Useful Stuff

Apple's Magic Mouse

  I bought a Magic Mouse right after they came out a few weeks ago, but Mac OS 10.6.1 didn't support it. 10.6.2, which does, was released a few days ago, so I'm getting to use the full functionality for the first time, and it's incredibly cool! The ability to scroll, zoom, etc., just by strokes on the back of the mouse (sounds like petting a puppy or something) is something that mice haven't allowed until now. And the scroll is far better than scrolling with a wheel. Rather, this is like scrolling on an iPhone, where if you give it a nudge, it keeps flowing until it slows down and stops... "scrolling with momentum." Check it out... I'm gonna buy one for everyone in my office. If anyone from my office is reading this, save yourself the time... go down to the Apple Store and pick them up so you can start enjoying them before I get back!

RAW Workflow 2

  OK, I know a little bit more about the workflow now... this is a continuation of the post on my new RAW workflow.

   A. Because DNG files carry keywords with them when saved as JPG, the next step should be to assign your keywords before creating the JPG files, otherwise you'll double your work. I'm using Photo Mechanic, which is favored by the news industry. I'm now in the process of building what they call Structured Keywords, which is a hierarchically-arranged list of keywords. This means that you can have thousands of available keywords, but only have to look at a handful at any given moment. This is an extremely cool feature, far more powerful than anything I've seen in Adobe's Lightroom. Lightroom has a much prettier interface, but it's amazingly slow compared to Photo Mechanic, and requires you to add all your images into its database, a process that could take hours, while PM just loads individual folders as needed.

   I should note that I've been contemplating building an image database for years, but it's always been such a daunting task that I've put it off for another day. But Structured Keywords eliminates the need for an outside database (with all its potential linking problems, size, etc.) and allows me to put keywords and other IPTC metadata directly into the image itself, so that the images themselves become the records in the database. And because this is an industry standard, lots of entities use the same metadata. I use Zenfolio to host my photos online, for example. Once I get keywords on my images and get them uploaded, anyone on Zenfolio can find my images if they search for a keyword I've used. I'm not sure if this also works when searching outside of Zenfolio (like with Google) or not, but suspect that it might.

   B. After keywords and other metadata are added, I will create JPG files from all of the images I want to upload or otherwise distribute. The reason for waiting until afterwards is because PhotoShop (the software I use to create the JPG file) saves the metadata to the JPG, too... so it makes for half the work.

   I'll post more info on this workflow as I develop it further.

iWeb Disaster Averted

   I thought I had a disaster on my hands this morning, but discovered a workaround. I'm about to go on the road for awhile, and needed to figure out another workaround: how to eliminate the font spacing problems Snow Leopard caused in iWeb, Pages, and Numbers. Some fonts are OK, while others are really screwed up. Hoefler Text, which is the font of all of my new websites (Original Green, New Urban Guild, and Mouzon Design) experiences tons of extra space between lines in Snow Leopard, totally screwing everything up.

   Because I didn't want to mess with the Original Green site, I created a new site with the default Site name (www.originalgreen.org/Site) and fiddled with the spacing until it was right. For the record, 14 point Hoefler Text Regular requires a line spacing of 0.72 in Snow Leopard to look just like itself at a line spacing of 1.2 in Leopard. Mission accomplished. Or so I thought.

   On a whim, I keyed in http://www.originalgreen.org, and to my horror, it went to http://www.originalgreen.org/Site, not http://www.originalgreen.org/OG, which is the real Original Green site. I did some Googling and discovered that I could delete the Site files fairly easily. They were on my iDisk at Web>Sites. When I got there, I found both the OG folder and the Site folder. I deleted the Site folder. Now, when I went to http://www.originalgreen.org, MobileMe gave me an error message. So it was still looking for Site, which was no longer there. I went to the OG site, created a dummy blog post, and posted it, hoping that would reset whatever was pointing to the now nonexistent Site. No luck. 

   After another frantic round of Googling yielded nothing, I noticed that within the iDisk>Web>Sites folder, there are two files I couldn't account for: index.html and Sites.rss. I copied them to my desktop for safekeeping and deleted them off my iDisk. I made a minor change to the dummy blog post on the OG site, published it, and everything's fine!!

