Tag Archives: mac

Photography

Photo Book Group Test (Part 1)

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Regular readers will know about my experience ordering a photo book from Apple using iPhoto 5 and cards using iPhoto 6. For my wedding I decided to get another book using the same pictures and, as far as possible, the same layout but order from three different suppliers: Apple, PhotoBox and MyPublisher. This is, therefore, going to be a four part article. This one is about the initial ordering process, then the next three will be posted when the books actually arrive.

All three orders were placed on the evening of Sunday 25th June. This is how it went.

First I looked at iPhoto as I (vaguely) knew what I was doing with it. This was a newer version of iPhoto (6 rather than 5) but pretty much all the comments I made last time are appropriate. That is: it’s incredibly easy to use, just drag and drop. If a picture is not of sufficient resolution a little yellow triangle appears to warn you. There are a number of decent themes. The only difficulty is that it seems to assume that I want a black cover on my hard-back book. As it happens I do, but I was sure there used to be a choice. It turns out there is, but only once you have clicked the “Buy Now” button. The order process is uneventful, picking up my details from my previous orders and allowing me to change them if required (I don’t). The book is just shy of 14Mb and it uploads as quickly as one might expect given the size. An email confirmation arrives shortly afterwards.

Next I decide to look at MyPublisher. MyPublisher works with both Windows and the Macintosh. For the former they provide a complete application, for the latter you can download an iPhoto plugin. I used the latter. The advantage of this is that all the lovely user interface elements are also present. Almost. One neat thing about iPhoto is that it only uploads the book once you have confirmed that everything is okay (including the price and delivery options). It, therefore, comes as a surprise when clicking the “Buy Now” button after downloading and installing the plug-in (very easy, which is why I didn’t mention it) and it immediately starts uploading it.

Once it has finished uploading it shifts focus to Safari where it asks for an email address and a password, then my address and credit-card details. And then it says that there had been a problem uploading the photo book (there were zero pages apparently). I’m not happy that they took all my personal details before announcing that there had been a technical problem.

The second time I upload things seem to go better. Upon completion it shows a screen where you can select various details of the book. MyPublisher has a better selection of covers both in terms of colours and finish (they have a leather bound book too). Thankfully they remembered my credit card details from last time. They do, however, have one last surprise for me: despite my address being in the UK (and them appearing to have a UK office), they charge me in US Dollars and charge me Fed-Ex shipping from the States.

Lastly I try PhotoBox. This is a two step process. Firstly: upload the pictures. There are a number of methods, but I choose the default which is a Java applet. You drag and drop image files into the window (I dragged them from iPhoto) and then click the “Upload” button. This takes a while as, unlike, iPhoto and MyPublisher, the full resolution images are being transferred. The pictures range from three to eight mega-pixels. In theory this should give PhotoBox the advantage when it comes to printing. We’ll see.

Stage two — building the book — is a web application. As a browser experience it is good and responsive. I try to keep the layout as similar to the iPhoto book as possible but some concessions are needed. I need to change the cover image, for example, and the first inside page, which is entirely text in iPhoto, had to be removed entirely. Page layouts are less flexible and selecting the right one is more of a manual exercise. While iPhoto dynamically changes the layout to cope with portrait versus landscape pictures, PhotoBox tends to crop the pictures and requires you to switch layouts yourself. All the formats leave space to enter captions for the photos. In trying to mirror the iPhoto layout we did not enter any, however there is still the niggling question of whether there are any “holes” in the design because of that. It’s not as WYSIWYG — you don’t see that acronym very much any more — as iPhoto.

The experience is not as good as that in iPhoto. It is, however, still very good.

I’ve not mentioned the prices of any of the books so far, and that’s because they’re all pretty much in the same ball-park: between £20 and £25 including delivery. That was including a discount from MyPublisher (seemingly “one time only” but I’ve been getting emailed the vouchers on a fairly regular basis since I first heard about the company). And for this month only PhotoBox had a special two-for-one offer, so I should be getting two identical books for the same price.

So that’s myexperience with buying process of three online photo-book merchants. Stay tuned for the results.

See:

Blog

Customer Mis-Service

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I’m not sure how true it is, but I always assume that doctors must have no fun at parties. Every time they’re introduced to someone the response is bound to be, “Oh, I have this strange tingle on my elbow…?” or “I have this pain in all the diodes on my left side.” Even lacking the title, working in IT as I do, I get the same kind of thing. “My PC blue-screens when…” or “How do I do [something esoteric] in [some weird application I’ve never heard of]?” It’s the curse of knowing something about computers.

