Category Archives: Photography

Hardware of the Year

Hardware

Good and bad.

The Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens for my Panasonic G1 is a joy to use, small, light and sharp. Add in my custom distortion correction profiles and you have a cracker of an ultra-wide zoom at a very reasonable price.

After a poor start with the original AppleTV (another Apple Toaster design, running dangerously hot) the second generation AppleTV gets it right and is a tremendous tool for showing your photographs on any big screen TV you connect it to. At $99, with included remote, it’s a bargain.

And finally, if you crave screen area as much as I do, try the Newer Technology USB to DVI adapter which allows you to add up to four displays to your OS X computer. It doesn’t support Quartz rendering (meaning some of the latest screen savers default to black) and does not permit screenshots, but other than that it’s proving to be a powerful addition to my desktop HackPro, which now sports no fewer than three displays.

But it would be disingenuous to write a piece like this without mentioning two genuine stinkers.

One is, by a considerable margin, the worst piece of hardware I have used in a decade, the Kindle. Poorly made, designed by a committee seemingly totally ignorant of the word ‘ergonomics’ and faulty in just about every way imaginable. It simply defies understanding why this piece of garbage sells at all. Sure, you save a few dollars compared to an iPad but then you could save more by not buying rubbish in the first place.

And finally, let’s not forget the Fruit Company which has made some of the least reliable hardware in the history of computing. Yes, that would be Apple. My most heavily used OS X machine is my HackPro simply because I cannot risk making my living on an Apple desktop. My MacBook Air is too new to permit any quality judgements, though the iPad with its cool running A4 CPU augurs well. But I have such an awful history with Apple’s awful hardware that I’m not about to say anything good about the reliability of the company’s computers; I use Macs rather than PCs primarily because of the robust OS and applications they run. Check back here one year hence to see if the iPad and MBA finally start bringing me around on the issue of reliability and heat management.


The best reason to use Apple’s awful hardware.

Software of the Year

Software

Some nice things.

You can see which software I wrote about in 2010 by clicking the ‘photography’ drop down menu below. These are all things I have used and in all cases continue to use as a photographer.

While no one could accuse it of being user friendly, Adobe’s free Lens Profile Creator does a fine job of creating distortion and chromatic aberration correction profiles for those lenses where profiles are not built into Photoshop or Lightroom 3. I created my own profiles for the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens I use on the Panaasonic G1 and they work well – you can download them by clicking the aforementioned link. These integrate nicely into Lightroom 3 as a point-and-click option in the Develop module.

The very thought of running Windows on any of my Macs frankly disgusts me (after all these years XP still has the most godawful fonts in existence not to mention it’s propensity to constantly lock-up), but on those mercifully rare occasions where there is no choice, such as certain financial tools I use which do not come in a Mac flavor, I have found Oracle’s Virtual Box robust, well supported and, best of all, free. The excrescence that is Windows XP runs in its own little jail or window, free to soil its own underwear without trashing the rest of my Macs’ disks.

On those occasion I want to access my desktop HackPro from a remote location, all I need is an iPad and LogMeIn Ignition, a totally bug free and dead reliable remote client. Not cheap at $29.99 as iPad apps go, but use it just once when you absolutely need to and it has paid for itself.

Finally, last year I named NetNewsWire Software of the Year, as I find it to be the best desktop RSS feed reader out there. For the iPad I have replaced NNW with Reeder months ago and would not go back. The $4.99 Reeder app understands the touch interface well and is a superior product. The back end is provided by the Vampire Squid of the Internet, Google’s reader. I’ll switch as soon as I find a free alternative. Be sure to visit Reeder’s web site – a masterpiece of minimalism and function, like the app. Apple should buy these folks and integrate Reeder into Snow Leopard as its designs accords with much of the thinking of Steve Jobs and Jon Ive in Cupertino.

A couple of Reeder screenshots on the iPad.

TotalFinder

Software

Finally a proper Finder.

Update October 14, 2015:

The new security features in OS X El Capitan require a hack to keep Total Finder working, a hack which compromises security. This from the developer:

So for all practical purposes this great app is dead. RIP – you will be missed.

* * * * *

Ask any Mac user what the single worst app which comes with every Mac is and the chances are pretty good that the answer will be ‘The Finder’. ‘The Loser’ would be more like it, if you ask me.

Well, the folks at BinaryAge have fixed much of what ails the stock Finder in TotalFinder, adding the ability to use tabs and multi finder windows, allowing the drag and drop of files across directories/volumes/drives. You can also use cut-and-paste rather than Finder’s copy-and-paste, precluding the need to delete the source file if you really want to move it. The multi finder window shown below is toggled with Command-U.

TotalFinder in dual window mode, with tabs shown.

TotalFinder integrates into Finder but is also available as a separate app, meaning it’s visible in HimmelBar which I use to avoid having on screen icons for applications. So now you can jump into finder rather than Command-Tab’bing or mousing to your on screen app display.

TotalFinder is visible in HimmelBar

MacLampsX you ask? It’s a neat seasonal app which frames your display with Christmas lamps! X-Mas tree? More of the same. 0SEx? No, not what you think. It’s a DVD ripping app. And the little printer icon in the menu bar to the right of the Dropbox icon is Fingerprint which allows my iPad and iPhone to print to any Bonjour printer on the network.

I cannot detect any performance changes on my desktop Mac. Highly recommended for anyone who uses the Finder a lot.

Computer of the year – 2010

iPad

No surprises here.

A year ago – it seems like a million years ago – I named the MSI Wind netbook the Computer of the Year.

Further, a few days later I wrote of the yet to be announced ‘iSlate’:

Such was my confidence in the iPad, finally released three months later in early April, 2010, that I bought a couple on the opening day and have since given away another half dozen to friends as gifts.

By this time next year another 50 million or so users will get the message but we early adopters have benefitted mightily from the unfair advantage this gadget confers.

So in nine brief months the iPad has obsoleted the netbook and created a whole new way of creating and consuming information, opening up sales to a demographic which would never touch a ‘computer’. Part of the device’s magic is that it really does not bear much resemblance to what we think a computer should look like. And you can take it with you, it weighs little and all you need is an internet – or maybe cell – connection to access the world.

So in a year which was decidedly blah for new gadgets, the iPad reigns supreme, easily being this consumer’s Computer of the Year for lack of any credible competition.

Computer of the year – 2010.

Four displays

Displays

When you are desperate for screen space.

A while back I wrote about using the Air Display Mac application which permits use of the iPad as an external display. After adding my third Dell 2209WA monitor to my desktop rig, I revisited Air Display to see if it still functions, this time as a fourth monitor.

It does!

The iPad is being used as a fourth monitor.

Sure, cursor response on the iPad is a tad jerky as the cursor’s data stream is being sent over the air, but it’s more than acceptable as a peripheral for displaying a screen which rarely needs mouse action, like a live stock price chart, for example.

Here’s how I have System Preferences->Displays->Arrangement set up:

The rarely accessed screen is pushed out to the left.

Note that the blue screen area with the white menu bar is aligned at the base, not at the top – this makes sure straight lines remain straight, rather than stepped, as you mouse across. Also, by relegating the iPad display to the left or right you avoid having to access the jerky iPad screen’s base if that’s where you keep your application icons. I have mine set to hide except in the case of a mouseover, which is why they are not visible in the photograph above.