iPhoto 4

First of all: iPhoto 4 is a vast improvement in speed in the organize view. iPhoto 2 was virtually unusable if you had more than 100 or so photos. But other than that it's still the most half-hearted iApp in the iLife suite.

This article contains a altered version of the KeywordMgr.nib that IMHO is a big improvement. Just download it, unzip it and put it in iPhoto/Contents/Resources/English.lproj.

Things this version got right, or almost right:

• You now can delete pictures directly if your looking at them in an album by using Command-Option-Delete. Yes, finally. But there's now way of doing this via drag and drop (drag and drop to the trash just removes the picture from the album, option-drag should move them into the trash but doesn't). I even think that moving a picture to the trash should always move it to the trash and out of the library, the trash can should not be misused to just remove a photo from an album. Moreover if you use Command-Option-Delete to move a picture directly into the trash, then do undo and redo, the redo does not work.
• Rendezvous Sharing
• Smart Playlists
• Speed of the Organize View

They tried to par it up with iTunes, which is a good thing, but sadly there are many points that still need a lot of improvement:

• The main window shows a dirty close button?
• Speed and behavior of the Slideshow
  Still nice looking and ok if you only want to watch your pictures. But the added features for rating and manual movement are utterly slow and unusable. The update of the rating is slower than the picture: press right arrow, wait a second for the picture, wait another second after the picture has been shown for the rating bar to update. And this is on a PowerBook 800mhz, 1GB ram. The trash can is one way only, and again just removes pictures from an album, instead of putting the pictures into the trash (if not started from smart albums or the Library), no way of marking pictures for deletion in albums. And no way of assigning keywords in this mode. Bad move. Please iPhoto developers, have another look at Slides! where you ripped your interface, and do it right. a Slides! has the speed needed, has undoable trash movement. I use this app since I bought my iBook. It's done in Cocoa, it uses only the NSImage classes (I asked the author) and is fast,fast,fast.
• Keyword handling
  This is a major pain in the ass. Since this feature was removed from the bottom of the main window the interface is a total mess.

  

  This was nice. You had to choose if you want to filter or assign, afterwards you used the Keyword Buttons which were radio buttons and everything was fine. My mother understood what to do, everyone did. Of course iPhoto was so slow in this version that nobody really used this feature. No iPhoto is faster, actually so fast that using Keywords is great.
  
  But have a look at the interface:
  What the heck is it? Keywords that are assigend to the currently selected photos show up selected (?) in the table view. To add, remove or rename a keyword you have to select the appropriate menu item from the Keywords dropdown menu (??). Assign and Remove assign or remove the currently selected Keywords to or from the currently selected photos. "Search" filters the current album for the selected Keywords, show all removes that filtering again.
  Renaming: renaming should normally happen by option-clicking on the keyword, or clicking a second time on the keyword when it is selected. But here the nearest thing is double-clicking which filters for the keyword.
  But the main problem with this dialogue is, that the table view of keywords is used for two three different actions: Assigning and Removing, Filtering, and renaming. I'd like to see at least a checkbox in front of every keyword, that determines if this keyword is assigned to the current photo selection or not, instead of just selecting the line. Reordering of the keywords is also important, which is not possible at the moment. And the window grabs the input focus, which is really annoying when you want to categorize many photos. Going back to the context switch for assigning and searching would also be better than this. There are tons of options that could work and be good, but the current is not one of them.
  
  Here's a little improvement I made by altering the nib. Just download it, unzip it and put it in iPhoto/Contents/ Resources/English.lproj. The improvements are:
  • I put the Keywords actions for adding, removing and renaming into the standard buttons that users are familiar from Mail or System Preferences
  • I made the window resizeable (I despise nothing more than fixed size windows with content that is larger and I have to scroll all my way to the stuff. Like the MacOS 9 open dialogue. Horrible. Here I am with a big Cinema Display only to let some darn program display content on a 10 by 10 pixels basis, while it could show my whole harddisc)
  • I added titles and some structure
  • I added a little verboseness to the Assign and Remove Buttons, so normal people get what they are doing.
  • I renamed "Search" to "Filter" because I think it was misleading, and I switched positions, cause you only need show all after you filtered once
  Nevertheless, it still needs a lot of improvement. But the version I came up with is the least I would have expected from Apple.
  
