After hearing a lot of good things about Apple’s Aperture photo editing software I finally installed it yesterday (thanks TG for the serial) and I gotta say that this beats Adobe’s Lightroom by loads in my opinion.  I’ve had Lightroom installed on my windows desktop for about 3 months now, and can’t find a single good thing to say about it.

Some things I like about Aperture:
- Number one thing I like about the Aperture is its ease of use. Within minutes of installing the program I was able to get satisfatory results, unlike Lightroom or photoshop where it takes a while before you can start getting good results. Lightroom may technically be more powerful (more features) and may be faster, but I believe that good programs are those that allow users to quickly and easily get to the end results that the user have in it. The less time spent fiddling around with settings and menus, the more time users will have to enjoy and share their results!
- Changes made to images are stored as “versions”, storing just the thumbnail image, adjustements and embedded information, but it does not create a image file until you export it. This saves space on your hard drive.
- Easy to “lift” adjustments made to one picture and apply it to other pictures.
- I have a e-520 camera, and Aperture’s update to support the e-520 RAW format was released before Adobe (they still haven’t).
- $100 cheaper then Lightroom (Aperture 2.0 is $199, while Lightroom is $299).

To close this entry, here is a before and after screenshot of the first image I edited with Aperture. Its a picture I took outside a cathedral in San Francisco earlier this year. Even though the file was not saved in RAW, I was still able to recover the details that were lost in the underexposed parts of the statue.

Original image.

After editing.

Everyone has their own good luck bringing ritual/item. Could be as simple as listening to a “lucky” song or wearing pair of lucky boxers or something else that’s physical or it could be an unusual way of doing some normal activity. I know I have a couple myself If I’m microwaving something, I’ll stop the microwave once the timer reaches either 1 sec or 23 seconds.

Earlier this week I caught a Shark’s game with my buddy LN who has a good luck bringing ritual of his own. TO ensure a sharks win he eats nachos in the first period of the game and pizza in the third period. Oooo a ritual that involves eating? Count me in!

Game was against the Pittsburgh Penguins. There’s no doubt that they’re a good team, as they made it to the final round of the playoffs last year. Check out the pic below.

That’s their team captain Sidney Crosby, who is one of the brightest stars in the league and considered by many to be the “face” of the NHL. He was a first round draft pick back in 2005 and since then has made headlines by becoming the youngest team captain in the league and by also being the youngest player in the history of the NHL to win both MVP and scoring awards.

The shark’s arena can hold 17,490ish fans…and its normally full of teal and white wearing sharks fans, but there was a good number of fans in attendance wearing Sidney Crosby jerseys, (Oh and btw Crosby’s jersey is the best selling jersey on NHL.com) especially fans of the female variety.

Sidney Crosby warming up before the game with Shark’s players in the background.

Well guess LN’s ritual worked! Not even Crosby could stop the 5 home game winning streaking. Sharks left the ice with a 2-1 win! Crosby didn’t get any goals…he didn’t even manage to get more then 3 shots on goal against the Shark’s defense! Ahhh the power of nachos and pizza (and a a good game by the sharks of course :))

You may have heard that Microsoft unveiled their successor to Windows Vista last week during the PDC. The new operating system will be called Windows 7, as it’s Microsoft’s seventh operating system to date. While it’s still in pre-beta form, they handled out copies of the upcoming operating system to developers and walked through some of the new features. Looking through the list I couldn’t help but feel like they were simply playing catchup with Apple’s OS X Leopard operating system as some of the features feel like crappy rip offs of features already present in OS X. Posted some screen shots below for a short comparison.

Desktop:
With Windows Vista and previous MS operating systems, if you have a lot of applications/documents open on your screen and you wanted to look at the desktop you could either minimize all the windows one by one, or click on a button on the taskbar that would minimize all windows at once. With Windows 7, placing your cursor on the corner of the screen, “hides” (as seen in next two screenshot) the windows and allows you to see the screen.

Windows 7: Loads of open windows.

Windows 7: Windows “hidden” to expose the desktop.

Hmm sorta useful I guess….but OS X already has that feature and it works better and looks sexier! As you can see in the screenshots below, first you have a screen full of open applications. Now one downward swipe of your fingers on the multitouch trackpad and it displays a miniature version of all the open applications, allowing you to easily find any window that was previously hidden. Want to see the desktop? Well one upward swipe with your fingers on the multitouch trackpad and ZOOM, open windows fly off the screen displaying your desktop!

