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Photon 1.1 Released
Photon, the speedy digital photo workflow app and labor of love from Mike Bernardo's Green Volcano Software, has been updated to v1.1. Photon differs from Aperture, Photoshop, and the like by focusing on the front end of the photography workflow. Importing RAW images from DSLRs is fast, and Photon's stacking feature simplifies sorting and culling your photos. The update includes: An overhauled caching engine to improve import speed and responsiveness A "Discards" stack for unwanted image files that provides a direct route to Trash A "File stack" feature for moving existing files to a new spot on your hard drive(s) Improved memory card download performance The ability to save and recall stacks when re-launching the app. The update is free to registered Photon users, or you can buy Photon for $69 (Universal Binary).Thanks to Mike B. for the tip!
Photos from the PlayStation Day 2008 show floor
Click for higher resolution PlayStation Day may have occurred a few days ago now, but our coverage has only just ended. From what we heard David Reeves say during the keynote speech, PlayStation Day will be an annual event so we look forward to doing it all again next year. Until then, you can enjoy a gallery of photographs taken from the show floor. Sadly we weren't allowed to take photos of Resistance 2 and we literally couldn't get close enough to photograph Killzone 2. There's still plenty to see, however, so go ahead and take a peek.Be sure to check the list of PlayStation Day posts after the break in case you've missed something. Let us know what you thought of the event, and our coverage, in the comments below.%Gallery-22442%
Even more supposed 3G iPhone shots
Engadget continues to do their part in fueling the fire of rumors that we'll see a second edition of the iPhone this summer. First they supposedly touched it themselves, then they nabbed some shape and spec hints, and now they've got yet another set of "leaked" photos, from a Chinese phone forum.As usual, we have no idea if this is the real thing, a prototype, or just a little Photoshop fakery. The most obvious difference between what Engadget saw first and what's posted here is the color on the back, but then again, why wouldn't Apple release iPhones in different colors? They've certainly done that with iPods.None of this guarantees anything, but I will say that if I was shopping for an iPhone, the AT&T memo would be enough for me to hold off on a purchase until mid-June at least. There is an iPhone update storm coming, and the thunder and lightning seem to be getting closer together.
iPhone is most popular camera phone on Flickr
I'm often impressed by the photos I get out of my little iPhone. It's not a pro-level DSLR for sure, but for quick, off-the-cuff snapshots, it does a very good job.I'm not alone in my belief. Computerworld's analysis of current Flickr Data shows that the iPhone is their most popular camera phone. Part of that is the novelty of the iPhone, undoubtedly. Owners continue to relish any excuse to whip them out.The other is ease of posting a photo to Flickr. Once you've added your special Flickr email address to your contact list, sharing a photo is a snap. Tap it once, tap "Email photo," enter the first few letters of your Flickr email address and hit Send. Done.While we're on the subject, I'll offer my tip for taking decent iPhone photos. Unlike nearly every other camera ever made, the iPhone exposes an image when the "shutter button" is released, not depressed. With that in mind, here's the three step process I follow Press and hold the "shutter button" Compose the shot Release The tendency is to compose the shot and then tap the button, often resulting in blur. Try this method and watch the results.[Via Ars Technica]
Mac 101: Zoom and pan images in Quick Look
Is your laptop not among those that can do Multi-touch? Don't feel badly, you can replicate those great features!Well, kind of. First, open an image with Quick Look. Next, hold down the Option key while performing a two-finger scroll. The image zooms in and out! Finally, let go of the Option key but keep your fingers in place on your trackpad. The cursor turns into a four-point directional, and then you can pan the image within the Quick Look window.This also works with a mouse and scrollwheel.Thanks, Max!
