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softpawYay for journal posts instead of sleeping :-P
As many of you know, I'm pretty set in my ways when it comes to software I use on my computer. At least, I am when it comes to productivity software, games are a whole different discussion. I will pretty much use whatever I've been using since high school until the end of time unless something compells me to switch. That "something" is rarely "new-ness", and in fact, a brand-new application will rarely see usage from me, unless I'm beta-testing it, which is rare. The practical reason for my avoidance of new software stems from a belief in the philosophy "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". If an application is stable, and does what I need it to do without leaving me desiring more functionality, I have little reason to seek out anything new. To do so requires me to invest time and effort into installing, migrating, and learning something that I may not even end up using.
There are less practical reasons for this as well. When I was in high school, I had a couple of nerd friends, but for the most part, everyone I knew was a blithering idiot when it came to computers. And, I also knew a lot of people who thought they knew what they were talking about, but actually (usually) didn't. So, whenever some new application came out and started becoming popular, I'd hear from the net-savvy idiots about how awesome it was, and how everyone should be using it, and how I'm less of a computer expert for not using it, and so forth. Kinda like the "cool kids" of computer nerds. Usually, the app they were pushing was bloated (original Mozilla), buggy (original Trillian), or did something completely superfluous (iTunes for people who don't buy music from Apple), so combined with my innate tendency to do the opposite of what the "masses" are telling me to do, I got in the habit of ignoring these sorts of things. Unless the advice came from someone I trusted to not be a blind trend-followed, and came when I asked for it, I never paid attention to anyone when they mentioned a particular program (or, in more recent cases, websites).
I also developed a habit of keeping my computer(s) as clean and efficient as possible. Only installing one application for any given task, and never installing or using anything other than built-in OS tools unless I needed to do something that Windows itself couldn't readily be adapted to do.
So, fast-forward to now, many years past high school, and several things have changed (relevant to this post, anyway). I still know a lot of people who will blindly latch onto whatever New Thing comes around, and will proudly exclaim that everyone should be using it (like Firefox). But, I know a lot more people who actually research and test their favourite new application before recommending it, and will approach the subject as "I like this app, and here's precisely why" instead of "I'm using this app, because it's new, and you're a dumb AOLer if you don't use it too" (again, I'm looking at you, Firefox fanboys). And, most importantly, computers and their software are just plain better now than they were in high school. I'm not including Vista in that statement, but with the vast majority of PCs having super-awesome-space-technology specs compared to 2001, bloat is only a major concern for constantly-running programs. For everything else, an application that takes up 100mb of RAM is acceptable if it actually can justify that much data. Which is another point, programs seem to be written more efficiently than they used to be. There are a LOT of exceptions to this, but for the most part, software doesn't use ridiculous amounts of resources that it doesn't need, and background "launcher" apps are a bit less common than years ago (a time when EVERYTHING had a launcher running at startup).
And, I've become a bit more open-minded than I used to be. There's still plenty of crap-tastic new software, but I rarely see or hear about it anymore, and it's balanced by the proliferation of really good software accomplishing the same tasks. For example, there are plenty of god-awful bloated and flaky media players out there, but there's also VLC, which is downright beautiful in its simplicity. Plus, having used many of my current usage habits for nearly a decade now, it's hard not to acknowledge that there have been a lot of genuine improvements made upon Windows' normal methods and some of my long-time apps, many of which are so well past their infancy that they've become the de-facto standard among the rest of the world. That damn tabbed browsing is a perfect example of this, though it's also one I loathe.
In other words, the conditions are right to find myself a bit more experimental with computer software than I used to be. And, one area where I've decided to give things a second look is in the realm of photo management.
For quite a few years now, there've been a lot of applications designed to manage digital photos. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are (or were) geared toward idiots, and primarily meant to dumb down the process of retrieving photos from a camera, as well as making it painfully easy to print, "share" (email, mostly), and "edit" (rotate and remove red-eye, and add stupid clip-art and captions). All of which are things that are already exceptionally easy for me, and/or (in the case of "editing") that I already have much better apps to do. However, more recently, these sorts of apps have become popular with professionals and hardcore artists; not the exact same titles as the "home" (aka "idiot") market, but same basic concept. So, I know of the existance of a couple professional-grade photo managers as well as the idiot-grade ones.
