Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Has anyone seen this problem? You assign a grouping to various podcast sources in order to organize them by category. For instance, set the "Ebert & Roeper" podcast description to have a grouping of "Movies". A couple days later you launch iTunes, and some new Ebert & Roeper movie review podcasts flowed in, but have not been assigned the Movies grouping you gave the source. Why would iTunes not automatically assign new podcast episodes to have the same grouping as the parent? Why does it matter? On the nano, there's very little screen space to read the podcast description, so it's nice to be able to have them organized by a user-defined category. 9:51:35 PM

Could this be the last model of Mac that can run QTVRAS? (the Mactel machines won't be able to since the Classic environment has been terminated on Intel) erik Power Macs Continue on PowerPC Track: "Apple's latest Power Mac G5 desktops signal that, despite the company's plans to move to Intel chips next year, the PowerPC processor will be around for a while." (Via eWEEK Macintosh.) 8:38:31 PM

Editors' Notes: Close-up on Aperture: "Kelly Turner expected Apple to unveil an advanced version of iPhoto Wednesday. It turns out that Aperture offers much, much more." (Via MacCentral.) 8:33:14 PM

Aperture's available Automator actions: " Filed under: Software, Apple Professional Aperture was released by Apple today, and seems to offer professional photographers a lot of useful features. But what good are the coolest features in the world if you've got to spend hours at your computer just to get your work done? Enter Automator. Automator.us has a nice overview of some of the Automator actions that are currently available for Aperture. A few highlights include: Choose Projects - This action will pass references of the chosen Aperture projects to the next action in the workflow. Select the checkbox to the left of the projects you wish to use. Assign Keywords to Images - This action will assign the provided keywords to the Aperture images passed from the previous action. Use the buttons at the bottom left of the keyword list to add and delete keywords from the list. Double-click a list item in the Keywords column to edit the keyword value. Store Disk Item References - This action will store references to the disk items passed from the previous action. There are more, of course. Check out the article for the complete list and some example workflows. (Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.) 8:28:30 PM

New Apple Pro Photo Tools: " Ok, I’m back from the Apple Special Event preview at PhotoPlus, and I’m having to eat my words. I said they’d have pro software for us, but that a photo expo would be a silly place to debut hardware. I was wrong, in part because the new Aperature editing software needs the new hardware. Video editors will love the new computers, too, though. First up: New Power Books, for editing and portfolio management on the go. All three powerbooks com standard with SuperDrive now, for mobile DVD burning, and they saw price cuts. The 15’ and 17’ got huge display boosts, too, now sporting 1440 x 960 and a whopping 1680 x 1050 (the same rsolution as the 20’ Cinema Display) repectively. At 40% brighter, they should be daylight readable under most conditions, and as an added bonus they an extra hour of battery life. Next up: new Dual Core PowerMac G5s. The G5 line was upgraded to use dual-core PPC processors, now comes in three varieties: a dual core 2Ghz, a dual core 2.3Ghz, and the ‘PowerMac G5 Quad’: a quad-core system with 2 x 2.5Ghz dual core PPC processors rated at a stunning 76.6 gigaflops. All three support up to 16GB 533Mhz DDR2 RAM and up to 1TB SATA on-disk storage. The graphics bus is now PCI Express with support for a custom built NVIDEA 4500 FX card that will support two of the new 30’ HD Cinema Displays. The bus has four slots and you can fill them all with cards, giving you support for 4 of the new 30’ displays, although there’s no word on whether you can fill all 4 slots with 4500 FX cards and get support for 8…at least without melting the aluminum case. (Update: you can’t the 4500 Fx is a double-wide card, and nothing else will handle 2 x 30’ at the moment. You can, though, make an 8 x 23’ array if you want, and can afford to). And finally, Aperture, Apple’s new pro digital editing application. This is a really slick looking piece of software, and I’m dying to test drive it later in the week. On the surface it combines the best features of Photoshop Elements and ACDSee into one powerful professional package. It has standard editing tools (curves, channels, crop, resize, etc.), a fast photo library, and new features for organizing workflows. ‘Stacks’ automatically arranges pictures based on a shutter lag time you pick so that it will automatically group shots from a single session—or even single burst—so that you can compare them. ‘Light Table’ is a virtual light table that lets you drag and drop pictures to create layouts or just juxtapose shots, and ‘Loupe’ is, well, a loupe that lets you magnify a section of picture up to 800% as you drag the circular windoe around. Prhaps most importantly, Apple set out to make non-destructive editing of RAW files as easy as working with JPEGs, and it looks like they succeeded. Aperture seems to handle the big files quickly and with ease (at least on a G5 Quad) and includes features for drag and drop batch editing to, say, apply white balance correction to an entire ‘stack’ of pictures taken in the same light. and of course, built-in web and print design with integrated Color Sync profiling. There was no mention about filters and other effects beyond basic adjustment, so this isn’t a CS2 competitor yet, but it will certainly take a lot of the grunt work off of Photoshop if people adpot it. And of course, that’s the question: will people with an existing investment in Photoshop and Extensis want to switch? It’s hard to say. But at only $499, Aperature is going to be intrigueing, at the very least. (Via The Digital Photography Weblog.) 8:28:25 PM

