Tag Archives: apple

Photography

Double Standards?

Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications ((It amuses me that with all the money that Microsoft has, the best their marketing people can come up with to describe this is “squirting.” At best that sounds comic, at worst somewhat rude. What were they thinking?)). But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.

If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days ((Even this, it turns out, is a simplification. At least one of the major record labels has forbidden wireless sharing of their music entirely. Unfortunately they don’t tell you about this until you actually try to transfer the file yourself. Is this legal? Is it not a case of adding restrictions after the sale?)) but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.

What about movies? Sorry, bad news here. You can’t transmit them at all.

Zune can also store pictures. What limits have Microsoft provided to protect photographers?

The answer, it turns out, is none. You can transfer as many pictures as you like to as many people as you like. Once transferred, they are visible indefinitely and can even be copied to further Zunes.

Er, hello? Double standards?

I imagine that the main argument is that most people don’t have a bunch of professional photographs on their computers but do have commercial music. How far can we get with that line of thinking? Well, in fact, there is a certain logic in that. Most people don’t write their own music, even with relatively simple to use applications like Garageband, but they do have large collections of holiday snaps.

However the argument starts to fall down when you start to think about movies. Do people have only commercial movies and nothing personal? I don’t think so. While it is possible to rip a DVD and put it on your iPod it’s legally dubious, non-trivial (because of the CSS scrambling scheme) and time consuming (transcoding to MP4 takes a long time even on quick machines). Even if you use P2P software to download an illegal copy it’s likely to be is DivX format which cannot be used directly by the Zune, so that time-consuming transcoding step returns. My guess is that people are, in fact, much more likely to have home movies. Of course, if you made the movie you’ll also own the copyright for and are quite likely to want to send to friends and family. Certainly my wedding video has done the rounds and my attempts on a Segway has been distributed fairly widely.

That being the case, then why are the limitations on distributing movies even more severe than that for music? There’s a definite mismatch between desired usage patterns and the programmed restrictions.

So where have the restrictions come from and why do they vary so widely? Maybe a clue can be found in the fact that Microsoft are paying the RIAA $1 for each Zune sold.

Why would Microsoft do that? Clearly, in the US, the RIAA, for music, and the MPAA, for movies, hold a lot of sway. But for photographers? I’m not aware of a single organisation that has the same level of influence.

I’m sure Reuters and PA protect the copyright of their own images, but who protects everyone else? Perhaps this is because while movies and music require large teams, photography is more often a solo activity but certainly it has no relation to the value of the medium.

Ultimately I think this is another strike against the draconian DRM measures that are currently being applied to movies and music. I have nothing against digital rights management in the abstract, but implementations that restrict or remove rights that you already have by law just make the music labels and movie distributors look like money-grabbing opportunists.

Photography

Photo-Book Results: Printing-1

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This is the second (and final) post about the Printing-1 photo book printing service. Last month I wrote about the ordering process, here I discuss the finished product and draw an overall conclusion comparing it with the books I saw last year ((The ordering process, the results from Apple, PhotoBox and MyPublisher.)).

The time-line looks something like this: the order went out on the evening of the 17th April; the dispatch notice email arrived on the 25th April; and the finished item arrived at lunchtime on the 30th April. This, by the way, is with express (DHL) delivery. It looks like it was printed in and dispatched from Germany. I still find it slightly surprising that, of the four services I have tried so far, only one has a full operation in the UK.

The book arrived well-protected in a thin, white packet and shrink-wrap. It looks good. I really like the spiral binding. It’s great for keeping it open at a particular page without worrying that you’re going to break the binding by pressing down too hard.

The editing tool did a good job of rendering the book and, largely, what I saw on-screen is what I got in hard-copy. In fact, in the places where they differ it’s the book that gets it right. In the ordering process I noted that some pages were blurry despite the images being of a sufficient resolution. The good news that it was just a rendering problem in the Windows application.

On the other hand, the preview didn’t prepare me for the low resolution of the finished product. I made the same complaint of my iPhoto book of Vietnam, however most people looked at me like I was crazy when I mentioned it. That’s to say, the quality is fine, certainly good enough, but it’s not as sharp as a normal photographic print or the output of a decent ink-jet.

