Day: Friday 1 September 2006
Apple iPhoto is one of the iLife applications that ships with Mac OS X to facilitate importing, organising, editing and sharing digital photos. I use Adobe Photoshop for my digital photo work but the integration of iPhoto with Apple Front Row was enough to make me want to look at iPhoto a bit more closely.
By default, iPhoto copies digital photos to a new location in order to work on them, leaving the originals intact (sounds like a good idea to me) but because Mac upgrades are horrendously expensive, my Mac Mini only has an 80GB hard disk (and I take a lot of photos) and I keep my data on a 320GB external hard disk. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere in the application preferences to set the library location but I did find a way around this. By deleting the existing iPhoto library and launching the application, I was prompted to create a new library:
Then, selecting a location on my external hard disk allowed me to set up a new library exactly where I wanted it.
Ever since I started taking photos digitally, I’ve been meaning to investigate the use of raw image capture as it offers much more flexibility for off-camera editing. Basically, a raw image is the unprocessed data from the camera sensor which most cameras then process to produce a JPEG image; however because image sensors vary, so do raw image formats. Thankfully, Nikon’s .NEF format is one of the common ones.
I wrote a post last year about the Microsoft raw image thumbnailer and viewer for Windows XP but I’m still shooting JPEGs as most of my photography these days is family snapshots. Meanwhile, I encouraged Stuart to buy a Nikon D50 digital SLR and he recently posted some information about digital camera raw support for .NEF files in Adobe Photoshop CS 2 that may come in handy one day.
This week I’ve had two separate geekfests… one with my mates Stuart and Pete, and the other with my buddy Alex. I usually learn lots from these guys as:
- Stuart is into gadgets and “stuff” – he used to know Mac things but does more Windows work these days.
- Pete knows a lot about coding (and now lives on the west coast of California).
- Alex teaches me about CSS, web standards and using my Mac – this week it was dumping 10 years’ worth of Mac operator experience into a couple of hours teaching me how to use Quark XPress 6.5, Adobe Photoshop CS 2 and Acrobat to get a feature about the proposal to build a wind farm close to our town ready for the local community magazine.
Now Alex is always telling me that he has nothing to write for his blog but based on the amount of “stuff” I learn every time we get together he should start blogging more. This time, aside from the XPress/Photoshop/Acrobat lesson, it was introducing me to VirtueDesktops for the Mac – now I’m hooked. Linux users may be familiar with the workspace switcher, VirtueDesktops gives me that for Mac OS X, with customisable effects as I transition between desktops (I love the cube transition).
The 0.x version number indicates that this is still pre-release software and it does have the odd glitch where a window gets left behind on another desktop but I’m finding it so useful to keep mail, browsing, coding/design and other stuff on separate desktops, all just a keyboard shortcut away, that I can’t see me dumping this utility for a while!
One Linux utility that I find very useful is wget. Last night I found out that Mac OS X 10.4.7 doesn’t include wget and I was a bit stuffed… luckily I found Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s OS X port of GNU wget. I needed to refer to the blog post comments to get things working but the basic process was to issue the following commands from a terminal:
sudo mkdir /usr/local
sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin
sudo mkdir /usr/local/man
sudo mkdir /usr/local/man/man1
sudo mkdir /usr/local/etc
sudo cp wget /usr/local/bin
sudo cp wget.1 /usr/local/man/man1
sudo cp wgetrc /usr/local/etc
Then, create a file called .bash_profile containing the following:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/usr/local/man
After logging off and on again, issuing the wget url or man wget commands from the terminal should produce the desired results.