Tag Archives: Apple

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

An iPad Enters the Fold

I’ve been thinking about the iPad of late. It’s been a real quandary for me. While, I’ve loved what I’ve read about the thing, and seen some really great ponderances about how it could be used as a photography tool, I just hadn’t quite found the killer use for the thing.

I still may not have.

However, yesterday, I found that one of our local Best Buy’s had the 64GB iPad 3G in stock. This, after the same store told me a week ago that they had no idea if they were ever gonna get any, and that when they did, they were always gone before they landed. I left in a bit of a huff, feeling like they were calling me a fool for having asked after one. Well, yesterday, the moons aligned, and one landed in my lap.

I’ve gotta tell ya, I really like the thing. It’s convenient, fun to use, and really beautiful when displaying photos. It does video well, and both the 3G and WiFi (802.11n) seem to work quite well. For me, though, the biggest part I enjoy is the physical size of the screen. It’s ginormous, at 1024×768, and full o’ color.

It’ll be a while for me to figure out how I’ll best use it, but I’ve been putting loads of apps on it, and intend to find its niche in my life!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Landlocked and Near Calamity

So, things have been pretty quiet from the Deauxmayne of late. Why? Read on…

Since December, I’ve been doing all my work on a “late 2008” vintage MacBook Pro. Nice machine, and while I knew it wasn’t gonna be the same kind of horsepower I was used to on my eight-core MacPro, but I figured I could make it work. And I did, for a while. However, with bigger images out of the 7D, and bigger memory footprints needed for bigger Lightroom catalogs, I found myself landlocked. It was obvious that I needed more memory to crank everything through, but my sad little MBP was maxed out at 4GB. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Some folks have had success putting 6GB in ’em, but it’s an unsupported configuration, and as hard as I was stressing the little machine, I figured I’d probably run into trouble.)

How bad was it? Well, for some images, I would try to do an edit in Lightroom or Photoshop, and have to wait minutes between edits. It was bad, bad, bad. And for Lightroom, I couldn’t run with everything in the same catalog, which was hampering my ability to find my images easily.

I’d been looking at the new quad i7-based iMacs, and figured I’d start saving my pennies to get one later this year. However, my laptop was really struggling, and it was taking the joy (and practicality) out of working with images from my camera. It was bad, bad, bad.

Darla came to my rescue on Wednesday, taking me to the Apple Store at West County Mall, and putting a new iMac i7 in my hands! Absolutely wonderful! Now, the default memory complement of the iMac is only 4GB — which is the same as the laptop — so I knew I needed to enhance that almost out of the box.

I spent a lot of Wednesday and Thursday getting the iMac up, and beginning to migrate applications and data from the laptop. I’d decided to install everything fresh, rather than migrating apps from the laptop. This would be the first clean install I’d had in years. Yeah, that’s one big task, but it was mostly done by Friday.

On Friday, OWC graced me with another 8GB of memory, taking me to 12GB overall. I could not believe how well Lightroom and Photoshop CS5 ran under those conditions. I was even able to re-combine my Lightroom annual catalogs together again, making searches across my whole catalog once again possible.

Woo-hoo!

That brings us to the near calamity part of this story. Saturday, my external FW800 drive started failing. I tried different cables, and different power supplies, and nothing seemed to help. I extracted the drive from the enclosure, and dropped it in my Thermatake BlacX. And the drive just churned. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I do have a backup strategy, but because of the fiasco with the performance of my laptop, I hadn’t been keeping it up to date over the last few weeks.

The drive eventually came to life, but of course, I didn’t trust it. Becky suggested that we go out this morning, and figure out a replacement strategy. Overnight, I researched the Drobo, thinking that’d be where I’d land. However, I saw some info that implied that there were some folks having problems with them staying mounted on iMacs, and that the performance might not be quite what I was hoping for.

