La Vita è Bella

UPDATE: with Aperture 4 Beta released with geotag support, I finally migrated to Lightroom (4), and will buy it on Day 1!

I bought my first "RAW camera" at the end of 2009, and found that iPhoto is not enough for me. So I purchased Apple Aperture 3 at February 2010, almost immediately after it's released. One reason is that I was used to iPhoto and Aperture carried on most of the things, another reason is that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is on its way but still about half year away at that time.

I'm just an amateur photographer, snap some photos for my life record and show them on Flickr. I don't sell my photos for life (but will be glad if you're interested :P). So I don't need something extremely professional to process my photos. Generally I just use the "Auto Enhance" in Aperture to tune my photos, and custom white balance sometimes. I rarely use other tunes in Aperture. So generally I'm happy with Aperture.

But there're still something drive me crazy, like the slowness, and some bugs. I was upset about some of the bugs, so serious considered to migrate to Lightroom. I downloaded Lightroom trial and borrowed a USB HD to move my photos (~80GB) from Aperture library into Lightroom, and seriously used it for a couple of days.

But, there's always a "but", Lightroom is not perfect and there're still something I don't like. And I found out that the "bugs" drive me crazy is actually something wrong with my Mac, not Aperture. So I finally decided to cool down and not to invest another $150 on Lightroom, and keep on Aperture, at least for now.

Here're some of my comparisons.

What Lightroom did great?

First I'd like to talk about some of Lightroom's advantages, and of course, they are Aperture's disadvantages:

• Speed. It's hard to believe that Adobe, a company famous of making hell slow softwares, can make a software much much faster than Apple on Mac, Apple's own platform. But they did it. Before using Aperture, I will generally quit Chrome and Thunderbird and almost every opened software to make it a little bit faster, but it's still not comparable to Lightroom. Lightroom looks like light speed in front of Aperture. It's a real shame of Apple, serious.
• Tune Quality. For the quality of the one click tune (Aperture's "Auto Enhance" and Lightroom's ... sorry I forgot its name), Lightroom is slightly better than Aperture. Plus there're some easy tasks in Lightroom, e.g. reduce noise dots, which will take a lot of complicated steps to be done in Aperture. But well, the difference is slight, and Aperture's quality is acceptable.

What Aperture did great?

There're still something Aperture did better than Lightroom. Most of them are just useless to professionals, but they are good for amateurs:

• Geotag. I agree that the Face feature in Aperture is useless, even to most of the amateurs. But the Place feature is important. It's 21st century now, the ability to organize photos by the place they're taken is a great and important addition, and Aperture made geotag easy. Yes there're Jeffrey's plugins to bring geotag feature to Lightroom, but they are just not native. You have to use Jeffrey's export plugins to get geotags preserved while uploading to Flickr, Lightroom itself have totally no idea about the geotags. And with all due respect, the plugins are not actually free. If you don't "donate", you can only handle 10 photos each time. That meas a lot of additional invest to Aperture, and kidnapped by a 3rd party developer.
• Integrated to Mac. This is not important at all, but the built-in mosaic pictures screensaver is so awesome. I just love it. It requires photos in iPhoto or Aperture library, a lot of photos. So migrating to Lightroom means that I need to find another screensaver.

Between speed and geotag, I chose geotag. But I do hope Apple can match Lightroom's speed, or Adobe can add native geotag support to Lightroom. I just hate Aperture's slowness, and Lightroom's lack of geotag support. For now, I can only suffer the slow.

I love Thunderbird, so I use Thunderbird + Lightning instead of Mail.app + iCal as my personal schedule and mail solution.

Also it's promised to have a syncing feature, it didn't have now. But I need the ability to sync my schedule with my Palm Treo 680. I can sync my Palm with iCal, so getting the linkage between Lightning and iCal is a good way to do this.

First, I installed the Provider for Google Calendar extension to get the bidirectional access to Google Calendar to Lightning.

Then, I use GCALDaemon to sync my iCal with Google Calendar. It can also sync Google Calendar with Lightning, but Provider for Google Calendar is much better at this.

Now if I add/modify/remove an event in Lightning, Provider for Google Calendar will update my Google Calendar immediately. Later, GCALDaemon will find the update, and update iCal. Now I sync my Palm with my computer, it will get the update.

If I update an event in my Palm, and sync it to iCal, GCALDaemon will update Google Calendar later, and then Lightning will update it later.