This week, I've been working on a couple computers for a client, who wanted (among other things) Kodak EasyShare set up on one of the laptops he brought me. If you're not familiar with it, EasyShare is Kodak's attempt to get people to use their photo manager by tying it into their cameras and printers so tightly that you can't even plug one of the devices into a PC without installing their software. It's bloated, messy (does a really poor job of managing the actual files, making idiots even more reliant on their app instead of working alongside Windows), and ultimately does very little. I was getting paid pretty well for this job, enough to make it worth my time to mess with the stupid thing, but it's not something I would consider using myself in a million years, even if I'd ever drop 50 IQ points and purchase a Kodak camera.
However, since installing it meant I actually had to use it, I got a chance to see the interface with my own eyes for the first time. And, as dirty as it made me feel to think this, I actually found some appeal in the basic concept. Not the application itself, but after seeing how it turned a jumbled, cryptic mess of files into well-organized, easy to navigate albums, I was intrigued. My own photo collection is over 5,000 files, and has just broken the 16gb mark (all of them taken by me), so even with a well-organized network of folders, they're a bit hard to navigate sometimes. So, during a bit of downtime this evening, I decided to do some research on the subject of professional photo management. In particular, I was interested in Adobe Lightroom, which I've heard a lot about. Since I use Photoshop for any processing that needs to be done, it was a natural starting point, and when I found out that it has a half-dozen different plugins available to interface with my beloved Gallery2 (image gallery on my website), I had to try it out. With a quick download of the 30-day demo (fully functional, just with a time limit), I started playing with it.
My first impression was mixed. The interface is nice, but the black/dark grey colour scheme is a bit depressing to look at, with no way to change it. But, after thinking about it a bit, it kinda makes sense; white on a monitor is kinda like looking at a light bulb, which isn't very good for one's colour vision after awhile, and neither are other colours (like EasyShare's enthusiastic use of bright yellow). So, I can forgive it for that.
It took me a bit longer than I was comfortable with to figure out exactly what I was doing, but I can forgive that too. I've been using Photoshop for years, and I've used Dreamweaver since it was in version 1, and both of them had a pretty steep learning curve (especially once Adobe bought Macromedia and changed everything), so I consider that to be the mark of high-end professional software. In my bumbling around, I did see a lot of things that would come in handy, like editing tools that are useful, quick links to export to Photoshop, and more metadata/keyword tools than I ever thought existed. Editing meta-data is something that Windows kinda fails at, so I've never really cared about it, but I might do more with it now.
Finally, I figured out what I was looking for, organizational tools. The interface for them is a bit quirky, but I picked it up fairly quickly, and I instantly fell in love with Lightroom because of it. It's hard to spell out everything that's awesome about the "collections" system, but my favourite feature is the ability to create "Smart Collections", known to the rest of the world as "filters". This allows one to create a "collection" based not on folder location or manually moving things around, but based on one or more filters using metadata. Want to find all the pictures taken in the last month? No problem! All pictures taken with a particular camera? Piece of cake! Filters can be created for all file metadata (owner, mod/create date), internal metadata, EXIF, and IPTC tags, as well as basic things like file location and name. To test this, I made one to find all images taken with my cellphone camera, and poof! Worked perfectly.
Lightroom also makes it stupidly easy to rotate images, without destroying them like the Windows Image Preview is prone to do. It even does a nifty AJAX-esque rotational effect on the thumbnail, and it doesn't make you wait for one to complete before clicking the button on the next one. And, it can do rotations in batches. That functionality alone makes this the most awesome piece of imaging software I've ever owned.
I also set up one of the Gallery2 interfaces, though I haven't had the chance to test it yet. It doesn't synchronize quite as well as I would've liked (I was hoping for something bi-directional to seamlessly merge my local photo collection with what's on my website), but it's still pretty darn awesome.
My favourite feature, though, is its dual-monitor support. I've been using dual monitors on my primary PC since 2003, and it's not something that's going to change any time soon, but I've barely encountered any programs that work inherently well with dual monitors. So, congratulations Lightroom, you have the most awesome dual-monitor support I've ever seen in over six years. It has a handy-dandy feature where you can set up the secondary monitor to have a full-screen display running Lightroom, with a number of different options, including a full-size view of the currently selected thumbnail. Holy freaking awesomesauce. I've been doing things that way for years whenever I do a photo dump, by parking the Windows previewer thingy on monitor 1 while I flip through images in the folder on monitor 2, but it's always felt very clunky and unnatural to do it that way. This is well-integrated, and so beautifully executed that I feel like I should be paying for the privilege of using this program (oh wait...).
I still have more to explore with this program, which is convenient because I have a bunch of photos to process, but I must say that Adobe has really stolen the show with this one, and I highly recommend it to anyone who uses their camera for more than just taking random auto-mode snapshots.
