Absolutely nothing – unless you happen to be a photographer trying to scrape every last ounce of quality out of your digital pictures.
Perhaps you’ve heard photographers talking about RAW, so what is it? Let’s begin with the familiar JPEG format most digital cameras produce. JPEGs do not contain all the information that registered on the camera’s sensor when you pressed the shutter release. When you pressed it the computer inside your camera took the data from the sensor, applied white balance, sharpening, saturation, and several other variables to that image. Then it applied compression using the JPEC codec which basically throws away data it considers to be superfluous to the image, which is why JPEG is described as a “lossy codec.”
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PalmGuard
Company: Moshi
Price: $20
Aevoe.com
My Black MacBook does have a tendency to show fingerprints and smudges. While the outside is something I wipe down constantly, the palm rest and trackpad are areas I’d like to try and keep as smudge free as possible…but that seems impossible at times. Enter Moshi and it’s product, the PalmGuard.
The PalmGuard is a “wear resistant semi-rigid thin film” that you overlay on the palm rests of your MacBook, white or Black, and MacBook Pro.
This week I have five really quick and easy tips for you.
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Need an email address that is not in your address book, but you have sent to it before? Well, if you’ll know it on site, or you had the recipient’s name in the “to” try this tip. In Mail, go to the “Window” menu. Choose “Previous Recipients.” This will produce a list of every email address you have ever sent to through Mail.
Tim and Chad talk about the latest in Macintosh news. Robert reviews both the EarBuddy and TechTool Pro 4.5. Guy Serle returns with an all-new Not Mac News! And Nemo interviews author Andrew Shalat.
Leave audio feedback by calling 801-938-5559
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Dreamweaver 8
Company: Adobe
Price: $399 full, $199 upgrade
Adobe Store
This is what happens when you procrastinate on a Mac article: the whole world changes before your eyes!
When I first got my review copy of Dreamweaver 8, it was fresh off the presses from Macromedia. I was happy to get it, and then it wasn’t Macromedia’s any more. Hearing that Adobe had taken over, I felt positively parental: “Be nice to my baby!” My younger brother may not have had the same reaction, though. Last October when I complained to him about Dreamweaver’s default action of asking for “alt” tags when inserting an image, he replied:
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Bravo SE Disc Publisher
Primera Technology, Inc.
Price: $1495 new, $1250 refurbished
http://www.primera.com
Convergence – it is one of the buzzwords in computing at the moment. It is the joining of disparate technologies in a single device – for example, a cellphone and an MP3 player. Done well, and you are the darling of the industry, (such as the iPhone), and done badly it will be a failure – Motorola’s ROKR comes to mind.
Primera Technology sent me a different and intriguing example of the same convergence concept – their Bravo SE Disc Publisher. What they have done is integrate a DVD writer, inkjet printer and a nifty robot arm to create a unit to automate the production of professional quality DVD or CD discs.
The unit is the size of a large inkjet photo printer. A large smoked plastic lid opens to reveal a hopper that can take 20 blank discs, and a mechanism to lift these discs to a conventional computer disc writer drive (the review unit supported DVD+R and DVD-R at 16x speed, and CD at 40x), with an inkjet printer head mounted above it. The robot mechanism uses a precision pick-and-place arm, and completed discs are dropped in to an output tray that can be pulled out separately while the unit is running.
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Posterino
Company: Zykloind.com
Price: $24.95
http://zykloid.com/posterino/
If you read my reviews on a regular basis, you know that I love finding art and design programs by smaller companies. I like it even more when the programs are great programs and affordable. Posterino is a great program, and at a price of $24.95 it is definitely affordable.
At first glance, Posterino looks like a Print Shop/Photoshop type of program, but it isn’t. Posterino is a program for making photo collages, photo postcards, and more. The projects you work on can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Plus, you don’t have to use only photos. If you can import the image file into iPhoto, you can use it in Posterino.
John Nemo kicks off the conversation:
Apple is promoting its MacBook for consumers, which makes sense due to the modest size and price relative to its set of features. A basic MacBook sells for $700 less in U.S. dollars than the least expensive MacBook Pro, or $800 less when you factor in an AppleCare three-year warranty (which MyMac.com strongly recommends).
For buyers over the age of 40, that extra expense can be a bargain. As we age our eyes and brains prefer a larger screen area. Keys that illuminate in low or dark ambient room lighting are a bonus. Typing keys are engineered to a higher standard, with more tactile response. Trackpad and mouse are larger, and palm rest areas are more spacious. Audio playback is better, with larger on-board speakers. A second FireWire port, with faster FW800, is very useful. Weight and size are only marginally larger on a 15″ MacBook Pro than on a 13″ MacBook.
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I’ve been finding a bunch of great, free downloads in the past few weeks. That’s about all they have in common. They range from a recipe organizer to a watermark program to a video converter. Here’s a few of them.
Measuring Cup: Want a recipe organizer? Try out Measuring Cup by Shallot Patch. Find it at http://www.shallotpatch.com/.
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Adam Christianson from The MacCast joins Tim and Chad for lively chat about his history in Macs, the current state of Apple and Steve Jobs, and much more. David Cohen reviews Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac, Second Edition. Robert Essential Acoustic Guitar and DVCreators Final Cut Pro Foundations. To wrap the show, Nemo interview one of our favorite Mac authors of all time, Robin Williams.
