Let's get one thing straight. According to Joe, I don't meet the definition of "gamer." I mostly play FPS games like SOFII, Jedi Knight II and Urban Terror. I do enjoy Warcraft III but I can't stand playing against other humans because of lame rush-n-win tactics (although multiple humans versus the computer is fine). Also, I own a Mac, which means very few games for my platform of choice. So what the hell else am I going to write about, except interesting Macintosh tidbits?
Today's tidbit: iPhoto, an OSX-only piece of free Apple software that allows you to store and organize any type of still picture or graphic - digital camera files, scans, Photoshop artwork - and organize them in lots of different ways. iPhoto also allows you to publish your pictures to the internet as albums and even order Kodak-printed prints and books. My wife and I recently utilized iPhoto to do the following after our wedding:
1. Import digital camera photos.
2. Import scanned photos (cleaned the blemishes in Photoshop)
3. Import photos from Kodak picture CDs.
4. Organize them into various albums (Rehersal Dinner, Ceremony, Etc) and publish them to the internet. Once organized, getting them on the internet was about 3 mouse clicks.
5. Order 100 4"x6" prints. They are printed on Kodak paper and look great.
6. Order a custom book with 10 pages of prints (with up to 3 pictures on each page). It looks really nice - the quality isn't as high as the Kodak prints, but for a custom-made book that took 20 minutes to assemble the quality is fantastic.
All of it happened with no problems at all. No crashes. No swearing. The only annoyance was waiting for the uploads to happen (I'm on DSL, but it's capped at 20k/sec upload).
Final thought: It's nice to see an elegent piece of software that actually exceeds the marketing hype. The fact that it's Apple-Only is a mixed blessing - Mac OS X users get the benefits but PC users miss out on yet another reason to seriously consider fitting a Mac into their lives.
That's enough out of me.
