TidBITS#718/23-Feb-04
=====================
iPhoto 4 features substantial speed improvements, but what else
is new in Apple's photo management application? Adam reports
on the positives and negatives. Also this week, Apple becomes
debt-free, music zips through the air legally in Austin, Texas,
and the AppleWorks User Group passes on news of corruption-
stopping AppleWorks utilities. We also note the releases of
Interarchy 7.0, iSight 1.0.2, Security Update 2004-02-23, and
new RSS feeds from Apple.
Topics:
MailBITS/23-Feb-04
Apple: Debt-Free and Flush with Cash
Austin Indie Bands Shared via iTunes
Solving AppleWorks Corruption Problems
iPhoto 4: The Potential Remains
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/23-Feb-04
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-718.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2004/TidBITS#718_23-Feb-04.etx>
Copyright 2004 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
<http://www.tidbits.com/terms/> Contact: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------
This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* Make friends and influence people by sponsoring TidBITS!
Put your company and products in front of tens of thousands of
savvy, committed Macintosh users who actually buy stuff.
For more information and rates, email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
* READERS LIKE YOU! Help keep TidBITS great via our voluntary <------ NEW!
contribution program. Special thanks this week to Geoffrey Lee,
James Butzberger, and Jonathan Wilson for their kind support!
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
* SMALL DOG ELECTRONICS: iBooks On Sale! <--------------------------- NEW!
iBook G3/800 12" display $759! iBook G3/800 w/640 MB RAM $829!
iBook G3/900 14" 640/60/Combo/56K/AirPort Only $1149!
Visit: <http://www.smalldog.com/tb/> 802-496-7171
* FETCH SOFTWORKS: Want to copy files between FTP servers? <--------- NEW!
Use Fetch, the FTP client for Mac OS 9 and X, and you can
drag and drop files for fast and easy file copying.
Download your free trial version! <http://fetchsoftworks.com/>
* Discover, Master, and Unleash the Music in You!
The Big Mix from Aladdin Systems delivers nine awesome titles
in one complete audio package. Get the Big Mix for only $69.99.
<http://www.aladdinsys.com/store/tidbits/bigmix.html>
* Dr. Bott, LLC: We got into this business because we love
computer stuff. We now have the chance - the DUTY - to sit and
geek out with technology every day under the guise of "work."
And if it's cool enough, we sell it. <http://www.drbott.com/>
* Web Crossing: now with plug-ins for blogs, wikis, RSS, and more.
Web Crossing v5.0 now sports a new plug-in architecture and
easy customization, yet it's still fast and powerful. Try our
free Web & email server! <http://www.webcrossing.com/tb-104>
---------------------------------------------------------------
MailBITS/23-Feb-04
------------------
**Security Update 2004-02-23 Available** -- Apple today released
Security Update 2004-02-23, adding fixes for a number of Mac OS X
components, including DiskArbitration, IPSec, and Point-to-Point
Protocol. For Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, the update includes a fix for
tcpdump; for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, the update also includes fixes
for Safari as well as Security Update 2003-11-19, which included
fixes for Personal File Sharing, QuickTime for Java, and a number
of Unix components. Security Update 2004-02-23 is available as
a 1.6 MB download for Panther (5.1 MB for Jaguar) via Software
Update or via Apple's Web site. [ACE]
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07448>
**Interarchy 7.0 Adds Tabs, Improves Interface** -- Stairways
Software has released Interarchy 7.0, the latest version of
their flexible Internet file transfer and network utility. For
Interarchy 7.0, Stairways has concentrated in large part on
enhancing the interface, pulling approaches from a number of
common Apple programs. Interarchy 7.0 offers Safari-like tabs
so you can avoid having many windows to different FTP sites open
simultaneously, adds a Finder-like icon view to the existing list
and column views, and provides a bookmark management approach
reminiscent of Safari's bookmark collections. Other welcome
improvements include a single combined Transfers window, Mac
OS X-style toolbars in every window, a History menu for recent
actions, and a new Network Host Info window that displays IP
address, ping results, MX records, and DNS information. Under
the hood, Interarchy is now completely Mac OS X native, using
Carbon events and native core networking. Like previous versions,
Interarchy 7.0 can upload and download files via FTP, SFTP,
FTP/SSH, and can download files or entire Web sites via HTTP,
all with a variety of repeating, scheduling, and link checking
options. Beyond file transfer, the program also features a suite
of network testing tools including packet watching, port scanning,
bandwidth monitoring, and more. Interarchy 7.0 costs $40, with
free upgrades from the previous version for anyone who purchased
since 01-Oct-03 and $20 for those who purchased before that date.
