Just a quick note. In one of his cutest moments to-date, Sam waved goodbye to me as I was leaving for work this morning. For those readers without kids, I’m sure you’re like ‘so what’ – but let me tell you, it really tugs at the ol’ heartstrings. He’s such a cutie!
iPhoto ‘06
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.
technorati tags: ilife, iphoto, photography, mac, apple
Such Low Heights
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.
technorati tags: apple, mac, intel, the postal service, advertising, cult of mac
SURPRISE!
Lisa is such a sneaky devil. She organized a fabulous 40th brithday surprise party last weekend for my childhood friend Jan. The weekend before, a small group of us had gathered for an outing at her fave Atlanta restaurant – Savage Pizza (margherita on whole wheat, ‘natch) – as an excellent decoy to the *real* big event. While Jan may have been slightly suspicious with all the cleaning going on in the house, she was blown away by the assembled crowd of 40+ friends and family when she walked in. Enjoy the gallery here. But no, I have not posted the photo of Jan and I at our senior prom. Putting that on the web just doesn’t seem like a good idea….