• Being more like iTunes
  by this I mean that iPhoto should provide a better and more prominent interface for keywords and filtering. On top of the things I already mentioned iPhoto should store the metainformation in the jpeg somewhere in the EXIF part, like iTunes does with the ID3 Tags. Information like camera model, flash, originated date, digitized date, size, ... should be displayable and sortable in a kind of list view. It should provide the Information about the Keywords and the rating in the Info dialogue, like iTunes does. There should be a browse interface like in iTunes (tabs could be Year, Rating, Keyword). Albums should open in a new window when you doubleclick them. You should be able to rate a Photo by directly clicking on the stars. You should be able to alter the title of a photo by option-clicking in the organize view.

Why do I write in such a great length about iPhoto? Because I demand excellent or infamous products from Apple when they bundle it with their computers. With excellent products everything is fine, the consumers are happy. With infamous products some third party will jump on the subject and deliver something that does the job right. But with products like iPhoto was, and in some respect even in version 4.0 still is, there is now real competitor. It simply does not make sense for someone to try to do this. You can't provide the iLife integration and no matter what you will be doing, the next version of iPhoto will come and repair some of the stuff you solved with your product. I myself actually thought about doing a nice, fast and simple Photo Library, that would take advantage of the things ridchard k. did with Slides! and put some nice categorization on top. I thought about in autumn 2001. But then rumors about iPhoto came and on macworld 2002 in january iPhoto was there and I was happy that I did not take the effort. So by bundling the iLife suite Apple takes the the responsibility to either do an exceptionally good or exceptionally bad job to provide the customers with descent solutions. iPhoto was inbetween, too good to not use it, too bad (most importantly slow) to really work with it.

RSS statt XML - Yeah

Nach meiner Anfrage und einer kurzen Umfrage hat IT&W doch tatsächlich die vermaledeiten XML Buttons mit RSS Buttons ersetzt. Ein kleiner Schritt für die IT&W, ein großer Schritt für die Blogheit! Mögen viele Blogs dem guten Beispiel folgen, und die Blogoshpäre einen Schritt verständlicher machen.

Hit the penguin!

Update3: Flash Game is down. But here is a even nicer substitute.
My Highscore: 319. How far can YOU get?
Update: 323.5 with sliding, 207.1 with sticking your head in.

Update2: an incredible score but of course he linked to a hacked version. :-(

[via tlf]

Mein Leben ohne mich

Gestern im Lichtspielberg Erding zum stolzen Preis von 4 Euro pro Karte (wo ist Kino sonst noch so günstig?).
My Life Without Me - wie er im original heißt - ist ein sehr stimmungsgeladener intensiver Film dessen Schauspieler, Charaktere, Kameraführung und Erzählweise mich innerhalb der ersten Filmminuten bereits in seinen Bann geschlossen haben. Ich freue mich sehr, dass ich den im Kino gesehen habe. Kommt derzeit bei mir direkt nach Lost in Translation.

Anmerkung: Schon wieder keinerlei Werbung im Kino davor, nur Trailer. Gedankennotiz: Something's Gotta Give - Was das herz begehrt ab 12.Februar

Why PHP sucks, Part II

function MyArray() {
    return array('de'=>array('eins','zwei','drei'));
}

// That would work in any decent language I know,
// in PHP it doesn't
$DE_MyArray=myArray()['de'];
$DE_MyArray=array('de'=>array('eins','zwei','drei'))['de'];

// With PHP you have to do this:
$DE_MyArray=myArray();
$DE_MyArray=$DE_MyArray['de'];

Yeah, the developers got this reported as bug since 3.0.12.

Fucked up ideal - "Beauty"

she's beautiful, 
she knows she's a winner
she couldn't be thinner
now she goes in the bathroom
and vomits up dinner

From Daria Season 2 Episode 1.

It's just scary how common eating disorders are nowadays. And the media is having a great deal to do with it. For those of you that still believe stars and models actually look the way you see them in magazines, have a look at here, here and here. Stars are retouched in every picture printed out there, boobs get jobbed, pores removed and everything gets smoothed. Gross.

Look what I found...

