We all have to share files and what we want is an easy way to be able to do that. One of the ways that we all know and love to use, would be Dropbox and there are other filesharing services of a similar type. With Dropbox when you want to share a file you can easily just save the file into a particular folder that you have specified as a shared folder. That shared folder will typically be shared between a small number of people and files can go into it from whoever is doing the sharing to that folder. You can also put files into a public folder within Dropbox and grab a URL which you give to whoever you want to give that file to. It is not particularly difficult to do it that way, but you could instead be using an application called Cloud, could be the best file sharing program.
Cloud is a Mac application which is simple file sharing app to use and very easy to understand, probably simpler than using Dropbox. All you have to do in order to share a file is to drag a file from your Finder window to the icon in the menubar and the URL to that file in the cloud is automatically put into your clipboard. How easy is that then? The receiver of the URL can put it into whatever browser they use and see the contents of the file or downloaded to their own computer, if it is a file type that is not able to be viewed in a browser.
Not only can you do the drag-and-drop easy style of file sharing like this with the Cloud application, you can also set up a keyboard shortcut that you can use in your Finder window when you have file selected, also selected images within iPhoto. The Cloud application also gives you a URL shortening service that can be triggered, these triggers being known as Raindrops and it works in the Chrome browser, Firefox and also Safari. If you want to upload selected tracks from iTunes you can also do that using this application too. So you can easily see that the Cloud app, apart from being a simple file and link sharing application for the Mac, is incredibly useful for a few specific tasks. If you are a user of Creative Suite Photoshop, then you may be pleased that this application also allows you to use the keyboard shortcut to share a file that you are working on within Photoshop. You can share files free and you can use this application for file sharing music from iTunes.
If you use the application Grab or Screenshots. you can have it set so that the screenshot files are automatically sent to Cloud. I don’t intend to use that service myself, because I prefer to use Skitch for doing my screen grabs as it gives me a number of options for annotations of those screen grabs and a lazy way to reduce grabs in size if I need to. Not everybody uses Skitch though, so this could be just what you are looking for in an application, for making available quick screenshots that you want to share.
When you drag and drop a file onto the icon for the cloud app in the menubar, you just have to wait for as long as it takes to upload a file to the server and when it is ready you get an audio notification and a Growl notification if you are using Growl. So why not go and take a look at the Cloud app website if you want more information, or just go to the Mac App Store and download and install directly onto your Mac.
Camera Bag is an application which I happened to see on the Mac app store and I thought I would give it a try, when I saw that I could get a 30 day free trial from the website rather than buying it first. I am looking at it in terms of a comparison with SnapSeed which I managed to get on my iPad. I was fortunate in that I found the application was free on one day of the week. I think I was alerted to the app being free by the application I have on the iPad which alerts me when apps are dropped in price or become free, whether that be a special one-day offer or a permanent change in price.
SnapSeed for the iPad is an excellent application that has a reasonable set of tools to manipulate photographs. There is also a desktop app which I presume does the same sort of thing and I have been tempted to buy it. With both of these applications, SnapSeed and CameraBag 2, I would be hesitant in making the purchase due to the fact that I already have Pixelmator. Although Pixelmator can’t do the filters and adjustments quite as fast as either Camera Bag or SnapSeed, it does do the same sorts of things. Another advantage with using Pixelmator 2 is the fact that I can make changes which are nondestructive. With using the other two applications for making changes to photos, you would have to first make sure that you are working on a copy of your original, rather than the original itself.
What can you do with CameraBag 2
When I first opened the application, my first task was to drag-and-drop a photo into it directly from iPhoto. You can of course use the file open command to get images to work with from your hard drive, but to drag-and-drop is always nice and easy. The first thing that you see is a list of filter effects over on the right hand side of the application. When you move the mouse across these filters you see a large thumbnail, giving you a preview of that filter on how it affects your photo. To apply the filter you have to just click on the plus button. It is as easy as that.
It is possible for you to apply more than one filter at the same time, but you should note that some filters will work against each other and cancel each other out. I found this out by adding the Holga filter and also the Skater filter. There is a section also within this application that allows you to add borders to your images. I did wonder if it would be possible to add more than one border and found that it wasn’t possible. For instance it could be rather nice to first add the paper border effect, which gives a ripped paper effect to the edge and then to add another border around that. It is not possible directly within the application although I suppose you could put on one border, save out the image and then bring it back in again. Then put on the second border. You would want to do that last of all so that you don’t apply filters to the border that mess it up.
How useful is the application Camera Bag 2
Like I said, with many of the adjustments I would be more likely to open up Pixelmator and do the adjusting in that application. On the other hand though this Camera Bag application for the Mac is quite quick in operation and is fairly useful for applying a couple of preset filters quickly. CameraBag is also handy when you have a photograph that you want to make different and more exciting and you don’t really know quite what you want to do to it. You could just throw the picture into Camera Bag and just click on a few filters quickly and see if something stands out as a good improvement.
The tool for creating a vignette in Camera Bag is very useful and is certainly one thing that I would be likely to use the application for. Then quite possibly, if I was opening the application to do the vignette, it is also likely I would also look to see if I needed to make any other changes to things such as the contrast, brightness and saturation of the photo.
The controls of the filters in the Mac app Camera Bag 2
With some of the filters you do get the opportunity to adjust the filter. Mainly the adjustment is concerning the amount of effect you give to that filter, but there are some filters which also have other sliders. There were a couple of filters that had sliders which rather than working as a slider that you moved from left to right, you clicked on them and it changed the setting in an seemingly arbitrary way and the button jumped back to the centre of the slider. I didn’t particularly like the way that worked.
On some of the filters you get curves that you can adjust by clicking and holding on the curve and changing the shape of it. There are also bezier like controls for changing the shape of the curve. One such filter where you have these curves is the RGB filter which allows you to adjust the colours of the photo.
