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December 27, 2005

Score with iPhoto

I use iPhoto on the Mac to organize my digital photos. I try to assign keywords and such as soon as I download photos - nothing fancy, but enough that I can find pictures from one thing or the other without much fuss. Like pictures of Nathan from the past 12 months.

One of iPhoto’s other features is the ability to create and order photo books. Pick a slew of photos, pick a theme, tell iPhoto to do an automatic layout for you. Tweak the ordering a bit, add titles and such, and you’re good to go. Click “order” and it’s sent to a printing service that makes and ships the book.

So the year, for Christmas, I made up a keepsake book for my parents - a series of about 50-odd pictures of Nathan that spanned 2005. 8 1/2 x 11, hardcover, glossy paper, nice layout. Score. Not only are my parents raving about their book of grandson pictures, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that this is now the expected Xmas gift for the foreseeable future. Their friends are asking to borrow the book so they they can show their parent-of-grandchildren kids what they want for Christmas.

Score.

Posted by jim at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

Cool Things

Okay, two cool things - one for the homeowner in you, one for the mac geek.

Leafblower. Damn. I bought a $70 leafblower back in early November to deal with the plethora of pine needles that had carpeted our front driveway. And that was pretty damn cool. But on Sunday I took it up on the roof to clear the leafs, pine needles, and detrius-clogged gutters. Holy moly! Took less than half the time it would normally take to sweep the roof and hand-muck the gutters, and the gutters are clean.

Coverflow. I saw what looked to be a neat little app on Jon Hick's desktop, and googled for it. What I found was a "tech demo" of a neat little app that loads all your iTunes album artwork, and lets you flip through it like you're hunting through your physical CD collection. If it can, I'll go out and hunt down your artwork from Amazon (which has an amazing library of CD cover art). Apple needs to buy this thing up now and integrate it into iTunes - major cool factor.

Posted by jim at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)