As many of you know, I'm pretty set in my ways when it comes to software I use on my computer. At least, I am when it comes to productivity software, games are a whole different discussion. I will pretty much use whatever I've been using since high school until the end of time unless something compells me to switch. That "something" is rarely "new-ness", and in fact, a brand-new application will rarely see usage from me, unless I'm beta-testing it, which is rare. The practical reason for my avoidance of new software stems from a belief in the philosophy "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". If an application is stable, and does what I need it to do without leaving me desiring more functionality, I have little reason to seek out anything new. To do so requires me to invest time and effort into installing, migrating, and learning something that I may not even end up using.
There are less practical reasons for this as well. When I was in high school, I had a couple of nerd friends, but for the most part, everyone I knew was a blithering idiot when it came to computers. And, I also knew a lot of people who thought they knew what they were talking about, but actually (usually) didn't. So, whenever some new application came out and started becoming popular, I'd hear from the net-savvy idiots about how awesome it was, and how everyone should be using it, and how I'm less of a computer expert for not using it, and so forth. Kinda like the "cool kids" of computer nerds. Usually, the app they were pushing was bloated (original Mozilla), buggy (original Trillian), or did something completely superfluous (iTunes for people who don't buy music from Apple), so combined with my innate tendency to do the opposite of what the "masses" are telling me to do, I got in the habit of ignoring these sorts of things. Unless the advice came from someone I trusted to not be a blind trend-followed, and came when I asked for it, I never paid attention to anyone when they mentioned a particular program (or, in more recent cases, websites).
I also developed a habit of keeping my computer(s) as clean and efficient as possible. Only installing one application for any given task, and never installing or using anything other than built-in OS tools unless I needed to do something that Windows itself couldn't readily be adapted to do.
So, fast-forward to now, many years past high school, and several things have changed (relevant to this post, anyway). I still know a lot of people who will blindly latch onto whatever New Thing comes around, and will proudly exclaim that everyone should be using it (like Firefox). But, I know a lot more people who actually research and test their favourite new application before recommending it, and will approach the subject as "I like this app, and here's precisely why" instead of "I'm using this app, because it's new, and you're a dumb AOLer if you don't use it too" (again, I'm looking at you, Firefox fanboys). And, most importantly, computers and their software are just plain better now than they were in high school. I'm not including Vista in that statement, but with the vast majority of PCs having super-awesome-space-technology specs compared to 2001, bloat is only a major concern for constantly-running programs. For everything else, an application that takes up 100mb of RAM is acceptable if it actually can justify that much data. Which is another point, programs seem to be written more efficiently than they used to be. There are a LOT of exceptions to this, but for the most part, software doesn't use ridiculous amounts of resources that it doesn't need, and background "launcher" apps are a bit less common than years ago (a time when EVERYTHING had a launcher running at startup).
And, I've become a bit more open-minded than I used to be. There's still plenty of crap-tastic new software, but I rarely see or hear about it anymore, and it's balanced by the proliferation of really good software accomplishing the same tasks. For example, there are plenty of god-awful bloated and flaky media players out there, but there's also VLC, which is downright beautiful in its simplicity. Plus, having used many of my current usage habits for nearly a decade now, it's hard not to acknowledge that there have been a lot of genuine improvements made upon Windows' normal methods and some of my long-time apps, many of which are so well past their infancy that they've become the de-facto standard among the rest of the world. That damn tabbed browsing is a perfect example of this, though it's also one I loathe.
In other words, the conditions are right to find myself a bit more experimental with computer software than I used to be. And, one area where I've decided to give things a second look is in the realm of photo management.
For quite a few years now, there've been a lot of applications designed to manage digital photos. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are (or were) geared toward idiots, and primarily meant to dumb down the process of retrieving photos from a camera, as well as making it painfully easy to print, "share" (email, mostly), and "edit" (rotate and remove red-eye, and add stupid clip-art and captions). All of which are things that are already exceptionally easy for me, and/or (in the case of "editing") that I already have much better apps to do. However, more recently, these sorts of apps have become popular with professionals and hardcore artists; not the exact same titles as the "home" (aka "idiot") market, but same basic concept. So, I know of the existance of a couple professional-grade photo managers as well as the idiot-grade ones.
