Apple!!!
Okay, so I've not blogged in a while, but today I MUST blog. Today I write about Apple Computer. It's an awesome company in my eyes. Here are some of my more recent experiences.
01. I ordered a PhotoBook through iPhoto on Aflac's iMac. It's very easy to lay out and customize despite the tiny resolution that Aflac's got things set at. The only problem I had was this auto-fill message on certain fields which, every time I made a major layout change to one or more pages, would reappear despite many deletions, sometimes even wiping out the text I'd already put in! And after checking it thoroughly, I submitted it. It came a week or so later. Beautiful, but those fields had come back again!!! I was horrified. These things are well-worth the expense - if they print properly. So I emailed them and asked how this could happen and what I might be able to do about it. Much to my surprise, they emailed back and said they would replace the book. They explained how to do this, gave some tips for how to work around the bug until it's fixed, and then promised that they would fix this bug in a future update. I did what I was told. The book came within a week. It was *perfect* in every way. Now THAT is customer service!
02. iTunes. I admit it. I was not happy with this software at first. On Windows, it's clumsy, slightly bloated, and inefficient as far as a music vault goes. But one thing I fell in love with and almost got addicted to was the music store. Yea, if you can't help but spend money on music, you do NOT want to go in HERE very often. They make it VERY easy to find what you're looking for, to browse new music, and the worst part is that you can preview clips like on Amazon - by double-clicking the song. Steve Jobs has always been good at one thing: Marketing. He's a pro. BUT, the one thing I did NOT like about the store is that you're buying m4p's - which you can ONLY play in iTunes or a device that plays m4p's. My old mp3 player wouldn't play them, I could find no way to crack this protective file type, and since I had no m4p-compatible player (which I suspect would be only an Apple product such as an iPod), the only way I could use my newly purchased music was to listen in iTunes or burn to a CD. The latter would allow me to rip afterward into the proper mp3 format for use on my mp3 player, but it was a huge PITA because the strength of iTunes is your ability to buy one song off an album and mix things up. The burned cd's do not retain any CDDB info, so any time you rip them, you need to fill in your own id tags. No way, no thank you. But despite this evil protection - and I do understand they're trying to copyright their property, but zheezh, can't we just all behave instead? - I am falling for iTunes a little bit. I think part of that is music videos and shows, though. I found two seasons of Knight Rider. I downloaded one episode for $1.99. Not cheap if you get the whole set, but if all you want is one show, it's a deal. And now I've got old music videos I'd always wished I could watch again. Now I can - anytime I want, on my own computer! Still, if only I could play my new music without iTunes or a lot of effort... which leads me to the iPod Nano.
03. Aflac got me one for my birthday. I can not tell you how wonderful my little Leif is (that's what I named him). A client of mine once had me work on a Nano because he didn't have a computer yet and wanted to put songs and such on it, so I knew I liked the little buggers and I had also become somewhat familiar with the controls. So of course I mastered the thing in less than an hour - right down to putting photos, calendar entries, contact info, notes, and - oh yeah, let's not forget MUSIC - on it. I created a couple playlists, made one for my photo slideshow, played solitaire (yep, it's got games, too), listened to music, and finally attached it to the FM transmitter I got with it so I could play it in my truck. Awesome. The biggest learning curve has been (yes you guessed it) iTunes, which at first I felt was kind of awkward and clumsy and not particularly friendly even for its own iPods. But, I'm a DOS and Windows native. OS X isn't exactly difficult, but Apple's software designers definitely have their own style. Menus are NOT going to be intuitive to a Windows user right away, and given the new technology in my hands, there's going to be some new ideas, too, with their own terms. Which brings me to...
04. Podcasts. I've been familiar with this technology for a while, because Aflac listens to them religiously. Well, once I had Leif in my hand, I knew I had to subscribe to a podcast. So I went browsing the categories and selected two that Aflac subscribes to which I love - The Onion Radio News and the Trivia Podcast. Then I found Linux Reality, The Geekcast, Your Computer Minute with Peter Kay, and a couple of video ones: Ask A Ninja and - this is my favourite by far so far - Adobe Photoshop Killer Tips. I'm done. Finished. I will never leave my computer again. So this morning I was listening to this Killer Tips, and just HAD to try them out myself. Which leads me to an Adobe product.
