Posts from 2 2010

• February 17, 2010
  Aperture 3 first impressions

  If you're interested in such things, by now you've probably seen the news that Apple released Aperture 3. Tons of new features, and it's finally a 64-bit app, so performance should be much improved. This past weekend I got the Aperture 3 (A3) demo up and running on my iMac, and loaded some D700 RAW images for testing.

  First impressions: I love some of the new features, including the WB preset previews, image adjustment presets (and previews), and the responsiveness of the interface. I'm very excited about the photo book plug-ins from high-end album companies. I'm always on the lookout for ways to streamline my wedding/portrait workflow, and for tools that make it easier to create quality products for my photography clients. On that note, while I haven't used Faces or Places yet, I'm certainly interested these features for my own personal images. Bonus: The new LCD-like metadata view (shown on the right) is killer.

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• February 10, 2010
  Facebook Chat in iChat

  Facebook announced today that Facebook Chat now supports Jabber/XMPP, which means that it's possible to integrate pretty much any app or services that talks Jabber/XMPP with Facebook Chat. I use iChat myself for AIM and Google Talk instant messaging, and the requirement to use Facebook's web interface always turned me off to Facebook Chat. With that restriction lifted, I figured I'd toss Facebook Chat into the mix.

  The setup was painless, you just have to know what credentials to use:

  1. Add an account in iChat's Preferences window
  2. Select "Jabber" from the "Account Type" dropdown
  3. Enter [email protected] as the "Account Name" where facebookusername is your Facebook username (i.e. the one that you set up in June 2009)
  4. Enter your Facebook password
  5. Expand the "Server Options" arrow, and enter the following info:
     Server: chat.facebook.com
     Port: 5222 (Uncheck the "Use SSL" box)
  6. Hit done and you should connect without any issues
  7. Optionally, you can go back into the iChat "Account Settings" and change the account description in iChat to be something useful like "Facebook"

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