Often it turns out that people have been mis-sold either the computer itself or some associated gadget. PCs are complicated and people often end up believing the sales-person not because they are inherently trust-worthy (quite the opposite) but because they don’t know enough to counter any assertions made. Can that £300 Dell really edit your home movies? Is an extra 512Mb of memory really necessary or do the margins on it justify a hard sell? How do I avoid all those viruses? (Answers: no, yes and buy a Mac.)

Of course, the truth is that life is complicated and mis-selling, or at least poor service, is rife in all walks of life. I recently went to buy a wedding band. I’m not a jewelry person and have never worn a ring previously, yet I have a good chunk of money to spend on one, a number broadly similar to a new computer. For something so expensive I would have expected some advice, the advantages and disadvantages of various designs and materials. But no, it basically amounted to looking at lots of shiny things and picking one based entirely on aesthetics. They seemed put out when I didn’t know what size my finger was and they offered no guidance on how loose it should be. Later on I found that the manufacturer engraved rings, but this was not offered at the time of purchase. It feels like I would have been better buying on-line!

And now, after a week of wearing it, I find it is doing the jewelry equivalent of blue-screening. We go back to query the workmanship and the assistant merely says — I paraphrase — “Yes, matt-effect white gold does that.” Thanks. She’s probably right but would it not have been useful to tell me this at the time of purchase? They could have made more money (as I might have picked something in a harder metal) and I wouldn’t be whinging about the scratches. We’d all have been happier, until my credit card bill arrived at least.

It’s very English not to complain about things. Many of us have had poor service in a restaurant, have grumbled about it to our friends but when the waiter asks if everything is okay we simply say, “It’s fine.” The difference with the ring and the computer is that we don’t even know that we’ve received poor service until it’s too late. Bad service in a restaurant can be rewarded with no tip, but the jewelers and the computer company already have our money. We have little leverage. After all the £300 Windows-box can edit home movies if you have the patience and my ring can be sent back to the manufacturer for re-polishing. They’re just not what we were expecting.

Blog

RIP

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We had a power-cut last night. Pretty much the only electronic thing that worked in the flat was my iBook G3, a 2001-era 600Mhz model with a DVD-reader and no disc writing ability. After sending a few emails I closed the lid, putting it to sleep.

Ironically, this morning it was pretty much the only gadget in my flat that wasn’t working. I opened the lid and found the Spinning Beach-ball of Death. Perhaps because of its age this is not unusual. What was unusual was that after a few seconds it stopped spinning. On restarting rather than a nice, grey Apple logo I found a Finder icon and a question mark flashing on the screen. Not good.

While attempting some of the steps in that Apple Knowledge Base it finally booted up. It wasn’t actually any of the steps that coaxed it to life, so while “RIP” might now be a little premature I still think it’s not much longer for this world.

In many ways this is the end of an era. I think it’s fair to say that I was one of the first of the new wave of “switchers.” I was drawn to MacOS X because of the beautiful, functional GUI, the availably of software such as Photoshop and Office and the underlying Unixy goodness. The fact that I wouldn’t have to continually have to reboot between Linux and Windows to get the best of both worlds was a winning combination from my perspective. Sure, I was believing the marketing to some extent and it could have been a very expensive mistake but I’m happy with the way it worked out.

And it all began on this iBook.

We’ve been through a lot together. I carted it back and forth to Norway for seven months. It was my DVD player and Age of Empires box. It’s been up and down the East Coast main line to my parents. It’s been to Malta. To Canada. The United States. And to work. It’s been dropped and battered and abused. Even after buying an iMac G5 I’ve been keeping using it as my occasional email, web and instant messaging console.

This machine has been special in a way no machine since my BBC Model B. I’ve had PCs, but they’ve all just been boring beige boxes; they feel like they’ve been assembled rather than designed. The iBook has been fun to use.

And now it’s no more. May your bytes rest peacefully in Silicon Heaven.

Links

WSJ.com – Mac’s Moment?

It’s nice to see an article about Apple that’s not about the iPod! This time a reasonably sized Japanese company has switched most of it’s 2300 PCs over to Mac’s.

It’s a sensible move if you ask me! Given the ease of use, lack of virus and availability of MS Office I’ve never quite understood why Mac’s are not in wider use. I guess we need more conversions like this to reassure people that it’s not a foolish move.

