a glob of nerdishness

Does iPhoto 7 use some garbage collection features? If so, that would explain the semi-regular beach balls, regardless of what the user is doing. I’ve been wondering for a while if Tiger will get updated to support the new garbage-collected runtime from Leopard, and perhaps the new iLife suite is testing some of that out internally.

On the other hand, this could also be caused by paging. I was only able to get it to hang up twice this morning — the hard drive was churning, so this points to paging, but I didn’t see much change in iPhoto’s Real vs. Virtual memory usage. Any ideas for a better experimental or investigative method?

Update: While the results posted in the comments aren’t entirely conclusive, the simplest explanation is that the hangs were for plain old paging. The 7.0.2 update seems to have greatly reduced these hang-ups either way.

This evening CDex, my long-time Windows ripping friend, turned fiend and messed up my settings. Unable to decide whether Stereo or J-Stereo, MPEG version I, II or II.5, and which VBR Method was best, I decided I was ready to stop using Windows to rip CDs. While iTunes does a good job at ripping, it uses a different filename and folder structure than all my previously ripped CDs.

I found Max, and I like it. It’s free, and has a good blend of power packed into a (mostly) intuitive interface. You can edit metadata on an album or track basis (or automatically fetch it from MusicBrainz), drag in artwork (or have it grab from Amazon) and easily choose presets for (or customize) a large number of output encoders. While not perfect, it’s a great example of a heavily-customizable, workaday utility that still feels right on a Macintosh.

(It’s not a typo, it’s French)

iPhoto ‘08 may very well change the way I work with photos. My old process was:

1. Import photos (by reference) into iPhoto
2. Occasionally sort out an album if I wanted a slideshow or make a Tabblo
3. Otherwise, scroll through around 36,000 pictures…hoping to someday caption and rate them all
4. Cringe at the amount of disk space used by the full-size copies of RAW photos, delete the whole folder and wait an extra 10 seconds to open the image.

While I still think captioning is a wise investment, and will continue to develop something like my flCaptionater for iPhoto, it hasn’t happened yet. It seems I’m always a step behind where I must be for the number of photos I have. This new version of iPhoto should buy me some time.

I anticipate my new “workflow” to be something like this:

1. Import photos (by reference) into iPhoto
2. Tidy up the Events, because it’s fun!
3. Use albums for thematic content, and use slideshows for slideshows (though iPhoto ‘06 has this too, I just didn’t know about it until my sister-in-law found it during the second day with her first Mac.)
4. Keep on working on a faster captions/keywords solution, glad that the AlbumData.xml format hasn’t changed significantly
5. Deal with the months of RAW photos I shouldn’t have taken, because iPhoto no longer will load directly from the RAW file (more on this in another post)

So far I’ve been impressed. It doesn’t gain as much speed improvement as I’d hoped, but it starts up and closes down a little faster and events helps keep the “iPhoto gasping for breath while scrolling” a little less painful. I like being able to “Magnify” (view) photos upon double-clicking, although I wish I could zoom (actually magnify) without having to go back to the old “Edit” mode.

The upgrade went smoothly. It kept all the old rolls, which wasn’t helpful in my case, so I soon “Autosplit Selected Events” on a select all. This gave me 36070 “items” in exactly 800 Events (why is one capitalized and the other not?). Unfortunately, that didn’t quite suit my picture taking habits (too many cropduster/helicopter sightings in the morning with actual photo excursions in the evenings) but the “Two-hour gaps” preference seemed to give me a good starting point. Although it’s the same organization under the hood, fixing Rolls enough to turn them into iPhoto’s main theme makes for a great new version.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who wasn’t surprised by no Blu-Ray in the new iMacs:

So who do I think will win the high-def format war? TCP/IP.
–Steven Frank

There’s an Apple announcement roundup on MacWorld that echoes the same sentiment. From the Apple TV to the new iMacs, Apple seems to be waiting on this format war (though see below) and hoping their disc-less hobby box and online store win.