Subtle new feature in iPhoto 7.1.2: "Actual Size" for gallery downloads
In the transition from iLife '06 to '08, one of the shifts in iPhoto functionality was the deprecation of photocasts in favor of .Mac web galleries. Sure, your friends and family can still subscribe to an RSS feed of your pictures (and what kind of loving grandparent doesn't want a newsfeed full of Halloween costumes and messy-breakfast snapshots?), but despite the enhanced gallery views in '08, some key features didn't roll forward -- in particular, while '06 photocasts could include original size, full-res picture files for downloaders, '08 web galleries downsized and/or recompressed most photos. Some may not have noticed the degradation in quality, but for the photo purists, including my colleague Jeff L., this was not an improvement. Today Jeff came by my desk practically jumping for joy. Tucked away in yesterday's iPhoto update to 7.1.2, where you'd least expect it, is a slender button on the web gallery dialog box: "Show Advanced," and we all know that means good things for Jeff and his poor pictures. There are two new options in the Advanced section: a checkbox to hide the title of the gallery on your .Mac galleries page (handy for those who have a photography 'hobby,' nudge nudge say no more), and a choice between optimized and actual-size photos for downloading. Huzzah! If you've got a web gallery that could benefit from higher-quality download files, try the new setting and let us know your results. Thanks Jeff
Order prints of iPhone photos with the phone itself
ECCE TERRAM announced a new service this week that will allow people to order prints of photos stored on their iPhones from the phones themselves. With their Photo2lab Client, users may select a photo (both those taken with the iPhone and those transfered from iPhoto), add text and create prints, post cards and even mini photo books. You'll even be able to add an address to a post card from the iPhone's built-in contacts list.This sounds great, and ECCE TERRAM says it will be available just after the iPhone's SDK is released in February.[Via Macworld]
Seeing iPhone in non-carrier countries? We want photos!
Some critics scoff at the notion that as many as 30% of all iPhones are being used in countries without an official carrier agreement. Just from our own reader comments/reports (and dim-witted criminals) we have no problem with the plausibility of those figures. One thing is for certain, plenty of people outside the officially contracted countries have and are using iPhones. And we want pictures!Reader Jim wrote to us with this suggestion, and we think it's just great. So, here's the deal - if you live in a country where the iPhone is not officially available (or you are visiting one of those countries) and you spot someone using an iPhone, take a picture. If you are a non-carrier iPhone owner yourself, we want your pictures too! We would like to see shots that at least somewhat indicative of their geographical location -- just so we can answer any of the nay-sayers who try to claim the photos are fake.Send your pictures to photos AT tuaw.com and we'll post up a gallery of the submissions. I think it will be interesting to see how many places the iPhone has traveled, even without an official contract.Thanks Jim!
Mac Automation: holiday photos
Now that you have downed the Egg Nog and feasted on the holiday food, it's time for the worst part of Christmas ... importing and organizing all those photos. Thanks to Automator and iPhoto, this task can be extremely easy. In this how-to, I will show you how to import your photos, carefully tuck them away in a new photo album, and e-mail them to friends and family. This tutorial assumes that you are using Mac OS X Leopard, and iPhoto 08; however it may work with Tiger and iPhoto 06.
Blizz gallery highlights fun WoW Halloween costumes
Oh, Halloween -- that one time of the year when it's almost completely socially acceptable in most circles for grown men and women to dress up as goofy fantasy characters. We're not knocking cosplay or LARPing, we're just saying ... if you're gonna do it, October 31st is the best time.And a lot of World of Warcraft fans seized the day. Blizzard's Nethaera requested that fans of the game send in photographs of their WoW-themed Halloween costumes, and they responded. Now the pictures have been added to the official World of Warcraft gallery.It's a delightful collection of Warcraft geekery, but we've got to say, our favorites are the here-pictured quest NPC hats!
Pomoto 1.0.1 plays better with iPhoto
Pomoto is basically a replacement for iPhoto's .Mac web albums, designed to take your iPhoto collection and put it on the web with as little trouble as possible. Like FlickrExport (although this is a separate app, of course, not a plugin), it looks like a pretty smooth way to get all the cool stuff in iPhoto out where everyone else can see it.The latest version, 1.0.1, includes support for iPhoto 7 Smart Albums and Events, better "privatization" of private Albums, and "more robust photo loading," which I'll leave up to you to decide. Since Pomoto publishes your photos for you, it's really an app tagged into a subscription service, so it costs either $3 a month or $30 a year. If you really like the .Mac photo publishing features, but don't need all of .Mac, it's definitely worth checking out.
TGS07: Afrika still spelled wrong, beautiful as ever
It's been awhile since we last heard anything about Sony's spelling-challenged safari romp, Afrika. When it was first unveiled, the consensus was, graphically, the title looked great, but no one really knew what the point of the game was.This video will do nothing to better explain the game's gameplay, unless it involves taking voyeuristic photos of meercats and giraffes mating in their natural habitat or trying to run over endangered animals.Who knows, though, we're sure there's a huge market for that kinda thing somewhere.
