Nikon vs. Canon: Consider the DRM

Canon and Nikon dominate the dSLR marketplace. Minolta/Konica just quite the camera business, and SONY is a very distant third in this world.

Both produce excellent cameras and superb lenses. How can one choose between a DigitalRebel XT and a D70 or D50? One factor to consider is which vendor is nastier about keeping their image formats proprietary.

OpenRAW - News is a good place to check. Nikon's D200, for example, encrypts the RAW image format. In general, Nikon has been playing harder ball than Canon in shutting out alternatives to Nikon software. It's not that Canon is being insightful or cooperative, it's rather that Nikon is being more aggressive. OS X support for Nikon is much more limited than support for similar Canon cameras for this reason.

On balance, the Digital Rights Management (DRM) wars favor Canon at this time. On the other hand, if either vendor implemented in-camera DNG they'd win this race.

It won't show up on in any online camera review, but if you're making the Canon vs. Nikon decision, consider Nikon's desire to lock in Nikon customers through the data format. If you choose Canon, consider sending Nikon a nice note.

Blogger bug: BlogThis! is mangling URLs

Blogger took 4 months to address a bug with mangling posts when the Link field was enabled. This past month they finally introduced a new version of BlogThis! that enables some rich text editing with Firefox and IE (no bullets though).

It turns out, however, that the new version has a nasty bug of its own. It doesn't encode URLs correctly. This is what you get if you post with BlogThis! against a Google search (I took out the angle brackets so Blogger whould show the html):

href="http://w....q=iraq" demographics="" population="" history="" shia="" sunni="" fertility="">iraq demographics population history shia sunni fertility - Google Search

Blogger is embedding quotes throughout the Google search string. If one hand copies the URL and pastes it by hand into the BlogThis! editing screen it works correctly. This is very easy to demonstrate, so I hope I'll have more luck communicating this bug than I did with my last report .

TuneCenter: Making the iPod accessible

TuneCenter - Griffin Technology does for your iPod what Front Row does for iTunes and iMovie. It displays playlists and tune info on a the TV screeen. Works with a remote. Getting the Playlist to the screen seems magical to me; I assume the TuneCenter has an embedded operating system but a quick search didn't turn up any leads.

This could be very helpful for visually impaired persons. A cheap compact LCD TV would be much more readable for many persons than the iPod's built-in display. The remote sounds a bit complex however.

iCal : create links to web or files

TUAW summarizes an OS X Hints tip:

Create clickable URL/file events in iCal - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

All you need to do for a URL is either drag it (or its icon) from a browser's address bar onto a time slot in iCal, or add a URL to an event's title and surround it with carrots like this, sans-quotes: "." To create a click-able link to a file, you'll need to use a web browser (such as Firefox) to surf your file system, then simply drag a file or folder from the browser into iCal in the same way as a URL. Don't try it with Safari, as it apparently doesn't do local file/folder surfing.

iPhoto keyboard shortcuts

Handy keyboard shortcuts for iPhoto:

Macsupport Your Source for Macintosh Computer Classifieds, Product Reviews, Mac Help and Forums. � Blog Archive � iPhoto Keyboard Shortcuts:

Go to next photo: Press the Right Arrow key

Go to previous photo: Press the Left Arrow key

Disable constrain setting when selecting an area: Press the Command key while dragging

Switch between portrait and landscape constrain setting when selecting an area: Press the Option key while dragging

There's at least one missing. When you apply an effect in edit mode, if you hold down the control key (don't save image and don't click) you see how the original looks.

I thought the Option key switch between portrait and landscape was broken in iPhoto 4 or 5, but it works fine in 5.02. Too bad I'd not been using it!

Data Visualization

Karl Hartig: Data Visualization

I got here by Kawasaki's blog. Great resource for a class I co-teach.

FrameMaker vs. Pages

How does Pages compare to traditional desktop publishing solutions? FrameMaker Feature Comparison compares Pages, Word, FrameMaker and InDesign. The PDF is a long and comprehensive report.

I hope the author will update the document for Pages 2.0. I'm still on the fence about committing to Pages. For now OmniOutliner and AppleWorks and Text suffice. Since Pages will install for all users, and Nisus will only work for a single user per machine, Nisus is rather more expensive.

I'd feel better about buying Pages if Apple were more serious about building iWorks -- or if they switched to an OpenDoc file format.