Neal Sheeran

I’ve written before about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom versus Apple’s Aperture and I currently use Lightroom as my primary photo management and editing tool. However, Aperture still has it’s uses: It is much easier to sync picks to my iPhone via Aperture (by selecting the desired albums under the photo tab in iTunes) than manually exporting from Lightroom. Lightroom also has no equivalent to Apple’s photo book tool.

Previously, I would select my desired picks and export them as TIFs to a folder in my Pictures directory. I would then apply a specific color label to indicate which ones resided in Aperture. This worked fine because I only ‘developed’ images in Lightroom, but if I ever went back and applied new develop settings or presets, none of those updates would carry over to Aperture.

With the release of Lightroom 3, much has been made of the new Publish Services, although most of this attention has been paid towards publishing images to online services such as Flickr*. Lightroom can also publish images to your hard drive and any changes made to these images can be updated with the push of a button. And these changes can be easily updated in Aperture. Here are the steps I use:

1. I created a Lightroom Publish Service set to export TIFs to a specific folder.
2. Drag my desired images to this service and select “Publish.”
3. In Aperture I import the images from the specific folder into a project. Nothing earth-shattering here.
4. If I modify any of these images’ settings in Lightroom, they will be identified as needing to be re-published.
5. After re-publishing in Lightroom (which updates the TIF in the desired folder), I return to Aperture and under the Photo menu, I hold down the option key, which changes the Update Preview menu item to Generate Preview:

This will force Aperture to reload the image, but without having to re-import the image. Now there is a live link between those photos that exist in both Lightroom and Aperture and if I make any further changes in Lightroom, it is easy to see those changes in Aperture.

When new photos are added to this Publish Service in Lightroom, just go back to Aperture and select Import to add them to the library. I keep all of these Lightroom exports in the same project and two key points if you do as well: ensure the original project is selected as the destination or a new one will be created and check that ‘do not import duplicates’ is selected.

I have only tested this with develop settings. I don’t know if any metadata changes like updated keywords will be reflected in Aperture. Since I use Lightroom as my primary asset management program, I’m not so concerned if these changes don’t make it over. I also haven’t looked at how this would work on a large scale. Of the 7000+ pictures in my Lightroom catalog, only my top picks—less than 200—are exported to Aperture. Feel free to comment if you notice any problems with this workflow.

* I find Lightroom’s built-in Flickr Publish Service inadequate because it lacks the ability to publish to a specific photoset. I use Jeffrey Friedl’s very thorough version instead.

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Some gadget thoughts and updates since it has been a while:

First, while I think the Apple iPad is a cool device, I don’t really need one. I don’t downright scoff it it like I did the iPhone (umm, this crow tastes yummy) and I readily admit that I fiddled with one whenever I went to an Apple store.

With the impending move overseas and my PowerMac G5 starting to show it’s age, what I really wanted to do was downsize (and upgrade) to a new MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, my lovely wife got me an Apple gift card for an iPad for Father’s Day. I was able to convince her about my dire “need” for a new laptop and applied the card towards it.

And now I’m typing on a brand new MacBook Pro with the updated 2.53 GHz Core i5 processor. I love the unibody construction and the hi-resolution matte display is awesome.

Now that I finally have an intel-powered mac, I’ll be putting Lightroom 3 and Aperture 3 through their respective paces. Both initially seem like solid upgrades.

Secondly, I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4 before I left—another solid upgrade. As for the iPhone 4, the move overseas pretty much denied that option. When I get back, I’ll get an iPhone 6 or something.

And a second or third generation iPad.

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Last year I posted about how my iTunes Store account was hacked. Cliff note version: somebody got ahold of my iTunes account password and purchased some of their own bogus $10 apps from the iTunes store. I called Apple and they refunded me the charges and shortly thereafter, the apps in question were removed from the app store.

Well, it appears the same trick was being used again and on a much larger scale. This has even made the front page of Drudge and Apple PR has kicked in.

So how is it these bogus apps are getting approved in the first place?

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It’s 12:30am and I’m sitting in the Seattle airport waiting for a flight to Korea. That will be home for the next two years and preparations for the move (that approach the D-Day invasion in complexity) are the reason things have been quiet around here. I have four hours before my flight leaves and another ten on the plane to write up some things. Stand by to stand by.

P.S. Happy Fourth of July…

UPDATE: Made it.

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I see that Michael Bellesiles has a new book coming out. Who? Why should I care? A quick rundown:

In 2000, Bellesiles wrote a book called Arming America, The Origins of a National Gun Culture. His general premise was that the commonly held view that America’s “gun culture” dates back to colonial times was a myth and in actuality very few people owned guns until after the Civil War. Eventually academics and journalists started to questions his conclusions, and more importantly, his research methods. For a synopsis of what happened next, see this Wikipedia article, but the fallout was anything but pretty (spoiler alert):

A negative finding from an internal Emory University review led to an external investigation that was “deeply disturbed” by his conduct and found that he “willingly misrepresented the evidence.” Bellesiles resigned his tenured position at Emory, his Bancroft Prize for Arming America was rescinded by Columbia University for “scholarly misconduct”, as was his NEH grant.

I remember being fascinated with this story when it hit the blogs in 2002 and blowing off more than a few hours at work to read James Lindgrin’s devastating critique from the Yale Law Review that paints the book as nearly a complete fraud.

Why is this important again? Oh, yeah. Bellesiles has a new book coming out and here is how is publisher is marketing it:

“1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous “swiftboating” campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000) — “the best kind of non-fiction,” according to the Chicago Tribune — which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.”

