Up Your Media's Quick Tips Newsletter Volume II

Hi, and welcome to another edition of our Quick Mac Tips newsletter. These are some issues that have come up with my Apple cpmputer clients around Parksville, Qualicum, Nanaimo and central Vancouver Island in the past weeks.

In iPhoto 9 you can now choose to send mail via iphoto or your mac mail application I suggest choosing the Mac Mail program. Choose this option in the iPhoto General Preferences pane.

Hot Corners, is one of my favourite navigation features. If you're like me, you tend to have a lot of windows and applications open at once. In your System Preferences pane, go to Expose and Spaces, and pick Active Screen Corners, I like my top right corner to tile all open windows and my lower right corner to clear all windows and expose the Desktop.

You can add a photo or logo to your email signature by opening up the signature dialogue in your mail program and simply dragging the image directly onto that particular signature from either the finder or the iPhoto application.

Change your Safari homepage from the default Apple store to a page more suitable to you. In the Safari preferences pane, simply type in the url to your favourite page where it says 'home page'.

Need to translate text or full webpages, use the Google translator at http://translate.google.com/ . This free tool will allow you to translate over 50 languages

iTunes Radio contains access to hundreds of radio stations worldwide in every genre.

To save a PDF for the best emailing and sharing compatibility, choose print in your Pages, MS Word, Safari or Mail program, at the bottom left of that window you'll see the PDF tab, from there you can save the PDF or mail it directly

To type fractions go into the keyboard language drop down menu near the top right of your screen (the flag beside the clock) and choose to "show character viewer". From there you choose symbols, then number and number symbols, pick the fraction you want and click insert.

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.