Overview of the Camera Bag 2 photo filter application for the Mac
If you don’t have an application like a Pixelmator, Aperture or Lightroom and you need to make adjustments to photographs, then this inexpensive application could be just what you are looking for. The application does work reasonably well, although I did find that with some of the filters, the interface or the options for that filter needed extra work to make it more useful and intuitive. There was one filter which applied a border to make the image square and I thought it would be better if there was also an option to move the image within that square. It would be good to be able to choose the area that you wanted to crop down to the square shape, but in Camera Bag 2 it wasn’t possible to do that. There are some filters where the sliders don’t work as sliders and without a doubt that certainly did annoy me.
For the casual photographer, that just wants to add a couple of preset filters and maybe put one on top of another, then this application is pretty good. I expect that this application will get better in time and if you have bought from the Mac App Store, then you will get the updates as the application is improved. It would seem a good idea that if you do buy this application and there are things that you don’t like, that you should make contact with the developer to inform them regards the shortcomings. The other application which you might want to look at and make comparisons with, would be SnapSeed which is from Nik software. I already have SnapSeed for the iPad so I doubt if I will buy it to have on the desktop as well. The desktop version could have the advantage though of being able to work with larger images. Overall I would at least recommend that you go to the web site for CameraBag2 and download the trial version and play with it for thirty days and see if it is a fit for you and the way you work.
It is to be expected that on account of the fact that I’ve just bought a new Canon 600D , you are going to get a few photography based posts on the Mac20Q Web site. I just also made a video for YouTube which is about how to create the Dave Hill photo style look using Pixelmator. I do like Pixelmator because it is an affordable alternative to PhotoShop, but when I first tried to create the photo style that I was looking for in Pixelmator, I couldn’t because a filter required was missing. The filter is the High Pass filter and basically what it does, is to do some sharpening to your image and if you wish it can be extreme sharpening. Well I was delighted, when I managed to find a third party Quartz Composer filter to use with Pixelmator to do the High Pass. The settings are completely different to the settings that you would see in a recipe for the Dave Hill style photos in the Flickr group, but it is possible to twiddle and fiddle, until you get something that does what you want it to do.
Making pictures rather than taking pictures
The Dave Hill photography style is quite amazing and stunning in terms of the final images that are created and mad. They go way beyond a snapshot or just taking a picture. A lot of it is to do with the way that the subjects are posed and lighted during the photo session, but then there is too large extent, a good deal of work which happens in the post processing to turn the images into something quite extraordinary. I suggest that you go and have a look at the website for Dave Hill photography and see what I’m talking about.
Get the Quartz Composer high pass filter
If you would like to have a go at working with some of your own images to make them into this style of photograph, then you can get the high pass filter to use with Pixelmator from the Pixelmator Forum. Look in the section where there are user made, third-party quartz composer filters and do a search for a High Pass Filter. There are other filters there on the site that you can download and usually they come with instructions on how to install them so that they are available within your applications. If you don’t want to go as far as visiting the Pixelmator Forum then download the filter from here.
Within the video that I posted on YouTube about How to Use Pixelmator to Create Images in the Style of Dave Hill Photography I also have a quick look at using the HDR photography application called Photomatix Pro. The reason for this is because to a certain extent the images that we are trying to create to have a certain relationship with HDR photography. I follow a recipe for making the images the way that I want them that I took from the Flickr website in the discussion forum for the group, but there are other recipes that are in there which could work just as well or give your photos that something special that you are looking for. In fact while I was using this set of steps to create my photo, towards the end, I did actually make a slight change in that I used a different blending mode with a layer, just because I tried a different layer and I liked the effect that gave better than the one in the recipe.
Here is the recipe that I used for the creation of the Dave Hill photo style
I would also do it different to how I did it in the video now regard the High Pass Filter.I would change the blend mode before setting the High Pass Filter, that way you can see what the filter is doing real time
The artistic way of seeing
There are photographers that don’t like wild and weird looking photos, that have been manipulated back in the studio using applications such as PhotoShop, Photomatix Pro, or Pixelmator. These photographers tend to be old school type of photographers that are looking for some sort of camera vérité. I have an artists perception on the debate about what is a good photograph and what is a terrible photograph. There is no truth in a photograph, because when you look at it, it is still either images on paper or pixels on the screen, in the same way as the famous artist Magritte created a painting of a pipe, on which it was written underneath insert ‘This is not a pipe’. It was paint on canvas, it was not possible to pick it up, put tobacco in it and set fire to it to use to give yourself cancer of the lungs. For me I think that it is perfectly reasonable to do whatever is necessary, just so long as the final result is exactly what you were looking for. If that final image says what you wanted to say to the viewers of that photograph, picture, collection of pixels or ink on paper, then the means justifies the end.
I am an artist and I don’t care who knows it
As I mentioned in the text above, I got to a certain point with the workings of the recipe to make the style of it look like a Dave Hill photography type of image and I tried using a different blend mode for one of the layers of the image. I decided that I preferred the effect that it gave me and altered the final image. I could do that because it is not about slavish copying of an artist’s work. In this case I was doing what many artists have done in the past which is to take something that is already there and use it as a starting point for something new and original. There is another photographer / artist whose work I really love seeing, his name is Michael Orton and again, there is a Flickr group dedicated to try and create images in the same style. I would think that it could be particularly wonderful, if I was to use my own artistic sensibilities and combine with these two styles of art. I will certainly be giving that a try and I will be posting more on here about my photography and art and hopefully I will be able to let you know if I have some success with that project.
This is WriteRoom I am using to write this article and right from the start I like the look of it. At the moment it is working well with Dragon Dictate. I am quite interested to see that it has optional session tracking and logging.