Interarchy 7.0 requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later and is a 2.7 MB
download. [ACE]
<http://www.interarchy.com/>
**iSight 1.0.2 Software Released** -- Apple has improved the
software for its sleek iSight video camera. The iSight 1.0.2
update improves auto exposure, auto white balance, and overall
performance. It also enhances compliance with IIDC, the
specification governed by the 1394 Trade Association used
for PC-to-camera communications over FireWire. The iSight 1.0.2
update is available via Software Update or as a free 512K download,
and requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or Mac OS X 10.3.2 or higher. [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/isight/download/>
<http://www.1394ta.org/>
**Apple Adds More RSS Syndication Feeds** -- Apple has quietly
offered RSS-based news feeds for a while, but the company
recently added a page that lists every feed, which includes
many subcategories. For instance, you can monitor all the latest
downloads, or just downloads by category. Likewise, you can get
an update whenever iTunes songs are posted in certain genres,
or generate your own custom query.
<http://www.apple.com/rss/>
If you haven't heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication, among
other expansions), it is a simple way for a Web site to format
(or "syndicate") a list of their latest headlines or Web log
entries so that a corresponding RSS news reader can subscribe
to a given set of headlines, given the feed's URL. In Apple's case,
you Control-click the XML icon next to the feed name and copy the
URL to the clipboard before pasting it into your RSS news reader.
(And yes, TidBITS offers an RSS feed as well via the first link
below.) With RSS, you control the subscription, and your email
address isn't passed to the site. I wrote a lengthy piece for
The Seattle Times about RSS recently. A popular Mac OS X RSS
news reader is the free NetNewsWire Lite from Ranchero Software.
The $40 NetNewsWire lets you post blog entries to popular
blogging software and hosts. [GF]
<http://www.tidbits.com/channels/tidbits.rss>
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/
2001786075_ptrss08.html>
<http://ranchero.com/netnewswire>
**Adam Interviewed on The User Group Report** -- If you'd like to
hear a radio interview I did with Chuck Joiner of The User Group
Report about our Take Control project and the new Take Control
User Group Program we've started, head over the page below.
Astonishingly, I don't even sound as though I'd been up half
the night before with a sick kid! [ACE]
<http://www.mugcenter.com/usergroupreport/2004/402.html>
Apple: Debt-Free and Flush with Cash
------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Apple is known for drawing attention to itself, but last week
even its harshest critics must have looked at the company in a new
light. As reported by the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription
required to view the first URL, below), Steve Jobs announced in an
email message to employees that Apple had paid off the company's
remaining $300 million in long-term debt. This means Apple is now
basically debt-free and has over $4.5 billion in cash and cash
equivalents - things it can sell off without penalty like bonds
and short-term investments. This doesn't include any stock in
other companies that might still have value, too.
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,BT_CO_20040115_002273,00.html>
<http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040116/101/ejkww.html>
The next time someone tells you Apple is in danger of imminent
demise because they have under $10 billion in yearly sales and
three percent of the market share of all new computers sold,
you might point out that $4.5 billion war chest, which compares
favorably to Dell ($50 billion in yearly revenue, but $4.6 billion
in cash minus long-term debt), Gateway ($3.5 billion in yearly
sales, $1 billion in cash minus debt), and HP ($73 billion in
sales, $7.5 billion in cash minus debt). For purposes of
comparison, Microsoft has $35 billion in yearly revenue and
nearly $53 billion in cash (no debt).
Because Apple has so much cash on hand and because it's regularly
producing positive audited earnings (so-called GAAP, or "Generally
Accepted Accounting Principles," earnings), the company isn't in
imminent danger of anything. At the current rate, it will just
keep amassing more and more cash.
With these types of numbers, it's possible that Apple might
consider offering stock dividends, which Microsoft finally started
releasing in January 2003. It would be a way to turn cash into
stockholder-owned equity without necessarily hurting the business.
<http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/jan03/01-16ds.asp>
One final note. Apple's formal price-to-earnings ratio (P/E, or
the value of its stock compared to its per-share net earnings) is
nearly 60, far above the 10 to 20 range that most stock analysts
believe is a sensible range based on continued reasonable growth
of a mature company. However, the financial magazine Barron's
recently noted that if you removed the $12 per share of cash
that Apple has ($4.5 billion divided by 369.73 million outstanding
shares) from the price, the remaining P/E is a more reasonable
number - in the 20s.
