From the looks of it, Aperture is far more thought-out than Elements is. (Which, I guess, could also mean that half of the features are useless for those of us who are not professional photographers - it's a very niche product, and it's almost by definition not a direct Photoshop competitor.)
Automatic backup to a secondary drive, good metadata handling - which goes hand in hand with things like the "Smart Web Gallery" feature to automatically rebuild the pages where new photos come in that fit a special criteria, automatic stacking of batches of images (taken within x minutes of each other). However, I think that the biggest thing here is that Apple gets to use Core Image to do some fun stuff - you can make several versions of the same image by adding effects and doing things like cloning and patching, which all just adds up to an incremental 'recipe' of the changes and a lot of saved hard drive space (which I guess would add up if you were to make a lot of toy alternate RAW images).
Obviously I haven't tried it, and I'm not a professional photographer, but from having watched the tours, there seems to be an awful lot of "extra miles" that Apple have taken in a lot of the features, which I think will be what sets it apart from Elements more than the stereotypical "artists buy Apple" factor.
For what it's worth, your opinions are not far away from my own, and this and the previous comment (to which you replied) was written on OS X, which I like you hold to be a superior OS to Windows as far as technical platforms go. It's a bit sad that so much software is constrained to any one platform. (Yes, I realize that there are technical reasons and APIs and market shares and clueless managers behind this all that - I am a programmer - and I'm not saying that it can and should all change at the drop of a hat, just that it's sad.)
Anyone out there using another platform that never finds themself asking, "man, if I only had Windows?"
My simple guess is that almost every instance of "man, if I only had Windows" actually means "man, if I only had this piece of software that runs on Windows but not on my platform". As people keep using other platforms, it becomes more and more likely that the software *will* run on your platform, as it makes more and more business sense for the creator of the software.
(Naturally, that does nothing to help people in this position today, and Windows might very well be the best solution if you really have to run this software today. I'm just saying.)
I, personally, am fully content with my 30GB iPod Photo. It can already do what people now have to pay $299 to do.
No. The new iPod has two big advantages:
Battery life. While 2 or 3 hours for just watching video is insanely poor any way you slice it, I don't doubt for a second that the battery life of the iPod Photo (or "color iPod", depending on which box it was in when you bought it) when viewing video is shorter.
Bigger screen. 320x240 means almost twice as many pixels as 220x176.
Don't get me wrong. I do think that iPod Linux is not only a fantastic idea but also fantastically executed, given what the volunteers have to work with - reverse-engineering a pretty much closed platform and getting used to the whims of the internal chips. Any project whose main developers are ingenious enough to extract big chunks of the boot loader through recording the piezo 'squeezing' it out definitely has my respect. I also really appreciate the stuff like OGG playback and games that it brings to the table - the subject of your comment is correct when it states that one doesn't need a new iPod to play video.
However, I do think that you'd be wrong in saying that "it does what people buys a new iPod for", because it's not just about the video playback itself, but also about stuff like screen size and battery, which takes video playback from possible to reasonably enjoyable.
AAAAAAAAH! AAAAARGH! THE PAIN!!! GET IT OFF ME! GETITOFF-GETITOFF-GETITOFF-GETITOFF! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
(Yes, this is a joke. And yes, this insanely long sentence with so many interventions until I get to the point was added to prevent the lameness filter.)
I hear it went for five million kidneys and twelve sandwiches looking like the virgin Mary. Although I can't understand why they bought from VeriSign - they're no A+++++ WILL BUY AGAIN.
Other people have answered in-depth, but the short answer is:
a) You do not need to worry about which vendor's dialect of SQL syntax you're using - provided you know how to create and populate the tables in any database system, you can switch at the drop of a hat if you need or want to.
b) Provided the layers are stable, it protects you from SQL query injections. The abstraction layer does the escaping for you.
c) Abstracted queries makes queries 'just another function/method call', and you get ordinary data structures back. This in combination with a) and b) and a competent framework (Rails, Django, TurboGears, Cake, Trax, WebObjects) makes coding much quicker as you don't have to keep the semantics of SQL and your database in mind - just the model itself.
There are *many* nuances to this, but the above three are some of the most pertinent ones. Peruse the other comments if you want to get in-depth.
You make a good point, but from what I can tell, these apps won't help make that happen.
