoned OS 9 users to focus on sharing tips for making the move to OS X easier.

Every now and then a healthy suggestion would break through the conversation, that is, if you could hear it. But overall, I felt somewhat deflated by this session. Too bad, because the potential for a great talk was there.

I understand the pain that accompanies a wholesale move from one platform to another. I realize that Apple sometimes engages in “tough love” that is hard on consumers who don’t have the disposable income to upgrade to the latest and the greatest. I too sometimes wish for a more kinder, gentler Apple.

But I didn’t feel that this was the place for that discussion. Instead, how about more time spent on low-cost workarounds that help with the transition to Mac OS X? What can schools do to begin the migration even though they have older hardware? If you’re not rolling in dough, how can you experience Apple’s platform of the future?

Bottom line: good participants, good topic. For some reason, it just didn’t work out. Too bad. I hope Woz comes back again for another try.

Steve Jobs presented a nearly flawless two-hour keynote address at Macworld SF 2003. Many people had predicted that today’s presentation would be short on good news and long on hyping existing products. They were wrong.

After opening with the usual “business” segment of the show, that included a retail store update, mentions of iCal and iSync, and some discussion about .Mac, Steve Jobs got down to business.

I could tell by his energy on stage that he was excited about the news he had to share today. And that excitement translated into a smooth, well-paced address that kept the audience entertained for what would be considered a long time, even by motion picture standards.

iPod

Jobs began with some really good news about the iPod. It has become the #1 MP3 player in the US with a 43 percent market share. He introduced a nifty ski jacket made by Burton that has controls for the iPod built into the sleeve — for $499. But other than that, no real news on this front.

New Audio Software

Dave Lebolt from Digidesign came out to introduce Pro Tools — everything you need to put together and finish an audio project. This is serious software used by music industry pros.

Steve then came back on stage to introduce Phil Schiller, who announced Final Cut Express, a consumer version of the powerful Final Cut Pro video editing application. It will sell for only $299 (compared to $999 for the pro version).

Big Digital Hub News

Steve then took the spotlight again to talk about the Digital Hub. It’s been 2 years since Apple announced this strategy (right here at Macworld). He began by announcing iPhoto 2, which is now integrated with iTunes, has one-click Enhance, Retouch Brush, and has direct transfer to iDVD. The Retouch Brush in particular is impressive.

He then moved to the announcement of iMovie 3, which introduces Precise Audio Editing and a neat trick called the Ken Burns Effect. Just like with iPhoto, your entire iTunes library now shows up in the Audio palette. Sound effects have been included from Sky Walker studios — a nice touch. The Ken Burns Effect design is outstanding. The integration with iDVD is seamless.

iDVD 3 includes 24 new themes, which look very professional. I was very impressed with the creativity and craftsmanship used to create these themes. As a nice touch, Apple is lowering the price on blank DVDs to $3 a piece.

All of these digital hub pieces are now integrated into something called “iLife,” which is a shrinkwrap product that will available on Jan. 25th for $49. Or, you can download iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie for free if you’re want to save yourself some money. The latest version of iDVD will be bundled on new Macs with SuperDrives, or as part of the iLife package, but isn’t available as a download.

The Safari Browser

Then a biggie. Steve announced Safari — a turbo browser for the Mac. Not only is it the fastest browser for the Mac, it has some nice innovations, such as “Snap Back” for Google users, a new approach to managing Bookmarks, and a great UI. They even added a “bug report” button in the upper right corner. It’s based on the open source rendering engine KHTML (the source code is posted), and it’s fully standards based. And the best part, you can download the beta version for free today.

Keynote Presentation Software

This graphics intensive application is for robust slideshow presentations that Steve has been secretly using for the last year for his keynotes. Keynote has full Quartz graphics support, including alpha channels with professional quality resizing and rotation.

The tables and charts functionality is slick. I really like the ability to easily bring graphics into the charts for added zip. Also built in are a variety of very sharp looking themes to add high production value to your presentations. It’s compatible with PowerPoint. And it’s an open file format (XML based). Amazingly enough, is sells for only $99 and is available today. Everyone in the auditorium got a copy for free. Cool.

“Year of the Notebook”

Then Jobs unveiled a 17″ PowerBook that’s still only 1″ thick. The resolution is 1440 by 900 pixels. The keyboard lights up when the lights go down using a fiber optic lighting system. The new notebook weighs in 6.8 pounds. The material is aircraft aluminum that is anodized so it won’t scratch. Plus it includes FireWire 800 (in addition to FireWire 400). Bluetooth is built in.

As part of the new notebook demo, Steve announced Airport Extreme that runs at 54 Mbs using 802.11g, which is also fully compatible with existing 802.11b. It all works together. The new card is built in to the PowerBook and the antennas have been repositioned to extend the PowerBook’s range to equal that of the iBook. The new 17″ PowerBook sells for $3,299 and will be available in February.

As an aside, the new AirPort Base Station features AirPort Extreme including USB printing plus a batch of new features and will sell for $199.

Just One More Thing …

And there was just one more thing … and a pretty good one at that.