(Although we're talking about financial performance and
comparisons here, don't mistake us for stock advisers. We're not
recommending Apple's stock, just providing some talking points.)
Austin Indie Bands Shared via iTunes
------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Two organizations in Austin, Texas, are bringing the music of
local independent bands to users of free local wireless networks -
legally, thanks to the music sharing features built into iTunes.
Austin Wireless and Less Networks, which help businesses offer
free Wi-Fi hotspots by providing technical advice and free hotspot
gateway software, have created a music library containing 36 hours
of music available at any free location.
<http://www.austinwireless.net/>
<http://www.austinwirelesscity.org/>
<http://www.lessnetworks.com/static/partners.html>
The groups worked with the legendary music and technology festival
South by Southwest (SXSW), which annually brings music industry
figures, performers, and creative technologists together to
look at the state of and future of performance. Through the
end of March, the music will be available at the 25 Austin-area
businesses that are participants in Austin Wireless's network.
<http://www.sxsw.com/>
To use iTunes music sharing, you need to have at least version 4.0
of iTunes installed on a Mac or Windows system, and make sure that
your firewall is set to allow it. If you're using the built-in
firewall feature of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar or Mac OS X 10.3 Panther,
open System Preferences, select the Internet preference pane,
click the Firewall tab, and make sure iTunes Music Sharing is
enabled. Or, if you're using another firewall, add a rule that
allows traffic over port 3689. (This may not be necessary to
mount a remotely shared iTunes music library, but only to share
your own.)
The Less Networks software component of this system allows
hotspots to register users who then have free access. The software
acts as a gateway where users at a location confirm that they
agree to a set of usage guidelines; the software also tracks usage
in aggregate to better gauge whether Wi-Fi is driving business
to the company at the hotspot location.
This music sharing is meant to tweak Starbucks, which has offered
limited in-store exclusive music via the T-Mobile HotSpot network
operated in nearly 3,000 coffee shops in the U.S. Where the Austin
project offers free Internet access over Wi-Fi, T-Mobile charges
$6 per hour (minimum one hour), $10 per day, or $20 to $40 per
month for unlimited access with cancellation penalties.
(Here's a tip to Comcast subscribers: a T-Mobile promotion
with Comcast allows any Comcast subscriber to purchase a single
T-Mobile $10 day pass and then receive one day pass free each
month through December.)
<http://faq.comcast.net/faq/query.jsp?name=17811>
Solving AppleWorks Corruption Problems
--------------------------------------
by Warren Williams & Cathleen Merritt, AWUG
Apple recently released a pair of software packages that
resolve corruption problems occasionally encountered when
saving AppleWorks files on a server. The corruption, which
prevents users of AppleWorks 6.2.8 or earlier from opening files,
occurs if you are running any version of AppleWorks 6 under Mac
OS X 10.2 Jaguar and use AppleWorks's Save or Save As command
to save your work on an AppleShare or other Apple Filing Protocol
(AFP) server.
As a workaround, you can save files on your hard disk then copy
them to a server using the Finder without fear of corruption.
Users running AppleWorks 6 under Mac OS X 10.3 Panther won't
experience this problem.
Apple's two new software releases fix the problem and let
AppleWorks users repair previously corrupted files; they add
no new features to AppleWorks.
**Fixing the Problem** -- Apple's new AFP Client Update 1.0
resolves the AppleWorks file corruption problem on the Jaguar
user's Mac, enabling files to be saved to a server without
corruption. Installing AFP Client Update 1.0 also reportedly
prevents open AppleWorks files from being corrupted on logout.
The AFP Client Update 1.0 is a 580K download from Apple's
Web site.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/afpclientupdate.html>
We recommend this update to all AppleWorks 6 users who are running
under Jaguar and saving files on a server. Users running under
Panther need not install this update; nor is there any reason
to install it if you never save files to a server.
**Fixing the Files** -- AppleWorks 6.2.9 includes built-in file
repair routines that automatically fix these corrupt files when
they're opened. The repaired files may then be saved without
corruption as long as the user is using Panther, or Jaguar with
AFP Client Update 1.0 installed. And once those files have been
repaired, older versions of AppleWorks 6 can open and save the
files with no trouble (as long as the users of those older
versions are also running under Panther, or Jaguar with AFP
Client Update installed).
