Posts tagged "apple"

• 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.

  Continue reading "Aperture 3 first impressions"...
• December 13, 2009
  Welcoming the new Apple 27" iMac Core i7 to the family

  This weekend, we celebrated the arrival of a new family member: a new Apple 27" iMac Core i7!

  I just wanted to take a minute and post my experiences with the machine, and what led up to the purchase of this hot new piece of tech. Thanks in advance to Jeff on the help and the idea to write this in the first place. Enjoy!

  Continue reading "Welcoming the new Apple 27" iMac Core i7 to the family"...
• December 11, 2009
  My New Desk
• October 15, 2009
  Microsoft's Competition for Windows 7

  Gruber, on Windows 7’s competition with XP, Snow Leopard, and “apathy”:

  Put another way, the idea that Windows 7's quality will spur upgrades from XP is predicated on the fact that the people holding out on XP make their computing choices based on quality. But if that's the case, why exactly are they still running Windows XP? Why are they still using Internet Explorer? I think it's hard to overstate the fact that, with the explosion of the Internet as a universal communication medium, hundreds of millions of PCs have been purchased around the world by people who don't care about computers or software at all.

  Read the entire article @ Daring Fireball.

• October 31, 2004
  forget the u2 ipod

  granted, the u2 special edition ipod is a pretty cool – if you like u2 and only need 20GB of storage that is. but i’m thinking i’d much rather have an ashlee simpson karaoke edition one… courtesy of airbag industries, hopefully it’ll still be posted by the time you make your way over there!

• August 11, 2004
  finally, wireless music!

  picked up my airport express today, and it rocks the house. seriously, it rocks the house! the setup was completely painless: installed the software, launched the airport express assistant, told it to connect to my existing wireless network, entered a password to save the settings, and it was done. now i’m cranking music through the onkyo, via the ibook, from my futon. and because i’m lazy (and have all the tunes on my desktop in my bedroom instead of on my laptop) i just plugged in the ipod and used that for a library source. quick ‘n pretty damn clean.

  needless to say, the sound quality is excellent – no buzzing, hums, ground loops, or anything… just crystal clear, full, rich music like you’d get on the soundsticks, albeit on a real stereo. :) can’t even imagine how great the digital output would be… too bad the stereo only has one digital input that’s currently being used for the dvd player, not to mention i’d have to pick up another cable.

  i’m almost upset my original airport covers my condo so well… there’s no need to use the airport express to extend the range! and i’ve already got the printer being shared in the bedroom, so that’s another wasted feature. still, it was more than worth it for the ability to stream music to my stereo. go buy yours now.

• June 29, 2004
  WWDC 2004

  so i’m a day behind, cut me some slack… :)

  apple previewed some cool stuff today @ WWDC 2004. i’m most excited about spotlight and dashboard. if i’ve had one need lately it’s better search, especially as my photo and music collection grows. (no, i don’t use iphoto, thank you very much) and even though dashboard looks a whole hell of a lot like konfabulator, it’s still a welcome addition to the osX family.

  the safari RSS reader is cool, too. makes sense that the browser should understand RSS and present that as an option when reading an RSS-enabled site. very cool. the new displays are cool, but i’m not shelling out any more cash for desktop stuff – a powerbook, desktop g4, and 17” cinema are fine by me…

  UPDATE: there’s a ton of debate out there re: dashboard vs. konfabulator… (including jeff’s comments below, heh) but while it certainly looks like apple ganked the idea, there’s a lot that changed engineering-wise behind the scenes. for one, dashboard is built on the base mac os x technologies of web kit and cocoa, where konfabulator uses custom XML and javascript. debate and opinionate all you want, but i think we all can agree that companies shouldn’t “buy out” other companies (or their software for that matter) simply for an idea. if you see something useful that other people are finding useful, and you develop a better way (and better, more open technologies) to do something similar, good for you. that’s competition, and that’s the real world.

  but i digress, here are a few links that try to clear things up:

  - daring fireball's view
  - dave hyatt's thoughts (safari lead developer)
  - extracted dashboard widgets from erik veland
  - todd dominey on "proprietary hoo-ha"

• October 31, 2003
  panther, mail.app, and ssh tunnels

  i did a clean install of panther the other night on the ibook… amazing improvement in performance, like a new machine! for the most part, things are working perfectly, especially after i went back in and configured stuff to my liking. looks like there were some under-the-hood changes, as is the case with any upgrade. one thing in particular came up when trying to send email from mail.app.

