I've written before about .Mac and iWeb. Back in the days of the free service known as iTools I was a happy user and when it went to a paid service I subscribed for a year. After that year first year I unsubscribed because I felt I was not using the features it offered... it did not fit my needs. As a free service it didn't matter that I didn't use the features but once I started paying I wanted a better match and better performance. Since then I have made it a habit of evaluating it once a year just to be up-to-date on the current features and performance. In the few years since my paid subscription I've never seen anything that would prompt me to subscribe again or recommend it to family or friends. Until now.

This past February I started taking more pictures when I purchased a new DSLR and I started thinking of finding an alternative to flickr. I love flickr but as a dial-up user I don't always have the time to comment on photos and really that seems to be a central focus of the site... it is a community for sharing photos and commenting. The other problem is that free accounts are limited to 200 photos. Thinking I would cancel my account there I cobbled together a system using iWeb and Galerie to host a couple of personal pages and a place for images here on my MacProductive server. It worked but it was never really convenient and as a result I've continued to post images to flickr and failed to keep my own pages updated. After a few weeks evaluating the new version of iWeb in combination with the recent upgrades to .Mac I've decided it is time to move back. Initially I'll just be moving my images and personal blog there but I may also end up hosting MacProductive there if I can work a way for the two sites to co-exist with domain forwarding and/or the new .Mac personal domain feature.

Using iWeb 2 with the new .Mac has been a pleasure. What has impressed me is that even on dial-up it has been very stable for me. While changing pages and adding images is not super speedy I have yet to have any errors. iWeb just steadily chugs through the process. By comparison when posting to this blog with RapidWeaver I often have to make several attempts due to errors. I'm still not totally happy with the way iWeb compresses images though the larger files are worth dealing with because of the convenience. Making new image albums in iWeb or adding to existing ones from my Aperture library is simple drag and drop. I'm hoping that the next version of Aperture will gain the same integration that iPhoto has with the new .Mac image galleries which look fantastic and are even better than those in iWeb. Until then though I am very happy with what iWeb offers.

If you are looking for an easy way to build a site and/or host images take a look at iLife 08 and .Mac if you have not already. I ordered my .Mac via Amazon because it is a bit cheaper that way, around $70 rather than Apple's $100.

So, come over for a visit and poke around for a bit. There are lots of images and my little blog: A hermit speaks. Feel free to leave comments on any image or blog entry.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Mac, iLife, iWeb, flickr

Before I continue with the theme of my switch from iPhoto to Aperture I thought I'd comment on the recently released iLife apps as they relate to image management and sharing. I've not used iPhoto yet but I'm sure I will before too long. I certainly won't be switching back but I do like to stay current in my skill set should the need arise that a client need training or help with troubleshooting. The iPhoto upgrade looks like a solid and useful upgrade but nothing earth shattering. Of particular note is that iPhoto continues to make back-up copies of each image the user edits which was my primary reason for switching to Aperture.

In regards to sharing images via the web, I'm happy to report that Aperture, with the recent update to 1.5.4 works just fine with the updated iWeb 08. I'm an avid user of Flickr and have been from the early days but I do not pay for the Pro account which means that only my most recent 200 images are accessible. I'm okay with that because I can still tag my photos and add them to group pools which is the point of Flickr, to share and comment on photos. Flickr is as much about social interaction as it is about images. Back in February I decided that for the purposes of sharing older photos, I would set up my own image archive here at MacProductive. My intention was to use iPhoto and iWeb. The main drawback was the size of the image output of iWeb: the files were gigantic, often twice the size of a properly optimized image. My work around involved the time consuming process of optimizing with Photoshop. Not the end of the world but the point of iWeb is to make the process quick and easy.

When I switched to Aperture I tried using the built in gallery creation of Aperture and was disappointed with the layout of the galleries as well as the web optimization. I'm not sure why this seems to be a problem for Apple. Rather than continue with iWeb for my photo pages I went in search of a third party solution. I settled on Myriad's Galerie photo gallery software and have been pretty happy with it. The images are optimized as they should be and updating changed galleries on my server is much easier than iWeb. I can also customize the gallery design as much as I would like and Myriad hosts a free commenting system too.

