Mac – Page 5 – Ian Dick

.Mac Web Galleries

After all the hype I decided to try out the new Apple web galleries so I uploaded my first album. The upload speed seemed pretty sluggish as did the loading of the actual album on visiting the web page. Presentation on the website is superb though and it’s a great way of showing off your photo’s.

One of the nicest ways of viewing the album is using the carousel. This is like coverflow in iTunes and allows you to scroll through the pictures. Only annoyance is it takes a while for pictures later in the album to get the high res sharper version of the photo so you can spend a while looking at fairly fuzzy pictures. Another feature I like is that as you move the mouse over the album photo in the gallery page it flicks through the images in the album – very slick and mirrors the functionality seen in iPhoto.

While many have seen this as a Flickr competitor for me they are two different beasts. .Mac Web Galleries allow you to easily upload albums of photo’s (and also video’s) and let your friends view or download them. Flickr lets you do the same but with far more disk space and has a whole community supporting it with forums, groups and commenting. It also has far stronger tools for editing sets, albums and also supporting geo-tagging. One feature that .mac has got is photo uploading – letting people upload photo’s to your album which then sync back to iPhoto. I find that pretty odd as thats something I don’t think I would ever use. Due to space and speed alone I’ll be sticking with Flickr – be nice to see them up their game when it comes to presenting albums though.

Mac Announcements

Initial thoughts…

New iMacs. I don’t like them. The design isn’t as clean as the iMac’s of old. Not convinced by black surround or by glossy screen. Love the size of the new keyboards but would need to try them first as the key’s look close to the style of the Macbook. Fine for laptop – not so sure for desktop. Good options on hard disk size though.
iLife – some nice improvements here on photo management and also video creation. Not much else for me
iWork – Numbers look very interesting. Tried Keynote over the last few days and it is very impressive. Must try Pages to see how good/bad it is especially as Office is delayed until next year.
.Mac. Some improvements at last. Disk space upped to 10Gb which is nice. Was also impressed with the new picture and video albums – .Mac Web Gallery. Very clean presentation and it reallt does feel like an app on the web. Sharing options were also nice to see with friends able to upload photo’s with them sync’d back to your mac. A nice upgrade to .mac but still feel they could do so much more.

More meh than yeah for me but some nice changes all the same. If you commit to everything Apple I can see why it makes sense but with sites like Flickr and so many other websites established with communities it’s hard to see many people moving over to the web albums. Good for one off’s more than a whole set of albums for me.

Mac Rumours

So, my thoughts on Tuesdays announcements? We’ll see an iMac replacement. This was my worry when I first bought a Mac almost a year ago. It wasn’t the switch or the initial purchase. It was the upgrades the following year to lovely new hardware. However the iMac still feels new to me so I’m not too fussed. I guess we’ll see how true this is later in the week.

I expect something on iLife as well although that might come later on with Leopard. The one product I’d liek to see change is .mac. I bought it earlier this year and it’s been great for keeping the mac’s in sync. However the access over the web is lame compared to other Web 2.0 apps and the tiny 1Gb disk space makes a mockery of taking docs anywhere. Increased disk space, an improved range of apps and more than the ‘Back to mac’ functionality announced at a previous Leopard demo. How about a nice wrapper around the Google suite of tools coupled with the web disk. That would really make a portable office accessible from anywhere.

So that was much of the draft I wrote at the weekend. Now there’s speculation that there really could be some .mac announcements as there’s downtime scheduled on the .mac service during the keynote. I still have my doubts. Hey ho – we’ll all know this time tomorrow.

EatRhubarb?

I was glancing through a donated Mac Format and I happened to spot a picture from a Glasgow MUG meeting.

Surely not a picture of Henry eating? Speaking of which, we’ve a curry night to organise – I’ll be in touch.

Who needs Apple TV?

Nullsoft have update Connect360 to play nicely with the 360’s spring dashboard update. While this is good news as after the update it was a bit buggy the best bit for me is that .mov files are now supported. Well, WMV+WMA, H.264 and MPEG4 are actually supported now which means the 360 alongside Connect360 can playback all my video podcasts plus movies stored on the Mac. Fantastico. I’m sure the Aple TV menu system is slicker and it’s obviously quieter but the 360 makes for a great free alternative which I already own.

Back in Business

New cards arrived, money refunded, Mac formatted and back up and running (very easy to do), offline and online passwords changed and wireless network checked, renamed, SSID hidden again and new password assigned. Feeling a bit better now – just the laptop to reformat.

UK Mac Ad’s

There are now UK version of the Get A Mac ads – http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/. With Mitchell and Webb no less. Pie Chart video is very funny…hopefully there will be some more over the next few months.

Temptation

So I was going to get a Macbook, I’d already decided I didn’t need more than a gig ram and the black Macbook would be the one. But then I saw the Macbook Pro next to the Macbook and I gave in to temptation.

One day I’ll learn!

Ruby Monday

The inner geek has been satisfied today. Since getting the Mac I’ve had an urge to do a bit of programming. Nothing fancy but I really wanted to play around with Ruby on Rails to see just ow easy it was to get a nice web app up and running. The only problem was getting a development environment. My web host offers Ruby skeleton and I couldn’t get command line access. No worries – install it all on the Mac. Todo that meant installing MySQL also. Firstly I followed the excellent post on Hivelogic, Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. This takes you through everything you need to get Ruby up and running. This was also my first proper use of Mac terminal. I loved the following warning…

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Anyway, the install went well and I’m now at the point of starting to dabble but that will have to wait until later in the week. One final tip – there’s an excellent set of MySQL GUI tools available from the MySQL developers. Handy if your not familiar with command line MySQL.

Tangerine

Tangerine is a new beta app for the Mac that has one major aim – to create playlists for iTunes based on the Beats per Minute (BPM) of a track. It also wants to do that quickly while looking good at the same time. First impressions are that it manages all three.

Once installed and running Tangerine will locate and analyze your iTunes library. There are issues if your library is located on an external drive but mines detected without a problem. The analysis is very quick – Potions website states around 3 tracks every second but obviously the anaylsis will be dependant on your library size and your encoding quality. Once analyzed it’s then down to you to create playlists based on the BPM that’s been associated to the mp3 file.

By using sliders to easily change the criteria it’s easy to make varied playlists – from fast paced workouts to slow burners. Once complete the playlists is displayed and you have the option of saving it in your iTunes library. Another nice feature is the ability to write the BPM values back to iTunes allowing you to use the BPM within iTunes itself.

All the basic functionality worked well but there were one or two quirks especially with the BPM analysis. It seemed to mark some real slow tracks with very little beat with a high BPM. However it didn’t mark any of the faster tracks incorrectly so hopefully this can be addressed before official release. The look and feel of the app though is terrific. Once the playlist has been generated it is shown in the Tangerine window along with it’s album art. There are also some nice speech bubbles used to show track info. Playback controls (more accurately playback info) could have been displayed with more clarity though – again something that could be addressed before 1.0 release.

Some features I’d like to see – ability to use a playlist as a source for the newly generated playlist rather than the whole library. I’d also like to pick genre or ratings (you can select use predominately higher ratings) and base new playlists on those criteria. Actually I can pick genre or ratings – you just need to add a rule in the preferences which you can enable/disable to you liking. Nice. I guess the one thing it really does need is a readme…and a help file.

This is a really handy app for gym bunnies or runners that want to tailor there playlists to not only good songs but songs that match their pace. I’ll be using it to generate some game based playlists – high for racing games (or Lumines), low for something like golf. One little point to finish on – the installation screens on Mac are great and Tangerines is one of the best. Enjoy.