Using WriteRoom on OSX Lion
The text is easily readable, although it does seem that I can change the font if I wish and also change the size of the text. It is a fully Lion compatible application, that will do the full-screen thing and has autosave and auto resume. There are two versions of full screen, one where you can still see what is on a second monitor and the Lion standard mode which only shows the Linen effect on your second screen. Well done for that, there are a lot of us that have a second monitors. I like that in the title bar it tells me how many words have been written as I go. The word count moves to the bottom left corner when in full screen.
It seems that there are quite a lot of new features in version 3.0 and I will have to take the time to go through all of the menus to see what there is available. One of the things that I like – that I have been using in Scrivener, is the way that I can have the line that I am working on highlighted. This little trick makes it easy to see exactly where I am writing on screen at any time. It is especially useful when I go back into the text, more so than when I am appending text to the end of what I have written already.
WriteRoom is a great looking app and it has themes too
There is something which will tint the selection and cursor. I have switched that on, but at first look I couldn’t see how that worked. Basically it gives you your selected text in the same colour that highlights the line you are working on. Not much of a difference and I can work with it either way. When I enter full screen it changes to having a dark background with white writing. It is possible to make changes to the full-screen view and the easiest way to do that, is to use the themes. I downloaded a theme called Dyslexia from the web site. I unzipped it and double clicked on it for it to be automatically installed, it was then immediately ready for use. I only had to increase the font size to take account of my tired old eyes, to get the best viewing set up on my 27in iMac. There are a couple of different themes that can be chosen. You can also swap your themes with other users of WriteRoom. Easy thing too, if I want to create a new theme or a full screen variant from scratch, just a simple as taking one you have and changing to suit your requirements.
Who is WriteRoom for?
The main idea behind WriteRoom is that it is a tool for writers and authors. It is good that it is totally up to date, being on the latest version of the Mac operating system, OS X Lion. You don’t have to go to the preferences to set up the application the way you like it. There is no preferences window for the application, everything you need to set is in the menus. Then when you are using themes, WriteRoom will keep the way you have set it up, ready for the next session of writing.
Tracking the writing work done with automatic logging
I will be able to track my word count of articles that I write and even log them to a spreadsheet. To be able to do this I will go to the File – Session menu to get it set up. The session logging is not working on my computer with WriteRoom, out of the box, I will have to do some checking to see why not.I have tried a couple of the usual tricks, but the spreadsheet has not appeared yet. I have tried to get it going by starting a new session and then closing the application down and starting it back up again. I must be missing a trick somewhere , but I don’t know where.
In amongst the options you are able to decide where you want the text to wrap, choosing from numbers like 40, 50, 60, 66 up to 200 or you can go with wrapping to the full width of the window you are working on or wrapping to a page size. Which one you go with will depend on the size of the text you work with and the screen size you have on you computer. I like to have bigger text of 36 and wrap to 66 characters, like I said, the old eyes are grateful for such considerations.
RTF or Plain Text – Markdown and Marked
It is possible to have your work in RTF format, you might do that if you had to have different font sizes in the one document. If like me you work with Markdown then keeping it as plain text is best. The text is more portable that way. Also you can use the application from Brett Terpstra called Marked to show you a view of your work formatted from the Markdown syntax.
Overview of the WriteRoom Mac Application for Writers
Up until now I have been using Textmate for this sort of work, particularly when using Markdown. I could certainly use WriteRoom in conjunction with Marked to give me the html code I need, to send text to MarsEdit, my blogging software. I could take advantage of the automation tool called Quick Cursor, that the developer has created so that I could use WriteRoom as the default text editor for any other supported application. I already have Keyboard Maestro which I can set up to do that job for me, though.
Without a doubt WriteRoom is a great looking application that feels good to use. The themes that are standard can be altered and new ones can be downloaded or created. It has some very useful features, such as me being able to look in the toolbar now and see that I have written 1044 words and 596 of those have been in this session. You can get a trial version of the WriteRoom writing app for Mac users from the web site and it is available in the Mac App Store. I have been using just a short while and I can say that I like it and would be happy to continue using it. It is a well thought out application for authors and writers and is a strong contender in a section of the Mac Apps in which there is plenty of competition. It is a good tool and gets a thumbs up from Mac20Q.
I got feedback from the developers about the not writing to the logging .csv file and now it is working.
The csv won’t be created or written to unless you’ve saved the file (via WriteRoom). Check that File menu > Record Sessions in Spreadsheet is enabled. You can manually start a new session entry with File menu > Begin New Session.
From a fresh launch of WriteRoom, try opening the file (drag-drop on to WriteRoom or the Open File dialog, doesn’t matter), make your edits, save, and check. I’ll look into this, we might have to better define what constitutes a ‘session’ in a future update.
You may need to repair your disk permissions (with Disk Utility.app). Under Lion, there have been issues with this sort of thing all over, preventing apps from writing their registration keys, allowing autosave in the (official) autosave directories, etc. It’s… awkward. Not sure, but this may be one of those cases.
There is the realm of picture editing for free in which you have in an application that is on a webpage online and it is attempting to be just like a desktop picture editing application. Then on the other hand you have a huge range of specialist picture editing applications for free editing photos, that are based more on crazy filters or just creating crazy photos. What I mean by this, is that you will find sites where you can create the front page of a magazine using one of your own photos. You could even place yourself on the front cover of the Playboy magazine, preferably keeping it clean. You could swap your face for the face of some of the superstar so that you appear in a scene with Brad Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts. What you will basically be doing, will be to create a joke sort of image. Of course it will be even funnier if you use the picture of a friend, rather than a picture of yourself.