With the new release of iWeb 08 I was curious to see if Apple had addressed any of the items on my iWeb wishlist. They did improve image optimization in some instances and the new photo album features are mostly an improvement. The ability to preview the images in the albums by hovering over each one is fantastic though I think the slideshow is a bit heavy on the reflections. The final verdict is that my updated image galleries are larger because of new files and effects. I might be able to deal with that but Apple continues to make updating to non .Mac servers a pain. Still no way to upload directly to a server and publishing to a folder marks all files as updated so a selective upload of only changed files based on date is not possible. For now I think I'll stick with Myriad's Galerie. Would have been great to just be able to rely on Aperture and iWeb... oh well, maybe next time?

You can check out my growing archive of images at Dennyville or via my Flickr stream.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, iPhoto 08, iLife, iWeb 08, Aperture

To continue with the process of my switch from iPhoto to Aperture I thought I'd briefly discuss a few issues I faced that may be of interest to other potential switchers. First up, can your Mac even run Aperture. iPhoto will run pretty well on any G4 or better, not so with Aperture. You'll want to check Apple's page for Aperture's hardware requirements. It requires a good bit of juice. Even if your machine meets the requirements you may want to close certain, resource hungry apps when running Aperture. When I'm not using Aperture I often run Safari, Mail, Vienna for RSS, iCal, iTunes, iChat, a text editor and an ftp cilent. When I start up Aperture I usually close every other app but Safari. I'm running on a MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of ram I notice a major slow down with those other apps open.

Next, importing images into Aperture and setting up the library can be a bit tricky. It's possible to import your iPhoto Library right from Aperture but the keyword import can be a mess. It is also possible to manually import the folders of images in the iPhoto Library. There is no "right" way to do it. My suggestion would be to experiment. I decided to take my time with a manual import of the folders into projects that were based on the folder names. I then condensed everything into projects based on each month's imports. I also reevaluated all my keywords and changed certain aspects of my keyword process. Because I was a bit uncertain that I was switching over for good I experimented with a partial import first and spent a week learning about the workings of Aperture.

In my experience, taking my time during the import process as well as learning during the process proved very helpful. I knew that all my images were still safe in my iPhoto Library and any mistakes I made could be discarded by simply throwing away my new Aperture Library. After one week I felt comfortable enough using Aperture and completed the transition. I spent the second week of the process importing the rest of my iPhoto library and tagging with my newly refined set of keywords.

You can check out my growing archive of images at Dennyville or via my Flickr stream.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, iPhoto, iLife, Aperture

In my previous post I mention that I had switched from iPhoto to Aperture. I've been using iPhoto since the very first version and have always enjoyed it. Over the years, as Apple has improved it that enjoyment has grown. It's never been perfect but worked weåll enough for the number of images I worked with. However, soon after I purchased my DSLR it became very obvious very quickly that I would have to do something about storage of images. Not only were my images 2-3mb each, up from 500kb, but I was also taking far more. In fact, I'm taking 500 images a month rather than 500 a year! I expect that during the winter months I'll take fewer but regardless, my shutter is clicking far more often so saving hard drive space was my first and primary motivation in the switch.

As much as I enjoy iPhoto it does require far more hard drive space when editing photos. While most of my editing is very subtle I do edit almost every photograph. With iPhoto that means a copy is made of the original. Imagine, my monthly total of 500 images, averaging 2.5 mb that's 1.2 gigs a month. With iPhoto that would be nearly doubled!! I hope to begin to pair each months photos down to 300 images or less but that is still around 750mb a month. By comparison, Aperture's method of non-destructive editing results in a small text file of a few kb for each edit version. If I want to use my Aperture images in other applications such as iMovie, Keynote, or Pages I have to make previews of those images, which results in an additional file of 125 - 250 kb. I don't make previews for all of my images, just my highest rated so my previews are still under a total of 100 mb.

The actual process of switching was relatively painless but certainly required a bit of effort. I'll discuss that as well as some of the other differences between iPhoto and Aperture in a future post.