Typepad's iPhone App Problem

  I love being able to blog from my iPhone, but Typepad's App has a fatal flaw. Specifically, it's a flaw that's fatal to post after post. Here's what happens: if at any point in the process of writing a post you are interrupted, you lose all your work. Got a phone call? Hang up and your post is gone. Gotta verify something on the web? Tough luck. Going to Safari wipes the post clean. And now I discover that Typepad has a nice new mobile device interface on its web browser, which lets you go back and forth with other Apps. So why should I ever use the Typepad App again if they don't fix it?

   Here's a feature request... Now that the iPhone does cut and paste, this would be easy: why not allow the creation of hyperlinks, like in the full-size version?

Technorati - Finally Claimed My Blogs!

   I finally got both of my blogs listed on Technorati! If you don't know already, Technorati is supposedly the biggest blog rating service out there. Creating an account was easy enough, but claiming my two blogs (Useful Stuff, which you're reading, and the Original Green Blog) was almost impossible. I tried probably a dozen times over the past six months to claim the blogs, but to no avail. Something always went inexplicably wrong. Today, I did the exact same stuff, and it worked. Go figure. In any case, you've gotta claim your blogs for them to start gaining authority with Technorati. Authority comes when other blogs link to you.

   Two other things...

   A.    Depending on which blog software you use, you may need to "ping" Technorati whenever you do a new blog post. Typepad supposedly pings Technorati automatically, but Technorati was about 50 days behind on the Useful Stuff blog... but when I pinged it, it brought it up to the minute. iWeb makes no pretenses about pinging, so you've gotta do that yourself. Either way, ping to be safe.

   B.    When you do a blog post, fave it on Technorati. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it's gotta help.

Snow Leopard & Suitcase Font Problems

I installed Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard a few days after it came out. At first, everything seemed fine, but I've been noticing some really weird font issues. I thought it was because Suitcase, my font management utility, wasn't yet compatible with Snow Leopard. But when I checked early this morning, Extensis had posted a Suitcase Fusion 2 update.

   So I downloaded and installed it... and things really got weird. Lots of fonts weren't available at all, or looked different than they should. I have a presentation at 9 this morning, so I finally decided to try just ditching Suitcase entirely and installing the necessary fonts right into my System Library. That helped, but while all the essential fonts (I didn't check them all) are now showing up, some of them are spacing much differently than before, which really throws stuff off. Here's one example... the first image is what it should look like, and the second image is what it looks like after ditching Suitcase entirely and doing what I've outlined above:

 

   Obviously, this doesn't work. And this is one slide of thousands in my library of presentations. So for this morning, I'll do the presentation on a machine without Snow Leopard. But if this can't get resolved without me having to go back and modify all of my existing documents, then I'm seriously considering ditching Snow Leopard. Typography is extremely important!

iWeb site verification on Google Webmaster Tools

  This is important, but it looks impossible at first. You can add your site easily enough, but when you try to verify, it tells you to put a code in the HTML of the site. As you probably know, iWeb saves you from having to know about HTML, but the downside is that it's all locked up where you can't easily get to it. So it seems impossible.

   There is another option, however. When you click "Verify" there's a pull-down menu that says "Meta tag." Change it to "HTML file." It'll say "Create the HTML verification file specified below and upload it to http://www.originalgreen.org." Oops, how do I do that? Sounds like more HTML gobbledygook that I can't get to, right? But what I did was copied the verification file name (google48d2351489d13ac8.html, for example) and went to my Original Green file in iWeb.

   Just adding a page with that name wouldn't do, because if you're hosting on MobileMe, then it adds your domain designation before any page name. So if I tried to add a page named google48d2351489d13ac8.html, then it would come out as http://www.originalgreen.org/OG/google48d2351489d13ac8.html rather than the http://www.originalgreen.org/google48d2351489d13ac8.html that Google is looking for... because the http://www.originalgreen.org forwards to web.me.com, which then sends it to your iWeb site, which has to have a name in your domain file. In my case, I use OG for the Original Green site, NUG for the New Urban Guild, MDZ for Mouzon Design, etc.