The other issue is one that I probably should have been expecting as it comes up every time I transfer images from my Mac to a Windows machine: the images were very dark. It’s true that many of the pictures were very dark anyway — such is the case of Iceland in winter — but they still had plenty of detail when viewed on my MacBook.

Overall, though, I think most people would be very happy with the results and much of what I’ve said is me being pretty fussy. The end result, the actual photo book, is very similar whichever service you use. Some offer you more bindings or colours — and Printing-1 do very well here — but the finished products generally look very similar. Delivery times are all within a week of each other so, again, there’s little to distinguish one above the others. You’re not going to get any of them as quickly as you’d get a standard 6×4 print.

So, really, the main reason you’d pick one supplier above one of the others is the ordering process. And, unfortunately, while using Macromedia Director has allowed Printing-1 to quickly make a cross-platform application it does have more idiosyncrasies than either PhotoBoxes web site or iPhoto. Maybe on Windows — where iPhoto is not available — it is more compelling, but next time I want to order a book I will probably return to Apple’s solution.

Photography

Photo-Book Test: Printing-1

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Last year I performed a photo-book group test, comparing the results from three different suppliers, Apple, MyPublisher and PhotoBox. The good news for consumers is that there are always new entrants to the market. This time a company called Printing-1 ((They seem to go by half a dozen different names — including myphotobook — and the URL on their website seems to switch between them!)) contacted me and asked for my opinion on their wares. That’s to say, while last years books were paid for out of my own pocket this one was not.

This test follows a similar pattern to last time. This post documents the software and the ordering process; the next will talk about the quality of the finished product. The initial order was placed on the evening of 17th April.

Printing-1 Splash ScreenI started with a visit to their website. Here I found that you have to download an application to build your book. The link to the Windows application leads directly to the installer. Unfortunately the Macintosh one does not work. After some digging around I found that clicking the “Start Creating” link takes you to a download link that does work.

Inside the disk image is an installer. I hate Macintosh installers as they’re just so unnecessary. If an application like Microsoft Office doesn’t need one I have by doubts that one is strictly required for a photo book editor. Nevertheless I continued.

Once complete there’s a myphotobook item in my Applications folder. Inside is a mess of files, one of which is myphotobook.osx which I take to be the executable. It is.

It starts with a splash screen. The picture shows a a smiling woman holding an IXUS at arms-length. Aspirational messages flicker on-screen. At least, I assume they’re aspirational as they’re all in German and languages are not exactly my strong-suit. I click “Create Photobook,” a window opens and takes over the screen.

Along the left are your files, with a directory chooser at the top an a list of thumbnails at the bottom. To the top of the screen are thumbnails of each page in the book, and at the bottom are two tabs, one that allows you to change the type of book and other than changes the layout of the current page. The rest of the screen is taken up with a two page spread from your book. I’ve not seen the real thing but I’m prepared to accept that the screen rendering is accurate, right down to the bar code and logo on the back page.

The default photobook is square and bright red. I’m not convinced about the colour, but when I try to change it the application beach balls for over a minute.

Printing-1 Editing ScreenEventually control returns and I change to a more muted colour scheme. I also decide to try the spiral bound option, something not available with the other suppliers last year ((I note that PhotoBox are planning on launching a similar service shortly.)). There appears to be iPhoto integration, which is a nice idea, but it doesn’t really work. Clicking the icon shows a list of folders, but drilling down on a folder caused the application to crash.

I navigate through the filesystem, finding the pictures I want manually, but when I select one the application crashes again. I tried repeatedly but, unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get very far without losing either everything I’d done up to that point or my patience.

Luckily I have a Windows machine available and decided to see whether the application is more stable there.

The installation goes much more smoothly. I end up with a single item in the Start menu and on my desktop (please, one or the other — not both!), which starts first time. It’s not the most responsive of programs but this time I am able to complete the process.

The user interface is more like that of PhotoBox than iPhoto. While iPhoto dynamically picks the most suitable page format once you have indicated how many images you want to see, Printing-1 expects you to tell it. The layouts are less varied but very presentable, and, unlike PhotoBox, it is possible to have pages consisting only of text. You can’t, however, mix portrait and landscape pictures on a single page which meant that I had to reorder some pictures and crop others. Not entirely satisfactory.