You can check out my growing archive of images at Dennyville or via my Flickr stream.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, iPhoto, iLife, Aperture

I'm still around!! Been following the latest Mac news which, this summer, has of course meant the iPhone. I've daydreaming of the upcoming Leopard release which is certain to be an excellent upgrade based upon Apple's WWDC preview. My summertime is usually spent with a preoccupation with my garden and photographing it. This summer has been particularly fun because I purchased my first DSLR, a Canon Rebel XT! Also of note is my switch from iPhoto to Aperture. You can check out my growing archive of images at Dennyville or via my Flickr stream. Perhaps my next post will address the switch from iPhoto to Aperture? I've also been trying out Myriad's Galerie photo gallery software as a substitute for iWeb's image galleries. Much better!! Perhaps that also will be an upcoming post!

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Canon, iLife, iWeb

After publishing yesterday's story about iWeb I did some more testing of the pages and I wasn't very happy with the number of incomplete page loads/errors I was getting on the photo set pages. It was pretty clear that the problem was the png thumbnails iWeb produced. Anytime you publish a page with images that use the stock iWeb image borders or drop shadows this will be a problem. Rather than render well optimized pngs or jpgs it renders huge pngs. My photo page thumbnails were each 40 - 60kb! Perhaps not a big deal with a highspeed connection but on dial-up it is unbearable. The trick is to drop the images in and resize rather than drop onto the nifty image placeholders. The downside is no neat reflection effects or graphic image borders but the upside is a page with well optimized jpg thumbnails of 12-16kb. The two themes which default to basic, no border photo pages are simply called "Black" and "White" though I did not test all of the themes. I had actually thinking of switching over to the black theme anyway so I was lucky. Much better and now even the largest photo set of sunsets loads much more quickly and without errors. If you prefer one of the other themes just set up your photo page then select all the photos and open the graphic tab of the inspector. Set the stroke to none and you're finished.

Tip number two concerns the slide-show produced when publishing a photo page to a server other than .Mac. The .Mac slide show is a beautifully rendered show based on Ajax. If you're publishing to your own server it's this terrible brushed metal window from the 2001 era. However, it is possible to download an alternative slideshow which is based on javascript and is free. Just download the file and decompress which will produce a folder called "SlideShow_assets". After you publish your iWeb site drop this into the main folder and replace the iWeb produced folder of the same name. Done. Of course each time you make a change to your iWeb site and republish, your alternative slideshow folder will be replaced again by the original iWeb slideshow folder so keep a copy of the alternative slideshow around in case you accidentally re-upload the iWeb version.

Last tip: visit Rowan Cottage. Just a nice little family iWeb site that happens to be loaded with articles about using and customizing iWeb. A fantastic iWeb resource and perfect compliment to Apple's iWeb discussion forum.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Mac, iLife, iWeb

Early last year I posted a mini-review of the iWeb and .Mac combo. My conclusion was that iWeb was a good start but that the code, graphics, images and resulting site were bloated. I also commented on the incredible slowness of .Mac. Since that time I've been happily using RapidWeaver and will continue to do so for this site as well as the occasional client site. However, with the recent announcement by Flickr that it's early users would have to transition to a Yahoo-based id I decided it might be a good time to revisit iWeb. I don't have a pro/paid account at Flickr which means I'm limited to 200 photos and I've thought before that I might switch over to hosting my photos on my own domain so that I could post as many images as I want (within my allotted space). I've also been thinking that it might be a good idea to just have a few personal pages to compliment the professional tone of the MacProductive site. Seems like the perfect opportunity to spend a bit more time with iWeb.

My two goals: 1. Produce a personal sub-site with a variety of photo sets. 2. Become proficient in the use of iWeb. I easily accomplished both in one day: Dennyville.

I really like iWeb. It is a fun and very easy to use application. They've done a great job in making layout feel like Pages and Keynote, both of which are a real joy to use. If you're thinking of using iWeb you may want to consider a few things. Since the images/graphics and code are a bit bloated the pages will tend to load slowly, if it is at all possible, avoid themes that use the artsy, non-standard fonts because those are converted to images which will add even more bloat! If you are publishing to a folder for upload to a server via ftp you may want to consider using Captain FTP for it's file-size based synchronization because it will work best for uploading only your changed files.

What I'm really hoping to see with iWeb 2.0

These are the big four which I would consider serious bugs. I really, really hope they fix these four:

Better graphics/image optimization. There is no doubt that iWeb sites load slowly. On dial-up they are painful and even with a broadband connection they are noticeably slow.