Replace ‘celebrated’ with ‘infamous’, replace ‘National Rifle Association’ with over ten independent academic researchers, journalists and bloggers, add in the part about the Bancroft Prize being rescinded, and use this quote from Roger Lane, who had originally given a positive review to Arming America:

“It is entirely clear to me that he’s made up a lot of these records. He’s betrayed us. He’s betrayed the cause. It’s 100 percent clear that the guy is a liar and a disgrace to my profession. He’s breached that trust.”

Do all those things, and maybe this marketing blurb can return from the complete fantasyland it currently resides in. I hear Jayson Blair is the mayor down there…

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My current machine is an Apple PowerMac Dual 2.0 G5 which I’ve had since February 2006. I’ve added an additional hard drive and bumped up the RAM (twice). It’s a perfectly fine machine. Does what I need it to. However, it’s not an Intel machine and can’t run Snow Leopard (10.6). And the ramifications of that are starting to show. Here’s a current list of apps I’ve been an interested in the last few months that require either an Intel processor and/or Mac OS 10.6:

1. Acorn 2
2. Aperture 3
3. Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta
4. MarsEdit 3

It may be time for a new MacBook Pro…

Update: And Google Chrome

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Click to see full screen on Flickr.

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I hope this theory by arstechnica turns out not to be true:

For the last several years, Apple has maintained a comprehensive (if not exhaustive) list of available Mac OS X software on its website. This has been a great resource for those who aren’t familiar with sites like MacUpdate or Version Tracker. However, the page hasn’t been updated since March 26—almost a month—leaving many developers to wonder if Apple may soon discontinue the service in order to shift its focus to a more locked-down distribution model for the Mac.

I’ve had a bookmark for that site since I don’t know when and found some neat stuff there. Hopefully it doesn’t go away, and double-hopeful it doesn’t go away for the reason noted.

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I’m not sure when reading the multitudes of blog posts and news articles—and keeping track of the interesting things—became a challenge, but I suspect getting an iPhone was actually a contributor.

First, some background: The first piece of software that I bought that didn’t come in a box from an actual store was NetNewsWire, way back in 2003. RSS was new to me at least and it made surfing a bit easier than actually going to every site in my ‘Daily Read’ folder and scanning for new posts. If I found something interesting that I wanted to keep filed away somewhere, I did one of two things: mark it as “flagged” in NNW or opened it in Safari and saved a bookmark in my ‘Stuff’ folder. Now and then I would go through these and move items to other bookmark folders, delete the ones that weren’t interesting anymore, or maybe blog about some of them.

Around this time, social bookmarking sites such as Ma.gnolia* and Delicious were all the rage. I think I had accounts at both of them—obviously I didn’t use them—and I think the reason was I didn’t really get (or care about) the “social” aspect of them. I just wanted something to easily track the interesting things I read. I didn’t really care what other people thought was interesting.

Along came the iPhone, which I’ve had for almost a year. My current newsreader app is Reeder, by way of Byline and the iPhone version of NetNewsWire. I’m also a big fan of Instapaper. Also around a year ago, I got started using Pinboard, the “anti-social bookmarking site.” The apps I use are interconnected to some degree: NNW on my Mac and Reeder on the iPhone (which both sync via Google Reader) can both post articles to Instapaper. Reeder can also post directly to Pinboard.

All that being said, reading and bookmarking stuff on the web goes something like this:

On My Desktop

Plowing through NNW. If the blog post itself is worth saving and I’m short on time, I just flag it. If the post is linking to a long-ish external article, I’ll send it to Instapaper. Sometimes I’ll find a link to an interesting site and then one of four things happens:

1. Interesting articles like web tutorials or new software I may want to try still get dragged the ‘Stuff’ folder in my bookmarks bar.
2. Snarky / cool / different kind of interesting tidbits get posted to my Elsewhere sideblog.
3. Or I just send it to Pinboard. I’m still trying to figure out what I should use Pinboard for. Right now it keeps really good articles I’ve come across and a holding bin for web design specific links. If there was an easy way to seemlessly incorporate my Pinboard list to feed into my sideblog, that would be huge.

I try to go through my ‘flagged’ items in NNW daily and do one of the above things with what what’s in there, or I just unflag it if I don’t think it merits permament, filed-away status.

On my iPhone

The two apps I use most on my phone are Reeder and Tweetie. I use Reeder just like NNW and a key feature of Tweetie for me is the ability to send followed bit.ly links to Instapaper directly from it’s own browser. Same goes for Reeder. Cell coverage where I work is spotty, so being able to archive links for future reference without having to go through Mobile Safari first is nice.

A note on Instapaper: the only time I really use it as it was intended (you know, to like read articles and stuff) is when I’m on a plane flying somewhere. I also you use it as a separate and miniaturized feedreader by subscribing to the developer’s Long Reads and Give Me Something to Read folders†. When I find something here, I star it for further reading or one of the steps above.

In summary (finally…— Ed.), worthy articles, posts and other assorted web goodness either gets flagged in NetNewsWire or Reeder, saved to Instapaper (from either of those two, and sometimes Safari itself), or sent to Pinboard. Or sent to my Elsewhere blog. In the case of this awesome New Yorker article about magician and actor Ricky Jay, it was nearly all four. Yes, I’m sure there is a cleaner way to do this, but I haven’t settled on what that is yet.

Now, if I can just figure out how exactly to put my desktop and iPhone versions of Evernote to good use…

* In January 2009, Ma.gnolia had a massive server crash and lost a ton of users’ data. The site went down for months and within days of relaunching, ownership received a cease-and-desist letter regarding the Magnolia name and they changed the name of the still-not-full-up service to Gnolia. Good luck.

† I found both of these from within the iPhone version of the app itself (Add Folder, then Browse Recommended Sites), but it seems this list isn’t populated anymore.

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Anatoly Zenkov came up with neat little widget that draws a map of where your mouse travels over the screen. Larger dots = dormant mouse. Click for full size.

Get it here: IOGraph

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