I landed on a pair of 2TB My Book Studio FW800 enclosures, one as a work drive, and a second as a Chronosync’d clone. So today has been spent copying data from my original 2TB drive to the first of the new twins. In retrospect, I’m not as convinced that the old drive was in as much danger as I thought, but getting away from a cobbled-together solution will help me peace of mind.

So… New iMac, and new storage. It’s been a big week at the Deauxmayne!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Canon 7D and Software Updates

Having had my Canon 7D for a few weeks, I can safely say that I really like it. Not yet love it, but I like. Why not love? Well, I just haven’t had enough time to exercise it enough to fall in love. I’m in love with its potential, but I haven’t realized that potential practically yet. Mine own dang fault… along with the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day. Dumb ol’ plantary rotation.

One thing that frankly had kinda slowed me down from getting too far down the path for making gobs of shots was that Apple’s Snow Leopard and Adobe products weren’t quite there with support for the new RAW format from the 7D. There’s been a release candidate for Lightroom that supported it, but after reading some of the forum info about that RC, I was concerned that I might end up having to re-import my images or some such nonsense to get them correctly rendered in the future production version of LR when it was released.

Today, both issues are solved: Adobe has released LR 2.6 officially, and Apple has update Snow Leopard to handle the 7D’s RAW files. Both are great news for me, and just in the nick of time.

Tomorrow morning, a gaggle from work are getting together at Forest Park to photograph, and it’ll be the first real world test for me with the 7D. Now that my tools are up to snuff for reading the images I’ll create, that just makes the pot sweeter. Woo-hoo!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t put my Grandpa Simpson voice on and mention the speed of the upgrades. I was downloading the almost 100MB upgrade to Lightroom at just a tick over 1MB/sec. That would’ve been just about one 3.5″ floppy disk every second for just under two minutes. It’s crazy to think about moving that kind of data around that quickly. And man, am I loving it!

Now to go to the camera store and see if there’s any used lenses I need! 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

New Gear: Apple Magic Mouse

When Apple announced their newest mouse a couple of weeks ago, I thought it sounded intriguing. They’d developed a Bluetooth mouse with a clean design, matching nicely with the recent offerings from the Kids from Cupertino. Normally, a ho-hum thing. I mean, Apple’s had a Bluetooth mouse available for a while, and there are tons of other folks out there with them.

This one’s got one extra step of cool on them though.

First, there’s no real buttons. There’s a click when you press the surface, but there’s no delineation between a left-click and right-click. You just click on the appropriate side, and the right thing happens. Cool.

The bigger coolness though is also delivered by the top surface. The top surface is also a trackpad, and man is it cool. The slick surface just begs to have your finger (or fingers — yes, it supports gestures) sliding across it, making for a really neat augmentation for any Mac.

For me, I’m finding that it’s a great addition to my regular use of my MacBook Pro. I like the glass trackpad on the MBP, but there are times when I’ll set the unit on the coffee table next to the La-Z-Boy. Doing that and twisting around enough to use the trackpad was a bit of a pain. With the new Magic Mouse, I can slide my mouse anywhere, making casual surfing pretty dang easy from the comfort of my easy chair. It just doesn’t get better than that!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

New iMacs

I have a certain sentimentality for the iMac. My first Mac was a 20″ G5 iMac, acquired just a bit over four years ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed cutting my teeth on it. I guess there’s always a certain nostalgia for your first love, eh?

This morning, the twitterverse is all agog about a potentially new iMac on the near horizon. The buzz is that it would be thinner, and include Blu-Ray.

Myself, I’d welcome that.

I have a great attraction for an all-in-one environment like the iMac, but I also see some pitfalls. The latest gen of iMacs allow for easy memory upgrades by the user, but a nearly impossible internal harddrive replacement. Last I saw, that operation involved removing the screen from the chassis, and that’s not a comfy spot for most, myself included. That leaves you with only USB or FW800 externals drives. Where’s eSATA? That would definitely solve the need for replacing the internal harddrive, as eSATA bays are available all over the place.

