Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Mac People: Photo management software?

Just a followup...

I spent some time tinkering with iPhoto last night. I get it now. The 'auto-event on import' feature saved the day.

While there still doesn't seem to be a way to tell iPhoto to use my folders as 'Events' , at least in my case I can see that in the majority of cases it doesn't matter. My folders were all of events, broken down chronologically anyway. So in most cases, the Events mirror what the folders were. I have a little bit of cleanup to do (where a vacation spanned multiple days, for instance), but it's minimal compared to what I thought it was going to be. It's looking great. And I did some digging as to how and where iPhoto is actually storing my jpgs when it's set to use its own library. I understand that too now, and see that all of my JPG's aren't actually disappearing into an OSX black hole. So I'm cool with that too.

And I installed Parallels 4.0 last night too, with an XP VM. Is that ever a slick piece of software. From my Linux/VM experiences, I'm used to VM's that run in their own window, with their own dedicated hard drive space. Basically independent of the host OS. Fine and dandy.

It can do that, but it can also share the Mac documents/files into XP's documents. And there's a mode called 'Coherence' where XP runs in the background and lets you start & run Windows apps as if they were native to OSX. Way cool.

For instance, for years I have been using MS Money to keep track of my finances. Installed it in the XP VM so I can continue to use it while I find a suitable Mac-centric finance app (I know, good luck...). Works perfectly.

But what I didn't realize is that Parallels is able to more-or-less merge OSX and XP together. OSX becomes 'aware' of Windows apps, so to speak. I can literally just double click on a MSMoney application link in Finder (in OSX), and Parallels will boot up/unsuspend the XP VM, then open MS Money in OSX just as if it were a native OSX App. It's not in it's own XP window, it's just the app itself. And other than potentially needing to cold boot the XP VM, it's just as fast & snappy as it was running natively on my XP/Vista machines. Very slick!

So far, I'm quite impressed.

Okay, I'll bite.

What's the difference between a MacBook and a MacBook Pro?

Options and cost.

A Macbook is a Macbook. There's one model, with a 13" screen. You can customize it with a bigger hard drive or more memory, but that's about it. 2 USB 2.0, 1 Firewire 400 port.
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook?mco=MTE4MTY

There are several models of Macbook Pro, some with more options to customize them than others.
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro?mco=MTE4NDY

The MBP 13" has a thinner, aluminum chassis, has Firewire 800, a slightly faster processor, backlit keyboard, and an SD slot.

Then, there are MBP 15.4" and 17" models. Faster processors, more RAM, more HD space, higher screen resolutions, and more options to customize.

I use VMware Fusion for that, but I'm firmly in the VMware camp, having drunk that coolaid (and having spent those tens of thousands of dollars at work...)

VMWare is very good too.

We frequently use it at work for software and deployment testing, both for internal and web designs. Has saved us a tremendous amount of time and energy.

The cool thing w/ Parallels and VMWare is that you can access your OSX network drives too.

When I use Quicken, I store the files on our NAS. Then when the wife updates her data into Quicken she opens her version of Parallels and makes her updates. Makes life much easier.

I do that too, but more for backup than sharing. Except my NAS is just a Linux server with Samba (Windows shared network drive).

Parallels is pretty slick. I have run into bumps, though. Somehow I had a file type in OS X associated with Notepad in Windows, so whenever I clicked on it, a VM would start up. Took a long time for the start-up, then shut-down, then fix the file association, so I turned off the "make Windows apps visible in OS X".

Glad you're getting comfortable with iPhoto, Peter. Yes, the files are accessible. I go through the same thing with iTunes. I keep my "System of Record" on my Linux server, and my laptop has a subset, and my iPod/iPhone has a subset of that. If I purchase anything through iTunes I have to copy it back to the Linux box. I usually rip from the Linux box - much more control over the format and tags. And a bigger CPU.

Not only do we use VMWare (ESX/vSphere) for development and testing, but it's embedded in our production side, as well. I'm also starting to convert many of our now out-of-warranty physical servers into VMs. We'll be virtualized to the hilt pretty soon.

My coworker's friend takes VMWare to another level. He has a Mac Pro and runs something like 4 or 5 VMWare sessions of Windows.

Then he uses lower end machines around house as terminals running VNC (I assume). That gives him 5 fast 'PCs'. Pretty cool.

Geektastic.