It’d still be nice to be able to make double-digit backups onto higher density discs. It seems like HD-DVD, being naturally more scratch-resistant, would be the better media for that. Depending on how much Blu-Ray’s “scratch proof” coating actually gets used, there’s no point in burning 10GB more per layer if it will be unreadable after the real world gets to it. But alas, Apple is on the Blu-Ray board (link=good comparison article, btw), so if only one makes next year’s Macs I probably won’t get my druthers.

The new iMac is definitely trimmer. But part of the new design is just cosmetic:

The black mask makes the bevel around the screen look amazingly thin. In reality, it’s about the same width as the previous generation’s. It had me fooled until I started looking to see where they put the iSight camera.

This neat visual trick follows a similar vein as Ive’s design of the iMac G4 display.

If you don’t have an iPhone but want to see what an RSS feed would look like on one, take a look at this hint from MacGeekery. The short, easy version is to change the general.useragent.extra.firefox value in Firefox’s about:config to be “iPhone”. If you try this and to see this site’s RSS feed as seen by an iPhone, here’s a convenient link.

Ok, so I’m not getting an iPhone (and don’t plan on even getting a cell phone anytime soon), but it is kinda fun to see what some people do the instant a new Apple product (or other hyped-up gadgets, not just Apple’s) comes out. For example, Think Secret has a gallery of their disassembly project, and AppleInsider has an article summarizing the take-apart job that the folks at iFixit did very soon after acquiring an iPhone.

Finally, for anyone who wants to see what it’s like to open up an iPhone box for the first time, CNET has been so kind as to post a video of the unwrapping of their iPhone.

I came across Philip Greenspun’s Mobile Phone As Home Computer at about the same time as Apple revealed a guided tour of their expensive (and hopefully excellent) new cell phone.

If Pilot/Photographer/Peregrinator/Professor/Philip Greenspun was on the right track in late 2005, Apple is on the right track now. The iPhone already has most features on Greenspun’s “What must it do?” list: Web browsing, email, calendar, contacts, digital photos, music and movies. Further, as he hopes, none of the desktop applications the iPhone syncs with (Address Book, iCal and iTunes, plus services on the Web) rely much, if at all, on the files/folders paradigm. Even the iPhone’s main menu focuses, arguably, less on applications and more on organizing documents into categories of appointments, photos, entertainment and the like. This could have been more revolutionary — Bruce Tognazzini rightly berates the “hard separation of email, SMS, and voicemail”, which also turns up in the separation of “Photos” and “YouTube” from the other multimedia accessed via “iPod” — but regardless, there is no visible hierarchy of endlessly-nested folders containing files and other files that open those files and more files to tell those files where the other files are. I digress…

There are other more disruptive/revolutionary ideas in Greenspun’s article which Apple has chosen to forego in lieu of what is, in undistorted reality, simply an evolutionary device done well for a change. I think, though, that users will appreciate being able to take smaller steps away from the familiar into the future via subtle changes in the computer interfaces they already know.

The iPhone contract rates have been announced. Take a mandatory 2 year contract at a minimum $59.99 a month, plus a $36 activation fee and the $499 phone. All together? An obligation to pay US$1974.76 (plus tax?) by July 2009 if I were to get the iPhone this weekend.

I’m guessing my wife won’t let me, though I don’t blame her.

Last night, at a farewell party for a teacher my wife worked with, the iPhone came up in conversation. I asked some of the teachers if they thought any of their highschoolers would show up next fall with the $.5K + $XX/month device in their pocket. Yes, “there’s always at least one kid who shows up with the latest and greatest”. The end of June is a great time to release a phone for students with summer jobs — late enough to have some cash, early enough to not save it all for winter.

During the summer, what more technology does the average highschooler want to use than their cellphone, iPod, email, and Web? A few highschool haunts like MySpace and eBaum’s World might not work, as Apple seems to have decided that Flash only belongs to the “watered down, kinda-sorta looks like” version of the Internet (Jakob Nielsen would agree). However, there are plenty of gathering sites that don’t make prominent use of Flash, to say nothing of the dedicated YouTube client that comes installed. With all the features and fashion of the phone — and with credit card companies always eager to take on new victims — the iPhone could easily be a big hit among students.