Coming in iPhone 1.1.1. probably
Eagle-eyed reader Travis (thanks!) went over Engadget's photos of the O2 iPhone announced yesterday morning, and sussed out every little feature and update he saw on their iPhones that current owners don't have. We can only believe that the iPhones shown must have already been updated to 1.1.1, and that US iPhones, via Software Update, will receive these features soon. Now Playing controls everywhere! Double clicking the home screen goes to Favorites or iPod, similar to what the iPod touch can do now. The iTunes WiFi Store (well duh) Closed captioning, and the already leaked support for Video Out. New Calculator icon-- to match the iPod touch as well International keyboards Network setup with VPN support and EDGE disabling A "Carrier" menu, but your guess is as good as ours on that one. This could simply be a European thing, as their rules may not match American regulations. I really don't think AT&T would like to see Apple give the ability to unlock iPhones from their service in the next major software update. Not listed: the disabling of ringtones, and a rollback of all the open source hacks so far. Ha, I'm kidding! Ok, maybe only about 50% kidding. Otherwise, looks like a nice update.
Archos' 105 PMP gets photo blow-out
If you've been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the sleek little Archos 105 PMP to slide your sweet music and video collection into? Well, this won't technically get you any closer to ownership, but the folks over at ArchosLounge have put together an enticing selection of photos which should have fans of the media player feeling awful excited. On the spec tip, the 105 comes in red, silver, or black, features 2GB of integrated flash memory, can play WAV, WMA, PCM, MP3, and protected WMA files, yet only plays back WMV video (or so we're hearing). No definite word on when the player is due (though last mention was September), and hushed voices on the street say it will be selling for around $80 or $90.
RapidoMap: slick geocoding for free
We've previously covered quite a few different applications to geocode your photos. Geocoding or geotagging is the process of adding location information (latitude and longitude) to the EXIF metadata of your photos, so you can see where they were taken. RapidoMap is one of the newest of these tools and looks to have a couple of particularly nice features. The application integrates a browser for Yahoo Maps which is how you actually locate your photos on the globe. It has an iLife media browser that makes it easy to get your photos in, and a built-in Flickr uploader.Best of all, RapidoMap is a free download from app4mac (points off to them, however, for using an installer package).[via Macworld]
PhotoNotes, Stickies for your digital pictures
PhotoNotes is a $15 application that takes one feature of Flickr and puts it at your fingertips in OS X. As you might be aware, you can annotate photos on Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing website, in order to identify people in the picture or just add a note. PhotoNotes allows you to do this without leaving your Mac. Simply import photos into PhotoNotes (iPhoto integration would be nice) and you're ready to add notes like a madperson. PhotoNotes pulls contacts from your Address Book, so if you want to identify someone and they are in your Address Book it is just a matter of pointing and clicking. If you want to add a random text note, or identify someone not in your Address Book, PhotoNotes has you covered.Once you're done covering your pics with notes you can export the results to a webpage (see an example at the bottom of the product page) to share with the world.
iPlace: Image download helper for Safari
Considering the graphical nature of the web, I'm surprised more features and plug-ins haven't appeared to solve the problem of downloading images from sites as well as iPlace does. Operating as a SIMBL plug-in for Safari (including the 3.0 beta), iPlace allows you to specify multiple locations on your Mac for downloading images, but that's not all. It then gives you a contextual menu item when right-clicking an image or a web page that will allow you to instantly download any image to one of your specified locations, or - and here's the kicker - bring up an image downloading window that shows you each image on the page, along with your download locations provided as drag and drop wells in a sidebar on the left. Opening this window on I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, for example, brings up the long list of images you see above, all ripe for efficiently dragging and dropping wherever I want.In a word: iPlace is awesome. There are of course enhancements I would like to see, such as the ability to scale these images up and down to make it easier to view more from the page at once, but for a spankin' new product straight out the gate, this is a really handy plug-in. iPlace is provided as donationware from Tekuris.