"Aperture" Finally Delivers Pro Photo Tool from Apple: "Apple announces 'Aperture.' It's a pro app that's designed for Raw shooters who want to work quickly and efficiently in post production. Aperture makes working in Raw as easy as Jpegs." (Via MacDevCenter.) 10:52:21 AM

If you've had any difficulties downloading a map from my Map Library after having made the BitPass login, I'd like to know. Especially if you are on a PC and using Explorer. erik 7:22:42 AM

"Epson has developed an application for the Stylus Photo R2400 and Stylus Pro 4800/7800/9800 printers that enables their colour output to be calibrated to match that of Epson's reference printer for each model. Called ColorBase and currently at v1.1, the Mac and Windows software is a free download from various Epson web sites." via RobGalbraith DPI 7:09:40 AM

The Traveler vs. The Tourist: " John Flinn explored the familiar tourist-traveler debate in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. His take? ‘The problem, I think, is that it’s gotten so much harder for status-conscious travelers to feel superior,’ he writes. ‘A generation or two ago, merely stepping onto an airplane or a train or a ship and going somewhere—anywhere—was all it took to give you the backyard-barbecue standing of a sophisticated man of the world. But these days everyone travels—on the trail to Everest I once ran into a vacationing San Francisco stripper—so what can be done to elevate yourself over your fellow travelers? Deride them as ‘tourists.’’ (Via World Hum.) 6:42:06 AM

Going on Armchair Safari — Again and Again: " I was at home listening to music the other night when the phone rang. It was my mom, and I immediately detected a sense of urgency in her voice. Was there a family emergency? Some new piece of bad news on CNN? ‘I won’t keep you long,’ she said, ‘but I wanted to let you know there are elephants right now at Pete’s Pond.’ Elephants? Really? I thanked her profusely, flipped on my computer and was soon happily glued to the screen, watching live as several elephants roamed among the trees near the Pete’s Pond shoreline, enjoying a tasty breakfast of crunchy green leaves. Ever since I blogged about the WildCam at Pete’s Pond in Botswana, I’ve been hooked, checking in every so often to see what beasts might be roaming within camera view. " (Via World Hum.) 6:41:34 AM

News: Lexar offers new pro CF card reader, more: "Lexar is offering a new professional-grade CompactFlash Reader and other products designed to help users get data on and off flash media." (Via MacCentral.) 6:40:03 AM

Apple Digital Camera: "There are a number of speculative articles surfacing around the web today that Apple is about to announced an digital camera. These seem to have arisen out of the notice that Apple gave last week of a press conference..." (Via Digital Photography Blog.) 6:38:47 AM

VRmag issue 22 is out, and has lots of articles on QuickTime VR. http://www.vrmag.org/ 6:37:24 AM

Exporting Video for an iPod with QuickTime 7.0.3 ...: "Exporting Video for an iPod with QuickTime 7.0.3 Er, make that 'to a fifth-generation iPod,' to use Apple's official lingo. What do you know? If you install QuickTime 7.0.3, you get a preset, named 'Movie to iPod (320 by 240)', for exporting video to a video-capable iPod. It works in iMovie HD, QuickTime Player Pro, and presumably, any... (This is a summary of a longer posting; to read the full posting, click the heading above or visit macilife.com.)" (Via Jim Heid's Mac iLife 05 Site.) 6:31:49 AM

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 (4.5 mice): "Flash Professional 8 constitutes a leap in the evolutionary chain for Macromedia’s Web video and animation authoring program; it provides significant enhancements in scripting, graphical effects, Web-video display, and development of media destined for mobile devices." (Via Macworld Reviews.) 6:27:57 AM

The Panorama Factory: "The Panorama Factory is now available in version 4 and can be downloaded as a trial version for 30 days. The panoramic stitching software guides you through the process with a few mouse clicks, it also detects the focal length automatically as well as correct rotation and tilt. The Panorama Factory version 4 accepts 24-bit and 45-bit color images, allows you to create web pages using templates or your own designs and create 360 degree virtual tours. It you like what you see after 30 days then buy it for..." (Via Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com).) 6:09:48 AM

Apple quietly plans major presence at PhotoExpo Plus: "Ahead of tomorrow's planned special event in New York City, sources tell MacNN that Apple has quietl..." (Via MacNN.) 6:09:42 AM

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