Another thing missing from the current line is a second Ethernet port. While I don’t have an immediate need for that extra port, it’s interesting to see companies like Drobo begin using that for faster-than-eSATA iSCSI drive connections across a second Ethernet port for their DroboPro high-end storage solution. For a data junkie like myself, that’s a real attractive path, despite the quite high entry pricepoint.

However, I think an iMac might be the only way to foist the last Windows machine in the house my spouse’s clutched fingers. She’s been on Windows for better than a decade, and I suspect that moving her to a Mac is unlikely. We’re running into some issues where she can’t browse my photo archive easily from her machine. Microsoft and RAW files still don’t get along with a piece of software to act as referee. She’s been going through an incredibly convoluted series of steps to view, select and print images from the datastore, and I’d no idea she was doing all that. An iMac would solve that in a snap, but I don’t know that she’s ready for that leap.

With new announcements coming though, anything is possible!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

New Gear: iPod Nano 5G

At lunch on Wednesday, Jay and I had lunch with Becky, spending much of the time looking at our iPhones, watching the blow-by-blow of the Apple announcements on Twitter. We had a great time. I’m not so sure about Becky. 🙂

Jay had three predictions:

  • Steve wouldn’t be there.
  • There would be no camera on the iPod Nano.
  • There would be no Beatles-related announcements.

Jay was one for three.

On Wednesday, Uncle Steve did appear on stage to a towering ovation, having beaten yet another life-threatening malady. He was still thin, and his voice sounded gravelly compared to a presentation he gave late last year, but he was still alive, much to the thrills of Apple’s shareholders, I’m sure. Frankly, I’m glad he made it. I think he’s a visionary, and maybe his shiny new liver will give him some shiny new ideas.

After going through a ton of announcements, the event ended with “One more thing…” — a Jobs trademark, and frequently means that the best was saved for last. Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of the iPod Nano — Touch, Classic and Shuffle all got some love during the presentation, but nothing about the Nano. One more thing. Steve talked about video, and how handheld solid-state video devices were grabbing up a big chunk of the market. And he said Apple wanted a piece of the action.

And they’re gonna give it to us for free.

Enter the new iPod Nano, now outfitted with a camera that’ll shoot video at 480p at 30fps. The free part? It’s free because Apple built the camera into the Nano, and kept the price the same. And added an FM radio. And a speaker. And a pedometer. And voiceover. And voice recording. And a slightly bigger screen. Same physical size, same price. Crikey. And it was available immediately.

In reality, it was available for order immediately, and only showed up at the local Apple Store on Thursday. A quick dash from work to the Galleria during lunch has put a nice electric reflective green iPod Nano in my hands.

I love the new finish on the 5G Nanos -– very nice. However I’m inclined to think it’s a fragile finish. In fact, despite it being aluminum, the slick feel reminds me of a plastic case. And I don’t know if it’s that my hands are telling my brain that the thing is plastic, but the 5G Nano feels lighter than my 4G Nano. That’s gotta be some kinda subliminal thing from my fingertips to my brain’s weights and measures division. Speaking of fingertips, the slick feel of the case keeps making me feel like the little thing is gonna squirt out of my hands — it’s the same kind of feel my iPod Touch had.

The FM radio works well enough, although the big ol’ building I work in blocks a lot of signals. BTW, you have to have the headphones plugged in for the radio to function -– it uses them as the antenna, and is aware when they aren’t attached. I’m using non-standard-issue Bose earbuds, and they seem to work just fine as the radio antenna, so it appears there’s no Apple voodoo going on requiring the use of the Apple headphones in order to use the radio. That’s a pleasant surprise after some the headphone wackiness that’s gone on lately from Apple.

The video camera functionality is fun and actually seems to work pretty well. Uncle Steve said that there was one-button publishing to YouTube, with the implication that this would come through iPhoto. However, even in his presentation Wednesday, iPhoto didn’t have an icon for YouTube, and we never actually saw him upload a video anywhere, despite playing some YouTube hosted video shot with the 5G Nano.

