If you’ve been following along with this blog, then you know I love Apple’s Aperture application. I upgraded from iPhoto shortly after I started using my first DSLR camera (the Nikon D80). Aperture is pretty straight forward to use. It’s elegant and intuiative, but there are many different workflow options when managing a large photo library. I started by reading through the Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5 (Apple Pro Training)which is a wonderful reference.
The new D80 has kept me pretty busy. This is my first “Pro-sumer” camera. I’ve never even focused a camera my self let alone adjust the f-stop and shutter speed. It’s all quite interesting. I rely heavily on Wikipedia and the Nikon user groups for help. But when it comes to the processing side, I’ve taken full advantage of the 30 day trial of Aperture. After playing around with it for a week or so, I can say that it is far superior to iPhoto, but you will pay the learning curve tax.
A little while ago,I wrote about using Podtube to download flash videos from Youtube. As Youtube pulls more and more videos off, due to complaints from studios like NBC, I enjoy keeping local copies for future viewing. Well, I'm happy to report the easiest way yet to capture these video. VideoDL is web service that simply fetches the flash file and provides you with a simple download link. Just put in the URL from a video that you want to keep.
Today I had the need to print out a calendar for my wife. She needed a blank printout to write a schedule to hang on her wall. My first thought was "I think there is a template in Apple's iWork Pages that could do this." Well, that was a poor assumption. No such luck. I went to the iWork community site to find a template but nothing was really useful.
I love to look at other people's photo's on Flickr. Maybe it's the voyeur in me or maybe I just wonder if other people's lives are more interesting than mine. With iPhoto, you can keep up with all of your favorite photo groups and pools without having to click through to the web page. Just go into iPhoto and under the "File" menu choose "Subscribe to Photocast." Get the RSS feed address from the bottom of a Flickr photo set and paste it into the address box in iPhoto.
Thanks to Apple's aggressive release cycle, many Mac owners have a couple of different machines sitting at home. My particular setup is a Mac Pro in the study and an older 17" Powerbook in the living room. You would think that this would be ideal. I have a powerful workstation for Aperture and a nice portable for couch surfing. But, eventually you realize that there is a fly in the ointment.
I tried out a trick making the rounds on many of the Mac news sites. Supposedly, it is possible to enable Apple's Front Row on the MacPro. This sounded like a great idea. I'd love use my Mac Pro as a media machine but for some reason Apple chose not to include an IR remote with the Mac Pro. The hack seemed easy enough. Just modify the AppleHIDMouse extension to allow the mighty mouse to control Front Row.
It seems that Disk Warrior is not going forward to support Intel macs. It's pretty disappointing because I was a big fan of this software for the PPC macs. Unlike the Windows world, there are few system diagnostic tools for the mac. Maybe that's because there are fewer issues with incompatible third party hardware. However, sh*t happens and sometimes you need more than Apple's disk utility program to figure it out.
This is a little gem from the last Digg videocast. I've totally ignored this option in Apple's Mail application for the past couple of years. You can select a message that is spam and bounce it back to the sender as if your address no longer exists. This is a great way to get off of those spam email lists. If you do this enough times the spammers will conclude that your email address no longer exists.
The new Aperture web site from O’Reily is definitely worth your time. It now includes the great websiteAperture tricks.
Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, Blogs, iPhoto, Mac, Photography, Tip
