This is what graphics card corruption looks like. Weeeeird.

I’ll cover two of those features today, Metadata Views, and Metadata Presets. Ellen Anon covered the step by step over at the Inside Aperture Blog, so I’ll be sticking to an overview– and an explanation of why views and presets are important features to understand and use.

First off, Metadata Views are all about viewing metadata, whereas Metadata Presets are all about entering metadata.

(Take a minute and re-read that last sentence–Apple does a poor job of seperating the two, and that can make it a bit confusing. Don’t get scared, this stuff is crazy easy and crazy useful. Remember, viewing data vs. entering data )

I. Metadata Views filter in what’s relevant to you at the time, and prevent information overload by filtering out the rest. Aperture ships with a bunch of metadata views as you can see here (choose Window>Show Metadata if you don’t see the metadata side panel):

Each view displays some relevant group metadata and filters out the rest. Each preset shows you a different slice of the metadata for a given image.

Aperture’s built in Metadata views are a great starting point– and it’s easy to make a copy of one of the built in views, and then add whatever else you need by clicking the buttons (Keywords, EXIF, IPTC, Other) at the bottom of the screen, and checking the box next to the fields you want shown. You can save your custom view using the action pull-down menu (the one that looks like a cog).

So, see what you want, hide what you don’t. Moving on…

II. Metadata presets allow you to fill in some information as a preset that you can rubber stamp onto your images. The beauty is that when a tool makes something easy you’re more likely to use it.

To create a preset, you simply enter in some custom metadata and then click save as preset. That’s it! then any time you want to add that metadata to an image.

You don’t have to type the same thing over and over again for each image you import– just select append or replace with preset, and BAM! your preset info is entered for you.

Metadata Presets help ensure that you enter the bare minimum metadata into your images: your name, contact info, and copyright info. This stuff is easy, and important.

I’ll get into some workflow related stuff next time out.

*Metadata views can be helpful for data entry as well– a well crafted ‘data entry’ view will prevent you from getting bogged down in useless info, make good use of your limited screen space when importing, and make it easier to see what info needs entering.

So if you have a iPhone you can use it to take notes– to start, go to your Mac and launch Address Book.

Yes, Address Book*. Create a new Group called ‘01 Notes’, and then create a new ‘company’ contact in that group with the name you want to give your notes list. Then scroll down to the notes section of this new contact and put in any of the text you’d like.

Type away to your hearts content– when you plug in your iPhone, the new contact you created will be synced back to your computer. You can edit the notes in the contact on the iPhone and all those changes will be synced back to the Address book on your Mac.

Creating a group makes it easier to get to your notes, and putting the number at the top forces the iPhone to alphabetize it to the top of your groups.

*Now, if you’re scratching your head wondering ‘why use contacts when you could use Notes?–here’s why: Notes doesn’t sync back to your machine in any way– where as Address Book contacts (along with the notes you create and edit) do. Using Address Book you can have synced access to your notes on both your computer and your phone, instead of just making/viewing notes on the iPhone alone.

• Always BCC added to email settings so you can carbon copy yourself
• Battery diplay updates to provide more accurate display of charge
• Passcode lock can have a longer timeout– prevents you having to enter your passcode EVERY time the phone goes into standby mode– instead allows you to picke a time frame to allow the phone to wait before it requires a passcode
• Audio out now works on many popular stereo docks and adaptors

So, back to the regret part…I really only listen to music in my car. Until this update my iPhone just couldn’t take the place of my iPod– it had iPod features, but no audio out to my car’s iPod setup.No matter how many ogled over the iPhone, or how many times I used Google maps–no amount of ‘cool!’ helped me shake the feeling that I’d potentially made a $600 (plus tax) mistake. The pitch had been ‘one device to do everything‘, and here I was still carrying around my 5th Gen iPod Video, AND an iPhone.

Along comes this supposed security update, and BAM, audio out through the dock connector– meaning, I can use it in the car!