05. Photoshop. I'm truly floored by the abilities that Photoshop has when it comes to images. It can seem complicated, but the Killer Tips podcast has certainly offered me some ideas to make my life easier. One I'll likely use often is this: No matter which tool you're using, you can press the spacebar and the cursor turns into the hand tool so you can move the picture. Useful if it's hanging off the screen (most likely). But I wanted something to help me select single images without going through the magic wand thing all the time. You know, selecting, selecting more, still leaving out pixels, then needing to do it all over again if you wanted to overlay a colour or something. Well, lo and behold, there IS a workaround. Instead of hitting Space to move my picture, as described in the aforementioned tip, I accidentally used Shift. Suddenly everything BUT the object was selected! I realized I was still in Magic Wand, and that Shift must affect it somehow. So I played. The workaround is this: Paste just the object into its own layer. Click the Magic Wand, and make sure it's set to Contiguous. Shift-click in any "white" part around the image. It'll become selected. Hit Delete. This will delete all unnecessary white parts around the image. Do the same for any white parts you want to become background (i.e., the background will show through). Then UNcheck the contiguous box and Shift-click outside the object again. Right-click the object and click "Select inverse." Vóìlá!! The object is selected. Now you can move it, fill it, whatever - the WHOLE object. All at once. Once you do this a couple times it becomes second nature - MUCH faster than pinpointing points around the whole thing little by little or continuously magic-selecting little pieces to get the whole image. If it weren't for that podcast, I would still be struggling with that issue...
Oh! I also updated my website yesterday. I discovered Publisher the other day and within two hours had a new "site" of 7 pages. I called it PCA - Personal Computers Anonymous and tacked it into www.psychomuse.com. Once I get Selene back up and running, I'll update the links on the left of my main page so it can be accessed there permanently. Until then you'll need to click the link I stuffed in the body (some may call it "news"). One of these days I'll also pack my old front-page ramblings into their own section and simply link to it. That would clean up that mess...
Signing off to go play with Photoshop some more (and listen to another podcast),
~nv
01. I ordered a PhotoBook through iPhoto on Aflac's iMac. It's very easy to lay out and customize despite the tiny resolution that Aflac's got things set at. The only problem I had was this auto-fill message on certain fields which, every time I made a major layout change to one or more pages, would reappear despite many deletions, sometimes even wiping out the text I'd already put in! And after checking it thoroughly, I submitted it. It came a week or so later. Beautiful, but those fields had come back again!!! I was horrified. These things are well-worth the expense - if they print properly. So I emailed them and asked how this could happen and what I might be able to do about it. Much to my surprise, they emailed back and said they would replace the book. They explained how to do this, gave some tips for how to work around the bug until it's fixed, and then promised that they would fix this bug in a future update. I did what I was told. The book came within a week. It was *perfect* in every way. Now THAT is customer service!
02. iTunes. I admit it. I was not happy with this software at first. On Windows, it's clumsy, slightly bloated, and inefficient as far as a music vault goes. But one thing I fell in love with and almost got addicted to was the music store. Yea, if you can't help but spend money on music, you do NOT want to go in HERE very often. They make it VERY easy to find what you're looking for, to browse new music, and the worst part is that you can preview clips like on Amazon - by double-clicking the song. Steve Jobs has always been good at one thing: Marketing. He's a pro. BUT, the one thing I did NOT like about the store is that you're buying m4p's - which you can ONLY play in iTunes or a device that plays m4p's. My old mp3 player wouldn't play them, I could find no way to crack this protective file type, and since I had no m4p-compatible player (which I suspect would be only an Apple product such as an iPod), the only way I could use my newly purchased music was to listen in iTunes or burn to a CD. The latter would allow me to rip afterward into the proper mp3 format for use on my mp3 player, but it was a huge PITA because the strength of iTunes is your ability to buy one song off an album and mix things up. The burned cd's do not retain any CDDB info, so any time you rip them, you need to fill in your own id tags. No way, no thank you. But despite this evil protection - and I do understand they're trying to copyright their property, but zheezh, can't we just all behave instead? - I am falling for iTunes a little bit. I think part of that is music videos and shows, though. I found two seasons of Knight Rider. I downloaded one episode for $1.99. Not cheap if you get the whole set, but if all you want is one show, it's a deal. And now I've got old music videos I'd always wished I could watch again. Now I can - anytime I want, on my own computer! Still, if only I could play my new music without iTunes or a lot of effort... which leads me to the iPod Nano.
