iPhoto '09, A Glorious App for Disorganized Photographers

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new iPhoto program, part of the iLife ’09 bundle I purchased for $99 CAD at my local Apple vendor.

Like most folks, I’ve got thousand of unorganized photos culled from various computers, cameras and file systems over the years. They move from one drive to another, renamed, shrunk for web and dotted throughout my pictures folder.

The initial import was a breeze, a one-click ‘import to library’ function typical of most Apple programs. The photos are arranged in a beautiful graphical format. You can modify the size of the thumbnails in the gallery and easily expand to view full-size and back again.

The Faces feature is one of my favourites. It uses a newly developed facial recognition software. You begin by inputting the name of the subject in the photo and the program will scan the rest of your photos and suggest other instances where that face appears. The more examples you have of that face, the more precise the selections will be. It’s not foolproof but it is pretty darn accurate, and managed to accurately scan and group photos of my children over the years, right back to infancy.

Sharing is super-easy, with one-click interfaces for email, flickr and facebook. Simply select the photos you wish to email and choose what size you’d like to send the photos, iPhoto does the rest of the work. Create an album for facebook and flickr and it will batch upload the entire album to the account you’ve assigned.

You can flag or hide photos, sort, title and rate them. You can add location data, keywords and descriptions. You can send to iWeb, iDVD or simply burn to CD. You can even fix red-eye and build cards, calendars and other mementos, then order direct from the program.

My only complaint is its lack of duplicate finder capability. While it was easy enough for me to sort the photos by date and click and delete duplicate files by hand, it seems like it could be even easier, given the strengths of the rest of the program. All in all though, I’m loving my iPhoto ’09 by Apple, and if you’re a photographer or collector of snapshots, you’ll love it too.

Back Up Your Data!! It's Easy With Time Machine

I received an all-too-common phone call from a frightened-sounding University student yesterday. He had accidentally knocked his MacBook off his desk and onto the floor, "It wasn't very high," he insisted, "But pretty soon the hard drive started making funny noises. I turned it off and when I turned it back on all I got was the grey screen." At that point I could almost hear the churning in his gut as he said, "How much to fix it and what are the chances of data recovery?"

Now I can't fault the guy for dropping his computer. Never mind it's a dumb-ass thing to do, but accidents happen to the best of us, and with a computer so versatile and robust it's easy to take it for granted and drag it into situations it should never be in.

I told the client that it was probably the hard drive and potentially the logic board that was at fault and that, since it had been dropped, it had voided any warranty. A replacement hard drive was likely to run close to $200.00 with the installation and software restore, and a logic board could be upwards of $1000.00 all told. Data recovery, if I couldn't do it here in the shop, was likely to start at $800.00 or more at a dedicated data recovery operation.

Money matters aside, this student likely had his whole year's work on his hard drive, complete with essays and notes, pictures, contacts, software and more, an entire year's investment in time and energy. But did he have a back up?

According to Apple’s own research, only 4% of users conduct a regular back-up of their important data. One feature common to Mac users, (and you can colour me guilty) is the sense of being bullet-proof. Which brings us to Time Machine, OS X Leopard's seamless and painless back up feature.

The Time Machine application is an integral part of the Leopard OS and its interface is as easy to use as anything else Apple. At every start-up you’re prompted to configure your Time Machine back-ups and asked where you’d like the back-ups to be stored. You’re also allowed to choose any files or folders you’d like to have excluded by the backup. After that Time Machine does all the work, automatically storing the contents of your home folder on your (preferably external) hard drive. Each subsequent hour the Time Machine will back-up only those files that have changed, storing them in an easily searchable interface on your new drive.

Restoring your system from the Time Machine backup is as seamless and easy as building the Backup in the first place. Simply find the date or the file you’d like restored in the quick look interface, click restore, and it’s done.

Let’s face it, even Macs die and not only through drops, spills and burlaries. With 1 Tb external drives selling for under $150.00, there is no excuse for losing a year or more's worth of effort and resorting to professional data recovery services charging a 'desperation premium'. Prepare for the worst, back up your data

When It Comes To Security, Apple's Got You Covered.