First Look: Pixelmator private beta arrives
The day is finally here. After an introductory video back in May and a more in-depth teaser earlier this month, the Pixelmator crew have begun sending out the private beta downloads and I just took it for a spin, creating the image in this post. It is indeed a sexy app - the UI is a gorgeous translucent black, and it really does offer a lot of functionality and innovation aimed squarely at Adobe Photoshop or, perhaps more appropriately, Photoshop Elements. While Pixelmator is still very much a beta and too buggy for shop or casual work, I am able to play with most of the promised features, including snapping pics from an iSight, the iPhoto browser and all the powerful color and manipulation tools. Thankfully, Saulius and the Pixelmator crew gave me permission to write up some initial thoughts with screenshots, so check out a preliminary Pixelmator gallery I've put together of some handy features and clever details, and read on for more of my first impressions of this highly anticipated image editor.%Gallery-6000%
TUAW Tip: How to manually delete a .Mac Web Gallery
The new .Mac Web Galleries sure are pretty slick, but their dependency on iPhoto '08 can have some unfortunate side effects. When I first installed iLife '08, I moved my original iPhoto library so I could tinker around with the new version using a few pics I had lying around on my Mac. I then created a Web Gallery with these images just to see how things looked. After deeming it safe to proceed, I replaced my original library to actually begin using the new iPhoto features - the only problem is that, somehow, the .Mac Web Galleries you create seem to be library-specific. In other words: when I created a gallery with my test library and then swapped it out for my true library, the .Mac Web Gallery listing in iPhoto's sidebar was no longer there. I couldn't find any kind of web admin panel at the .Mac site for managing these galleries either, so I quickly found myself in a predicament.Fortunately, I'm not alone here, and I found this thread in the Apple Discussions forums that describes a method for deleting a gallery manually if it no longer appears in iPhoto's sidebar. The solution basically involves logging into your iDisk from the web (http://idisk.mac.com/UserName) and browsing to the directory that houses your galleries, then manually deleting it from there. For some odd reason, this folder doesn't appear in your iDisk on your Desktop like your other .Mac website files, even with hidden files turned on (I used the Show-Hide widget to quickly toggle hidden files. As far as I can tell, Apple simply doesn't sync this folder down to your Mac or give you access to it with the iDisk). The only problem I had with the solution as it is described in that forum thread is that I didn't find the _gallery folder where the forum poster said I should; instead, it's in iDisk > Web > Sites. Each gallery you have created is stored in its own directory under that folder, so you should be able to delete just the ones you want without affecting the others.[Update 2: Matt Ronge, developer of upcoming Mac OS X email client Kiwi, enlightened me in the comments with an even easier solution to this problem: simply go to iPhoto's Web Gallery pane in preferences, and simply click Check Now to cause iPhoto to check your .Mac account for any new photos. This should also cause it to catch any galleries not already listed in iPhoto's sidebar, ultimately allowing you to manage and delete them from the comforts of iPhoto.][Update: Some commenters are reporting that the _gallery folder in question does actually appear in their iDisk when viewed in the Finder. I don't know why only some of us see it, but you could be one of the lucky few.]Considering that your Sites (for the old homepage.mac.com pages) and Web folders are synchronized and fully available in your iDisk, I hope that this strange gallery behavior is simply the result of an oversight. While I understand Apple's desire to use software to manage this stuff instead of forcing users to dig around in folders, having manual access to this directory will be useful in a pinch, especially for users who, for example, buy a new Mac or need to have a sick Mac restored.
1001: A really cool Flickr client
The old adage that 'a picture is worth 1000 words' is still going nice and strong. Considering the sheer number of pictures that Flickr is hosting these days, that could be a lot of stories to sift through - why not try out a desktop app to help with all the work?1001 is a unique Flickr client from Adriaan Tijsseling, developer of the Mac version of blogging app ecto (the one with a slick new alpha version) and RSS newsreader endo. In addition to letting you upload your own photos to Flickr, I think 1001's primary appeal lies in its downloading and viewing abilities. It provides rich features for watching the stream of photos from your friends and groups, filtering the public photo stream with tags, blogging (of course) photos you like, displaying a Growl-like popup with certain photos you want to see and even using photo as your desktop wallpaper or screensaver. It's a really interesting way to interact with Flickr, and the only downside is a somewhat unique UI that might make it a little confusing to navigate 1001 your first time through. For a quick primer: 1001 allows you to pull down these photos by setting up one or more 'streams' that specify exactly what photos you want to see. You can create one stream for, say, just your friends (or even specific friends), and another for Flickr's popular Interestingness page. You can then toggle the different streams on and off depending on your mood, allowing you keep the streams from becoming a flood. Be sure to use the Streams button in 1001's toolbar, or check out the Streams menu to get started.All things considered, this really is a great app for Flickr enthusiasts or even newbies starting out. Once you get over the very brief learning curve, 1001 is a powerful app that lets you view just the Flickr photos you want and use them in other places on your Mac. But what does all this Flickr wonderfulness (hey, if Flickr can use pseudo-words, so can I) cost, you ask? Surprisingly, it's donationware, and I encourage you to show Tijsseling some appreciation if you enjoy 1001 and would like to see ist development continue.