OS X: Lots of open windows.

OS X: Swipe fingers down on touchpad to see all open apps.

OS X: Swipe fingers upwards on touchpad to see desktop.

Windows 7 Widgets/Gadgets:
Apple calls them widgets, Microsoft copied them and calls them “gadgets” in Microsoft Vista. In Vista, these gadgets were in a sidebar on one side of the screen. In Windows 7, the sidebar is gone, but as you can see in the screenshot below, the gadgets can now TA-DA be placed anywhere on the screen.

Hmm…that seem’s pretty familar..OH wait…OS X has the same feature! (screenshot below).

So yeah looks like microsoft is just ripping off features thats have been available on OS X for a while now. There are some upcoming features that sound cool, but with the way Vista went, I won’t believe a word of what they’re saying Windows 7 will be like until I can actually see it with my own eyes.

(Note: On macs without multitouch trackpads, the features above can be activated using keyboard shortcuts and also by moving the cursor to one of the corners of the screen…as MS copied)

The new generation of Ipod nanos were announced at todays “Let’s Rock” event in SF around 10:30ish a.m (but you already knew about that because all of us geeks were following live blogs of the event from 10am this morning right?).

Changes:

- Cosmetics. Has a oval cross section. Went back to the “thin tall” factor of the 1G and 2G nano (3g nano was fat and short). Looks pretty sweet. Check out image below.
- built in accelerometer (same as iphone). This will allow games designed with the iphone in mind to play on the nano. Sweetness! It will also allow the nano to switch to cover flow mode (the mode in which instead of listening song titles/album titles it displays album covers instead that you can flick through through the use of the click wheel) ..and it also allows for the next bullet point
- Shuffle songs by shaking the nano! Now thats cool!
- Genius mode (this is also being added to the ipod touch and to itunes). Here’s Apple’s description of this feature:

“Say you’re listening to a song you really like and want to hear other tracks that go great with it. The Genius feature finds the songs in your music library that go great together and makes a Genius Playlist for you. It’s like having your own highly intelligent, personal DJ.”

- improved battery life (up to 24 hours)
- headphones with built in mics and built in remote control.
- voice recording capability
- Use of more environmentally friendly materials

Changes to the ipod touch were also announced, but I’ll skip that for now due to time constraints. It looks like the iphone now and includes the genius feature. Also has external volume control and speakers like the iphone. Aside from that there’s also a new version of itunes (version coming out and NBC will be returning to the video store (they left itunes a year or so ago because they wanted to charge around $5 per episode for their tv shows including heroes, but Steve Jobs did not want to charge customers any more then $1.99 at the time).  Also out by the end of this week will be iphone software version 2.1 that is supposed to reduce number of dropped calls, improve battery life, crash less and provde faster backups. Mine hasn’t crashed much and my backups are also fast, but I know some readers of this blog have those issues so hopefully 2.1 will fix those problems.

Oh and heres more info on the new nano and touch. Cool thing about apple is most of the time their products are available to buy at the same time as the announcement.  Oh and there was supposed to be some Microsoft announcement today as well..but who cares? (new zunes…blah).

Just ordered a 16gb ipod nano to use in the gym. It’ll be replacing my older 30gb ipod whose screen is starting to give up (I sat on it) and i a lil bulky for the gym..don’t want to use my iphone in the gym because then it’ll be covered in sweat at the end of each session. Ordered the black nano…second on the left in the pic below. Can’t wait till it arrives! I should have just gone to the apple store in a day or two and picked it up personally instead or ordering it online but I doubt I’ll have a chance to go to the apple stores anytime soon.

By now you must have heard about Cuil (pronounced cool), a new search engine created by former google employees. It was in the news all day today, and a lot of people initially thought of it as a potential google killer.

Google killer? Ha

As soon as I heard the news I jumped on Cuil and searched for some terms. Cuil claims that they have a larger index of web pages (i.e that through cuil you can find more results then google), but most of the terms I typed in resulted in ZERO search results! Here’s an example: I searched for “olympus e-520″ (its a digital camera) on both Cuil and Google.

Google came up with over a 880,000 search results including the price of the olympus e-520 at 3 online retailers and also linked the e-520 product page on the official olympus website.