Me, playing with some Quicktime VR software and my iSight. Since then I have to admit that I used my iSight not more than 5 times, and that was in July. Beard is off now.

Ein Besuch bei WOM

Es wird Zeit für den iTunes Music Store Europe. Heute habe ich wieder mal etwas Zeit in einem CD-Laden, WOM in München, verbracht. Eines vorweg: Die WOM Mitarbeiter haben kein Wissen darüber ob eine CD kopiergeschützt ist. Deswegen habe ich vor drei Wochen schonmal die Elephunk von den Black Eyed Peas nicht gekauft. Interessanterweise hat Amazon diese Information aber, und schreibt bei jeder kopiergeschützten CD es ausdrücklich dazu (unter Format:), falls sie kopiergeschützt ist. Wieder was gelernt. Der Einzelhandel ist so tot.
Kaufen wollte ich eigentlich die "Try This" von Pink und eine CD von Curse. Erstere spielt auf Windows PCs aber nicht auf Macs, was auch noch deutlich auf der CD Hülle gekennzeichnet ist. Super. Danke dafür BMG, danke auch für den Link auf deine Propagandaseite, welchen du auf jede CD mitabdruckst.

Curse, der krasse Rapper, ist voll stolz darauf, dass alle seine CDs kopiergeschützt sind. So stolz, dass er gute Versionen von seinen Songs in den üblichen Tauschbörsen in Umlauf bringt, an die er folgenden Spruch anhängt:
"Hey yo, das hier ist für all die Leute die denken sie supporten uns, aber ziehen sich dann unsere Sachen von Napster, brennen sich unsere Alben, pah, das ist für euch". Krass ey.
Interessanterweise stellt er sogar eine 6 Track EP ganz einfach so frei ins netzt. Möchte man meinen wenn man die Seite ansurft. Pah. Alle links führen ins Leere. Super. "Danke für euren support"

Soll ich mal was sagen: Ich besitze keinen CD-Player, und werde das auch in Zukunft nicht tun. Ich höre Musik über mein Powerbook oder meinen iPod. Ich würde gerne die Künstler "supporten", aber nicht indem ich überteuerte CDs kaufe, die ich dann nichtmal verwenden kann. Soll ich mir die CDs kaufen und danach mir die Privatkopie aus dem Netz ziehen? Ist doch Mist.

Deswegen sind heute folgende 2 CDs in meinem Einkaufskorb gelandet:

Die Guano apes live, weil da mal wirklich Mehrwert drinsteckt. Einfach mal so für ein paar Euro mehr das Livekonzert als DVD mit dazu. Dafür zahl ich gerne. Interessanterweise ist die Audio CD nicht kopiergeschützt, obwohl sie auch von BMG vertrieben wird. Und Ferris einfach deswegen weil ein kurzes Reinhören gezeigt hat, dass die gut ist, und sie ebenfalls keinen Kopierschutz hat.

Trotzdem wird es Zeit für den iTMS Europe, ich will die Pink CD, zahl gerne dafür. Aber nutzen können will ich sie danach auch. Komische Ansprüche die ich da an Produkte stelle.

Oh du schönes Wasserburg...

Wasserburg im Winter ist echt ein schöner Anblick. Leider kann man bei der Bildqualität vom Nokia3650 das nur erahnen.

Insgesamt sind Fotohandy-Fotos eher unbrauchbar. Der einzig sinnvolle Einsatzzweck bleibt nach wie vor Bildchen für das Mac OS X Adressbuch zu schiessen. Ich wollte heute im WOM ein paar Beweisfotos von CDs schiessen, aber die Ergebnisse sind alle durch Unschärfe unlesbar.

Sick Sad World

Watching Conan O'Brian 2003-11-20 to start the new year, I learned from Billy Bob Thornton that the MPAA actually restricts the number of "thrusting motions" per shot in a sex scene.
I had a look at the Voluntary Movie Rating System and eventually know the american classifications now. Interesting to browse the IMDB and look at the "Certification"s. E. g.: Braveheart gets a just R for "brutal medieval warfare" whereas Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King gets a PG-13 for "intense epic battle sequences and frightening images". Yeah, only bad orcs get slaughtered, that's nicer.