Last week I spent most of my free time thinking about switching to a new photo workflow. I pondered hundreds of issues from scalability, ease-of-use, to archival systems, backups, and even touched upon some philosophical aspects of photography and where it’s heading with the tools of trade now at hand.

On this I could write at least 15 pages, perhaps even 30, and it’s not my aim now. I’m an impatient man, if you’re too, read my conclusion:

Whatever the tool, or software, or workflow; in the end it is the content which counts. Not the sharpest photo, not the 20-Megapixel-photo, not the perfect levels/contrast/saturation/hues/white-balance/dynamic-range photograph will ever be the “keeper”. You and I, and the rest of the world, will rather give preference to a photo that makes sense.

Good luck with taking such pictures! And while I’m at it, all three programs are incredible titans in their own ways. Congratulations to the developers–they have done an astonishing piece of work!

By mistake I held Command Key (the key with an Apple on it) while in edit mode in iphoto 6 and this automatically brought up the edit controls and adjusted the white point to match the point where I clicked. Whoa! Another undocumented, hidden feature in iPhoto. And this one is extremely powerful and so much missing!! Try it. Hold the Ctrl key (another one of my finds among the hidden functions, but already known I believe) after you do so to see the original image. Let’s see how long it takes till my post gets into Macworld jar of tips.

Keywords: AWB, white point, white point compensation, white balance, setting white balance, iPhoto 2006, iPhoto ‘06, Apple, Mac, manipulation, adjustment

Surely I’m a big fan of iTunes and was among the first to support it by purchases. As an audiophile I’m not buying everything there, since it does use compression after all and it does have DRM applied.

Check out Linn Records. They offer lossless and DRM free music. I’ll be returning there frequently it seems.

The folders “Sheets”, “Others”, “Preesentations”, which Symbian S60 3rd on the Nokia E-61 and other such “Smart”phones creates and irritatingly prevents their deletion can be removed by going into “Connections”, “Data cable”, selecting “Data transfer”.

Connect to PC or whatever and change attributes to SYSTEM, HIDDEN (use for instance Total Commander to do this).

Done. Enjoy less clutter and Nokia imposed folders on your Symbian!

Finally at Adobe forums a guy with an alias WRFan posted a solution to this long pending bug in Adobe Acrobat 7.

Description of the problem: Running Adobe Acrobat 7.0.0 and the Edit/Preferences/General/Enable text selection for the Hand Tool is selected grayed out. The consequence of this is that instead of effectively using the hand tool users end up accidentaly entering the text edit mode and altering text of the PDF. This is a huge problems for electronic publishing and electronic proofing of publications before print as it can introduce last stage errors in addition to making life miserable for those working with Acrobat 7 for hours on a daily basis.

Solution: Start registry editor. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\7.0\Selection and set the value of bShowKeyboardSelectionCursor and bHandSelects to 0 as shown in the screenshot. Restart Acrobat.

There are many tricks for the iPod Shuffle on the net so I’ll just add my ‘five cents’.

Usage
I use the Shuffle for books, podcasts, and music. Since it doesn’t have a display, podcasts come first, then the books, and music last. Since I don’t listen to 5 books at once I usually have 3 podcasts and 1 book there. I switch to ordered play, press the play/pause button three times and I’m at the beginning of the list. Playback position of the book and podcast is remembered so it’s very easy. When I’m tired of the spoken word I flip the switch to shuffle. Since the podcasts and books are skipped in the shuffle mode, I only get music. Shuffled. The way I like it. I find that the shuffle has a special position among MP3 players in its size, usability, and now wearability.

Tips & tricks
I read the apple manual for the new shuffle, which sets a few unclarities and rumours on the net straight. Here they are:

• Setting Songs to Play at the Same Volume Level (p. 16)
  

  The loudness of songs and other audio may vary depending on how the audio was recorded or encoded. iTunes can automatically adjust the volume of songs, so they play at the same relative volume level. You can set iPod shuffle to use the iTunes volume settings.

• Checking the Battery Status (p. 7)
  

  When you turn iPod shuffle on, or disconnect it from your computer or power adapter, the status light tells you approximately how much charge is in the battery. See the table in the following section. If iPod shuffle is already on, you can check the battery status without interrupting playback by quickly switching iPod shuffle off and then on again.

• Start a track over
  Press Previous/Rewind button
• Play the previous track
  Press Previous/Rewind button twice.

My favorite one:

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious,
and adding the meaningful.

from The Laws of Simplicity » Blog Archive » Law 10: The One

There is a nice gallery over at Olympus Pursuit Magazine called Global Warming Witness presenting Mitsuaki Iwago’s photographs from ‘almost’ the Arctic Circle.

So much for an available update as rumoured on the net…

Note that there is NO NEW FIRMWARE available at this time. Hopefully Nokia doesn’t count on selling the new firmware to us in form of another €400 device and an “including the new feature pack 1″ sticker on the box.

As firefox keeps crashing more often and demands more resources, it’s time to move back and simplify by reverting to SeaMonkey, the old-new Netscape-Mozilla Suite branch. Less extensions cause less clutter and installer properly presents an option to install just the browser, or as it’s called, the navigator. Then it’s time for some house-keeping (see below) and the browser is clean and simple and above all just works!

Go to Edit :: Preferences, select Appearance and deactivate Print, Bookmarks, etc…

How to get rid of the irritating SeaMonkey icon to the left of the address bar? Quite easy, too. Go to your profile directory (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\**UserName**\Application Data\ Mozilla or SeaMonkey) or you know what, just search for the file “userChrome-example.css” on your computer, yeah, that’s easier. Now edit this file and exchange

/*
* Eliminate the throbber and its annoying movement:
*
* #throbber-box {
* display: none !important;
* }
*/


with

/*
* Eliminate the throbber and its annoying movement:
*/
#throbber-box {
display: none !important;
}

hence undocumenting the part of CSS responsible for the throbber. Now save the file into your chrome directory with the name “userChrome.css”. That’s all. Enjoy a clean and simple app (screenshot of a clean browser interface with the throbber button missing included). Hopefully future versions come like this by default.

By the way, installing a browser-only version will still leave the address book tab in the sidebar (F9). To remove it search for “panels.rdf” in your profile and delete

<RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:sidebar:panel:addressbook"/>


and

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:sidebar:panel:addressbook"
NC:title="Address Book"
NC:content="chrome://messenger/content/addressbook/
addressbook-panel.xul"
NC:exclude="navigator:browser" />


to take care of that.

Note: don’t you love the fact that there is no need for a second ‘google search’ box in the right hand corner? All is nicely integrated into the address input box.

Keywords: remove button, animated button, animation, seamonkey, loading button, loading animation, get rid of loading button, put away, hide button, hide logo