  Continue reading "panther, mail.app, and ssh tunnels"...
• June 14, 2003
  itunes and album art

  if you’re looking for a better way to get album art than downloading it manually and linking it to your music, search no further. fetch art for itunes is a plugin that downloads album art from amazon and adds it to the mp3’s id3 tag. while clutter is still cool for displaying the art on the desktop and in the dock, fetch art is so much easier to use. instead of only working on songs that are playing, fetch art can work on a group of songs, a playlist, or your whole library. just select some songs, run fetch art, and booyakasha you’re downloading the album art and updating the id3 tags. a couple caveats though: fetch art ties up itunes while it’s running, so don’t do it when you want to have control. fetch art also only works on mp3 files, so don’t bother trying to get art for your aac files. :)

• May 01, 2003
  time interview with steve jobs

  there’s a great interview with steve jobs over at time.com, about the new itunes music store. what’s great is that jobs seems like a kid when he’s talking about technology, especially apple technology. even though he typically says “this is so cool” or “omg, check this out” in his keynotes, i especially enjoyed this interview. even if you have your issues with jobs and apple, you have to respect someone who says:

  "Downloading sucks on [listen.com's] service! You download a track and you can't burn it to a CD without paying them more money - you can't put it on your MP3 player, you can't put it on multiple computers - it sucks! So of course nobody downloads! You pay extra to download even on top of subscription fees. No wonder they have hardly any download traffic - they hardly even have any subscribers!"

  my personal favorite quote, though, is what jobs says in response to “Can you say anything about [Music Store’s] development costs or Apple’s investment?”

  "I had somebody comment today, "Now that you have introduced your store, do you expect a lot others?" And I guess our answer is no. This is really hard. Over the last several years we've created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that's tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms - it's huge - and we've already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that's tens of millions of dollars. We have one-click shopping, only us and Amazon have that, and then to make a jukebox - how much does it cost to make iTunes and make it popular? A lot! But we've got that. And then iPod, if you want to make an iPod, what does that cost? Well, nobody has done it but us, people have tried, but they haven't even come close. That's a lot of money. So we've already made these investments and we can leverage them. And then we've invested more on top of that to make a store. But to recreate this, it's tens of millions of dollars and years. That's why I don't think this is going to be so easy to copy."

• April 30, 2003
  linking to the apple music store

  thanks to a couple hardworking guys (bill bumgarner and fuse), here’s an easy way to link directly to the itunes store.

  the basic structure of the link should be as follows: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults

  variables passed at the end give the search terms and are as follows:

  songTerm (the title you are searching for)
  artistTerm (the artist)
  albumTerm (the album name)
  composerTerm (the composer)

  for example to do a search for fight test by the flaming lips, use this: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults? songTerm=Fight%20Test&artistTerm=Flaming%20Lips (click to try it)

  if you want to have the results show up in itunes itself replace http with itms. (click to try the itms link) of course, that’ll only work for you mac junkies out there, but hey… i’ll probably still link to amazon from the media section but might add some additional links to the music store. maybe if the user is on a mac, display the links, hmm. tons of possibilities!

• April 30, 2003
  apple comes through

  new itunes, new ipod, new online music service. you go apple.

  i especially like the new itunes, what with its rendezvous sharing and all… finally, i can just play all my music that’s on my desktop from my ibook. no more need to mount network drives, update multiple libraries, any of that. check out the screenshot on the right: dope shiznit all up in the wireless grill! on top of that, i can really share the music, thanks to our friend the internet. just go to connect to shared music and you’re in business. there was only one real stumbling block, the firewall i had on my desktop. to get things working, i just had to open up port 3689. i don’t know why apple doesn’t update the firewall pref pane with a checkbox for itunes sharing… oh well.

  first impressions of the online music service are also very good… previews are fast (really fast), there’s a bunch of music, and the store is freakin slick. of course, i haven’t bought anything yet, but supposedly that’s pretty smooth, too. $.99 for a song, and most albums are $9.99 (or less if it’s older)… much better than $15 for a cd that has 2 good songs on it anyway!

  on the marketing front, apple as usual comes out with some winners. a bunch of tv ads show just how much fun you can have with a new ipod, of course playing songs downloaded from the music store. duh! my personal faves are jacob doing "lose yourself" and nic doing "baby got back"…

  so tell me, apple, when can we send in our own videos?!?!?!

  update (2003.05.18): apple apparently has removed the ads from their site… too bad, they were pretty sweet. you may still be able to catch them on tv, though! good luck!

• April 27, 2003
  apple online music service?

  there's a story on billboard re the new apple online music service, which is expected to be announced monday 4/28. looks like the rumors have been true, at least to a point:

  High-quality design and simplicity of use are expected to be the hallmarks of the new digital music service from Apple Computer, to be unveiled Monday (April 28), Billboard Bulletin reports.
  
  Label sources tell Bulletin that the service is an a la carte download store -- not unlike that of rival Liquid Audio -- that is built into Apple's iTunes player. No subscription is required for the service, and tracks are expected to retail for an average of 99 cents. Once purchased, tracks are transferred to the consumer's iTunes music library and are automatically synched to the user's iPod portable player.

  if this all actually goes down tomorrow, i'll be interested in seeing what content is available. if they get some quality acts to get on board (which, based on the old itunes/ipod commercials seems more than possible) this might be something that takes off. i'd certainly buy a few singles for $.99 each. i'm wondering, also, what the security will be like on these files and in the online store. of course, anything can and will be hacked given enough time, so it'll be interesting to see what apple tries.