Free photo editing sites
To a large extent with these free photo editing sites that are offering a specialist type of image creation, where faces are changed for comic effect, you will not expect to have a masterpiece at the finish of it. On the other hand if the joke is funny enough, then I am sure you will quite likely be happy enough with the picture, if it gives the desired effect. There are also online picture editing for free sites that work on the basis of giving you a single click photo effect, that will perhaps turn your image into something that looks like a drawing. For example with the site called BeFunky Photo Effects you will get fairly simple effects, such as the one that will turn your image into an ink drawing. You do get a few options, in terms of how strong the effect should be, so that you can customise it to a certain extent.
Special effects you can get when free editing pictures
The sort of special effects that you can expect from a site such as Fun Photo Box will be images that make it look like you are underwater, images that will have a poster effect or pictures that look like they have been just distorted in some strange way or other. Sites such as Instagram have been very popular for applying photographic type of effects perhaps to emulate a certain type of film or photo type and it is also possible to find sites online that will do something similar. One photo editing service called Fotocrib will let you create montages, add three-dimensional effects or just simply give your photos rounded corners. If you have a need to encrypt your photo then this would be the place to go to get that done. This is the sort of encryption where you can’t see the photo, unless you have a password. This is not the same as photos which have encryption that the photo can be seen but have a secret message contained within.
Free photo editing sites to use if you want to be famous
Well, sort of famous. You can take one of your photos and use it to create a fake magazine cover, such as for Wired Magazine. You could on the other hand create images that make you look like your picture has you inside a comic book. Online free photo editing sites that offer this service, would be places like FotoTrix or another one called Poladroid. These sites allow you to use the funny templates and make comics, or put your friend’s face on the body of a chimpanzee. Does it get any better than that? Free photo editing sites that could perhaps be more likely to suit the female of the species, would be Hair Mixer and on this site you can upload or choose two photos and fairly simply put one hairstyle on top of another face. This could be very handy to do just before you go to your next hairdressers visit. There are all sorts of possibilities with this image making, for the comedians of the world available as free editing pictures applications online and you may also find similar sorts of applications for applying one image on top of another within the Mac App Store. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do something like this quite easily using Pixelmator 2.
Photo editing software reviews and the free photo editing sites
When you are looking to do some free editing photos, or picture editing for free then you could start by looking online for places such as IMagic Photo Enhancer. Obviously when using these free photo editing sites you do have to take into account the upload and download of images to and from the site. The connection speed could have an effect upon how long it takes to get the job done with your free editing of pictures, but certainly there will be times when you don’t want to mess about learning how to use one of the better Mac desktop photo editing applications. So why not upload your photo and use the templates available on sites such as Funny Photo and just enjoy yourself.
Considering that I have a Fine Art degree and that I worked as an art teacher for a few years and on top of that I worked as a signwriter / graphic designer for about 12 years, it is only natural that I have an interest in all things artistic. At the time that I did my artwork I wasn’t a Mac user and the graphics application that I became expert in because I used it on a daily basis, was CorelDraw. I did used to get funny looks from the people at the printshop when I asked to give them a file that came from a PC and I have to admit that it did used to annoy me slightly. I was able to do all that I needed to do and to a high standard also, that I could not understand what all the fuss was about with regards artists needing to be using Macs. Since that time though, things have changed quite a lot, PCs have become much less secure to use, Macs have become more mainstream and of course, I am now a Mac user. Naturally when I came over to the Mac, I wanted to find ways to do photo editing for Mac. I did find that the prices charged by Adobe for their Creative Suite to be prohibitive and so I had to look for alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator. So I needed to do some photo editing download of Mac applications and I tried out quite a few different Mac drawing apps. There is the Gimp application which is free, but at the time when I tried it, I didn’t like the look of the application and it seemed a bit crashy. Since then I have also tried Acorn, Picturesque and Pixelmator. I am sure that I have also tried one or two others, that at the moment I can’t remember the names of.
Online drawing pad at drawing websites
An account of the fact that my Internet connection is rather poor, to say the least, I have not really been able to make use of the drawing sites in any way, shape or form. I have tried a couple of vector drawing applications that are located online and are as such an online drawing pad for artists, but so far I have not been terribly impressed. It seems that I am kind of old school in this way, in that I prefer to have a Mac application and I am prepared to do a photo editing download to have it directly on my computer. I always thought it was a great shame that CorelDraw wouldn’t make a Mac Application and their only suggestion to users, making a request for illustration and photo editing for Mac from Corel, was to say to run a virtual machine like Parallels and run CorelDraw within Windows. I have tried using virtual machines for other applications, and to be honest I really don’t like it. I much prefer to have my Apple Mac computer unsullied by the Windows operating system.
What is the experience like on these drawing sites?
The latest experience I have had of these drawing sites, is one called Queeky and to be honest it wasn’t all bad. There seemed to be a reasonable number of tools that were available and extras like brushes that could be used to aid your artistic creations. It did seem to me that this online drawing pad could be used in a pinch to create a design, but for me it had enough lag for it to be disconcerting while I was using it. I found that I would certainly prefer to be using Art Text 2 or Pixelmator to do some real artwork. It would seem to me that you would have to be desperate to have to use one of these online drawing sites. Maybe you don’t have the money or you just begrudge paying the money to buy something decent. It is fair enough that if you only need to create a piece of artwork, or so some work on a photo maybe once per year, that you would prefer not to spend the money, but on the other hand you would probably still be better off using the Gimp application than an online drawing website.
Being social with drawing websites
It seems that just about everything is becoming social online and that also includes art and the creation of pictures and images. So one legitimate use of drawing sites, could be to use them as a place to do collaborative artwork. The latest website I was looking at does have an online application where you can collaborate on a drawing with an online friend at the same time. I can certainly imagine that that could even be a fun activity.
Photo editing download – What are the options?
