What makes you happy ?

Two nights ago I find that the mac won’t see my Creative Zen. A google later and I have installed XNJB which had me grinning at the monitor because of just how damn great it is.

A couple of hours ago I open iTunes (which I am/was checking out) and find it has duplicated lots of tracks. All by itself. Easy, find Duplicate Tracks and remove them to trash. Why to Trash? Why not – after all, it’s Apple’s code, it just has to be good right? … and then I find half the music is missing – it’s in the trash. Way to go there Apple! Go to trash and find that unlike Windows you can’t ‘Restore’. Oh no. Manual drap/drop back to where it came from. Think I’m ever going to do that again? Not a chance in hell. iTunes can keep the hell away from my music files. This is yet another reason why I hate iTunes. That and having to give credit card details if ALL you want to do is download an album cover. You need to open a whole new account JUST if you want to see artwork.

Songbird is it.

XNJB is really really good though.

This may appear dumb, but I don’t know.

I need to buy Windows XP. Amazon have XP Home SP2 OEM for £63 and they also have XP Home SP2 for £159. It doesn’t take a genius to work out my next question…… can I buy the OEM for use on the Mac ? If not, why not? I like the idea of a big saving and 63 quid isn’t so bad. A hundred more is.

(And if it’s OEM and intended for builders, can I do a reinstall on another machine?)

I’m after advice.

10,000 images.
On Windows they are in the main tagged, are certainly in folders and between the tags and folder names single images are pretty easy to find. What would you do to get them into the Mac?

So far I see:
- an image viewer that does not tag but is a good image viewer.
or
- iPhoto + keyword assistant and start from scratch
or
- spend a lot of money for something like iview which comes with many more features than I’d need.

Ideally I’d have an image viewer for many tasks and something a bit heavier for the organising. I don’t think or expect 1 app to do the whole lot.

Retagging all the images is one task, re-organising them to how they are stored right now is another. I can see that if I worked through every image and both tagged and stored them that I could have a very good system. But I don’t want perfection, just a level of workability that I have on Windows. I’m not even tied to the absolute file system I have on Win but there would need to be an advantage to changing it. Does iPhoto have some hidden setting where it fully respects the current organisation? Is this something a Win > Mac user will find tricky no matter what software?

Back to the problem.
So, what would you do?

[....several hours later and I think I've got an answer. But it's 00:33 so I've no more time to play today..]

I owe iPhoto an apology. I have my camera plugged in last night and unplugged it when iPhoto was not running. The card still reset completely. So iPhoto – sorry. And the mini – bad mini, tut tut tut. For the sake of a second to restart communicating, why not shut down communication? If you have a FinePix s5600, copy everything out. (The lesson has been learned though and I’m sure I know why this happens but it’s still not so good)

Now that’s out of the way… bad iPhoto. I thought I’d give it another go because images still reside in the PC. Open iPhoto, point it at a full copy of the My Pictures which I have copied into this machine. 6gig of images and click Import. iPhoto starts copying them – by default it copies images. Bad. What it should have done is say:

Hi, importing images to iPhoto when the photos are on the same hard drive is a complete waste of time and disc space. If the images were on a different drive we would recommend copy so you have a safe backup. But they aren’t and it really is a waste of space. So would you like iPhoto to just index them instead?

So being the Window to Mac user, I agree with this wisdom and say Yes, just index. Which it does. And I’m then presented with thousands of images all in the one folder. It does not respect at all how I had them ordered. I can make all the albums again though. Wooo. Bad iPhoto.

Image viewer + image tagging. I’m taking Stimulus for a spin. It already has a huge plus in that I sent a question after 9pm yesterday and got the comprehensive reply at 1am – for a trial user that’s damn fine service.

(I know about the iPhoto diet thing, I’ve looked at Lightbox, Graphic Converter, Coco and a couple of others)
(Next, batch converting…)

In Windows I had a couple of file managers. Dual pane, I could open anything on the network in one and anything else in the other then drag/drop items. Very useful. I need one for the mini. I’ve found Xfile and like most things on the mac it costs. I’d rather not have something where I need to learn cli. Does anything free and good exist? Or should I wear out my usb drive?

[I've found mucommander and am playing right now]

[mucommander is great. really good indeed]

screws up the optimised build of Firefox.
Thanks Apple.
That is just so damn good of you.

Microsoft NEVER broke a program for me, and this happens twice in 10 days.

In case you are wondering – it breaks the screen drawing for me, the tabs do not render correctly until you click on them and it makes navigating around the wordpress.com admin absolutely impossible. That is not an exaggeration. And to think I was liking the small but increasingly dodgy white box…..

I’m sure I have said this before but it warrants repeating: Firefox on OS X is garbage. Useless. Slower than slow. An optimised build can only hope to improve an already crippled product.
And now I’ll try to get back to working not waiting……………………………………………

There’s a post this morning on The Unofficial Apple Weblog called ‘Make OS X More Secure Now‘. I checked the date – but it’s not April 1st! But it must be a prank because us Windows users know that macs are rock-solid, impenetrable, more secure than a very secure thing that’s already been locked up securely, that they are virus-proof, worm-proof, attack-in-any-way proof yet the blog above says otherwise. Weird. But maybe all the zealots are wrong. Nah, can’t be…. but at least I haven’t got a burning Macbook. Now fire-proof would be a neat trick.
“Look – we toss this Windows machine into a furnace and it melts in moments. But we toss the Macbook in and it survives! It’s pristine! It’s box-fresh! Just the machine for taking to hell for lying to all those Windows users”.

:)

Mini:/Users/mark/Downloads root# sudo gem install fxruby
\Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: While executing gem ... (RuntimeError)
Error instaling fxruby:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
ruby extconf.rb install fxruby
can't find header files for ruby.
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fxruby-1.6.6 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fxruby-1.6.6/ext/fox16/gem_make.out

Somewhere – but not yet here – lies the solution.
The program I want to install is an .exe file on Windows but hey, why swap an afternoon of puzzlement for 2 clicks….. :)

Last night I got the free bonus mac software from Apple (for non-mac owners it’s like the Update Tuesday from Microsoft which Windows machines get absolutely slagged for but happens on Macs too. Oh yes, and each time I’ve had to do this I need a restart) and it broke ClearDock. I’ve been using Cleardock because the default grey background is ugly. Super ugly. And now Apple has broken my ClearDock. Thanks Apple. That’s really nice.
(And yes I’ve uninstalled, restarted, installed, done every combo known but it stays that dull Apple-grey). That’s Software Update switched off here. Hey – that’s good – how to promote safe machines! And it doesn’t matter that it’s 3rd-party software, it still broke a program I use and want. And worse still, it was probably Quicktime. That was one thing I hated on Windows. I bet is critically essential to the Mac too.
Can you tell I’m annoyed yet?

–
I fixed it. Because this will undoubtedly happen again, I’ll write myself a few steps:

1. Download Application Enhancer
2. Uninstall
3. Remove the Application Resources (along with a whole heap of stuff that previously installed programs left behind….still, personal files don’t matter eh? Just so long as it’s not an .exe)
4. Restart (why in a Mac it’s called Restart but they say Windows has to reboot? Effect to the user is exactly the same)
5. Install, it fails, uninstall, reboot
6. Install, log out, login, it works.

And here was me thinking the solution would be complicated. I’m working on my intuitiveness.