The application is fairly fully featured but not as user-friendly as it could be. Many options are hidden in context-sensitive (right-click) menus and it often requires you to click two or three times before it decides to respond. In a similar hidden-functionality vein, the book size options allow you to choose between 24 and 36 pages leading you to conclude — incorrectly — that these are the only sizes. You can add more but the last page gets a large, red X through it. I assume, correctly it turns out, that this will be the back page and that it is not possible to print pictures here. Nevertheless, I am able to drag a picture here. It’s not until I upload the book that I get an explanation.

More worryingly, despite all the photographs being high resolution — mostly six megapixel with a few eight megapixel images for good measure — some appear very pixelated. Sometimes they grow sharper, as would an interlaced image file, other times they do not. I am hoping that this is just as display glitch.

Finally happy with the book I click the order button. The first thing I have to do is register. This generally goes smoothly, except for the fact that it is expecting addresses in German format. Once complete it to starts to upload the book to their servers. It’s a big file and takes a while, but that’s clearly a limitation of my cable internet connection.

Once complete I head over to their website to actually complete the order. The process is straight-forward. The only glitch is that I have to massage my address (I want it delivered to my work address rather than home) into a German format again.

Overall ordering the photobook has been a frustrating experience, even more so when you realise that most of the problems encountered suggest a lack of attention to detail rather than anything fundamentally wrong.

I eagerly await the finished product — hopefully it will be worth it in the end.

Opinion

The end of WMA?

The sky is falling! EMI have announced that they are to allow distribution of their content without DRM. From next month, you’ll be able to buy albums from iTunes without the digital rights management chains of Apple’s FairPlay and in higher quality (twice the bit-rate). This is clearly good news, and EMIs move can’t help but encourage the other major labels to follow.

But one thing missing from the articles is that this also pretty much spells the end of Microsoft’s WMA.

Right now, when you buy a song from iTunes you get a file with AAC encoding. AAC is the follow-up to MP3 and is both higher quality and, unlike the latter, requires no payment for distributing a player. [ Update 2007/04/10: Okay, I got this bit wrong. There are royalties for selling a player or encoder. However, distributing content is free. For a low margin service such as the iTunes Store this makes perfect sense. Plus, the fact that AAC is not controlled by a single organisation makes it more desirable overall. ] That is, it’s an industry standard. What is non-standard about iTunes is the FairPlay DRM system.

WMA is Microsoft’s attempt to tie music playing to Windows. Both the file format and the DRM scheme they use is proprietary, tying you to Windows Media Player (only now getting usable with version 11) and one of the few PlaysForSure devices you see, dusty and unloved, next to the latest iPods. Even Microsoft’s Zune uses a different scheme.

Previously there was an advantage, if more potential than actual, in that the WMA gave you a greater choice of on-line music store and music player. But the new EMI songs will be in AAC format that it playable on most recent portable music players, including the Zune.

Why would Creative licence WMA in the future given that AAC is free?

And those stores that compete with iTunes? They can also use AAC, which doesn’t require payment to Microsoft for its use and can be used on an iPod (which WMA can’t).

Why would Yahoo licence WMA in the future given that AAC is free?

Microsoft have spent the last five years chasing the iPod and Apple’s “closed” system. With Zune they finally have achieved parity. Only now they find that the landscape has changed again. How will they respond?

Opinion

Backup

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Reading this article by David Pogue reminded me of my own search for a reliable and easy backup solution. I came to a rather different answer so I thought it might be worth detailing a little history, the options I considered and the one I eventually chose.

Ancient History

In the olden days — i.e., going back a couple of years — I split the files into four categories:

  1. System files such as the operating system itself and all my applications
  2. Email
  3. Small files such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets
  4. Big files such as movies, photos and music

Category one, system files, I didn’t backup at all, figuring that I had all the discs and licence keys so I could recreate the whole thing if necessary.

I was much more careful with emails. While my archive gets a little spotty in places where I’ve not been able to transfer them from one computer to another, I have some messages going back to 1997 and have no intention of losing them. So I used the IMAP server ((There are two types of email server in common use at most ISP’s. “POP” is the most common and is designed to allow you to download messages but not to store them for the long term. “IMAP” is rather more sophisticated and email programs tend to cache messages that are permanently stored on the server.))provided by Apple’s .Mac service. This had the added bonus of allowing me to access my emails on my desktop, laptop and work machines.

