macosx

iPhoto is one of the simplest picture management tool ever written, so simple that it is not well suited to manage a huge picture library :
- it consumes a lot of memory,
- pictures are stored into a directory structure that only iPhoto developers seems to be able to understand thus organizing you picture files as you want is not possible,
- backups are not possible
- usage of removable media (DVD, hardrive...) is not possible,
- classification is painful, at the application launch all picture are displayed,

I finally installed Adobe LightRoom, and magically everything I wanted to do with my pictures is now possible.

LightRoom has a kick-ass GUI organized the same way Eclipse does : it features some kind of "perspectives" to classify, retouch, print and publish pictures. It can run fullscreen allowing to take advantage of modern large screens. It does not destroy you're files folder when importing picture directly from an hardrive, and has a convenient import tool. Batch editing is really easy eg: add 9 hours to dates of pictures of only one camera model = less than 5 clicks and no need to go to a menu... Surely the best GUI available today for a Mac OS X application.

I will never launch iPhoto again

A few days ago, I've installed Firefox 3 beta 2 for Mac OS X.

It features new security mechanisms, a new URL bar auto-completion, a download manager that can be used by a human, a new password management and a faster rendering engine a bit more integrated to the os.

The first thing that surprised me is the new rendering engine using a new way to render fonts that forbids the use of non anti-aliased fonts : even setting "AppleAntiAliasingThreshold" to a very high value does not disable anti-aliasing

Anyway, it looks faster and this is a good news as Firefox is quite slow compared to Internet Explorer and Opera. But the more useful new feature is the way stored password are managed. The password manager do not ask you anymore before submitting a password form if you want save this password, but it asks you after you've submitted the form. This is especially useful because you can choose to remember the password only if the login was successful and not a priori.

Download Firefox Beta Version.
Firefox 3 beta 2 Release Notes.