I’d wanted to post a new video on YouTube from the Nano, but have yet to get it to work. First off, I found no place for one click publishing to YouTube from iPhoto. Instead, I copied my videos to my desktop, and tried to upload one through YouTube’s web interface. To quote Janie Porsche, “Eeeehhhhnnnntttt!” I didn’t save Christmas, nor did I get a successful video upload. While the video appeared to upload, the backend processing never completed, and finally errored out.

Not being satisified with that — and having a blockbuster video shot with my iPod Nano that I wanted to share — I tried uploading the video via Quicktime Pro. It does have a menu item for uploading to YouTube. Filled in the boxes, and once again, the upload finished, but there was no completion. In fact, I left it churning for about 10 minutes (for about 30 seconds of video) before mercifully ended the process’ life.

I’m not a YouTube video expert, but to me, it seems like YouTube doesn’t like converting the Nano video stream into whatever it prefers. I like the video shooting capability, but so far, the one-click publishing to YouTube seems to be falling on its face for me. YMMV.

Speaking of pulling video from the Nano, it appears that the only way you can access your video gems is to put the Nano in “disk mode”. I tend to slam my iPods in docks when I’m done with ’em, and pluck ’em out at a second’s notice as I’m headed out the door. In disk mode though, you can’t do that. You have to do an orderly eject from the Mac desktop or iTunes. While that’s not a real big deal, it does take longer, and it definitely doesn’t fit with how I’ve been using my iPods for years. A prediction: I will foul up that sequencing at some point, and toast the load on the new Nano, forcing me to go through a restore.

One thing of note. The camera will not shoot stills — it’s motion only. My understanding is that that’s not uncommon in fixed-focus, fixed-zoom solid state video cameras, but it still would’ve been a nice thing to have. (Pardon the pun.)

The built-in speaker was a surprise the first time I accidentally hit play on a music screen while showing the thing to co-workers. The sound is tinny, of course — on a movie of my Bernese Mountain Dog, playback made her sound like Chihuahua — but the fact that it’s there at all is cool and is great for quick and dirty video sharing.

The slightly bigger screen is nice. When playing tunes, the thing displays artist, album and title with no scrolling — a nice UI improvement. Not a big deal, but nice.

I really thought the form factor would be different with all the new toys, but Uncle Steve says it’s the same form factor. The photos I saw early on made me think that the new Nano was a little thicker, and more squared off on the sides. That doesn’t appear to be the case. Obviously, there are changes to the case in order to accommodate the bigger screen and the camera on the rear. And in a brilliant move, the headphone and dock connector have swapped positions on the bottom, meaning new accessories if you have a toy that is strict about that sort of thing.

Also, the capacity isn’t stamped on the case anywhere. That tells me Apple can stockpile cases, and put them on whatever capacity comes down the line. (C’mon Apple — 32GB would be sweet!!!) My guess is that the new case manufacturing process probably doesn’t lend itself to a quick turnaround. This way it doesn’t matter what comes next as long as the form factor is the same.

Two paws up on the Colinomometer. 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

More Snow Leopard Weirdness

As part of my day job’s schedule, I have Friday’s off. Typically, it’s my day to run around town, visit the bookstores and execute some coupon action. This morning’s no different.

However….

I went to print my coupons to my crusty trusty Okidata B4100 laserprinter from Doc Oc this morning only to find…. there’s no printers installed! Yep, it appears that when Snow Leopard installed, it scrogged both my Oki and my Epson R1800. Bummer.

The Oki’s got a really flakey driver install path — don’t use the drivers that Apple provides, use ours — so I always have to remember that little step, lest I have printing heartaches.

So, no biggie. The Oki’s printing, although I haven’t reinstalled/checked the R1800 yet to see if it’s printing is better than it was under Leopard. More on that, I’m sure, to come this long holiday weekend.