The simple fix for corrupted files is thus to upgrade to
AppleWorks 6.2.9 and, if you're still using Jaguar, to install
the AFP Client Update. However, network administrators who want
to fix many files at once may find it worthwhile to use Apple's
new AppleWorks File Repair Utility 1.0 to fix damaged files.
To fix a damaged file, just drag it onto the AppleWorks File
Repair Utility. Unfortunately the utility works by creating a
new version of the file, after which you need to remove the old
file and rename the new one. You can download the 436K utility
from Apple's Web site.
<http://www.apple.com/appleworks/update/>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/appleworksfilerepairutility.html>
To stay up to date on important news about AppleWorks, consider
subscribing to the AppleWorks News Service, a low-volume mailing
list run by the 15,000-member AppleWorks User Group.
<http://www.awug.org/news/list.html>
<http://www.awug.org/>
iPhoto 4: The Potential Remains
-------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Let's not beat around the bush. iPhoto 4 is better than iPhoto 2
in almost every way, and its performance is so much improved that
if you currently use iPhoto 2, you should immediately ante up $50
for iLife '04 or, if you've been hankering for one anyway, a new
Mac. On the other hand, if you rely on other programs to import,
organize, and edit your photos, iPhoto 4 doesn't offer enough new
to warrant the cost of iLife '04 on its own.
<http://www.apple.com/iphoto/>
**What's New and Improved?** The iPhoto engineers deserve credit
for speeding up iPhoto to such a great extent that it's impossible
to quantify the performance improvements. Scrolling through a
large iPhoto library no longer produces the spinning pizza of
death, switching between modes happens nearly instantly, resizing
the window fluidly is actually possible, and basically everything
else works at a totally acceptable speed. The only actions I've
found poky are occasional slowdowns between drawing a pixelated
image and the final smooth one (mostly with very large photos) and
occasional odd delays when Control-clicking albums to edit them.
Rendezvous-based photo sharing is probably iPhoto 4's sexiest
feature, since many people wish to share photos with other people
on their local network (but not the Internet), and it indeed works
well for enabling someone to view and copy your photos. However,
photo sharing is read-only; the other person cannot edit your
photos, change titles or keywords, or use your images to build
a book. For those activities, the photo must be copied locally
first.
Perhaps my favorite new feature in iPhoto is photo ratings - a
1 to 5 star rating system that mimics the one in iTunes. Although
I can't imagine someone expending the effort of distinguishing
between a really lousy picture (that was somehow good enough to
avoid being deleted) with 1 star and a somewhat lousy picture
with 2 star, the higher star ratings simplify separating out your
favorite images from the many plebeian pictures that have mostly
documentary value.
iPhoto 4's addition of smart albums makes photo ratings useful.
A smart album, like a smart playlist in iTunes (sensing a trend
here?) populates itself automatically with photos that match the
criteria you set. So, you could easily create a smart album that
selects your favorite photos (4 or 5 stars), or even your favorite
vacation photos (4 or 5 stars for photos taken during specific
date ranges or in specific film rolls). iPhoto 4 includes some
built-in smart albums that collect photos taken in each of the
last four years, over the last few months, and the last few
imports.
Smart albums can construct themselves according to a number of
criteria, but as much as they're cool and useful, they suffer from
one major problem - the need for manually created metadata. When
you import a CD, iTunes automatically looks up the CD's title,
artist, track names, and more from the Gracenote CDDB; any smart
playlists you create use that information, along with metadata
that iTunes generates automatically, like play count and last
played dates. The only metadata you must assign manually is
rating, although you can edit a track's ID3 tags if you desire.
In iPhoto, by contrast, you must enter manually almost all the
metadata you'll use with a smart album, and people are notoriously
bad about adding metadata.
Part of the reason I'm bullish about ratings is that
they're easier to apply than other types of metadata, thanks
to omnipresent keyboard shortcuts (Command-1 through Command-5).
These and other keyboard shortcuts work even when you're viewing
a slideshow in iPhoto 4, so you can rotate, delete, and rate
photos while watching, and you can do it all from the keyboard
if you don't want to display the new slideshow controls.
(Ironically, iTunes lacks these keyboard shortcuts, and I find
myself using utilities to rate songs from the keyboard because
of that.) Speaking of slideshows, iPhoto 4 can finally use an
entire iTunes playlist instead of repeating just a single song
(a painfully obvious failing that persisted into iPhoto 2),
and they also provide a choice of Keynote-inspired transitions
between slides.