I can’t explain how happy I was when this thing worked like I knew it could. It was like getting an iPod all over again (which by the way, can’t be explained, if you have one, you get it– shuffles don’t count…).

In the last 2 days, I’ve had time to really judge this thing as an iPod, and take a look at some of the new features of this ‘best iPod ever.

My favorite example of the iPhone’s improved iPod? Shuffle.

Now before you laugh at me, and call me names, try out this situation: you’re listening to your iPod, on shuffle, and a GREAT song from an even GREATER album comes on. All of a sudden, you need to hear that album. With iPods of yesteryear, you have to Menu Menu Menu your way out, then select Artist, or Album and scroll to the Artist or Album in question.

Now, I would never do this while driving…but, I bet some have and do. It’s a potentially dangerous pesky interface, and a total buzz kill.But with the iPhone? Screw that son, you just shuffle away, and when one of those DEEP TRACKS comes on, you can just hit the track listing for the album, and BAM, you have the entire listing of that album to choose from.

I can’t tell you how great this is. Is it worth 600$? Well, having something work the way you hoped it would, and having a pet peeve eliminated goes a small way toward making me a bit less impetuous– but $600 less? I think that’ll take another few ’security’ updates…

Over the weekend I noticed that my power adaptor was buzzing when charging my laptop. I’d read that there were issues with some adaptors, and that Apple had replaced them, so I called on Saturday.

During my less than 20 minutes on the phone, I spoke with 2 courteous AppleCare reps, and explained my concern to each of them. After advising me to unplug the buzzing adaptor, the AppleCare Specialist requested my address info, and today– less than 2 fully business days later– I’m using my new–NON BUZZING– power adaptor

Then this happened:

For the uninitaed, that’s a Kernel Panic, in short a total system crash. What’s impressive is that it came up during a system install.

Kernal Panics can indicate any number of software or hardware issues, that eventually cause you computer to crash. In the bygone days before protected memory, and multithreaded operating systems, total system crashes were common. This is not the case any more–Apple suport tends to regard Kernel Panics as a strong indicator of a hardware issue.

Aside: In case this happens to you and you call support, Applecare support will normally ask the following common troubleshooting questions:

• Have you installed any 3rd party ram?

No matter what, if you answer “yes” to this question, all other troubleshooting will usually cease until the 3rd party ram is removed.

• Have you run disk utility to repair permissions, and check your disk?
• Is your drive reporting any type of errors (what’s the status of the S.M.A.R.T. reporting)
• Does this happen in any specific apps / 3rd party apps?
• Have you tested this in another profile?
• Is you firmware up to date?
• Have you cleared you PRam, and reset your PMU?
• Have you run the Apple Hardware Test (AHT), have you run it in extended mode, have you run it in looped extended mode?

Back to the story. I bought 3rd party Ram. It was fine, or so I thought. Then I had the following issues:

1. Kernel Panic when using Aperture
2. Kernel Panic when installing OS
3. Video corruption when using OS (and by using, I mean watching a trailer in Quicktime, and running NO other programs Safari and Software update)

And by video corruption, I mean:

and:

So I put back in the Apple ram (512 megs–ughh!) and thought everything would be fine.

Then my machine wouldn’t login to my user account. The AHT said everything was fine–which was not true.

Disk Utility–while booted from the MacBook install disk–reported errors. “Hmm, that’s not normal.” Letting Disk Utility attempt to repair them resulted in failure, and–as is often the case–the drive no longer showed up on the desktop.

Shit.

DiskWarrior is great with stuff like this, and it was able to repair the drive and get it to show up on the desktop. But now, (even though S.M.A.R.T. reporting was showing that my drive was OK) I was having a hard time believing it.

Various files on my desktop weren’t copying to an external drive, Superduper couldn’t sucessfully clone the drive.

