Forget about Aperture’s ‘beta release’ – it’s all about iLife ’06! I installed the yearly update late last week, and good lord does it rock. The improvements to iPhoto alone are worth the price of admission.
My iPhoto’05 library was over 28k images. So I was surprised to hear various reports that the ’06 installment increased capacity from 25k to 250k. Hmmm – perhaps that’s why my old install was so sluggish – but never any errors or warnings about the size of ye olde library. Anyway, the new version is blazingly fast – like WOW!
It also upgrades handling of RAW images. In iPhoto5, your edits to RAW images were to a JPEG version. You could also edit in an external editor, but you were still working with the JPEG version. 2006’s version enhances this by letting you open the actual RAW file in the external editor. It doesn’t automagically import the RAW edits back to iPhoto (though I wish it would), but you can fairly easily re-import the edited RAW version.
In an interesting case of ‘who had the rights,’ it’s been widely reported on the web that Apple’s first video ad campaign promoting the new ‘Intel Inside’ Macs is a blatant rip off of one of my favorite bands music videos. Here is an excellent sie-by-side comparison created on the ‘Cult of Mac’ site. The Postal Service is one of many side projects of Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, and their video for ‘Such Great Heights‘ is a frame-by-frame match to the Apple spot, showing bunny-suited lab techs in a clean room, carefully lifting out some precious silicon, etc. It turns out that the same director created both the Apple Intel ad and the Postal Service video. Unclear if he had rights to essentially duplicate a product for a commercial service without the band or label’s blessing, though. Ben chimes in on the controversy with a note on the band’s website saying that “We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties.” The band’s label could, conceivably, have approved reuse of the video which one would think they might own.
Long story short – I love the Postal Service, and can’t wait to get my hands on a MacBook Pro (at least when the 12″ is available). But like the controversy over the recent ‘orange’ Eminem iPod ads which bore their own uncanny resemblance to a Lugz campaign, this is fishy. I hope Apple comes out and clears this up soon.
To complement our spiffy new HDTV, I managed to find an Xbox360 on eBay for not-too-high a premium. JoeBobATLThe Fedex guy came a day earlier than the tracking said it would (who knew that was even possible), and I was like a kid on the first night of Hannukkah as the delivery dude came up the front steps. In a word, the image this thing produces on the SXRD is stunning. I had picked up Project Gotham Racing, Madden 2006 and Kameo – and every one of them is just mind bogglingly beautiful. PGR is especially slick – driving the streets of NYC and seeing the skyline come hurtling toward you, driving past the casinos of Las Vegas by your headlights – all the while seeing true-to-life reflections and dirt on your windscreen. I’ve also partially hooked this up to our Dell PC running Media Center Edition 2005. I did have to update it to this year’s patch, but once I did, the two machines saw each other easily. Now I can get photos, video and music from my desktop on the Sony in the living room. Spiffy! Embedded here in this post is my XboxLive ‘GamerCard’ that shows my current reputation, score and ‘zone’, whatever that is. It will also show any games I’ve gone online with.
The Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation (one of the top two online journalism ogranizations focused on the newspaper business) has announced their 2006 awards nominees – and two of my old companies – The Savannah Morning News and The Augusta Chronicle received the ol’ hat tip in the Best Overall News Site (50k-99k circulation). Also receiving kudos for innovative storytelling in the 50k-100k category is a multimedia project photographed by Josh Meltzer for the Roanoke News, where Josh and my good friend Natalee Waters are photojournalists. Augusta also gets a nomination for their ‘Spotted‘ site – a slick take on user-generated photo-blogging their parent company, Morris Communications, has syndicated to several of their newspapers.
Also nominated is the Chronicle’s Masters web site. I launched this back in 1996 in a joint effort with Sports Illustrated magazine. In 1997, we took the “Digital Edge Award”, recognizing the most innovative web site in the newspaper industry, besting papers of all sizes including the New York Times which took the number two spot that year. Morris has a great history of breaking new boundaries in the online news business, and it looks like this continues today. Great to see my old cohorts keeping up the good work!
