Archive for June, 2005

I am totally digging the Digital Rebel XT. It is a hell of a lot of fun. As previously mentioned, Derrick’s Digital Photography Pocket Guide has been tremendously helpful in getting me over the first-time-SLR-confusion hump.

I also picked up a Canon Pixma iP6000D printer. The print quality is beautiful and the consumables are reasonably priced (though still quite the “first hit is free” business model). It will be interesting to see how the ink holds up over time. Epson’s ink seems to be the most stable. Lexmark’s ink was pathetic; images would fade to yellow in only a month or so.

Canon’s print drivers for Mac OS X are surprisingly good, it seems. It gives the user quite a bit of control over print quality, media type, and other parameters. As well, iPhoto has proven to be totally rock solid at handling and printing the images from the camera. There are any number of features I would love to see in iPhoto, but that it “just works” and, via Frasier Spear’s FlickrExport, integrates seamlessly with Flickr makes up for the handful of rough edges. Also, being able to order prints and have them sent directly to family members makes for a wonderful source of personal gifts.

Now, as far as the rest of the software that came with the Camera, it pretty much defines The Suck. Seriously. Worst user experience ever. All of the applications have totally weird-ass one off user interfaces that do not follow any standard guidelines. Worse, in all cases they are specifically optimized around an unworkable approach to a workflow.

Example: When you launch “Easy-PhotoPrint”, it displays an iTunes like interface only with the top level volumes on your computer where the playlists would be. If you want to print a photo, you are expected to start at that level and navigate down to wherever the bloody hell your photos are — deep in iPhoto’s world, in my case — by toggling the stupid little disclosure triangles. And, no, this flaming piece of UI does not accept drag and drop.

Given that atrocity, I have no idea what “Easy-PhotoPrint” even does. I couldn’t get past the atrocity of the initial UI to find out.

The “Digital Photo Professional” software is equally as painful to use. I did tolerate the pain long enough to process some images, given that it appears to be the only software provided with the camera that can process RAW images. A totally broken app, though. If you crop an image, there is no way to actually see the frickin’ crop in the work area. You effectively end up stacking up a series of “effects” that are then applied when you “export” the image. This makes it really difficult to tell exactly what is going to be exported.

Canon also provides something called “PhotoStitch” that allows one to stitch together a series of photos into a larger shot, including a QTVR “movie”. It works, but is also amazingly painful. For example, if it decides that you have images that are out of order or overlap too much, the software happily pops up a dialog box informing you that there are too many pictures or it wraps too far or it is being dense. The dialog is totally ambiguous and, far worse, the stupid software doesn’t actually indicate which pictures or pictures are in err. Instead, it tells you to “remove pictures that are unnecessary”. I’m sorry, I have 60 bloody pictures in the damned panorama and I could really use a damned pointer or two. Especially since the software already figured out what was wrong. Sheesh. Dumbasses.

“PhotoStitch” will also happily tell you that it looked at every photo and decided some photos have a different focal length than others and, therefore, it isn’t going to bother trying to stitch anything together. Of course, the stupid POS software doesn’t actually allow you to see the focal length anywhere. Again, the helpful “remove pictures that are unnecessary” message.

About the only thing going for it is that the stitching algorithm is actually pretty good and the software doesn’t crash. More than can be said for the software I had previously used.

So. Canon camera good. Apple good. Canon printer good. Canon image software pathetically awful, but — at least — it works if you manage to keep from spewing on your keyboard in disgust at the UI/UE.

As a kid, I had a stamp collection. As a computer professional mostly dealing with data management, I have always been interested in how the USPS can route so many bits of mail so quickly for such a relatively low cost. As a result, news from the Postal front usually piques my interest.

Endicia released PictureItPostage for Mac OS X Tiger. It is a little (2.1MB) Cocoa & Quartz Composer app that leverages your iPhoto library to enable the creation of custom postage stamps. You can then buy sheets of said stamps from Endicia to splat on your various paper envelopes.

It is a neat little application. Given the 50 cent/stamp premium, I doubt I’ll use the service for anything but the rare special occasion.

I finally took the plunge and bought a new camera to replace the Sony F505 I have been using for the last 5 years. Upon the recommendation of several folks a hell of a lot more experienced & talented at photography than I am, I picked up a Canon Digital Rebel XT with the 17-85mm lens kit.

Now, the Canon certainly does the point-and-shoot mode of operation extremely well. Much better results than the F505. Certainly, this is not a criticism of the F505 as much as an indication as to how much digital photography technology has changed in the last five years and that the Rebel XT is aimed at a different market than the F### series.

The photo included in this post is my first attempt at actually taking a shot based on consciously hacking the various settings to achieve the desired composition. That is, trying to deal with the potential photospace that results from futzing with things like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, etc…

Wow. Quite the change. Boy Howdy, do I have a lot to learn! I have no idea what I’m doing yet. Well, that isn’t quite true. I do have Derrick Story’s incredibly useful Digital Photography Pocket Guide. It has definitely given me a leg up, but I’m still a total newbie.

Ronald ported PyObjC to the Intel based Mac OS X environment last night. All of the unit tests pass except for the mach_inject related tests.

It took about 2 hours to do so. Not bad for having to port a nasty bit of assembly that constructs stack frames on the fly.

Nice.

The Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference starts, effectively, tonight. At least, badging will be open this evening and there are a series of special events tomorrow.

I’m heading to San Francisco in a few hours to settle in to my hotel room for the week. I am speaking several times throughout the week and am involved in a bunch of other sessions and events. It will be quite the show. Tiger is simply jam packed with cool new APIs for developers to leverage and being able to focus a developer conference on leveraging production quality APIs will be a welcome change!

The festivities begin this evening with a sojourn to Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant.

I have been around technology long enough to fully expect that integration between random technologies just isn’t going to work right. So, whenever something does “just work”, I’m generally pretty surprised. Of course, I have been using NeXT related technologies for long enough that my expectation are unnaturally high, certainly.

I have been avoiding owning a cell phone for a long, long time. Hate the things.

But, life has taken a turn where a cell phone would be helpful.

So, off to the Cingular store around the corner to pick up something. I grabbed a Motorola V551 GSM phone. It was the cheapest bluetooth enabled phone available. Given that they have a 30 day no penalties, I figured I could trade to something that does work with Mac OS X Tiger if this one didn’t (having done nearly zero prior research).

Obtaining the phone was about as painless as any contractual agreement that requires a financial anal probe can be. Why the hell the phone company needs to know my SSN and driver’s license # is lost upon me.

Without cracking the manual, I tried syncing the phone with Mac OS X’s calendar and address book.

It just worked. Seamlessly. The hardest part was figuring out how to turn on bluetooth in the phone’s twisty little maze of menus, all slightly different.

Not only that, but BlueTooth File Exchange (including w/Tiger) worked just fine. I was able to grab the really low res grainy digital photos off of the phone without a problem.

Unfortunately, it looks like Salling Clicker does not support the v551.