To recap:

1. Kernel Panic
2. Video Corruption
3. Data storage issues

So yeah, a few RMA’s later, my MacBook is back up and running. Complete with new ram, a new hard drive and most (if not all) of my data back in place.

Moral of the story? I have no idea. It’s not like I ran right out to buy Apple ram, or that I’m never going to replace my stock hard drive with a newer, larger model.

In fact, it’s because I got new ram, and a new hard drive, that I was able to revert back to the stock ones when the new stuff failed–or maybe it’s because of the new stuff that I had to.

Either way,I don’t really care–after all, mechanical shit breaks. Plan for it.

Tangerine has 3 main functions.

• Scanning – The app will scan your music library (except for iTunes music store purchases–something about the DRM makes this difficult) and keep a record of the BPM, beats per minute, of each song.
• (Really) Smart Playlists - You can use the app to create playlists of tracks falling in a certain beat range
• Syncing – The app will sync your Tangerine playlists to iTunes.

The burning question: Does it really work?

Yes. Yes it does. Usually…

Sometimes it gets the beats a little wrong, sometimes a LOT wrong. But I gotta tell ya’ it’s more right than wrong, and it scans your library WAY faster than just about any other BPM scanning app I’ve seen.

There are 3 perks that I feel put Tangerine above the rest

• It’s pretty – It’s easy on the eyes, and if Apple has taught me anything it’s that looks do matter. Think of it this way, you can be the smartest, nicest, most wonderful person in class, but if you show up every day with 3 day B.O., un-brushed teeth, and greasy hair…none of that matters.
• Playlist visualization – The app makes use of the album art for your tracks (if you have it– and if you have iTunes 7 Apple will let you download it!) and then shrinks or enlarges the art across a time line like a bar graph.  The tall the album cover the faster the BMP, the wider the cover the longer the song.
• Styled playlists – Just like the stair master or treadmill at the Gym, Tangerine can ’style’ your playlist to be gradually building, decending, random, or stepped.  It’s a great way to tailor the playlist and keep things from seeming too perfect.

Give Tangerine a look and decide for yourself.

Read that. Everything that you see about BeOS? That’s where MacOS X will go. I mean, it’s only taken like 10 years for OS X to catch up to Be and it may look different, but mark my words, it’s where Apple’s interface is headed. More and more of iLife will become part of the OS– the already blurry lines between iLife apps will become even more blurred. The apps will become the OS.

And before you think I’m crazy, just keep in mind that Apple one of the guys that designed the BeFS (BeFileSystem), Dominic Giampaolo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo

Even routers– such as my linksys WRT54GL are running linux.

The result is nothing short of amazing…

The important bits:

1. Linksys makes router and ditches high priced development platform in favor of linux
2. Linux is licensed via the GPL, or general public license, which allows/requires the ability to view, edit and add to source code
3. Linksys is called upon to, and eventually does, relaease the source code for the router
4. People edit update and otherwise modify the source code for this router to the point of it now having features not seen in routers 10x it’s purchase price of 60$.
5. I bought said router, and upgraded it, and am now enjoying many of these features.

Our router now works with our airport base station as a WDS has better management tools, as well as Sticky DHCP (when your router gives you the same address automagically whenever you get on your network–great for bittorrent!) as well as a VPN server, bandwidth QOS controlls, great WIFI security, and a boatload of other stuff.

In short, it’s all that and a bag of chips. I can get all the great features of Apple’s Airport Express base stations (small size, good signal strength, music streaming, wireless printer sharing) linked into,and managed by, a cheap super functionial linux base station.

Two drops, from 4 feet, onto a corner, and the worst thing that happened is that it got dented.

10mp, small, and sleek.

Just like the iPod, Apple’s cell would be late to the market, and just like the iPod it would offer far more value for money than all that came before it.

I’ve grabbed the image from IFO to keep from hotlinking their image:

So now you can have music all over your house, dorm, harem whatever…

I can’t believe how complete this guide is. Check it if you own an iPod 5g…