03. Aflac got me one for my birthday. I can not tell you how wonderful my little Leif is (that's what I named him). A client of mine once had me work on a Nano because he didn't have a computer yet and wanted to put songs and such on it, so I knew I liked the little buggers and I had also become somewhat familiar with the controls. So of course I mastered the thing in less than an hour - right down to putting photos, calendar entries, contact info, notes, and - oh yeah, let's not forget MUSIC - on it. I created a couple playlists, made one for my photo slideshow, played solitaire (yep, it's got games, too), listened to music, and finally attached it to the FM transmitter I got with it so I could play it in my truck. Awesome. The biggest learning curve has been (yes you guessed it) iTunes, which at first I felt was kind of awkward and clumsy and not particularly friendly even for its own iPods. But, I'm a DOS and Windows native. OS X isn't exactly difficult, but Apple's software designers definitely have their own style. Menus are NOT going to be intuitive to a Windows user right away, and given the new technology in my hands, there's going to be some new ideas, too, with their own terms. Which brings me to...
04. Podcasts. I've been familiar with this technology for a while, because Aflac listens to them religiously. Well, once I had Leif in my hand, I knew I had to subscribe to a podcast. So I went browsing the categories and selected two that Aflac subscribes to which I love - The Onion Radio News and the Trivia Podcast. Then I found Linux Reality, The Geekcast, Your Computer Minute with Peter Kay, and a couple of video ones: Ask A Ninja and - this is my favourite by far so far - Adobe Photoshop Killer Tips. I'm done. Finished. I will never leave my computer again. So this morning I was listening to this Killer Tips, and just HAD to try them out myself. Which leads me to an Adobe product.
05. Photoshop. I'm truly floored by the abilities that Photoshop has when it comes to images. It can seem complicated, but the Killer Tips podcast has certainly offered me some ideas to make my life easier. One I'll likely use often is this: No matter which tool you're using, you can press the spacebar and the cursor turns into the hand tool so you can move the picture. Useful if it's hanging off the screen (most likely). But I wanted something to help me select single images without going through the magic wand thing all the time. You know, selecting, selecting more, still leaving out pixels, then needing to do it all over again if you wanted to overlay a colour or something. Well, lo and behold, there IS a workaround. Instead of hitting Space to move my picture, as described in the aforementioned tip, I accidentally used Shift. Suddenly everything BUT the object was selected! I realized I was still in Magic Wand, and that Shift must affect it somehow. So I played. The workaround is this: Paste just the object into its own layer. Click the Magic Wand, and make sure it's set to Contiguous. Shift-click in any "white" part around the image. It'll become selected. Hit Delete. This will delete all unnecessary white parts around the image. Do the same for any white parts you want to become background (i.e., the background will show through). Then UNcheck the contiguous box and Shift-click outside the object again. Right-click the object and click "Select inverse." Vóìlá!! The object is selected. Now you can move it, fill it, whatever - the WHOLE object. All at once. Once you do this a couple times it becomes second nature - MUCH faster than pinpointing points around the whole thing little by little or continuously magic-selecting little pieces to get the whole image. If it weren't for that podcast, I would still be struggling with that issue...
Oh! I also updated my website yesterday. I discovered Publisher the other day and within two hours had a new "site" of 7 pages. I called it PCA - Personal Computers Anonymous and tacked it into www.psychomuse.com. Once I get Selene back up and running, I'll update the links on the left of my main page so it can be accessed there permanently. Until then you'll need to click the link I stuffed in the body (some may call it "news"). One of these days I'll also pack my old front-page ramblings into their own section and simply link to it. That would clean up that mess...
Signing off to go play with Photoshop some more (and listen to another podcast),
~nv
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