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Sonntag, 10. Juni 2007 |
 At todays WWDC´s keynote, Apple-boss Steve Jobs unvealed the secret features of the upcoming Mac OSX 10.5 aka “Leopard”. Not all of this was surprising to us nerds who wildly clicked the rumor-sites the last days: - New desktop features “stacks”, transparent menu and dock. The whole GUI is said to be resolution-independent
- New Finder features “Cover-Flow”-view, new sidebar, easier access to network-computers, “Back to my Mac”: remote access via .Mac
- Core animation makes it easier for developers to build animated GUIs
- Fully implemented 64-bit capability
- “Quicklook” shows all common types of files in the Finder without starting the appropriate program (i.e. pictures, movies, PDFs, Excel-sheets)
- New version of Boot Camp with better support & easier installation (driver-CD needless) — but it´s not going to substitute VMWare or Parallels
- Improved Spaces and Dashboard with extended WebClip features
- iChat Theater: You can now present files via iChat
- Time Machine capable of backing up to a remote drive over Airport
The “Leopard” version of OSX will ship by October at 129,-$. This year´s one more thing is in fact a surprise pointed at Microsoft: As of today, there will be a Windows-version of Safari. The public beta is downloadable from Apple and is said to be twice as fast as MS Internet Explorer though running on a Windows-PC. The keynote ended with the promise of the iPhone being extendable with new third-party applications. These will benefit from AJAX, a browser-based coding-language already used by the famous Google Online-Apps. Thanks to macnews.de, mactechnews.de and gizmodo.com for their newstickers. |
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Donnerstag, 31. Mai 2007 |
 Just earlier this year, the Dailide brothers from London started off coding a new application for image editing, based on libraries provided by the OS X system and Open Source, utilizing the Mac’s video card for processing image operations. Pixelmator has tons of features to offer, making the new core-image-app a possible alternative to Photoshop. You can play around with layers, use Apple’s Automator for recurring tasks. The software supports iSight cameras and iPhoto and has a wonderful, full-screen-aware GUI. It even opens Photoshop-files including layers, though seems to lack support for the most common raw-files from Canon and Nikon, i.e. .cr2 and .nef. Probably this will be included in a later release. Version 1.0 of this Universal Binary is announced for late June at only 59,- $.
Check some press releases I found with a quick Google search: Macnews.de, MacObserver.com or over at Digg.com. |
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Dienstag, 22. Mai 2007 |
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Ein kostenloses Apple Seminar richtet sich an alle amibionierten oder professionellen Fotografen: Am Dienstag 5. Juni (14:00 - 15:30 Uhr) stehen in Köln Apple Aperture 1.5 und Adobe (Photoshop) CS3 auf dem Programm. Weitere Infos & Anmeldung nach dem Klick. |
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Montag, 21. Mai 2007 |
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 There have been various tidings in the Mac-related world of software the last few days. I’ve gathered some news & links (to german sites) for you:
- Adobe will discontinue developing Freehand in favor of Illustrator (what a pity!)
- The Mac-version of Canvas, once a good alternative to both Freehand and Illustrator, will be discontinued (I never used it)
- A new version of LightZone is available. This application is meant as a substitute for Photoshop (it´s in “Ansel-Adams-Zone-Style”)
- NewSoft’s Image Workshop is meant to be an alternative for Aperture or Lightroom, but it’s not. Keep away, as this 200MB monster will not even launch if you don’t have an Epson printer driver installed on your machine. That’s the reason I haven’t reviewed it after downloading & installing. Good to have uApp for cases like this
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Montag, 9. April 2007 |
Recently I read an article on automatic image enhancement in the german magazine “Macwelt”. It´s a review of Agfa´s “Intellitune” software. They seem to be impressed by this application and rate it 1.5 (where 1 is best and 6 is worst). Now the good news about this damn piece of code is, Agfa is giving it away almost for free: The “starter edition” is priced 4500€. At this extremely low rate, I´m sure you are willing to accept the fact that they limit the software to a maximum of 4000 pictures. If you´d like to optimize another 4000 pictures you´ll have to pay an additional 2500€ fee  This brought me to the idea of having an automatic, batch-processing-capable image optimization tool for free. Lucky who has a copy of Photoshop installed. Now you can download my auto-enhancement action script which should run with PS CS2 (use rightclick/save target as…). It´s free & it should keep being free, so don´t try to re-sell it! Use it, change it, give it to friends, I don´t mind. It´s just a rough construct balancing the web-aware sRGB with printable whitepoint/blackpoint-compensations. You can use Photoshops batch-processor or scriptings or even make a droplet out of my action. And as always, if you have good advice to refine this action-based enhancer, please leave a comment. |
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Dienstag, 3. April 2007 |
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We all face the worst case once in a while: The images got deleted mistakenly. I know there are a lot of applications out there which claim to be able to restore images from a memory card, but some of them are not quite reliable. I just want to share my pacifying experience with a small piece of freeware, EXIF Untrasher. It isn´t blazing fast, as it first creates an image file of the volume, but I managed to save all pictures I thought that were lost. Works on .jpg´s only, though. And you´ll need Mac OSX 10.3 or higher. |
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Montag, 26. März 2007 |
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 Today, Adobe will unveil the secrets of their latest professional software package, Creative Suite 3. You will be able to watch a live-webcast, which will start at 3:30 EST (which is 20:30 GMT). If you don’t want to be patient till then, you’ll find some videos already available on this site. There is also an extensive promotional page, from which you can read some of the key features of CS3:
Indesign: Extended integration with the other CS3 products, more (non-destructive) creative controls, multi-file-place, better formatting of tables and cells, XHTML-export.
