iPhoto 5 is worrisome

Apple - Discussions - iPhoto 5 Strips Color Profiles!

This doesn't look pretty.

1. Not suited to use on a G3 machine. Too slow to tolerate, several editing tools unavailable.
2. Strips out color profiles when editing, seems to ignore system ColorSync settings.
3. Reports of unuseable Libraries after upgrading from earlier versions.
4. Various problems with book editing.

Software QA is my primary concern with Apple. What are they doing?

Delete iTunes store account information

macosxhints - Manually delete iTunes store account information

A comment on software quality: OS X and iPhoto 5

Apple - Discussions - DO NOT USE IPHOTO 5... FOR NOW

I posted this as a part of the above thread. It may be deleted, Apple's policy allows them to delete commentary of this sort.

... Thanks for the warning! I've also read that iPhoto 5 does not work fully on older machines (G3 iBooks) -- many of the new editing features require a G4 (or perhaps use a newer GPU?)

You will receive many replies to your post essentially "blaming the user" for not running UNIX maintenance scripts, not running one disk repair utility or another, not repairing permissions (that's largely superstition by the way), not deleting caches, not forcing iPhoto database restores, etc. Some of these posts are somewhat accurate, but all are irrelevant to the main point -- OS X is marketed as a consumer OS, not a geek platform. (Ironically, some versions of classic had more problems than most OS X releases -- so it's not the 'UNIX' underpinnings that cause issues.)

I believe Apple doesn't do enough beta testing. They ought to have released iPhoto 5 in a public beta, as Google does with their apps (Gmail, etc). Of course this is contrary to Jobs passion for secrecy and big bang product launches. Jobs is a genius, but his interests are not the same as ours.

The RAW support in iPhoto is weak. They shouldn't have gone this route -- the manufacturers simply aren't willing to cooperate. Adobe has spent a fortune reverse engineering RAW file formats, that's why they're championing a "generic" RAW-like file format.

As to the import problems you ran into, similar experiences were seen with iPhoto 2 to iPhoto 4. At that time it seems iPhoto 2 had some severe bugs (they may have been in OS X, we don't know) that led to corruption of the iPhoto 2 database; this corruption was often invisible to the user. The initial release of iPhoto 4 responded to the problem badly. Later iPhoto 4 releases seem to have managed iPhoto 2 database corruption better.

It may also be that you have a hardware issue. Do you use an external drive? External firewire drives have often been problematic with OS X, especially with suboptimal cables. The iPhoto 5 update is a severe stressor on drive i/o, it might precipitate i/o errors and lead to database corruption -- even on a journaled file system. (This might be especially true if you had your iPhoto Library on an external firewire drive that was not journaled.)

Finally, I do want to affirm that I (at least) agree with you that consumer software is far, far from what it should be. Apple is not alone, I do most of my work on XP and Microsoft is at least as guilty. (Apple has very demanding customers, that helps. Microsoft customers have largely learned helplessness.) Perhaps the newer NetApps from Google will take us down a better path. In the meantime, backup relentlessly (yes, backup is FAR more costly, difficult and less reliable than it should be) and, above all, don't install anything until it's been on the market for at least 2 months. Sad advice indeed, but true.

iLife -- not for G3 machines

Apple - iLife

Many of the editing tools in iPhoto 5 are not available on a G3. Rumor has it displaying images on a G3 is very slow. This is a time honored way to force upgrades, one that Apple has practiced for many years.

I suspect there are similar stories for iDVD and iMovie HD, but I don't follow them closely. Bottom line -- don't go for iLife 5 if you're on a G3. (I still have iMovie 2 on my iBook!)

Testing Picasa and Blogger/Hello

I'm a dedicated iPhoto user, but I also have an XP Box with a large volume of photos on it. So I downloaded Picasa and gave it a try. Then I tested the Picasa/Blogger integration. Here's the photo I chose, it's of our dog Molly about 15 years ago - in her once-upon-a-time favorite chair.



A few impressions of the combination of Picasa/Blogger and (even) Firefox.

• Picasa is very impressive. Unfortunately for OS X fans, it makes iPhoto look anemic. In particular, Picasa doesn't blink at handling a volume of photos that brings iPhoto to its knees. iPhoto is a spectacularly inefficient piece of software.
• The Picasa/Blogger integration still requires use of "Hello", an addin software that acts like a robotic blogger. It's better than in the days when one had to use Flickr as an intermediate store, but getting it all working is strictly for geeks. When I went to the Hello site for downloading one of their inline images was missing -- not a good sign!
• For geeks though, the Blogger integration works. I posted the above, then edited with the image displayed inline using the Blogger/Firefox "Compose" interface. It has a few bugs, but overall it's pretty impressive.

Points to Google. I hope Apple takes the competition to heart. iPhoto 5 is better than 4, but the performance issues are hard to get over.

How did Quicken become a joke?

Quicken.com

In the late 80s Quicken was one of my favorite applications. It was a fast, reliable, DOS application that kept my checkbooks balanced. One a month a diskette arrived in the mail containing my credit card transactions. It was always complete and my accounts balanced. Every so often it corrupted all my data, but heck -- that's what backups are for. (I knew 3-4 different ways to rebuild Quicken's famously unstable database.

15 years or so later Quicken is a joke. I download my statements and the reconcile function is off by $1000 or so. Same thing happens every so often with the "fully integrated" Quicken credit card. I used to track down those things, but it was an enormous pain and the bank was always right. Intuit/Quicken extort money from banks to use their proprietary transfer format (Quicken no longer supports the old "open" xml format they once championed) and few want to bother with tight integration.

Last year I gave up. I use Quicken to download transactions (it mostly gets them straight) and otherwise I'm back to spreadsheets. I assume the banks get the checking accounts more or less right.

It's a sad tale ...

Gmail: You are currently using 146 MB (15%) of your 1000 MB.

Gmail

Hmm. That didn't take long at all! After a few months of sending my mail stream to Gmail I'm at 15% of capacity. Of course the 6367 spams in my Spam folder don't help! They count againsts my 1GB total and there's no practical way to delete them enmasse.

At this rate I'll overflow my Gmail account within another 12 months.