With the advent of the Mac App Store, a popular place to go and buy your applications is direct from Apple. This is partly because of the great deals you get for buying applications, the wide variety of applications in the App Store and the fact that apps bought in this way are automatically given a family license. I like the fact that I can buy an application and I can also install it on my wife’s computer. We just have to login on her computer using my Mac App Store credentials and we can share that application. A much more civilised way of buying software.
There are some software companies that still have versions of their software that you can download from their website as a trial version. I like that this is still a possibility so that I can try an application without having to spend any money. The latest application that I have downloaded to give a try in this way is a Mac graphics application called Artboard. It is a vector drawing application which will also allow you to import bitmap images into it. So far I have been quite impressed with it and I might even be tempted to buy it. Look out for a full review of the application Artboard on this Mac20Q website soon.
Give the drawing websites and the online drawing pad idea a try.
Even though in this overview of this type of application, I have come down on the side of downloading applications rather than using drawing sites and that it is better to have your own Mac photo editing download of your favourite drawing applications, so that you can do proper photo editing for your Mac Mini. You may have faster Internet which could make it more viable. So by all means ignore my recommendations and search for those drawing sites, because you may find one that suits you for what it is you are trying to do and in any case you probably have faster Internet connection than I do.
When you actually look at the Mac Mini and decide to do a Mac mini test, you can’t help but be astounded by having so much goodness all fitted into such a small package. You might even decide to verbalise this, with the saying that all the best things come in small packets. No small wonder that many Apple fans look upon the Mac Mini with a certain amount of affection. I have in my house still, one of the early Mac Mini computers with the G4 processor 1.25 GHz, which was the first Mac that I ever bought and I don’t think I could ever come around to selling it. As the moment it sits under my television and use it to connect up, so that I can watch videos on the TV. When I first got it, it only had half a gigabyte of memory, but I did a Mac Mini memory upgrade to the maximum which is, for that model only 1 GB.
Mac Mini wiki to know all there is to know about the Mac Mini
There are plenty of resources online that you can use to find out more about the Mac Mini and one place to look would be the Mac Mini wiki. Just in case you don’t know, a wiki is a user generated set of webpages that are informational about whatever sort of subject you are interested in. There are wiki’s about all sorts of topics and with some of them you would perhaps need to be careful with regards believing all that you read. There is the possibility that somebody with an agenda added information to the wiki that was not strictly correct. This largely does depend upon the subject matter of the wiki, I think we will be fairly safe with the online Mac Mini wiki. The users of such a site, I feel fairly sure, know their stuff well enough that they would want to make sure it was all completely correct. It is a fan boy thing!
Mac Mini memory upgrade
With the latest version of the Mac Mini, Apple made it very easy indeed to be able to do a Mac Mini memory upgrade, with there being a circular entrance to the computer underneath, that is easy to undo and get into. Not only is it easy to do the memory upgrade in a Mac Mini now, the Mac mini will now support more memory than I was able to fit into my early G4 version of the Mini. Certainly when you are running OS X Lion and even more so if you are using applications that require more memory, such as video editors like Final Cut Pro X and bitmap image editors like Pixelmator, then the more memory that you can have, the better. These days with the latest Mac Mini, which is incredibly small for such a powerful computer you can add up to 8 GB of memory.
Mac Mini rumours – what can we expect from a new Mac Mini
You would have to wonder if there is much more that you could do to perfect this tiny computer, aside from putting in faster processors and graphics cards or a larger amount of storage space. Already with the latest version, you can opt to have solid-state drives instead of the spindle drives, which will give you extra speed. They already have the i5 or the i7 Intel processors and you have the possibility to buy the iMac to use as a server. There are in fact businesses that have a colocation service where you can have a Mac Mini mounted on a rack at their site and use the machine remotely, serving up whatever you want to to the Internet.
There are not going to be any Mac Mini rumours concerning Thunderbolt because the Mac mini already has Thunderbolt installed. Nearly all of the Apple line-up got Thunderbolt ports during 2011. Apple also recognise that the Mac Mini is perfect for connecting to a television and include a HDMI connector so that the Mac Mini can easily be connected to a HDTV. Connecting your Mac Mini to a television is a good Mac mini test and you will have an excellent view of the operating system and how it works on the largest screen in your house.
The many varied uses of the Mac Mini
One of the interesting uses I have seen of the Mac Mini would be to have it as an entertainment system within a car. There are car fanatics that have taken a Mac Mini and connected it to a small screen that has been fixed into the dashboard of the car. A GPS receiver can also be connected to the Mac Mini to give the computer unit, even more functionality suited to using in a car. I did see in a Mac Mini Wiki, that somebody had installed a Mac Mini into a Mini car. How cool is that then?
Certainly within my own experience, I have found that getting onto a site that has elements of flash all through it, I have seen monumental slowdowns or crashes of the browser. This would be on the desktop computers on a Mac or even a Windows PC and this bloated Adobe technology really doesn’t have a place on the mobile platforms. Full marks to Steve jobs and Apple for calling a spade a spade and refusing to have flash on the iPad. It was inevitable that there would be many naysayers that would say things like, the iPad can’t succeed because it doesn’t have flash. Just look at how wrong they were though, again on a personal level I can say that after using the iPad for a year and a half, never once have I wished I could use flash on the device. Forward thinking decisions for the future, as you would expect to see from Apple.
Watching videos on HTML 5 YouTube
There is an application on the iPad for connecting into YouTube and also when you are on the YouTube website you can choose to watch the videos in a HTML 5 version of the website. It isn’t difficult for website designers to make sure that they use the HTML video tag for HTML 5. It isn’t even difficult to make sure that the videos are formatted so that most, if not all browsers can view the videos on the HTML 5 pages. It looks like the HTML5 W3C have been doing a good job of working out the HTML5 framework, making it so that web developers can create stunning HTML 5 websites that look great, as well as being much more robust and speedier to load.