The annoucement of a beta version of software to allow Windows XP to run on new Intel Macs, isn’t going to hurt either.

Blog, Photography

iPhoto 6 Cards

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As you may have seen, I was generally quite impressed with the photo books that the previous version of iPhoto was able to generate. I was therefore quite keen to try the new cards that you can buy using iPhoto 6, the version included with the recently released iLife ’06. (Am I the only person that thinks that “iLife” is a really naff name? First that, then “MacBook Pro” rather than “Powerbook.” What next?!)

The first real opportunity was Valentines Day. I picked a picture of the two of us and poked around trying some of the various options. There are about twenty themes, ranging from very plain to unusably gushy (to my eyes). You can then customise the theme, modifying the way the picture is displayed (full page, drop-shadow, etc.) and adding text to the front and inside. It’s a nice, polished interface. Easy to use and just like the photo book process.

When ordering a single card, as I did, postage is more than the actual card! On the expensive side, I’d say, but well within the bounds of acceptability.

So what’s the verdict? What’s it like?

The short answer is that I still don’t know. I clicked the order button a full week before the 14th and now, a week after Valentines Day, it has still not arrived.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in expecting a card to take less than two weeks to print and be delivered. I realise that a card is more complicated than a few prints, but I have had my snaps delivered the next day a number of times after ordering through PhotoBox (no affiliation, I am just a satisfied customer!). Apple really need to improve their service in this area if they are to avoid alienating their customer base.

Opinion

iPhoto 5 Books

As many of you will already know, I recently came back from a trip to Vietnam. Some will even have seen the pictures. Others, however, do not like looking at pictures on a computer screen and always insist that I get prints. This time I decided to go one better and get a book.

Those still wallowing in the PC world may not be aware of a Macintosh application called iPhoto. It’s a bit like Adobe Photoshop Album if you’re familiar with that. It allows you to catalogue photos, categorise and label them and perform some minor edits such as red-eye removal, cropping and simple colour adjustment, although I normally use Photoshop for this kind of thing. I mention it here as one extra feature that I’ve never used before was its ability to make custom books. I normally use Photobox for my prints but this seemed like a much easier option.

I’m pleased to report that it was simple to do. I selected the book size and template and iPhoto automatically distributed the images in the book. I picked the “Travel” theme which is on the good side of slightly tacky. Then I added and subtracted a few, changed the order and altered the layouts, putting my favourite pictures on their own page and sequences of shots on a spread. I also wrote an introductory text for the first page. They allow the pictures in a variety of formats: a single shot taking the whole page, with borders and a number of different pictures per page. I think I used all of the various formats in the book at some point and they all work well.

It was all drag and drop (except for the typing!), just working as you’d expect with no need for a manual or even the on-line help. The first surprise was when I tried to order it. Firstly there were more pages than the default. It must have automatically created enough pages to show all the pictures, which is fair enough but I was a little shocked when I saw a higher price than I was expecting. And secondly I found that I had to enable One-Click ordering. I don’t like to have that switched on normally ? I like to be inconvenienced a little when there’s impulse buying ? to be done!

It took about a week to be delivered. First impressions are good, it is well packaged, appears to be nicely bound, and the cover has a hole in it revealing the title page. In my case this is a slightly Photoshopped sign I took (“Welcome to Vietnam”) and a small picture of myself. Opening up the book I find the introduction text. It’s clear and sharp, unlike my writing, but I note that they’ve not changed the quotes into “smart quotes,” which is a little un-Apple-like in the sense that it’s a small addition that would make it look that little bit more professional.

I confess that my most serious criticism is one that most people slowly nod their head and agree to in a patronising and not entirely convincing manner. Despite the gorgeous presentation, I feel that the image quality is not especially good. It’s not shockingly bad ? as we can see from the response of other people to my comment ? but it lacks adequate resolution and looks to be dithered. The colours also appear to be aiming for saturation at the expense of realism although this may, to some extent, be affected by the resolution.

In Apple’s defence I would say that they have a difficult balance to strike. Even at the resolution they used the book, which included just over forty images, was in excess of a 20Mb upload which takes some time even on my ADSL link. By contrast prints I get individually are normally between two and four megabytes each. Plus this is their consumer application. Maybe Aperture or iPhoto6 performs better in this regard?

But overall I am impressed. The book was quick and easy to create, the order was processed and delivered reasonably quickly and the quality is more than adequate for its intended audience. A definite thumbs up and I am very likely to do the same thing again next time I return from a holiday.