Because of the meager info in the article about what Quartz ([insert obligatory way-to-not-steal-names-from-Apple-technologies jab here]) and Acrylic do, you might want to take this with an additional spoon of salt, but I know that Sparkle is meant to be something like Flash. If you sit down any random guy with Flash they're probably less likely to build a good UI than if they were sat down with Visual Studio or why not Interface Builder. (Because Flash has a ton of drawing tools, and then a few widgets, whereas the others just have widgets, and maybe a 'box' control if you're really nice.)
It's to my understanding that UI designers and programmers alike should work with standard widgets like buttons and text fields first and foremost. Polish is nice, and in a lot of ways essential, but if you're trying to build it as you go, you're deluding yourself. The first 95% or so of the time on a project, you should *always* concentrate on the UI before the sizzle. The sizzle's insanely important, but not more insanely important than a well-designed UI. Maybe I could see Sparkle as a nice UI prototyping tool, if anything, but it doesn't sound like that.
The failure of RIAA members to adapt their offerings to the market encourages illegal downloads. People buy things when they get reasonable terms. Making fair use harder by using "copy-protected" retail CDs qualifies as not reasonable by a lot of people.
Okay, seriously, what has the internet come to these days? I just tried typing "huge organ" into Google and I actually *got* info on pipe organs. It's going downhill, people.
Here's what a "blog" is - writing (OR photos OR audio OR video OR any combination of them) published serially on the web, with or without archives. That's what it all boils down to.
My own definition of "blog" started out as "thoughtful writing accompanied with links" (much like the "personal journalism" angle taken by others) but as we can see in your post, where it's "angsty writing by a teenager" and basically just a published diary, there's really no consensus. One's definition tends to be colored by the type of "blogs" one frequents/dispises, and more and more people are using the word to describe their own web sites.
You can't even assume that "blogs" are personal, because businesses have started to host "business blogs" (not to be confused with actual personal "blogs" under the business domain) where everything goes through PR. It's just gotten to the point where it's no longer useful to ask if something is a "blog" because the only thing that could possibly be deduced is that it's a recurring list of entries rather than a static page.
Here's hoping that more people will, like you already have, realize this and stop judging things by that specific word: "blog".
I fully agree and I don't know what all the fuzz is about - it's comparable to Nokia touting its phones as Opera phones. With the addition of iTunes to this phone, it can do exactly one thing that other phones can't - play FairPlay-DRMed songs. Compared to the rest of the phone, it's not exactly tipping the scale.
Did anyone see the part of the Special Event where Steve "demos" the phone? They're so embarassed about it that they don't have a camera to show the phone interface. When he gets interrupted by a phone call, he can't even press the right button to resume the music. It's a bad move. Steve probably would hate this phone if it hadn't got iTunes on it in the first place.
Motorola's interfaces are among the worst in the industry. Their computer connection software is a riddle and a half. The phone is clumsy. The 100-song limit, USB 1.1 connection and lack of Bluetooth syncing are all braindead, and three companies all trying to limit the functionality to not hurt other aspects of their business compromised what little was already good with this phone to suckiness. There's no fucking way in hell that this is going to sell well unless you're a complete must-be-Apple/Motorola/Cingular consumer fascist. This is the worst move Apple has made since the mid-90s era.
Someone (I can't remember who) once said (long before this) that this is the scenario: Steve Jobs has a cell phone which he uses daily, and which he hates, and which he one day is going to do something about. After watching that part of the event, I think for the first time in my life that the iPhone might actually happen someday, because if Apple's trying to push iTunes onto even an average phone, this just won't do.
Drinks tend to be more "fancy", yes. A good rule of thumb is basically that if you make it up on the spot and has no added color, then it likely is a Grogg.
The distinction between a Drink and a Grogg does lie in the way it's mixed, yes - Drinks often have names and are mixed professionally whereas a Grogg is likely something you're throwing together by yourself at home - but that doesn't mean that there aren't rules to what they're composed of.
The swedish Grogg is very different from the Grog. A Grogg is one or more types of alcohol mixed with one or more non-alcoholic beverages (like tonic, soda, grenadine... often called Groggvirke, meaning basically "The Stuff That Groggs Are Made Of"). If the non-alcoholic part exceeds 50%, it's a drink, but if it doesn't, it's a Grogg. Grogg is *not* used to describe any old thing with alcohol in it, but since a Grogg in itself is fairly non-restrictive, it's often thought of that way.
Slashdot Mirror
From the looks of it, Aperture is far more thought-out than Elements is. (Which, I guess, could also mean that half of the features are useless for those of us who are not professional photographers - it's a very niche product, and it's almost by definition not a direct Photoshop competitor.)