If data and internet security is an issue for you and your computer, the new Leopard OS X operating system from Apple is sure to help you sleep nights

Parental Controls

As the parent of an 11 year old, I dread the internet and any unfettered access my children may enjoy. Porn, violence, creeps and predators all pose hazards to our children. The new parental controls in the Leopard operating system are robust and comprehensive, allowing you to place time limits on your child's usage, to block broadly filtered and/or specific Adult or other sites, to limit the programs your child can use and even to log email and chat messages for parents to monitor. They're available in System Preferences under Parental Control.

User Accounts and Filevault passwords

For any government worker, medical practitioner, business person or researcher, it's imperative that one protect one's data from prying eyes. Apple's user account setup can effectively give varying levels of security depending on your specific needs. The user accounts and keychain passwords can keep your data relatively safe when sharing a computer with others in a home or office environment. Users with particularly sensitive data can store their entire home folder in an encrypted disk image using Filevault, or you can just as easily encrypt specific files.

The EfI Firmware password is a feature that can protect your entire computer from being booted with an external disk if that computer should fall into the wrong hands.

Just another reason, you should'a bought a Mac.

Tax Incentives For Your Computer Upgrade

In our recent Federal budget, the Harper government has offered a tax incentive to all businesses to upgrade their computer systems. A 100% deduction is in place from Jan 27 '09 to Feb 1st 2011 for the purchase of all computer hardware and software packages, which means that that RAM and hard-drive upgrade you've been looking forward to can now practically pay for itself when you figure in the speed and storage benefits combined with the tax savings. Splurging on that new Airport Extreme base station, OS upgrade, Time Machine and Mobile Me account, all the while fully and seamlessly integrating your Apple technology into your home and worklife has never been so easy and appealing.

Web Advertising Rising While Newspapers Fail

According to research firm eMarketer, Internet advertising will grow this year while traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television continue to fall. US spending stands to reach a total of over $23 billion this year with yearly increases of over 10%. Cost effectiveness and accountablity are some of the reasons cited for the steady increases while claims that net advertising is recession proof are also heartening in these apparently bleak economic times.

Paid search ads through Google, Yahoo and smaller engines and directories will make up nearly half of that spending while banner and classified ads will comprise nearly 35% of the total. Video advertising also stands to grow by almost 50% per year.

Linking Strategies For Traffic and Robots

To achieve any level of traffic to your website, you need to develop a series of inbound links from relevant sites and dedicated web directories. The links themselves will drive a certain amount of traffic to your site, depending on how busy that site is, but the true value of that inbound link will be in the 'link popularity' your site will achieve. Google robots and other search engines will view these links and rank your site higher in its database because of the perceived popularity of your site.

It's important to choose relevant links to your site and not just random link farms whose generality and lack of relevance can actually hurt your site. The best way to find relevant and well-weighted directories and link sites is to do a google search within your niche. For example, for a vancouver island tourism site, google 'vancouver island tourism directory'. For an Ottawa tattoo studio, search for 'Ottawa search engine' and 'Tattoo link directory'. The top hits listed are the sites you want to be affiliated with, for their Google relevance will transfer itself to your site.

There was a time when most link and web directories offered free linking, but sadly those days are gone. Most of the most important directories these days charge for listings, anywhere from $30.00 to $250.00 per year. Do some research and find the best opportunities for your particular niche with the best return on investment.

Linking is important. Don't ingore it.

What do people have against meta tags.

Through my work with Vingo.ca, my Vancouver Island Travel Search Engine, I regularly have to dip into a website's source code to pull the company's description from their meta tags. Fully half of these sites, even the pretty ones, have ignored their meta tag keyword and description fields, the first step in effective search engine optimization.

Your meta keyword field should be littered with significant and descriptive words about your business, page or product, preferably words that appear in the text of the site. Separate them with commas and string them together. (ie., web, web tech, web tech blog, web blog,...). Your meta description should be a sentence, (a long sentence), also full of those same keywords but in an easy to read description. This is how you'll be identified by the search engines.

Visit my site at Up Your Media. Don't be shy, dip into my source code to see what a properly optimized meta stack looks like.

Programs like Dreamweaver make it easy for anyone to build a website, but too often these budget priced websites, though they may look good, have forgotten the basics, making it far more difficult for customers to find you. If it's worth building, it's worth promoting.