Check out the HTML5 wiki sites to help you implement doctype HTML5 on your webpages
It is very easy to find all the necessary details about how to create your HTML 5 webpages using the HTML5 framework. All you need to do is to go and visit a HTML5 Wiki to find out about how to implement a HTML5 database or HTML5 storage for your website creation. Keeping it simple is always a good idea, with whatever technology you are using and with HTML 5 it’s easy enough to add the tags that you need for a good web page. Very simple to do hand coding using a simple text editor like Text mate, or you can use something like the application called Hype.
Creating Animations Using Hype on Your Mac
I have this application on my Mac, it was very inexpensive to buy and it makes it very easy to be able to create animations for your pages using HTML5 tags, without having to know any coding. It is a joy to use, this Hype application for the Mac. I have created a number of animations and also there are videos on the Wizardgold / Mac20Q YouTube website channel in which I show how to use the application Hype. Much of the creation involves using drag-and-drop, which makes it very easy to create your animations. You can organise things on the timeline to give yourself a very sexy looking webpage. The application creates your webpage with the doctype HTML5, you can create a HTML5 menu and use a HTML video tag and within a few simple steps you can really make your web page come alive. You can’t quite go as far as making the sort of interactive magazine like the Aside Magazine, like that one created by those German webpage developers and HTML 5 web page designers, but you can get very close.
When you set the page size in Hype, to suit the iPad you can have webpages that are ideally suited to viewing on that device. To get a document that looks more like the Aside Magazine then you might decide to create something using iBooks Author. Even though this application is not creating webpages, it does use HTML 5 for the construction of the electronic e-book’s. It would be nice if in a future version of iBooks Author that it would be possible to output from the application to a HTML5 framework using the Doctype HTML5. If you know what you’re doing in terms of hand coding webpages, then you could possibly get inside the iBooks format and pull it apart to use elements of it to put on a webpage. As you can tell from this HTML5 article I am totally behind the idea that this new revision of HTML is the future of web publishing. What sort of experience do you have with HTML 5 apart from the use of the HTML 5 YouTube video experience?
Just the other day, last Thursday, Apple had a special presentation in New York in the Guggenheim and it addressed the publishing industry and the stranglehold it has had over it, for goodness knows how long. In the same way that Apple has been a disruptive force with regards the music industry and has been spearheading the sale of music via digital form and is going the same direction with the movie industry, it is hardly surprising that books and publishing is going to get the same treatment. There are a huge number of reasons why electronic books should be dominant by now, ecological, technological and even physiological. You only have to mention the idea of students in schools being able to have all of their books in an iPad and parents get excited that their little darlings, will no longer be harmed by having to carry around too many kilograms around the school daily. With regards the ecological argument for electronic books it is obvious that many trees of the world are going to be saved by a reduced amount of paper being required for making books.
A new era of textbook publishing
We are most certainly, at the cusp of a revolution in the publishing industry and book reading is finally going to change and I think it is a change for the better. Many of us traditional book readers, that are used to the dead tree versions of books, like to have the feel of a book in our hands and the smell of the ink on paper. On the other hand young people that are going through school now are more used to the fantastic technology that is available to us now and don’t have the romantic notions of what a book should be like.
There are some benefits of course to having a paper-based book, no batteries required to charge it or keep it going, easy to write notes in the margins or even to rip pages out if you’re so inclined. On the other hand the electronic books in some ways have even more things going for them. You can have a large number of electronic books in one small device. All of the text within the book is searchable and as we have seen with these latest text books the multimedia aspects of electronic books, turn a boring dusty old text into a rollercoaster ride of fun and learning. Many people will benefit from the different types of learning available with the use of photos, infographics, charts, animations, audio and video clips, that can all be used within the main body of the book and also to create exciting glossaries and pages of description.
iBooks Author a legacy from Steve Jobs
The destructive influence of technology over the textbook publishing industry is something that was close to the heart of Steve Jobs. At least in America, Apple have had a big influence upon education with efforts that have made to bring young people into the Apple Mac fold, while still students in schools. Not so much in other countries, where little effort has been made to get Apple computers into the schools. I wonder if the deals that Apple has made with the textbook publishers in the US will be any good across the other side of the pond, where we have different spelling of words, as well as huge differences in the subjects being studied, not to mention languages. Apple do seem to be looking towards having a worldwide market, even if they do tend to push things out first in their own country.
Books, writers, authors, media content producers – How will this new technology change the world?
I am all for the struggling artist, writer and content producer not getting blocked by the gatekeepers of the traditional published world, such as the agents and publishing companies. I like the idea that a writer and artist can create their stuff and get it out there building a fan base on the go. It seems to me that this is the best way forward with chance for the cream to rise to the top. A more egalitarian creative publishing world, could be possible, if the tools are made available to everyone. Apple have done this with making iBooks author available for free, you just have to have a Mac to be able to use it. Creative types tend to gravitate towards using the Mac anyway, so you could say the first step has already been made.
How will this new type of iBooks publishing work in reality?
As I mentioned just about anybody can pick up the tools to channel their creativity towards being published. The work can be given away, although if it is to be sold then there is possibly a requirement is that it has to be sold through the iBook store. There are some that complain that Apple is locking people into just one way of doing it. While that may be true to a certain extent, so long as there are other ways that creativity and sales of that creativity can flourish, I say – So what! When you consider that authors using the old paradigms of book publishing and the percentage that they would earn from sales would be very small indeed, then the 70% that is possible by using Apple as your storefront does seem to be quite generous.
Although it is still early days, the signs are very promising for this new way of publishing, with over 350,000 text books being sold in the first three days of the store being open. That is quite an amazing number when you consider that the number of titles available is quite small compared to what it will be like in one or two years time.
