lifebsideben

I finally hit the 10,000 mark of photos in iPhoto. It’s taking about 15 seconds to load now, which I think is fairly reasonable. And what’s even better, the 5.0.2 upgrade Apple released a few days ago actually fixed a problem I had intermittently with importing photos from my Canon digital camera. (Well, it’s possible the OS X 10.3.9 upgrade actually contained the fix, as part of the Image Capture application, but whatever.)

Now if only it was speedier when moving between photos. And I’m really looking forward to the Spotlight integration in Tiger, so I can do fulltext searching against image comments, etc. That’ll rock.

While I’m on the subject of digital photos, I want to plug one of my favorite apps, JAlbum. It’s Java freeware, and creates kick-butt static HTML albums for uploading to any webspace. Super flexible, almost too good to be free. I donated to the author, so ya know it’s good. Although, I find myself doing that a few times lately, which is something strange for me considering my uber-pirate past. I guess now, my time really is worth enough that anything cool enough, or time-saving enough, is worthwhile me tossing a few bucks to the author. Not a bad trend.

Tags: apple, iPhoto, jAlbum, photography

Finally the SD300 is available, I’ve been waiting for its release the past 3 months. I’ve been wanting to replace my Olympus D40Z digital camera for a while now… it takes decent pictures most of the time but I still wasn’t satisfied. I’m a “little camera” fan, I’m willing to give up (some) features for smaller footprint, and so far I’m quite happy with the SD300.

Here’s the big differentiators from the Olympus, in my opinion:

• fast start up and shot-to-shot cycle time
• much smaller footprint. the sd300 I really can fit in any pocket!
• larger LCD display, and entirely more sensical operation. after a shot, if you want to keep the review onscreen, press one key. no mode switching, no rushing to show it to people before it disappears!
• it actually remembers the last mode you were in, complete with various manual overrides etc., between power-off and back on. this was immensely frustrating on the D40Z.
• SD cards go a lot bigger and faster (I picked up a 32x 512M) than SmartMedia!
• the movie mode is waaaaay nicer, including 640×480 @ 30 fps, saved as some variant of QuickTime (I think actually MJPEG)
• formatting a SD card takes less than 1 sec!
• “stitch assist” mode for panoramic photos, and half-decent software to stitch them
• generally the software is much much nicer than the olympus stuff, and has full OS X support too!

That’s the good stuff. The less impressive stuff about the new camera so far include:

• Uses proprietary batteries. All the smaller cameras do, but there is something nice about NiMH AAs, and the ability to “fall back” to alkalines when you’re out of the country, can’t get to a AC outlet, etc. (This happened to me in Romania; I didn’t have time to charge the batteries but could pick up some cheap AAs to tide me over until the end of the day…)
• Picture quality, in general, is not noticeably better than the Olympus. But I’ll take more outside shots and compare further. So, it’s a 2-year-later-model camera, same resolution, but about same quality pictures. I guess I expected some advances, even in a smaller camera.
• No case included, and the official Canon one is on backorder. When the camera has 40% of its back as the LCD, you really feel safer with a case to put it in! I finally just picked up a $10 Case Logic model from Fry’s in the meantime. I can’t find the specific case on their site, but it’s kind of cute–built like the black case that comes with the iPod 2nd gen… like two pieces of padded material with snug elastic on the sides.
• “long shutter” mode is up to 15 sec; the Olympus can do 45 sec. Granted, you don’t need this often, but I’ve gotten a few really cool nighttime shots of the sky with the long exposures.

That’s kind of the roundup at this point. I’ll see how I feel in a few more weeks after the holidays… really worried about the battery situation, until I can get a spare (for $40!)

Now the really sad part is that the D40Z, which cost me $550 at Amazon 2.5 years ago, only goes for about $100 on eBay. Sigh…

Tags: cameras, photography, review

Just got my ACDSee 7.0 upgrade “offer” email (the first of many I’ll receive, I’m certain.) It’s overall pretty good software. In case you don’t know, ACDSee is essentially photo browser/organization software. I’ve been using it for 3-4 years, and have had a legit license for it for the last 2, 2-1/2 years. But almost every new release since 2.2 has been slower (often, they claim they’ve made it faster), and had minor, but not insignificant, bugs. Plus, the company that makes it (ACD Systems), has probably the lowest-value upgrade/patch policy I’ve ever seen–even compared to Microsoft and Apple! They have marginally useful image printing and editing software as well (which I mostly don’t use due to owning PhotoShop).

A few of the bugs I’ve run across have been easily reproducible and I’ve taken the trouble to document to them how to do so. And still, some are not fixed in major new releases. Their tech support essentially claimed one of the issues wasn’t possible, and that I should reinstall my OS (oh, that old trick). (I finally figured out it was an issue with a network drive no longer being accessible–causing 20 second delays before a dialog would pop up–really, I think they should have been able to diagnose this!) They seem convinced to change the keyboard shortcuts with each new major release. There are almost never patches, and essentially every new release results in a ton of spam from them about a pricey upgrade. At the current rate, they’re putting out a couple major upgrades a year, at the “discounted” price of $40 each. I don’t recall them EVER offering minor upgrades for download for free, with bugfixes or otherwise. So a couple times, I’ve plunked down the bucks for an upgrade, hoping at least to have the bugs I reported to them fixed, and had mixed results. Once it actually did get faster for large directories of images (from essentially a failure condition, to “taking a long time”). But I was treated to totally-changed menus and keyboard shortcuts in exchange. Grrr.

Essentially, ACDSee seems to be mostly getting away with a $80/year “subscription” plan, making it, year-over-year, more expensive to keep current than either Mac OSX or Windows–and believe me, both of those are way more important to me than my image browser. In fact, it seems a good chunk of the most important functionality in ACDSee will turn up as part of Longhorn, and newer versions of iPhoto. As for me, I don’t plan on wasting any more time or money on ACDSee’s upgrades… version 6.0 works more or less, and philosophically, I can’t support a company that treats me more as a cash cow than a customer. If I end up needing more features, I think PhotoShop Album is going to get my next software-god tithing… I got slightly burned on trying out v1.0 of it, but hear the newer version is pretty great.

Tags: ACDSee, photography, software