This week, I've been working on a couple computers for a client, who wanted (among other things) Kodak EasyShare set up on one of the laptops he brought me. If you're not familiar with it, EasyShare is Kodak's attempt to get people to use their photo manager by tying it into their cameras and printers so tightly that you can't even plug one of the devices into a PC without installing their software. It's bloated, messy (does a really poor job of managing the actual files, making idiots even more reliant on their app instead of working alongside Windows), and ultimately does very little. I was getting paid pretty well for this job, enough to make it worth my time to mess with the stupid thing, but it's not something I would consider using myself in a million years, even if I'd ever drop 50 IQ points and purchase a Kodak camera.
However, since installing it meant I actually had to use it, I got a chance to see the interface with my own eyes for the first time. And, as dirty as it made me feel to think this, I actually found some appeal in the basic concept. Not the application itself, but after seeing how it turned a jumbled, cryptic mess of files into well-organized, easy to navigate albums, I was intrigued. My own photo collection is over 5,000 files, and has just broken the 16gb mark (all of them taken by me), so even with a well-organized network of folders, they're a bit hard to navigate sometimes. So, during a bit of downtime this evening, I decided to do some research on the subject of professional photo management. In particular, I was interested in Adobe Lightroom, which I've heard a lot about. Since I use Photoshop for any processing that needs to be done, it was a natural starting point, and when I found out that it has a half-dozen different plugins available to interface with my beloved Gallery2 (image gallery on my website), I had to try it out. With a quick download of the 30-day demo (fully functional, just with a time limit), I started playing with it.
My first impression was mixed. The interface is nice, but the black/dark grey colour scheme is a bit depressing to look at, with no way to change it. But, after thinking about it a bit, it kinda makes sense; white on a monitor is kinda like looking at a light bulb, which isn't very good for one's colour vision after awhile, and neither are other colours (like EasyShare's enthusiastic use of bright yellow). So, I can forgive it for that.
It took me a bit longer than I was comfortable with to figure out exactly what I was doing, but I can forgive that too. I've been using Photoshop for years, and I've used Dreamweaver since it was in version 1, and both of them had a pretty steep learning curve (especially once Adobe bought Macromedia and changed everything), so I consider that to be the mark of high-end professional software. In my bumbling around, I did see a lot of things that would come in handy, like editing tools that are useful, quick links to export to Photoshop, and more metadata/keyword tools than I ever thought existed. Editing meta-data is something that Windows kinda fails at, so I've never really cared about it, but I might do more with it now.
Finally, I figured out what I was looking for, organizational tools. The interface for them is a bit quirky, but I picked it up fairly quickly, and I instantly fell in love with Lightroom because of it. It's hard to spell out everything that's awesome about the "collections" system, but my favourite feature is the ability to create "Smart Collections", known to the rest of the world as "filters". This allows one to create a "collection" based not on folder location or manually moving things around, but based on one or more filters using metadata. Want to find all the pictures taken in the last month? No problem! All pictures taken with a particular camera? Piece of cake! Filters can be created for all file metadata (owner, mod/create date), internal metadata, EXIF, and IPTC tags, as well as basic things like file location and name. To test this, I made one to find all images taken with my cellphone camera, and poof! Worked perfectly.
Lightroom also makes it stupidly easy to rotate images, without destroying them like the Windows Image Preview is prone to do. It even does a nifty AJAX-esque rotational effect on the thumbnail, and it doesn't make you wait for one to complete before clicking the button on the next one. And, it can do rotations in batches. That functionality alone makes this the most awesome piece of imaging software I've ever owned.
I also set up one of the Gallery2 interfaces, though I haven't had the chance to test it yet. It doesn't synchronize quite as well as I would've liked (I was hoping for something bi-directional to seamlessly merge my local photo collection with what's on my website), but it's still pretty darn awesome.
My favourite feature, though, is its dual-monitor support. I've been using dual monitors on my primary PC since 2003, and it's not something that's going to change any time soon, but I've barely encountered any programs that work inherently well with dual monitors. So, congratulations Lightroom, you have the most awesome dual-monitor support I've ever seen in over six years. It has a handy-dandy feature where you can set up the secondary monitor to have a full-screen display running Lightroom, with a number of different options, including a full-size view of the currently selected thumbnail. Holy freaking awesomesauce. I've been doing things that way for years whenever I do a photo dump, by parking the Windows previewer thingy on monitor 1 while I flip through images in the folder on monitor 2, but it's always felt very clunky and unnatural to do it that way. This is well-integrated, and so beautifully executed that I feel like I should be paying for the privilege of using this program (oh wait...).
I still have more to explore with this program, which is convenient because I have a bunch of photos to process, but I must say that Adobe has really stolen the show with this one, and I highly recommend it to anyone who uses their camera for more than just taking random auto-mode snapshots.