Using the iBooks Author Software
So if I want to write a book and sell it through the iBook store, first thing I have to do is to put the content into the iBooks Author application. You can work directly into the application or you can use other applications and bring the content in from those. When you have it all set up the way that you would like it to be in its finished form, you can apply for the account so that you can sell your work through iBooks. Whether you live in the United States or not you have to have a US tax identity and you also have to the able to provide an ISBN number for the book you intend to publish. That is if you are planning to work directly with Apple. I expect that payments would be made on a monthly basis in the same way that application developers get paid for their applications that are sold through the Mac App Store. If you don’t intend to work directly through Apple then you can use one of the publishing aggregators such as Lulu. One of the benefits for going in that direction, would be that Lulu would provide you with the ISBN numbers. Organising your own ISBN numbers can be a little awkward because of the way that they are set up on a country by country basis and from what I have seen that it is either a little expensive or just not that easy. In the UK you will pay £118 for 10 ISBN numbers or get 100 for £256.32. You will want to be sure that your book is going to sell if you are making that investment and that you will get the use out of the numbers you buy. I could see a group of authors getting together to buy a set of 100 and sharing out the costs.
On the other hand you might have a book that you want to give away, in which case you don’t have to go through the Apple iBook store. I have created a small iBook already through the iBooks author application and was able to export it and then copy it to my iPad. To be honest the process didn’t go particularly well, I have a number of problems to deal with and I am still working out why those problems occurred. I expect though that it would be easy enough once you have created an iBook in the iBooks version 2 format so that it will be possible to host the files on your website or in some place where it can be shared. From that shared place your readers or fans will be able to enjoy your creative content. I did think it would be possible at first to sell my books in this way, only finding out later that there is an agreement that is part of the software, requiring you to sell through the Apple iBook store. This may change, if other applications become available that produce electronic books in the same format in which case Apple may not know or be able to police how it was the book was produced, to enforce the selling through the Apple channel.
Is Apple deviating from the ePub Standards
The electronic format of the books as used by the textbooks you will find in the Apple iBook store, with all of the associated multimedia content is somewhere in between the EPUB2 and a new version that is being worked on and published at present. There are people that are claiming that Apple are sabotaging the Open Epub publishing format by including technology in this format that are not in the standard format, as well as not adhering to the standard as they should have done. Whether this is true or not doesn’t really matter because in all likelihood this format will become a standard for electronic publishing, at least where textbooks are concerned. It is still possible to publish books in the standard Epub format and they will still be available to be read on devices that also support that standard. This new Apple format has the .iba suffix
With the use I have had so far of iBooks Author, I have found it quite similar to Pages and maybe Keynote in terms of use. It is quite useful and handy to have that familiarity with the interface already. There are extra things within the application of course, with regards the importing, exporting and the elements that you can include within a document. Obviously it is easy to add text, you can drag and drop from Word documents or from Pages documents. Same with images, very easy to add them and as you would expect it is drag-and-drop simple. You can have an image or a video which will be viewed when the book is opened. I did set it so that a video played in my book and it was in the correct format as required by the application, but seemed to make the application crash. It seems that more testing is required by me to have this working properly.
The iBooks Store is highly USA biased
I looked at the options for creating an account so that I could sell my books through Apple and there are a number of barriers if you don’t live in the United States. You do have to get yourself US tax code identity numbers and fill in a number of forms to register, it seems quite complicated, but I may persevere to see if I can complete the process. If it is not possible, then there is still the easier route by going through one of the aggregators. I would most likely use Lulu where I have an account already. I did look at a couple of aggregators on this side of the pond and one was mostly in German and the other seemed to be more French based. With all of the hoops that you have to jump through, I am sure that many will be put off and if you still want to sell electronic books that are in the older Epub 2, then you can still sell those by whatever means you wish. No need to give part of the proceeds to Apple.
Like many people that have dissected the details of iBooks and the requirements for publishing, I am a little disappointed. There is to a certain extent a gatekeeper to the world of publishing, instead of it being the established publishing houses, agents and distribution mechanism of the old way of doing it, there is the technical details of the process as created by Apple.
Not quite the same as seeing a book for sale in an actual book store
There are lots of old school type people that see self publishing as an inferior way of getting a book out there to the reading public. There is something in the kudos of having an actual book sitting on a bookshelf for sale within a bookstore. I can see how that would be appealing, but I think that the businessman has to take over from the creative person, when you’re looking to have a best seller with the operative word being ‘seller’. What it comes down to is the writer or author getting paid for the blood, sweat and tears, time and effort that goes into creating any sort of book. Personally I would rather see the cash from sales of books than getting a warm fuzzy feeling from having a book for sale in a bricks and mortar shop.
One of the important things with creating bitmaps is to make the image look good, with extra things like drop shadows and outlines. This is particularly so with text that you might include within an image. In this Pixelmator 2 review I point out that there are some things with Pixelmator that could certainly be improved upon. It has got better with version 2 of Pixelmator, in that it is now possible to fairly easily, add some drop shadows to text and to shapes. In the past I would be able to create drop shadows in Pixelmator, but only by using extra filter plug-ins and the one that I used was from Noise Industries. (Well not the only way – there is the making a duplicate and making it into a shadow layer.) I do still have those extra plug-in filters available, as I have installed FX Factory which includes those filters that are free to use, along with some that you have to pay for. The Pixelmator filters that are available within FX Factory can also be used within video editing applications such as Final Cut Pro 10 and iMovie.
Pixelmator 2 improvements and failures
When you want to have a drop shadow on an item within Pixelmator 2, the way that you go about it will depend upon what type of object you are working with. The developers at Pixelmator could improve this and make it so that it is the same process for whatever type of object, whether it be a text object, a vector shape or a bitmap object.