A Better Finder Tool Suite
Company: Publicspace.net
Price: $37.49
http://publicspace.net
A Better Finder Tool Suite is a set of Finder add-ons that perform bulk renaming, attribute editing, and file finding tasks. A Better Finder Rename and A Better Finder Attributes are launched through contextual menu items and thereby applied to batches of files, making changes to files that are either slow or impossible to make in the Finder. Via a keyboard shortcut, A Better Finder Launcher gives the user shortcuts to files and applications. Since each is also available as a standalone product, this review will look at each of them separately before balancing up the entire set in terms of value and usefulness.
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Taylor Kew and Rich Baker developed and self-funded the concept in 2000, and opened for business in 2002. Veterans of PictureTel, a video conferencing company, they “just wanted the 10:00 a.m. meeting to be able to start at 10:00.” Their product, Glance, is being used by over 2,600 paying customers from eighty different industries in forty countries, for live, remote, screen observing “all day and all night.” Glance is not in competition with Netopia’s Timbuktu, which is a remote screen controlling application. With Glance, you look but don’t touch.
No, it’s not a chat client either. You bring your own phone, iChat, Skype, or conferencing method when you use Glance. Taylor tells MyMac.com they wanted screen demos to be “easy, reliable, and fast.” Being a web interface, they have “tight discipline on the whole user experience.”
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Keyword Manager 1.1.1
Company: Bullstorm
Price: US$ 19 EU: €19 (incl. VAT)
http://www.bullstorm.se/KeywordManager.php
If you’ve read my review of FlickrExport 2 here at mymac.com, you will already know that I have a bit of a thing going for keywords. Looking at this review you will also note that my biggest regrets about that particular tool were, that it wouldn’t write the keywords back to iPhoto.
The reason I didn’t want to tag my images in iPhoto was that the iPhoto native keywords feature is so limited to beg the question of usefulness. Obviously I wasn’t the only one with this feeling, since two Swedes sat down and developed a plugin for iPhoto..
Keyword Manager does what the label suggests and it does it extremely well.
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Canon EOS 30D: Guide to Digital Photography
by David D. Busch
270 pages
Thomson Course Technology Press
ISBN 978-1-59863-336-8
$29.99 US, $40.95 CN
When it comes to books about digital photography, Thomson Press is a sure bet for both beginner and experienced photographers. Their photography books are typically well illustrated, designed, and written from a practical point of view. Their series includes basic guides for beginners and more advanced books on subjects like boudoir and nude photography; nature, sport, and food photography, and a recent one on best business practices for photographers.
Canon EOS 30D: Guide to Digital Photography, by prolific author and award winning photographer, David D. Busch is one of the most recent contributions to the Thomson’s digital photography series. This guide book is the type that I enjoy reading from cover to cover. Busch states upfront in the introduction to his book that he wanted to write a guide to one of Canon’s most popular and professional digital SLR cameras that did not resemble the manual that comes with the camera. And he certainly accomplishes that goal.
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Anyone who regularly shoots digital photographs realizes just how easy it is to fill up a photo management system like Apple’s iPhoto with thousands of images. In fact, uploading, managing, and processing digital photos is probably the most difficult part of digital photography. Everyone loves to shoots pictures, but digital photos can easily fill up a hard drive just in same way many old school shutterbugs could fill up shoe boxes and plastic covered album pages.
If you’re using iPhoto, or any other photo management system, it’s very useful to develop and maintain a practical workflow for importing, organizing, processing, and outputting your digital images. Having a workflow can enable you to process photos faster and make photo management effectively manageable. I would never say that digital photo management is fun, but I would say that it’s a lot better than keeping your photos in shoe boxes.
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Music is something shared by friends.
In your lonely room you listen to your tunes. Certain songs strike a chord somewhere inside you.
You share these songs with your friends. You play them when you get together. You tell them of your newfound gem. You look up a band’s website together and see what else they’ve done. This is a social interaction . . . an age-old bonding ritual. Mom did it with CDs. Her mother did it with Cassettes. Her mother did it with 45s. Her mother did it with 78s. Her mother did it with sheet music and a piano.
This is how music GETS to be popular. This is the mechanism by which music is found by an individual and subsequently purchased.
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Do you have to send a large file to someone and it is too large for email? If you are a .Mac member you can easily do this with iDisk and the Public folder, and it’s really easy.
First you need to get to your iDisk folders. To do this use the “Go” menu from the Finder, and choose “iDisk”. Next, choose “My iDisk.” This will open your iDisk window where you will see a folder called Public.
Open the Public folder. Now drag and drop the files you need to transfer into the public folder. A progress bar will appear, and when it disappears your file is in your public folder.
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John Nemo talks with author Joli Ballew about her new Do-It-Yourself Mac Projects book. Robert reviews two Logitech products, the diNovo Edge keyboard and the MX Revolution mouse. David Cohen talks more on Virtualization on your Mac, while the round-table discussions with Tim, Chad, and Guy hit on many different subjects.
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There was a time, not long ago, that Chris Seibold was known for his cartoon work as well as his writing. Where, or where, has the funny gone, Chris? Presented here for the first time is the complete collection (downloadable in PDF format) ebook of all his work. It’s free, it’s funny, and it is worth the download! Click here to download. (6.8MB – 142 pages)
Comments. Be heard!
MyMac Podcast #385
MyMac Podcast #384