Automatic backup to a secondary drive, good metadata handling - which goes hand in hand with things like the "Smart Web Gallery" feature to automatically rebuild the pages where new photos come in that fit a special criteria, automatic stacking of batches of images (taken within x minutes of each other). However, I think that the biggest thing here is that Apple gets to use Core Image to do some fun stuff - you can make several versions of the same image by adding effects and doing things like cloning and patching, which all just adds up to an incremental 'recipe' of the changes and a lot of saved hard drive space (which I guess would add up if you were to make a lot of toy alternate RAW images).
Obviously I haven't tried it, and I'm not a professional photographer, but from having watched the tours, there seems to be an awful lot of "extra miles" that Apple have taken in a lot of the features, which I think will be what sets it apart from Elements more than the stereotypical "artists buy Apple" factor.
For what it's worth, your opinions are not far away from my own, and this and the previous comment (to which you replied) was written on OS X, which I like you hold to be a superior OS to Windows as far as technical platforms go. It's a bit sad that so much software is constrained to any one platform. (Yes, I realize that there are technical reasons and APIs and market shares and clueless managers behind this all that - I am a programmer - and I'm not saying that it can and should all change at the drop of a hat, just that it's sad.)
Anyone out there using another platform that never finds themself asking, "man, if I only had Windows?"
My simple guess is that almost every instance of "man, if I only had Windows" actually means "man, if I only had this piece of software that runs on Windows but not on my platform". As people keep using other platforms, it becomes more and more likely that the software *will* run on your platform, as it makes more and more business sense for the creator of the software.
(Naturally, that does nothing to help people in this position today, and Windows might very well be the best solution if you really have to run this software today. I'm just saying.)
I, personally, am fully content with my 30GB iPod Photo. It can already do what people now have to pay $299 to do.
No. The new iPod has two big advantages:
Don't get me wrong. I do think that iPod Linux is not only a fantastic idea but also fantastically executed, given what the volunteers have to work with - reverse-engineering a pretty much closed platform and getting used to the whims of the internal chips. Any project whose main developers are ingenious enough to extract big chunks of the boot loader through recording the piezo 'squeezing' it out definitely has my respect. I also really appreciate the stuff like OGG playback and games that it brings to the table - the subject of your comment is correct when it states that one doesn't need a new iPod to play video.
However, I do think that you'd be wrong in saying that "it does what people buys a new iPod for", because it's not just about the video playback itself, but also about stuff like screen size and battery, which takes video playback from possible to reasonably enjoyable.
Because if there's one thing we really need to know, it's where that fly in our soup has been prior to landing there.
AAAAAAAAH! AAAAARGH! THE PAIN!!! GET IT OFF ME! GETITOFF-GETITOFF-GETITOFF-GETITOFF! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
(Yes, this is a joke. And yes, this insanely long sentence with so many interventions until I get to the point was added to prevent the lameness filter.)
I hear it went for five million kidneys and twelve sandwiches looking like the virgin Mary. Although I can't understand why they bought from VeriSign - they're no A+++++ WILL BUY AGAIN.
Other people have answered in-depth, but the short answer is:
a) You do not need to worry about which vendor's dialect of SQL syntax you're using - provided you know how to create and populate the tables in any database system, you can switch at the drop of a hat if you need or want to.
b) Provided the layers are stable, it protects you from SQL query injections. The abstraction layer does the escaping for you.
c) Abstracted queries makes queries 'just another function/method call', and you get ordinary data structures back. This in combination with a) and b) and a competent framework (Rails, Django, TurboGears, Cake, Trax, WebObjects) makes coding much quicker as you don't have to keep the semantics of SQL and your database in mind - just the model itself.
There are *many* nuances to this, but the above three are some of the most pertinent ones. Peruse the other comments if you want to get in-depth.
That band name sounds incomplete - The WHO, exactly?
...does it scratch easily?
Does that mean my father will have to pay for permission when he chuckles?
No.
It's a joke. Wave a magnet near a floppy disk and you just broke it.
I'm guessing one of those computers won't have floppy drives.
Define "it".
You make a good point, but from what I can tell, these apps won't help make that happen.
Because of the meager info in the article about what Quartz ([insert obligatory way-to-not-steal-names-from-Apple-technologies jab here]) and Acrylic do, you might want to take this with an additional spoon of salt, but I know that Sparkle is meant to be something like Flash. If you sit down any random guy with Flash they're probably less likely to build a good UI than if they were sat down with Visual Studio or why not Interface Builder. (Because Flash has a ton of drawing tools, and then a few widgets, whereas the others just have widgets, and maybe a 'box' control if you're really nice.)
