iPhoto book tips: on-the-fly book-specific cropping

Apple's iPhoto - Books make great gifts, but they're not trivial to make. It takes me about two hours to put one together, and it's not unusual to have to start over. Here are a few tips, including one big tip. Some are from Pogue and Story, some are my own:

1. Assemble photos by attaching keywords, drag and drop to an album etc. Order photos as desired in album. Adjust descriptions and edit in the album.

2. Create the book. If you want to use the iPhoto descriptions and titles as starting points, choose the Classic layout.

3. Do your layout work. Don' t bother with autoflow, it's not worth it. Do not edit any of the titles or captions, any flow changes will delete your work. (Isn't that absolutely obnoxious?!)

4. To add pages click add, to delete pages switch the top view to book, select a page, and hit delete.

5. The photo book likes 4x3 (point and shoot, VGA) aspect ratios. If you have 4x6 it makes arbitrary crops (center). Here's how to make your own temporary crops without editing the image. Right click. Choose 'fit photo to frame size'. Then double click photo. This brings up a zoom box. Zoom in. Click on photo and hold, you can move it inside the frame. Voila, a book-specific crop, no need to do special crops on your 4x6 (dSLR) (or 16:9) aspect ratios.

6. Last of all, edit the titles and captions that were carried over from iPhoto's Library. Edits here will not affect what you have in the Library. (I think if you update the Library description, you can have that flow back to iPhoto by removing the image from the album and dropping it back in again.) You can vary fonts by using Cmd-T or fonts and styles by Control-click on strings.

7. Pogue/Story (good book) has a crazy tip. Use an image editing program to create an image of text and include that in the book as a picture (1350x1800 pixels, 150 dpi).

Aperture's date problem: Adam Tow replies

I have been pursuing a lonely campaign to bring image date editing to Aperture. Alas my broken heart, this didn't come with version 1.5. The other day it occurred to me that perhaps one could modify dates using AppleScript, and I asked that of one of one of my favorite OS X blogs: tow.com.

Here's Adam Tow's reply. No API, so AppleScript would read dates, but not edit them. On the other hand I didn't know that Aperture uses the open source SQLite3 database (note SQLite, a public domain C library application, runs on Windows too).

I wonder if one could simply write SLQ code to adjust dates [1]. Adam is thinking of writing a utility to set dates in Aperture. If he did that, I might buy Aperture (especially since the MacBook is expected to go Core Duo at the end of this month).

[1] Not so simple, read the excellent Wikipedia article. Fascinating. Apple uses SQLite fairly extensively and 10.4's CoreData API overlays SQLite (I think I knew that once). Maybe the date could be edited or modified using the SQLite database browser.

Update 10/13/06: sqlite3 runs at the command line in 10.4. So a really reckless geek could fix up the dates using SQL at the command line ...

Update 10/14/06: My, that was fast ...

Google Video, Picasa Video and 'unlisted'

Digital Inspiration is an excellent, lesser known blog. I get more from it than many more famous alternatives. In a single post Amit tells me that Picasa now allows video uploads and storage in Picasa albums, and that Google Video has added a new 'unlisted' feature. I'll be 'unlisting' all family videos now; I'd previously been marking them as 'religious' to minimize interest. Excellent links as well.

A web site devoted to making things

Instructables: step-by-step collaboration. Build a bike stereo.

MacBook shutdowns: maybe I can get a few more months out of my iBook

AppleInsider | Apple MacBook owners organizing class action lawsuit summarizes the state of the MacBook shutdown problem. I suspect the real fix will come when Apple switches to the next Intel chip.

Apple pushed hard to make the Intel migration early, probably too hard. I'll try to get a few more months out of my iBook ...

Eudora goes open source, and joins Thunderbird

I began using Eudora 2.x on the Mac, back when Steve Dorner owned it. I even corresponded with him. When I went to Windows I moved my email files to Win 95 and ran Eudora there. I still use in on my XP box, even though it’s definitely showing its age. I figured I’d eventually move all my mail archives to a future version of OS X’s Mail.app and use Gmail for much of my routine emailing, but to my surprise Eudora has a migration path …

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

... Qualcomm … and the Mozilla Foundation… announced that future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program. Future versions of Eudora will be free and open source, while retaining Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements. Qualcomm and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project, with a view to enhancing the capabilities and ease of use of both Eudora and Thunderbird.

Qualcomm also today announced that it has released the final commercial versions of the current Eudora products for Windows and Mac operating systems. The open source version of Eudora is targeted to release during the first half of calendar year 2007. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, Qualcomm will cease to sell Eudora commercially. In the interim, Qualcomm will continue commercial sales, at a reduced price of $19.95 and with a six-month period of technical support. Existing technical support commitments will be honored in their entirety.
"I'm excited for Eudora to be returning to the open source community," said Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for Qualcomm's Eudora Group. "Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine. Making it open source will bring more developers to bear on Eudora than ever before." ...

I had no idea Steve still worked for Qualcomm, and for him this probably really is going “home”. it sounds like a win-win for Mozilla and Eudora email users, and a credit to Qualcomm. They really didn't have to bother providing a migration path, they could have just killed Eudora.

Natural Language Search: a handy critique

The next time someone sells you on the joys of natural language processing, read this critique of Natural Language Search. NLP is reasonably big in my industry, I am skeptical but still receptive.