Drop Shadows on text objects
If you want to have drop shadows on your text, it is now possible to do that, but it is not particularly obvious how to go about it. Open the system font palette and you can do that from the View Menu, show fonts or just hit command – T. There are some small controls at the top of the palette window that let you add the drop shadow and to control the amount of blur and the distance from the text. After you click on the button to apply the drop shadow you can control the opacity, blur, and offset. The final control to the right, lets you choose the angle of the drop shadow from the text.
While I was trying out these tools for the drop shadow, I also wanted to see if it was possible for me to add an outline to the text. I found that when I was able to add an outline, which I got in the text tool options, that the outline removed the fill. So the only way that I could get text to have outline and fill, was to have a duplicate of the original. One text object was the text with a fill and the other was the text as just an outline. It didn’t seem to be possible to change the thickness of the outline either. We shouldn’t have to convert our text into a bitmap to be able to apply outlines. Although version 2 of Pixelmator is better in many ways, it does still require a lot of work from the program developers to smooth out some rough edges.
Bitmaps, text and shapes in Pixelmator version 2
So you take the brush tool from the Pixelmator brushes palette and you draw a line in the background layer, so you end up with a line of whatever colour on top of a white background. You think to yourself, that it would be rather nice to have a drop shadow to that line and when you’re using Pixelmator you will be scratching your head, when it comes to working out how to do that. If instead of drawing the line on the layer that is the background layer, you were to create a new transparent layer and draw your line, then you would be able to apply a filter to the layer and give that line a drop shadow. If you try and apply a drop shadow to the line when drawn on the background layer you will find that the drop shadow that is applied will work on the whole of the rectangle of that layer. Obviously if you know how this works, then you can plan your design accordingly, so that if it is something that does need to have a drop shadow added to it you can put it on its own layer.
Drop shadows on shapes
With these vector shapes that are now part of Pixelmator version 2, it is very easy to add a drop shadows to these objects. The way that the objects are dealt with also work on layer by layer basis. Any objects that you put into a shape layer will all have the same configuration of colour, outline and drop shadow. You do get better tools within the window for manipulating these controls than you do when you’re working with text items.
Information on the Pixelmator website in the forum/help site
I have seen within the Pixelmator forum that provides help to Pixelmator users, that there should be within the Quartz composer filters, a drop shadow filter. On my computer in Pixelmator, that is not visible. Fortunately, I do have the Noise Industries filters that I can use to create my drop shadows. I can recommend getting the FX Factory Filters / Pixelmator plugins, as it is easy to install and there are enough free filters included to make it worthwhile having. When you are creating your drop shadow for your painted line then you should make sure you get it correct and just the way that you want it. If you go back to the filter afterwards then you will find that you will just add a shadow to the object again, and also be adding a shadow to the shadow that you created the first time around.
If you have other objects that you want to have a shadow added to it then you will need to put them on their own separate layers, so that you can add that shadow. Trying to add another item to a layer that has already been manipulated by the drop shadow filter will not automatically have the same drop shadow applied to it and you will get more shadows than you require if you use the filter again.
Using Pixelmator 2 versus using other applications
While Pixelmator 2 is a big improvement over the previous version there is still a lot of work to do if it can be compared with the big boy on the block, which is Adobe Creative Suite. Usability of the interface has to be improved and standardised across the various tools in the application. Having vector shapes within the application is very useful but it should be made so that each object within a layer can have its own settings. For manipulation of text and shapes to create logos and other graphic design creations, then I would recommend the use of ArtText 2. With ArtText 2 you get the ability to add as many outlines to an object as you wish. You have the opportunity to manipulate text as a proper vector graphic on a node by node basis. Within ArtText 2 it is very easy to be able to add drop shadows to whatever objects you have in your design.
Pixelmator vs Acorn
Acorn is another app that does the bitmap editing thing on OSX and it is OK but I do prefer the interface of Pixelmator vs Acorn graphics editor look and feel. Acorn is good at the drop shadow and has tempted a few people across from Pixelmator drop shadow manipulation.
Pixelmator on OSX Lion
On OSX Lion Pixelmator windows don’t have to be strewn all over the place you can be very organised by going into the full screen mode that is offered by Lion. If you have a separate monitor you can also move some of the Pixelmator windows / tool boxes and so on, over on the second screen.
Although I have spent much of this article complaining about Pixelmator 2, I do think that it is a worthwhile application to have on your Mac, if you are any sort of a graphic artist. I would say though, that as it is not perfect, it is best used in conjunction with other applications. Pixelmator version 2 on its own is not quite good enough to be the only tool in your creative toolbox. I really do love using Pixelmator 2 and I think it has a superb, very Mac like interface, despite some of its failings and idiosyncrasies.
Go and get your FX Factory set of filters to enhance Pixelmator 2 . Here is a Quartz Composer drop shadow filter. Go and buy ArtText 2 also to do some really fancy logos. You can do a Pixelmator download from the Mac App Store and get your Pixelmator license to run it on all of your Mac computers. No there isn’t a Pixelmator for Windows – Go and buy a Mac. For photography work then you can do some photo editing in Aperture, but Pixelmator has more to offer for image manipulation so in the Pixelmator vs Aperture contest there is no contest, having both softwares is a great plan.
online that will do something similar. One photo editing service called Fotocrib will let you create montages, add three-dimensional effects or just simply give your photos rounded corners. If you have a need to encrypt your photo then this would be the place to go to get that done. This is the sort of encryption where you can’t see the photo, unless you have a password. This is not the same as photos which have encryption that the photo can be seen but have a secret message contained within.
So I needed to do some photo editing download of Mac applications and I tried out quite a few different Mac drawing apps. There is the Gimp application which is free, but at the time when I tried it, I didn’t like the look of the application and it seemed a bit crashy. Since then I have also tried Acorn, Picturesque and Pixelmator. I am sure that I have also tried one or two others, that at the moment I can’t remember the names of.
