What’s really behind a Steve Jobs keynote
Wednesday, January 18th, 2006I imagine most of us could imagine most of these things, but I’ve never seen it articulated so well. See what I mean…
So I received iLife…
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
My thoughts on Apple’s venerable suite “…for the rest of your life” will be coming as the package arrived in the mail today. Without some decent reviews out yet, I’m looking to post my thoughts on it ASAP.
That being said, the installer initially couldn’t install because it needs 7.3GB of free space. Wha??? So I was only able to install iPhoto and iWeb until I clear some more space off my Powerbook to an external hard drive.
Stay tuned…
Google Earth is officially released for Mac!!
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006After a long, long wait, we Mac users can rejoice in the beauty that is Google Earth. Download it here.
Way to go Ars!
Sunday, December 18th, 2005For those not following any of the recent negative buzz surrounding Apple’s Aperture 1.0, you should start by scouring the web for most of the reviews that have labeled it as phenomenal and a ‘must-have’, then read the initial review at Ars Technica. The latter, while having been demonized as an Aperture bash-fest or propoganda spewed by a newly discovered MS gopher, is actually a VERY GOOD review of Aperture and brings to light some highly overlooked yet nearly showstopping issues with the software.
I’d rather you read the original review and then the followup review which addresses some user questions, than blockquote salient parts of it here. The point of my post here is to give kudos to Dave Girard for sticking to his guns on the issue. I adore Apple as much as the next Mac-head but the very discernible difference between the RAW Importer of Adobe Photoshop and Aperture should be showstopping for anyone who takes their digital photography professionally or as serious as such. I would think that the three photographers mentioned on the Aperture minisite in the Profiles section would rethink their head-first commitment to Aperture having learned of this serious flaw.
Having vented all that, I still love Aperture and I want to love it more. I’m confident that Apple would address this issue, just like they dealt with the fact that iPhoto 1 couldn’t handle more than 25 images before slowing to a crawl. I’m not looking to bash Apple, but I’m certainly looking to praise Ars Technica which has had a number of really well-executed reviews in the past (too many to link to). This is the kind of inspection that I have come to expect hope from MacWorld magazine but have been seriously disappointed from a predominant percentage of write-ups. Many, feel like fluff pieces that are little more than regurgiations of press releases and little more. The saving grace are usually the well-done hardware reviews, Game-Room articles, and the David Pogue banter (Breen is in there too).
I’m not off to bash MacWorld, but it hasn’t merited it’s dollar-value as much recently. This may have been spurred by the lack of a good hard drive reviews, but then again, my recent experience of data-loss and recovery has greatly scewed my opinion that ultimately the prime criteria for hard drive reviews should be reliability. There will always be echos of people who don’t do enough backups, but the problem of backups breaking is more commonplace than one would think and it comes down to how well a drive will work when you really need it to.
Having vented all that now, I’ve some Filemaker stuff to write about, off to that!
iTunes for your fonts…
Thursday, December 1st, 2005
Yeah, that’s what the folks are saying over at Creativebits, and with good reason. I find Apple’s own FontBook to be great, just horribly sluggish especially when dealing with a large number of fonts as most designers have. But LinoType’s FontExplorer seems to be changing everything. This is laden with several features, which I won’t really get into here, but you can read more at this link.
Most notably, it’s fast, it works, and it’s free. I’ve used it for a couple of weeks and it couldn’t be performing any better.
Interview feature over at FileMaker Addict!
Thursday, November 24th, 2005
I’m absolutely delighted to announce the publishing of an interview of myself with Tim Dietrich who recently started publishing the FileMaker Addict blog (who doesn’t love to hear themselves talk?). Some of you may recognize Tim’s name as I have mentioned this blog before.
My interview notwithstanding, I think Tim has a great idea and has some great potential to expand on interesting FileMaker facts as well as interesting people-that-use-FileMaker facts. The more I dive into FileMaker, the more I’m delighted to meet fellow enthusiasts, addicts, and developers who hold FileMaker in the same regard as myself. At the very least, add FileMakerAddict to your blogroll and stay tuned, I’m sure you won’t regret it.
Without further adieu, the interview can be found here!
FileMaker Tooltips As Data Delivery Vehicle?
Thursday, October 20th, 2005
I’ve always liked tooltips, the ingenious little popups that fade in and out of existence when users place their mouse cursor over certain hotspots on the screen. Generally, they give you more information about a link or describe the purpose of an obscure icon. And recently, in reading an interview with Shaun Inman (of Mint-fame) in the free Treehouse PDF, I noted that the beta-testers for his product Mint noted that data should not be presented to the users in the form of tooltips. I can understand this point of view but then again, tooltips can be an invaluable resource in the GUI toolbox for saving space, so long as they are not used exclusively for delivering the information they highlight.
I’m developing the next version of my bread-and-butter FileMaker solution (tooltip image above) and I’ve implemented a tooltip feature that provides deeper insight into real-time statistics. I like it and it works well. I think my users will like it as much as I have so far and response has been positive thus far.
Along comes Apple with their new digital photo workflow app Aperture (which rocks btw, but more on that in a subsequent post) and there in Apple’s own nifty new app is the feature that customizable tooltips instantly display EXIF and meta data for the image currently being viewed - see http://www.apple.com/aperture/quicktours/ for more info.
Thus my question comes back to how to use tooltips well? One could simply put icons and have the tooltips offer the descriptive purpose of the button, but given that a lot of processing ability is available to FileMaker developers for tooltips, using the calculation engine, it’s possible we are missing a golden opportunity by not exploring the larger options possible with customizable tooltips. How’s that for run-on sentences! I’m also wondering if these tooltips translate when a database is web-published i.e. if FileMaker will automatically translate them into HTML TITLE attributes, ALT attributes, or some JavaScript blend of code?
What are some of your thoughts on the new tooltips feature available to FileMaker users?