   So here's what you do: In iWeb, click on File:New Site. Click on the site in the page panel on the left side of the window... it'll take you to the Site Publishing Settings page. Paste your code (google48d2351489d13ac8.html, in my case) into the Site Name box. Publish the site. Then go back to the Google Webmaster Tools browser window and click verify. After the site is verified, you can remove the gobbledygook site from iWeb. That's all there is to it! Takes all of three minutes once you figure out what to do.

iApp

  I have several great ideas for iPhone Apps, but can't do anything about it, because I'm not a programmer, nor do I have time or want to become one. That's exactly how I feel about building websites... I don't have the time to become an expert. But Apple's iWeb solved that problem by being so simple and intuitive that anyone can do it. I built the Original Green site, and am currently building Mouzon Design and the New Urban Guild, and will build the Guild Foundation site before long.

   Apple did all this by harnessing a technology they did not create (the internet.) How much easier should it be for them to build an "App-making tool for the rest of us?" After all, they invented the iPhone and iPhone Apps. This ought to be a piece of cake. "iApp," as I'm calling the App-making software, could take many clues from iWeb... the task at hand it fairly similar in these regards:

A.    Both take complex underlying technologies (HTML for iWeb and whatever language Apps are written in for iApp) and attach a simple user interface that does not require the user to know anything about the underlying technologies.

B.    Both iWeb and iApp allow the user to create an end user interface using image- and text-manipulation techniques that everyone is familiar with.

   How about it, Apple? Interested?

Image Management Breakthrough

Some photo experts may know this already, but this is a seriously big deal for me, liable to save countless hours and also make my work more secure. Here's what's up:

   I'm now beginning to load my photo libraries onto Zenfolio, but massive numbers of images are almost useless to anyone except me if they're not searchable. I've thought about building a database in FileMaker or some other program, but it would be massive, and any proprietary database would have other problems, too. Recently, while working on the Original Green Blog, I've been learning about Tags, and how to make a "tag cloud." This afternoon, it occurred to me: what would happen if I could just tag my photos on Zenfolio? I did some checking, and sure enough, they have a feature called Keywords that allows you to apply tags, or keywords, to each photo.

   Great progress, but there were problems. First, I could be tagging for years... and what if Zenfolio goes out of business? All my work would go with it. Too big a risk. And then it occurred to me... when you click Get Info on an image file on a Mac, there's several pieces of info that come up concerning the photo (image size, date shot, exposure time, focal length, etc.) And then I got to wondering if there might be a place in all this data to store keywords? So I started Googling... and hit the jackpot! There's an organization called the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) that developed the standard for all that photo data... and yes, they do have a field for Keywords! An a lot of other really cool stuff, too. So that solved the problem of where to put the data... just attach it to the photo itself, rather than using any type of proprietary database software.

   But there were other problems... how do you attach all that info in an efficient manner? Keying it all in one image at a time would take just short of forever... which means it would be too daunting to ever tackle. So I started Googling again. At first, I ran across a lot of blog posts saying that there was no good IPTC metadata editor for the Mac. But I kept digging and finally found Photo Mechanic. I've downloaded a trial version, but from what I can tell in the past hour of playing with it, it gives you access to the full range of IPTC metadata for each image... and it allows batch processing! That means I can just click on the thumbnails of the photos I want, then apply the keywords to all of the selected images. HUGE time-saver.

   One last piece of the puzzle: getting that info on the web. I also looked at Flickr (once I knew what I was looking for) and from what I could find, it appears that Flickr doesn't have a good way of extracting the IPTC keywords. But Zenfolio (who I'm already hosting with) appears to do it automatically!

   I can't describe how exciting this is... I've worked for years to figure out a way to make the image information easily accessible and durable... and the method was embedded in the images all along! Makes me wonder how many other cool things are sitting right under our noses...

Saturday Updates

I have my MacBook Pro set up to check for updates once a week, on Saturday morning. It's been so long since I did it I hope I'm telling it right, but if I recall correctly, all you have to do is to click "Check Now" on a Saturday morning, then make sure it's set to do it once a week. Why? Because in the rare instances when a software update breaks something else, it's not on a workday where it would disrupt things too badly. Also, I'm more likely to be home on weekends where I can get to my main Time Machine backups.