So it works.

Make a symbolic link with the ics file of Lightning and iCal may also work, but I can't find the ics file for Lightning :P

You can subscribe my busy/available status on Google Calendar now :)

This should also works for Mozilla Sunbird.

If you prefer DMG or CDR format, then you can just use Disk Utilities to make image of your disks. But if you prefer ISO format, then this is the way.

1. Insert your disk into your driver, of course.
2. Unmount it but didn't eject it. To do so, you need to type this command in your Terminal: "sudo umount /dev/disk1". "disk1" may vary depends on your other drivers.
3. Use dd to create the image: "dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/path/to/foo.iso". Again, "disk1" may vary.
4. When it's done, you've got the ISO image file, and you may eject the disk now. But as a bug in Finder, you can't eject a volume which you unmounted in Terminal in normal ways. Instead, you need to type this command in Terminal to eject it: "sudo diskutil eject /dev/disk1"

The Finder bug is really annoying, even a logout can't eject the disk, you must reboot your machine. But fortunately I've found the workaround on macosxhints.

Camino is superb fast. Much much faster than Firefox and maybe a bit faster than Safari.

Compare to Firefox, it comes with some good system integrations, including Address Book integration, Keychain Access integration, etc. And compare to Safari, it's much closer to Firefox, it also have a "about:config" thing (though a little different from Firefox), and a powerful ad-blocking engine.

So I'm going to give it a week's trial, to see if I can be used to it.

Although it's close to Firefox, it didn't have extensions. So there's something I missing in Firefox:

1. It can't force links that open a new window to open in new tab. I can use about:config to set "browser.link.open_newwindow" to "1" to disable links that opens a new window, but can't use a new tab instead. Anyway, this is acceptable. At least they won't open lots of new windows to annoy me.
2. I can't type a site name (e.g. "google" ) and press cmd+enter to automatically surround it with "www." and ".com", this will open it in new tab and use "I'm feeling lucky" search. So I must type more words to input a address.
3. Keyboard short-cut is different from Firefox, it mixed some Firefox short-cuts and Safari short-cuts up. I don't like this. I prefer a configurable keyboard short-cuts. Maybe I can configure it in System Preferences? UPDATED: Oh yes, I can configure them in System Preferences. This makes me feel much better.
4. I can't specify the text encoding of the keyword in the search tool-box. Some search engines in China only accept GBK keywords but Camino can only encode keyword in UTF-8.
5. Lack of spell checkers. It can't use the system spell check for standard text editors (cause it didn't use the standard text editor?), nor the spell checker provided by Google Toolbar for Firefox or Firefox 2.

Anyway, a impressive thing is that the build-in ad-blocking engine is powerful, and the default black-list is very useful that it filtered out almost all the ad from the pages I visited. And if the black-list isn't powerful enough, I can edit it myself.

Or at least, Skype for Mac is for geeks? There are some cool stuffs in Skype for Mac, but not available on other platform versions of Skype.

1. In the chat style tweak window, the chat example is from George Orwell's 1984. Maybe because of Mac begins from 1984?
   
2. In the newest beta (currently) version, the history events was brought on and off with a cool effect, similar to the water wave effect of dashboard.
   

1. Get the latest darwine distribution from sf, and install it. Files on sf seems differ from files on darwine homepage
2. Get IEs4Linux
3. Install wget, cabextract, etc. from MacPorts
4. Run the ies4linux script. You should need to add wine path into PATH before that. The wine path should normally be: "/Applications/Darwine/Wine.bundle/Contents/bin".
5. After ies4linux script finished, edit the generated "ie6" script, add the following line(you can also add this line into your bashrc):
   

   export DISPLAY=":0.0"

After that, you'll be able to use "ie6" to start-up ie 6 via Darwine. Remember to open X11.app first.

As you can see, the font is really, really ugly, and Chinese characters can't be displayed properly.

I hate times that in the "am/pm" format. It's a big waste of screen space, especially when I am using a 13.3 inch screen. I miss the 24-hour format time, but I didn't find it in Mac.

But finally I've found the way:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open International
3. Click the Format tab
4. Click the Customize button beside "Times"
5. Hover your mouse over the hour indicator, and it will show a arrow. Click on the arrow you'll get a drop-down list to choose hour formats.

Here's my snapshot:

So I get my 24-hour format time back, in my iCal, Mail, anywhere.