Archive for May 2002

29 May 2002

Harvard Square.

Cape Cod.

IMing in the car.

Harvard Square, in the rain.

13 May 2002

For P&GFS.

Going to sleep early has always been hard for me. I’ve never been able to give up on the possibility that the day has more to offer.

11 May 2002

10 May 2002

“Muy pronto Starbucks,” Madrid.

9 May 2002

My dear friend Jacob confronted me about my motivation for that whole Starbucks thing, so I started on a chart to explain where I was coming from. And then of course the apathy and self-loathing set in, so I never finished. Here’s the partial causality graph.

A few weeks ago, after many months of fruitless searching for a Linux- or even Windows-based video editing tool that doesn’t have a Stone Age interface and that allows you to export to something other than fucking Microsoft Media Format, I had a near-religious experience with iMovie and decided to buy a Mac. Another in a long line of carefully-considered personal financial decisions.

Since then, besides trying to learn how to take video instead of stills (it turns out that you need to find subjects that not only look cool, but that move as well), I’ve been making an effort to migrate all my photography stuff over to the G4. See, Macs are supposed to be this uber-cool-digital-lifestyle-hub thing: a compelling vision. For months, I’d been using Nautilus to manage my pictures, and it worked out amazingly well, but I figured, hey, Apple is all about digital content management. Let’s give it a shot.

Photo management in Nautilus. (1280×1024)

As it turns out, iPhoto loses badly in several important categories. I love Apple — OS X is a thing of real beauty — but they do sometimes overemphasize learnability instead of usability. Like most Mac applications, iPhoto is very simple and easy to learn to use, but once you get comfortable with it, you find that it’s just not that efficient a tool. Besides having horrible keynavigation, it simply isn’t scalable. If your imageset is larger than 1,000 pictures, iPhoto is about as responsive as a fat man on a hot day after a full meal. For me, this is a total showstopper, since I have about 8,000 images and it’s way too unwieldy to split them up into different photo libraries.

Perhaps worst of all, iPhoto’s model is to make an internal copy of each of your photos, using its own directory structure and filenames. So you’ve got to mold all your non-iPhoto processes around the way iPhoto works, meaning that I would have to tweak my whole crappy collection of photo-managemenet/publishing scripts. Or write AppleScript versions, or something.

(It turned out to be a regular bar.)

Anyway, so my digital universe has been in chaos for the last month or so, and I’ve been in the market for a nice application for OS X. Today,
Peter pointed me at “iView MediaPro,” a photo management tool for the Macintosh whose name contrives to combine the early ’80s penchant for StudlyCaps (VisiCalc, WordPerfect, SuperTab, etc.) with the late ’90s “iProduct” trend. It also comes off as a completely arbitrary string of disconnected word units: is it iView MediaPro or iMedia ProView?

Anyway, today I imported my entire set of photos into it, and I have to say, it runs like a pro (an iPro MediaView, to be precise). The user interface leaves some things to be desired — setting keywords on N photos at once is a bit of a pain — but it’s speedy as hell, doesn’t touch the source files, and does almost everything I want it to do. So, for now, it looks pretty good. If anyone has any other recommendations, I’m all ears (a horrifying image, really).

Oh, and to be clear: the Starbucks jamming project is definitely still on.

8 May 2002

On the BU bridge.

This weekend we’re going to hang out at Starbucks.