For small files, category three, I also used part of the .Mac service, this time the iDisk. iDisk is basically an online disk ((Technically speaking, it’s just a web server accessed using the WebDav protocol. OS X cached the files so they were available off-line too.)), automatically copying anything saved there onto a server on the internet. Everything was magically and almost immediately backed up. Again, this allowed me to access my files pretty much anywhere.

I backed up larger files on a more ad hoc basis. I copied my photos onto CD (or DVD for larger projects) more or less as soon as they were downloaded from my camera. Usually. As ever, laziness had a tendency to set in and it didn’t always happen for a while after the event; not good. Music downloaded from iTunes followed a similar pattern.

Everything ripped from a CD was not backed up at all. I had no easy way of backing up over 20Gb of data and, in theory, I had all the source data anyway.

What happened next

There are (at least) three problems with this system. First is .Mac’s reliability, something I’ve already talked about. Second is the piecemeal approach, where some things are saved immediately and other things might not be backed up at all. And finally, if my hard-disk did ever die, how long would it take to restore everything?

When I got my new MacBook I realised how long it takes to set up all my applications. And when I wiped the hard-disk of my “old” iMac ready for sale on eBay I found how long it can take to install the operating system and get it up to date. For the record, it took the best part of a day and that was without restoring any data ((First install OS X 10.4.0. The plan was to install iLife and then run software update, but iLife required OS X 10.4.3. Unfortunately, one of the problems with 10.4.0 was that WiFi didn’t work so it took a while to work around that. Then I updated to 10.4.8, which was over 100Mb of files. Then I was able to install iLife, which also required some very large updates. In all, there were over 250Mb of updates to just iLife and OS X.)).

In reality, despite these problems, I was far too lazy to bother changing things. Until I decided on two things: not to renew my .Mac subscription and to get a new laptop not just to replace my ailing iBook but also to replace my iMac. Without .Mac I had no choice but to re-evaluate my options.

I am going to concentrate only on the backup side of things in this article, although that was not the only thing I changed. For example, rather than use an alternative IMAP provider for my email, I decided to move to Google Applications for Domains. My experience there is perhaps worth another post but for now I will move on.

For backups I considered two main approaches, online backups as promoted by David Pogue in the first link in this post and traditional backup software, copying data to an external disk.

The answer

I considered a few different online backup solutions. Their pricing structures varied slightly and I’m sure that they all worked, but after I thought about it I realised that none of them were ideal. Pogue mentions the main problem in passing: timing. I have about 100Gb of data that needs to be backed up. How long would that take, even on a broadband connection? Let’s see, 256kbps (the upload speed on my cable broadband connection) works out to around 20k/sec. A little bit of maths ((100 * 1024 * 1024 / 20 / 60 / 60 / 24 = 60.68)) suggests it could take 60 days to upload the whole disk! In the event of a disaster, it would be quicker (download speeds are ten times faster than upload speeds) to download everything but it would still be nearly a week! Even if my maths is bad (very much a possibility), I still think my bandwidth would make online backup impractical.

Note that I think online backup is a fantastic idea in principle, just not one that works for me. If you mainly have Word documents to backup I’m sure it’s cheap and easy.

So, software. I had been using Apple’s Backup software, which is mainly for use with .Mac but also works with external hard-disks. However it was slow and, according to reports on the Internet, very unreliable. The one time I ever needed it I had managed to get back my files but I didn’t really want to risk it another time.

My LaCie external hard-disk came with SilverKeeper backup software. I had a quick play about with it looked overly complicated. Having had to write backup software at work, I did have a tendency to look for “complete” solutions — i.e., get me that file I deleted three weeks ago — but on further thought I realised that I didn’t need anything so sophisticated at home.

Most other software I looked at was just as complicated and, worse, they all had the same failing: they don’t back up the operating system itself. I’d already seen that it takes nearly a day just to restore the system software before you even start looking at the data.

In the past I had played with the Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), software that cloned a whole disk. I liked the idea — as the backup is just a complete, boot-able copy of the main disk — but I didn’t like the amount of time it took to copy the whole disk every time.

In the end I decided on Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper!, which is like CCC except it has a “Smart Update” feature that only copies the files that have changed, making a weekly backup take, on average, less than ten minutes. Nice.

So that’s the system I’m using at the moment. Would something like that work for you too?