Search services support "time in ...."

A handy tip. Want to know the time in Montreal? Enter "Time in Montreal" into the search box of your favorite engine.

Mac smart phones: Blackberry, Palm or ?

Missing Sync claims to support Microsoft's PDA/Phone clients (I've no idea what they call those things now). Treo has Missing Sync support that probably works.

Blackerries, however, come with a vendor supported OS X solution.

Unless Apple produces a phone, the Blackberry is probably the best supported OS X phone. The business Blackberries (not the Pearl) also have much better Amazon reviews than Palm or Microsoft phones.

FileBrowse and my attic cognitive map and catalog system

I may have a use for FileBrowse. I catalog our attic using a combination of filesystem metadata, full text search, using the OS X folder layout as a map to domains, and storing images of boxes, bins and bin contents in folders. The result gives us cross-platform support, very rapid data entry, and anb inexpensive combination of spatial indexing (move folder icons about in folder view) with text search and low cost inventory capture. I think of it as somewhat similar to the way my memory would do this -- if I only had a memory.

The strengths are match to human cognition and speed of data acquisition and entry. The disadvantages are storage (far more disk use than a traditional database, but, OTOH, much less than a few hours of family photos or a minute of video) and image browsing -- I have to open folders to see images. Ideally I'd like a flattened view that would show images and image data.

I might try using a saved spotlight search to do something similar but I'll also test Filebrowse. (I could dump all the images in iPhoto, but it's awkward and I have to redo every time I add an image to folder.)

Update 10/15/06: FileBrowse can't view all files contained in subfolders, so it didn't work. A Spotlight smart folder showed all images very well (flattened the hierarchy), but I can't get the icons beyond 128x128, so they're not quite big enough. Preview will ALMOST browse a smart folder -- but not quite. Maybe in 10.5. Smart Folders in 10.4 seem to be only accessible by the Finder.

Timature: Adam Tow's pending Aperture time adjustment utility

Is it what you know, or who you know? Or, in the modern world, is it rather knowing who to get to know?

When I asked Adam Tow about using AppleScript to fix the Aperture date problem, I was asking the right person. Once Timature is out and tested a bit, I'll be able to buy Aperture 1.51. At last.

I suspect Adam's app will be a mixture of AppleScript and a shell call to SQLite, but I've no inside knowledge. This is only possible because Apple uses SQLite3 for Aperture's data store.

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.