People pining for a selective import in iPhoto (like Apple's
Image Capture utility provides) will still be disappointed, but
in iPhoto 4 selective import would be welcome primarily for quick
imports of only a few select images from a large memory card. In
earlier versions, many people (myself included) avoided iPhoto's
all-or-nothing import to ensure that each film roll contained
only related images. iPhoto 4 lets you create new film rolls from
selected photos, and you can also drag photos from one film roll
to another. It's a great feature, since film rolls are in many
ways iPhoto's best organizational feature.
Along with these major features, iPhoto offers a number of
smaller, but no less welcome, changes. You can now edit the
titles, comments, or dates of a set of photos simultaneously,
which makes fixing improperly dated photos a breeze and definitely
makes adding metadata easier. A new Sepia button gives photos
that old-time look. A new Collage book theme looks attractive,
and Apple can now deliver books and prints to addresses in Japan
and according to the iLife product manager, in several European
countries starting 18-Mar-04. .Mac members now have the choice of
a number of new HomePage themes (though I'd like to see some more
elegant designs), and even better, iPhoto can now replace a
HomePage album, so you need not login to .Mac to make changes
(although iPhoto re-uploads the entire set of photos rather than
just the changed photos or titles).
<http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/books.html>
**What's Still Missing?** All that sounds great, so what's my beef
with iPhoto 4? As soon as I saw the very first version of iPhoto,
I was impressed, because Apple clearly understood what a consumer-
level photo management program needed to do. But as much as iPhoto
covered the necessary ground on paper, the application itself
continues to suffer from glaring holes that have been painfully
obvious from day one. I'm undoubtedly more familiar with iPhoto
than just about anyone, since I've actually tested every function
in every version of the program while writing my iPhoto Visual
QuickStart Guide books, but the complaints I'm about to list
aren't just my pet peeves, they're also the concerns I've heard
from hundreds of iPhoto users in email and at talks I've given.
(As an aside, for amusing evidence that even Apple understands the
importance of at least some these features, iPhoto's Help until
today contained a document called "What's new in iPhoto 3" (it
currently retains that title, but the content has been updated for
iPhoto 4). There was no external release of iPhoto 3, of course,
so this document must have been a wish list or been left over from
a version left for the future. You can read the original text in
TidBITS Talk.)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkmsg=20081>
For many people, iPhoto 2's abysmal performance with thousands of
photos required the creation of multiple iPhoto Library folders.
Other people rely on multiple libraries to separate unrelated
photos (work and personal pictures, for instance). iPhoto 2
provided only the most half-hearted capabilities for creating and
switching among iPhoto Library folders. It was saved by a hidden
Mac OS X shortcut: if you Command-Option-drag a file to any
application on the Dock, that application will attempt to open
the file, even if it's not that application's file. In iPhoto 2,
if you Command-Option-dragged an iPhoto Library folder to iPhoto's
icon, iPhoto would switch to that folder. Unfortunately, since the
iPhoto team wasn't aware of this shortcut, they managed to break
it in iPhoto 4. Now the best way to switch among iPhoto Library
folders is via Brian Webster's free iPhoto Library Manager
utility. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to merge iPhoto
libraries; the best approach is probably to burn photos to
a CD or DVD and import them (thus retaining keywords, which
doesn't happen when copying photos via photo sharing) again
from disc.
<http://homepage.mac.com/bwebster/iphotolibrarymanager.html>
iPhoto Library Manager also provides a clumsy workaround for
another glaring iPhoto 4 omission: the capability to share an
iPhoto Library among multiple users of the same Mac. This points
out a limitation in the concept of iPhoto 4's Rendezvous photo
sharing as well. The problem is that for couples, photos are
usually a shared resource to which either person can add titles,
keywords, comments, or ratings. But iPhoto 4 doesn't make it easy
for two people to work on the same set of photos from multiple
accounts or multiple Macs. There are workarounds that involve
external or network volumes (explained with detailed steps
in "Take Control of Sharing Files in Panther") or changing
permissions constantly (which is what iPhoto Library Manager
does), but this should be built in to iPhoto. Apple is responsible
for breaking everything apart for multiple users in Mac OS X;
it's their responsibility to make sharing data between those
users easy.
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/panther/sharing.html>
Perhaps the most troubling omission in iPhoto 4 is that it still
provides no method of exporting metadata you create, which is yet
another reason many people don't bother putting the effort in.