It's to my understanding that UI designers and programmers alike should work with standard widgets like buttons and text fields first and foremost. Polish is nice, and in a lot of ways essential, but if you're trying to build it as you go, you're deluding yourself. The first 95% or so of the time on a project, you should *always* concentrate on the UI before the sizzle. The sizzle's insanely important, but not more insanely important than a well-designed UI. Maybe I could see Sparkle as a nice UI prototyping tool, if anything, but it doesn't sound like that.
The failure of RIAA members to adapt their offerings to the market encourages illegal downloads. People buy things when they get reasonable terms. Making fair use harder by using "copy-protected" retail CDs qualifies as not reasonable by a lot of people.
Okay, seriously, what has the internet come to these days? I just tried typing "huge organ" into Google and I actually *got* info on pipe organs. It's going downhill, people.
You might also want to consider investing in a full-sized pipe organ.
I hear they're real easy to find. Supposedly, you just type "huge organ" into Google and there you go.
Here's what a "blog" is - writing (OR photos OR audio OR video OR any combination of them) published serially on the web, with or without archives. That's what it all boils down to.
My own definition of "blog" started out as "thoughtful writing accompanied with links" (much like the "personal journalism" angle taken by others) but as we can see in your post, where it's "angsty writing by a teenager" and basically just a published diary, there's really no consensus. One's definition tends to be colored by the type of "blogs" one frequents/dispises, and more and more people are using the word to describe their own web sites.
You can't even assume that "blogs" are personal, because businesses have started to host "business blogs" (not to be confused with actual personal "blogs" under the business domain) where everything goes through PR. It's just gotten to the point where it's no longer useful to ask if something is a "blog" because the only thing that could possibly be deduced is that it's a recurring list of entries rather than a static page.
Here's hoping that more people will, like you already have, realize this and stop judging things by that specific word: "blog".
Not very hard, but also not very secure. To my knowledge format just nils the filesystem tables, not the actual file content. Am I wrong?
'Nobody snuggles with Max Power. You strap yourself in and feel the "G"s!'
I fully agree and I don't know what all the fuzz is about - it's comparable to Nokia touting its phones as Opera phones. With the addition of iTunes to this phone, it can do exactly one thing that other phones can't - play FairPlay-DRMed songs. Compared to the rest of the phone, it's not exactly tipping the scale.
Did anyone see the part of the Special Event where Steve "demos" the phone? They're so embarassed about it that they don't have a camera to show the phone interface. When he gets interrupted by a phone call, he can't even press the right button to resume the music. It's a bad move. Steve probably would hate this phone if it hadn't got iTunes on it in the first place.
Motorola's interfaces are among the worst in the industry. Their computer connection software is a riddle and a half. The phone is clumsy. The 100-song limit, USB 1.1 connection and lack of Bluetooth syncing are all braindead, and three companies all trying to limit the functionality to not hurt other aspects of their business compromised what little was already good with this phone to suckiness. There's no fucking way in hell that this is going to sell well unless you're a complete must-be-Apple/Motorola/Cingular consumer fascist. This is the worst move Apple has made since the mid-90s era.
Someone (I can't remember who) once said (long before this) that this is the scenario: Steve Jobs has a cell phone which he uses daily, and which he hates, and which he one day is going to do something about. After watching that part of the event, I think for the first time in my life that the iPhone might actually happen someday, because if Apple's trying to push iTunes onto even an average phone, this just won't do.
Drinks tend to be more "fancy", yes. A good rule of thumb is basically that if you make it up on the spot and has no added color, then it likely is a Grogg. The distinction between a Drink and a Grogg does lie in the way it's mixed, yes - Drinks often have names and are mixed professionally whereas a Grogg is likely something you're throwing together by yourself at home - but that doesn't mean that there aren't rules to what they're composed of.
The swedish Grogg is very different from the Grog. A Grogg is one or more types of alcohol mixed with one or more non-alcoholic beverages (like tonic, soda, grenadine... often called Groggvirke, meaning basically "The Stuff That Groggs Are Made Of"). If the non-alcoholic part exceeds 50%, it's a drink, but if it doesn't, it's a Grogg. Grogg is *not* used to describe any old thing with alcohol in it, but since a Grogg in itself is fairly non-restrictive, it's often thought of that way.
While that may be true, browser sniffing for no reason is still evil.