This morning I made a small click and drag mistake on Safari and found two tab features I was not aware of.
The first feature is that you can click-and-drag a tab off the tab bar and create a new window from the tab.
The second feature is that you can do click-and-drag a tab off the tab bar onto another tab bar.
Up to now the only thing I knew about tabs was that you could reorder them.
I have been looking at Apple Aperture to process my photos, well what passes as photos.
To this date I have just put them up, doing no processing on them. My underwater shots were initially done with the white balance set to cloudy giving all the photos a blue hue, and then someone pointed out that I could set the white balance using a white slate as reference at which point the photos started to get better colors. I also got good at setting the white balance upside down while descending on a dive.
While the colors got better, I still had “snow” on the pictures and sometimes the white balance was off, but overall the results were good.
Recently a friend suggested I take a look at Aperture to do some post processing on my photos, and I started to experiment with it a few days ago.
Overall I am very impressed, it will take me a few more days to get comfortable with the interface and all the settings you can apply to a picture, as well as all the things I still don’t understand. The tutorials have been invaluable in speeding up that learning curve.
One thing I noticed is that there is a lot more control available over images in RAW format compared to JPEG. Unfortunately Aperture does not support the RAW format for my camera (it is a dinosaur), but I found that I could convert the image format from RAW to DNG using Adobe’s free conversion tool and regain more control over the image. This is of course a stop-gap measure until I get a new camera.
I have installed Mac OS 10.5.2 on both my desktop machine and laptop and was disappointed to see that the “Translucent menu bar” option is buggy. Indeed it appears on my laptop but does not appear on my desktop machine, probably because it has multiple monitors attached.
Which is… a bummer…
I downloaded the AppleTV update last night and I have to say that it is pretty sweet.
I can strongly recommend Paul Thurrott’s review.
I noticed a few things about the AppleTV which were not initially mentioned when the update was announced:
I have rented my first HD movie, the download took about 60 minutes which is not too shabby, and we will have to see what my cable provider thinks of this. The selection is rather limited so Netflix has nothing to fear in the near-term, but long-term I suspect that this is a different story.
It was nice to see Apple bump the memory on the iPod Touch and the iPhone.But I am holding out for a memory-bumped iPod Nano. I currently have a 8GB iPod Nano (the previous generation) and I typically upgrade when I can double the amount of storage on the device.
So I have probably blown my “General Audience” rating here but this comment about the MacOS X file system was amusing.
Linus Torvald being interviewed by The Sidney Morning Herald came out with this quotable quote:
“I don’t think they’re equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system,” he said. “(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.”
So what does “utter crap” really mean? The article is short on specifics, and context for that matter.
Personally I find the file system to be pretty good given its heritage, and the requirements for backward compatibility.
For a while I had been wondering if I should set my AppleTV to display 1080i or 720p. I tried both and they look pretty much the same to me, but then again I have strange eyesight, I am slightly long sighted in one eye and slightly short sighted in the other.
I found nothing about this the last time I checked on the internet for an answer, but today I found a couple of interesting threads on the apple discussion forums about this, this one talks specifically about 1080i or 720p and this one talks about resolution question/observation.
Basically it comes down to this, 720p is better than 1080i because:
It’s both. Yes, the scaler on your Bravia is superior to the one on the tv. But the bigger factor is that all of the video standards supported by tv (MPEG-4, h.264) are progressive-scan only. So, in 1080i mode, your tv interlaces while your Bravia then deinterlaces (which typically softens the image, though I’m not aware of what algorithm Sony uses on the Bravia line). Anyway, as you’re aware, that’s not an optimal combination when the source files are progressive-scan.
There are two things I want on my Mac, but I can’t find an easy way to do them (by easy, I mean not doing any coding).
The first one is to have quicklook open up xml documents. To me it seems to be quite an oversight not to have that.
The second is a little more involved. I would like to be able to add stationary documents to my contextual menu. What I envision is the right click on the mouse (in the Finder) giving me a list of possible documents to create in the selected Finder window. This list of documents would be constructed from document I put in a folder somewhere, in the “Contextual Menu Items” folder for example.
Two interesting reviews of Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, one from Paul Thurrott and the other from MacInTouch.I have also had a peek at the software and it looks pretty good.
I have not upgraded my version of Microsoft Office for a while and I think I will do it this time.
MacWorld has finally wrapped up, and now that the heady excitement of Steve Jobs’ keynote has passed, here is my 2 cent’s worth on that was announced.
To me, by far the most interesting announcement is the AppleTV take 2.0. I don’t think there was any value on buying movies online, the prices were no better than buying the actual DVD, the quality was not there and all the extras were missing. There just wasn’t any value for the consumer and it showed in the number of AppleTVs sold and probably in the number of movies sold. Going for a rental model makes much more sense (as we can see from all the other rental options out there). I think the price is competitive, and we shall have to see what the quality looks like. One wrinkle though, I wonder how much of a long tail there will be. I don’t watch the bulk of new releases and I tend to rent from the long tail. If those movies are not made available, I am not likely to cancel my netflix account anytime soon.
The second most interesting announcement is the MacBook Air. I have not seen one in person, but I think it looks very attractive. Lots has been written about the compromises that had to be made to build it, but to me it is very attractive for a number of reasons. I already have a MacBook Pro, I only use wireless networking, I don’t usually have more than 50GB of data on it, and I hardly ever use the internal DVD drive, all it is is a mobile extension of my MacPro. So I am in the target demographic for the MacBook Air. While I probably won’t be buying one just yet, I will likely be doing so when I come to replace my MacBook Pro.
The third most interesting announcement is Time Capsule . I think integrating a drive directly into the Airport Express Base Station makes a lot of sense, and I think that this would make a very good, simple, backup device for the home. However for the prosumer I think it falls a little short. While the USB port is still there, it is too slow for attaching any kind of respectable storage. What I would have liked to see is either a Firewire 800 port, or an eSATA port, so I would connect a storage appliance to it.
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