Jobs announced the 12″ PowerBook weighing in at 4.6 pounds, with a 867 MHz G4 processor, a slot-loading combo drive, AirPort Extreme wireless, and1024 x 768 resolution that sells for $1,799. This “most affordable PowerBook ever” will ship in 2 weeks. You can build it to order with a SuperDrive for $1,999.

The presentation concluded with a couple of commercials, one of them quite good, and a closing jab from Jobs referring to rumor site predictions of a dull keynote, “Well, I guess you can’t always believe everything you read.”

Today Apple announced their Safari Web Browser — the “Turbo Browser for OS X”. So of course I had to download the public beta right away.

This is sweet. I work in a web-based publishing system all day long, and I’m flying thru tasks more quickly than ever before. I never realized that the browser itself could make such a difference.

And of course, I had to try it out on O’Reilly’s own Safari — Safari Bookshelf, though maybe we should start calling it “Turbo books for your browser”. And I’m happy to report: Apple Safari is a good match for O’Reilly Safari.

Update: Here are links to some more in-depth postings around the web:

• Initial reactions to Safari — some excellent information (especially in comparing Safari to Chimera) from Six Log, “the weblog of Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type”.

• Safari information for web designers — lots of information about rendering bugs and CSS issues, from diveintomark.org.

• Apple’s “Other Applications” discussions area has some lively discussions about Safari issues and features.

What do you think of the Safari web browser so far?

When I first discovered audible.com, I was one happy guy. The online book-download service solved a nagging problem for me — not enough time to read all the books on my list. I could download the digital files into my iTunes library, transfer them to my iPod, and listen happily while on the road. Perfect!

Well, not exactly.

As long as I stuck to the scenario I outlined above, everything worked fine. But the minute I wanted to repurpose the material that I had paid for ($11 - $25 per book), my rosy attitude began to wilt.

I have to blame George Carlin for this. His wonderfully funny book, Napalm & Silly Putty was a hoot to listen to in the car. I decided to burn it on to audio CD so I could play segments for house guests on my living room stereo. Sounds fun, right? A couple of beers, bowl of pretzels, and George making fun of the white establishment.

No dice.

The book is too long to burn on to a regular audio CD via iTunes (it’s over 2 hours long). “No problem,” I thought. I’ll use the MP3 format instead and burn to a MP3 CD. After all, I paid a premium price for that feature on my stereo.

No dice again.

DRM rears its ugly head. Seems that the .aa format that audible.com uses to encode its books doesn’t allow conversion to MP3. Hmmmm. In other words, I can only listen to the book the way they want me to. It’s like saying that I can only read a printed book while sitting up straight at my desk, but it I want to take it into the bathroom, forget it!

Now it gets even better.

Being the easy-going guy that I am, I said, “OK, I’ll just burn a few episodes of News from Lake Wobegon on to CD and we’ll all listen to those.” I made a test disc, using the audio CD format, and it seemed to work pretty good. So I set-up the final disc and guess what? I couldn’t use those tracks I had just burned for testing. Seems you can only make ONE audio disc from any file you purchase.

Oh heck, that really dampens my plans to buy books on audible.com, then burn hundreds of discs and sell them on street corners in New York for $5.

Now, I can probably think of a couple of workarounds that will address some of these restrictions. But the bottom line is, I shouldn’t have to. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do about my monthly subscription to audible. But I’m not happy. I’m certainly open to alternatives. And I won’t be adding them to my Christmas card list any time soon.

If you have alternatives that will work with Mac OS X, please post them here.

If you were lucky enough to score a new digital camera over the holidays, or you know someone who did, here’s a QuickStart guide that cuts right to the chase.

Also, it’s never too late to turn over a new leaf with your existing camera. Make 2003 the year you start taking great shots.

• Memory Check — If you only have the 8 or 16 MB memory card that came with the camera, add “buy new memory card” to the top of your ToDo list. 128 MB is the minimum, 256 MB is better. Don’t procrastinate, just do it!
• No Big Email Attachments! — For gosh sakes, save your friends the pain of downloading 1 MB email attachments that when finally open on their computer display some freakish body part at 100 percent. Keep your friends and your dignity by learning how to “sample down” your images to 320 x 240 or 640 x 480 pixels.
• Set the Clock! — Once of the great features of digital cameras is their ability to record metadata such as date and time. This information persists with the image so you always have a vital information accompanying your picture. But if you don’t set your camera’s time and date, you record gibberish.
• Devise a Catalog Strategy — Now’s a great time to figure out how you’re going to organize and retrieve your exciting new images. I encourage Mac users to launch iPhoto and use it as your digital shoebox. If you’re not on a Mac, there’s lots of great software to help you manage your images. Make 2003 the year that you catalog every shot you keep.
• Customize Your Camera Settings — Today’s cameras provide you with lots of options for recording images. I recommend that you choose the highest resolution setting, best quality (least amount of Jpeg compression), “warm” white balance (the “cloudy” setting), and “flash off” as your default settings.
• Shoot Pictures! — You’ll be surprised at how quickly you become adept with your new mate if you take the time to shoot. Take lots of pictures. Have fun. Impress your friends.