Think about it - more so than any other data you create, you want
your photos to last forever. They'll be even more important to you
in 50 years than they are now, and you should be able to pass them
along to your children or to institutional archives when you die.
Ignoring the silly question of whether Apple will update iPhoto
for the rest of time, the near term answer to this problem is an
export capability that lets users retain any metadata they've
applied.
Where should this metadata live? There's a specification called
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) that many digital cameras use to
store metadata in the JPEG files they create. Perhaps there are
technical concerns surrounding the use of EXIF data, but on the
face of things, Apple could use it for storing titles, ratings,
and more.
<http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/tib/tib4317.shtml>
Smart albums are useful, but for many people who have become
accustomed to hierarchical filing systems such as used by the
Finder, iPhoto's lack of hierarchical albums is bedeviling. Sure,
you can concoct a smart album to hold all your vacation photos,
but you can't have a Vacation Photos album that contains sub-
albums for each vacation. iPhoto has done a good job of mimicking
iTunes; perhaps it should look at the Finder next.
There's one final omission made all the more egregious by
comparison with the Finder. Perhaps the primary point of a
graphical interface is direct manipulation of objects, yet iPhoto
still refuses to allow direct naming of photos or film rolls, as
you do with files and folders in the Finder or with songs in
iTunes. Instead, you must select the item in question and then
enter the name in the info pane. You can apply ratings directly,
through a hierarchical contextual menu, but adding keywords and
changing dates must also be done at arm's length from the actual
target of the action.
**Development Sloppiness** -- Apple fixed a number of bugs in
iPhoto 2 that I ran across while writing about it, but they've
managed to introduce an entirely new crop that you may find
irritating. If you set the option to place most recent photos at
top, creating or modifying film rolls reverses that setting until
you open and close iPhoto's Preferences window. Control-clicking
a photo in a separate image-editing window displays a contextual
menu of editing commands, of which Sepia is always disabled.
(Ironically, in iPhoto 2, Enhance was always disabled in that
menu, though it works now.) If you duplicate a photo that you've
edited in any way other than rotating (and sometimes even
rotating), duplicates made of that photo do not get "copy"
appended to their titles, making identification of the duplicates
hard. You can delete photos from the Last Months and Last Rolls
albums just as you would from the Photo Library, except for
dragging to the Trash album, which works only from the Photo
Library. And lastly, if you select any album, iPhoto shows you
the amount of disk space the album takes up... except for the
one album whose physical size on disk matters most: the Trash.
(Work around this by selecting all the photos in the Trash album;
the info pane then shows you the amount of disk space used by
the selection.)
These aren't subtle bugs - I've found them merely by monkeying
through iPhoto's interface while updating my iPhoto book, and I
can't believe any of them would be hard to fix. Perhaps we'll see
a 4.0.1 release that will fix these bugs, though I'm not holding
my breath, since there was no 2.0.1 to fix the similarly obvious
bugs in iPhoto 2. Looking forward to the next major release of
iPhoto, I'm more than happy to do this with a feature-complete
beta release so I can report the bugs directly to Apple for fixing
rather than telling the world about them in the release version
and attempting to come up with workarounds for my book.
In the end, I'm left frustrated by iPhoto because it constantly
displays glimpses of greatness that are then promptly undercut by
obviously missing features and boneheaded bugs. I expect better
from Apple, and as I've done with the last two major releases of
iPhoto, I'll hold out hope that a full year of development time
will allow the iPhoto team to make great strides for iPhoto 5.
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/23-Feb-04
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
**Konfabulator** -- Following Adam's review of Konfabulator,
readers discuss the utility - is it truly useful, or just
well-done eye candy that takes up too much screen space?
(14 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2170>
**Eudora and Web browsers** -- Is it possible, when clicking a URL
in Eudora, to open the link in whichever Web browser is currently
running? AppleScript to the rescue! (5 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2171>
**Digital signatures in TidBITS** -- Should mailing lists use
digital signatures to ensure that only messages from subscribers
get through? (8 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2174>
$$
Non-profit, non-commercial publications may reprint articles if
full credit is given. Others please contact us. We don't guarantee
accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and
company names may be registered trademarks of their companies.
This file is formatted as setext. For more information send email
to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. A file will be returned shortly.
For information: how to subscribe, where to find back issues,
and more, email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Send comments and editorial submissions to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back issues available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/>
And: <ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/>
Full text searching available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/search/>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