Direct ftp publishing to any host. In regards to the publishing process, as it is currently it is awkward and inefficient to the point of being useless without broadband. While it allows for publishing to a folder which can be FTP'd to any host, each update produces an entirely new set of files. Pages and photos that were not edited are republished with a new creation date which means the date-based synchronization of most FTP programs is useless. Captain FTP is the exception and it offers the option to ignore file dates and bases synchronization on file sizes. This makes uploading the updated files of an iWeb site much easier. If Apple's not going to offer direct ftp publishing then I hope they'll change the updating process so that only files which are changed are actually re-published. Doing so would open up proper synchronization to practically any ftp application.

Semantic code. As I understand the situation, iWeb code is technically standards compliant and will validate. This is good. But it is incredibly bloated code and it disregards any notion of the semantic web. Don't get me wrong... these pages look fantastic and the vast majority of iWeb's intended audience have probably never heard of "the semantic web". For these folks what matters is that they can very easily create a website that looks great. But it does matter if for no other reason that all the bloated code adds to the bloated graphics for an even slower experience. Apple, please give us some p tags!

Changing Themes. As it is now, once a page is set up the theme cannot be changed. The only option is to set up a new page and copy paste content from the old page to the new and even that's not clean because it will carry over various elements of the previous theme such as page image borders. If I have an entire site, say 10 pages that I want to change I have to do it page by page.

There are plenty of things I'd like to see added in as new features or improvements in current features, particularly for folks not using .Mac. A better slideshow or slideshow options for photo sets for sites which are not hosted on .Mac. Currently there is just one option and it appears to date back to the early days of .Mac/HomePage. Yuck. Keyword tagging for photos would also be nice especially if iPhoto keywords could be carried over. Searching... I'd love to be able to use the search mechanism that is available for .Mac. I'm not sure what they're using for that or if it's possible to carry it over to non-apple servers but would be nice. Same goes for comments. Adding the ability to edit themes would begin to cut against the grain of iWeb's intent so more themes would be great. The included themes are very nice but still, if users are limited to only what Apple provides, more is better.

iWeb, like all the iApps Apple hase created, is off to a good start. Certainly it is a bit rough around the edges but that's to be expected in a first version. I'm really looking forward to iWeb 2.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Mac, iLife, iWeb, flickr

Is your hard drive filling up with an iPhoto library full of photos? Here's a bit of advice. First, don't be afraid to delete images that are near duplicates. I can't tell you how many hundreds of megabytes I've seen wasted because someone was either afraid to delete photos that were nearly identical or just never took the time. Go ahead, do it. It's a great rainy day project... or a good any day project. Get a cup of coffee and enjoy your pictures as you work through them. If you have not added keywords to your images now would be a great time to do that too.

Once you've taken this step to remove photos you don't really need you may find that you still have too many images to host on your Mac's internal drive. If you have an external drive you can create a new libraries there or just move your current library. Here's how. If you just want to move your current library copy the folder, "iPhoto Library," (which is usually in the Pictures folder of your home directory) over to the external drive. When you start iPhoto hold down the option key and keep it down until you get the iPhoto dialog window. Yes, it's that simple. You'll be prompted to create a new iPhoto library or to choose an already existing library to open from. At this point you can choose your library in it's new location or, if you are keeping the original and creating a new library choose that option from the buttons presented. Easy. The next time you open iPhoto it will choose the last library you used. If you have opted to start a second library just hold down the option key during iPhoto startup anytime you want to open the previous library.

Back it up! If you have so many photos that you are using an external drive to move your current library or are creating new libraries you should be thinking about where you will back-up. Do you have a second external drive that can serve as a backup for the 1st external drive which will now be hosting photos? If not I'd suggest going back to the beginning of this tip. Delete the photos you really don't need. Don't expand or move your iPhoto libraries until you have a separate drive you can back-up to. This means at least 2 external drives... on for your iPhoto libraries and another one for backing up.

One other note of caution that I'll mention since I'm on the topic of iPhoto libraries. While this hint discusses moving the folder "iPhoto Library" so that you can save space on your internal drive, do not, ever, for any reason, move or delete files or folders inside of the iPhoto library. Never. The contents of this folder are not for you, they belong to iPhoto. If you want to work with images that are in the iPhoto library you use iPhoto. No exceptions.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, iPhoto