Photoshop Extended: 3D features, animation controls, non-destructive smart filters, quick selection tool, refine-edges for easy selections
Illustrator: Better color editing, faster tracing, a new paint bucket, enhancements in integration and typography I’m sure we will read a lot more in the next days. The Adobe pages claim the following (language version) availability: - English language version is expected to ship by end of April 2007.
- French language version is expected to ship in May 2007.
- Spanish language version is expected to ship by July 2007. Hey, and what about the german version? EDIT: Der deutsche Adobe Online Store nennt eine Verfügbarkeit der deutschen Version im Mai 2007. Der Preis für die CS3 Design Premium Collection beträgt 2.616 €.
EDIT2: Inzwischen hat auch golem.de einen ausführlichen Artikel online.
EDIT3: Einen ersten Test zu Photoshop CS3 kann man bei Digitalkamera.de finden |
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Dienstag, 20. März 2007 |
Initiated by the release of Apple’s Aperture back in late 2005, every couple of months I reevaluate my strategy in managing my digital assets i.e. photos. I’ve played around with Aperture and its direct rival, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and found the overall concept of these applications to suit my needs best. I already mentioned my dislikes on Lightroom and I’m pretty sure I will use Aperture once I have a suitable Intel-Mac. Unfortunately I can’t install it on my old G4 machine. So right now I’m using iView Media Pro which got sold to Microsoft lately. That’s a reason why I’m willing to give up using it as I expect MS to totally ruin the software.
At my office over at AO Foundation, we use Canto Cumulus since a year. I spent a lot of time setting it up and we had to program some add-ons to suit our needs. Now it works quite well and in fact it’s probably the best enterprice solution. I have to admit the GUI looks really ugly and Windows-like, though. Right now we have about 25.000 images in the database and that’s just the beginning.
Now for me and my personal needs this program is quite over-dimensioned, so I googled around again the other day to find solutions running on Mac OSX. As a result, I found a couple of applications and downloaded a bunch of Trials, but I’m not quite convinced I will find the time to test them all. Probably you’ll find the list useful as a starting point for your own seek, so here are my results: - Apple iPhoto (which unfortunately uses proprietary keywording)
- iView Media Pro 3 (which unfortunately is owned by Microsoft now)
- MediaDex (which is a single-user spin-off from Cumulus)
- Extensis Portfolio (well-known, I guess)
- AlbumShaper (Open-source, but forget it)
- Retrieva (the Trial is limited to 30 minutes, so better hurry up)
- Shoebox (and it’s nothing more)
- MediaboardONE (looks good, will give it a try)
- QPict (promising shareware) Well, if you have any good alternatives as an image database or even as a competitor to Aperture and Lightroom, please feel free to leave a comment. |
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Sonntag, 4. März 2007 |
I post this in return to some search results I found in my blog´s stats. Seems like some crazy Photoshop-guys urging for the release date of Adobe´s Creative Suite CS3 that will finally run natively on the new Intel-based Macs. Besides the fact that those dissappointing benchmarks of Photoshop CS3 Beta (said to be much slower on MacPro than on Windows) are caused by Safari eating up the processors power (Apple is working on this), we all are looking forward to what the new Suite brings. It is relatively sure that Illustrator will take a huge step forward (it hasn´t been updated that much in CS2 and still lacks stability) and Golive will be replaced by Dreamweaver. Macworld UK claims to know that Adobe CS3 will be released on March 27, 2007. I don´t know how reliable this (or their) source is, but we´ll see. In the meantime you might want to watch Adobes teaser or play around with the latest Beta 2 of Photoshop CS3. UPDATE: Latest rumours say March 27 to be the date of announcement, availability however will be due late April.
UPDATE2: Macworld.com reports about an extended version of Photoshop CS3 featuring 3D abilities. |
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Dienstag, 27. Februar 2007 |
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In the past weeks Linden Lab’s “Second Life” has been hyped far beyond belief. Not a single day without articles in the press, even newspapers trying to establish papers within second life, books on “how to live and have success in second life” etc. I have to admit I’m really pissed off bugged. Gladly I recently noticed an initiative called “Shutdown Day“: It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?
That might be a good beginning. Hey folks, go out and take a deep breath! Meet your friends or relatives. Go drink a coffee, take a walk, watch the sun and the clouds, smell the flowers, listen to the sound of life. Just live, unplugged! You will actually find out that you can’t restart by pressing a button, though. So probably I’ll see you around, on March 24th, irl (in real life). PS: There’s also an article in german, if you prefer… |
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