How did Cuil do? All I got was a stinking:

“We didn’t find any results for “olympus e-520”

Some reasons might be…

• a typo. Please check your spelling.
• your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
• too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.”

Some other terms ended up giving me the same message. How pathetic is that? Google killer? Pfff….

Edit: Btw Google has found over 1 trillion pages on the web, but does not index all of them because many are similar or has auto-generated content. Read more on that here on the offical google blog.

Haptic feedback on a touchscreen? Now that would be sweet. I love the iPhone to death, but I can’t type out messages on it without looking at the screen as I could with other cellphones that have raised keys. Haptic feedback technology on touchscreens would create the same “raised key” feeling and apparently nokia is already working on it:

“The main idea behind the haptikos is the possibility to create “… variable and controllable user perceived surface roughness or friction coefficient“.

This is achieved by placing   a “…plurality of closely spaced voltage controllable protuberances” that  can be raised and lowered on a touchscreen surface.

When no current is applied, the protuberances are flush with the surface of touchscreen and the whole surface area feels solid and smooth. When voltage is applied, the protuberances raise from the surface with increasing extent, providing the feel of tactile elements on a touchscreen. By controlling on which parts of the touchscreen and when the protuberances are raised, and illusion of a tactile feedback is achieved……”

Click here for more details

One of the biggest complaints about the current generation iphone and the 3G iphone due to come out on July 11th (besides not having a physical keyboard) is the lack of MMS support. That got me thinking…Apple rarely does anything without a reason..were they trying to make a statement about SMS and MMS becoming less relevant as more and more devices can access email accounts combined with a greater abudance of both unlimited data plans and wi-fi networks? Personally I have no real use for SMS or MMS…I can email messages and images to friends…if I need to have a quick conversation with someone, I can log onto meebo on my phone and chat with anyone logged onto their gtalk, MSN, yahoo, aim accounts. And at $20/month for unlimited data, it goes a lot further then paying $20 a month for unlimited SMS messages or $0.10 a sms for messages capped at a measly 160 characters.

I was surprised to find that I’m not the only one who shares this view. Came across this blog earlier today -Click Here.

What do YOU think? Think this is crazy talk? Think that SMS is too important..too widespread to just be tossed aside?

Think back to May 6th of 1998, when Apple announced the then shiny new iMac..that caused a media uproar because it lacked a floppy drive! Now no computer manufacturer ships computers with built in floppy drives! It started with one company and then moved across the board.

Could the death of SMS and MMS also been looming? With over 70% of cellphone users using these services I don’t expect it to drop dead all of a sudden….but a slow death could be in the books for both SMS and MMS.

A little something extra thats also on my mind: When the Mac Air was announced a lot of people laughed at the lack of a optical drive (including myself..I think the Lenevo X200 is a much better laptop - almost as thin as the Mac Air, but has a optical drive)…but from the early 90s companies like Sun Microsystems have been trying to promote the concept of a “dumb terminal” (computer with basic hardware and not much software installed on it - these computers will run software off of central servers). Now while the Mac Air is not “dumb” in any regard it does look like a step in the direction of what Sun and other companies promoted at the time.

Thank paramount and dreamworks for just prolonging the high def war between Blu-ray and HD dvd by deciding to go exclusively HD Dvd. Their reason? Lower cost players and lower manufacturing?

Hmm….since when does a studio care about how much $$ consumers will save by buying a lower cost player? ($299 for HD dvd vs $499 for blu-ray) Especially since blu-ray disc sales are kicking HD dvds ass to kingdom come? The movie 300 came out in both blu-ray and hd dvd and even though the hd dvd had more extra content (that content will be added to a future blu-ray release of the movie), blu-ray outsold HD dvd 2 to 1. So why ditch the LEADING format in the hi-def war for hd dvd?

Answer: HD dvd backers reportedly gave paramount $50 million and dreamworks $100 million in return for this exclusive deal for the next 18 months.

Interesting fact 1: Steven Spielberg is a supporter of blu-ray and his movies are not covered by this deal. Think his first blu-ray movie will be out by the end of the year.

Interesting fact 2: Michael Bay (director of transformers) made a post on his official forum expressing his anger over paramounts decision in choosing HD dvd. These comments were later removed from the forum.

So who does this deal hurt? The consumers! Just creates uncertainty in the market just when everything was pointing at blu-ray as the victor.