macJasp

Sorting Movies in iPhoto

I've been meaning to post about this nice little feature for a whlie. I have a reasonable amount of movies that are stored within iPhoto but they are just scattered across the many photo albums and events and they prove  difficult to see. I could never find a way of consolidating all those movies into a single view without actually pulling them out of iPhoto altogether and simply storing them in the Mac's Movies folder. I ideally want to keep them in iPhoto for it's tagging features….and I've recently found there just a way to do it.

Smart Albums

By creating a smart album (File->New Smart Album) you can define a search criteria based on certain attributes within your iPhoto library, in the screenshot below for example,  i've chosen to base  my smart album on photo's that are of type movie, calling this particular album 'Videos'

Hitting the OK button after creating the search criteria will show all your videos under Albums section in the left hand pane of iPhoto. For something so simple to set up I can't believe it took me so long to find the option. Typical Apple style…

Mobile Blogging with the iPhone

I'm planning to blog more and more through 2010 and if I'm to do that effectively then taking advantage of the iPhone is the way forward. I really like the idea of posting a quick thought or something I've found of interest while out and about and generally increasing my blog's overall content while I'm not near my Mac.

So for this very reason I've purchased and/or installed what is seen as the three best blogging Apps available from the App Store;

WordPress 2

Being a WordPress user WordPress 2 would seem the most sensible choice and the big plus over the other two is that It's completely free, it's pretty solid too, allows moderation of comments, something the other two Apps don't do but..and it's an annoying but, any photos you add to your post are appended to the bottom of the post, there is no choice to move it anywhere else. I have heard that the developers are looking into improving the photo feature which I do look forward to.

BlogPress

BlogPress is a generally nice App from coollittlethings and reasonably priced at £1.79 at the time of writing. It doesn't have comment moderation but it does allow you to format your post more effectively than the WordPress App. I really like the Geo-Tagging feature, where it creates a link within your post to Google Maps, showing your current location, most useful if your visiting somewhere of interest and want to append it to the post. However, and this may only be specific to certain blogs but the three options you have with photo alignment just doesn't work well with my own WordPress theme (Modern Clix). I'm particularly fussy in terms of making every post layout the same where possible (photo first, then content) and no matter where I align the photo using BlogPress it doesn't come out right on screen, it's a disappointment as I favour this App over the other two. I do like the ability to post to flickr and your videos to youtube – very nice and something the other two Apps can't do and i'd love to use this App on a regular basis if it wasn't for the odd formatting.

iBlogger

iBlogger is certainly the most expensive App at the time of writing, £5.99 when I purhased it, but this particular App comes highly rated. Written by Illuminex, the makers of the Ecto blogging software, It has very similar features to BlogPress, including Geo-tagging your posts, in fact there is very little to tell the two apart, except the fact iBlogger doesn't allow multiple photo uploads in a post and doesn't pull back post tags that you already have setup on your site (and occasionally crashes) but in terms of how it formats the post it certainly works the best out of all three for me (as seen in this post here that used the iBlogger App). As stated, it is more expensive but it seems to be in active development. It does some extremely weird formatting of text if you have posted a photo but amending the html after posting and then re-submitting seems to do the trick.

What to choose?

There isn't one perfect mobile blogging application for the iPhone as yet. They all generally work well but all have their flaws. Out of the three i've tried and tested there is one i'll be using over the other two due to the fact it's final format once posted works well with this site, so future mobile content to macjasp.com will likely be posted courtesy of iBlogger for iPhone.

Momento for iPhone

This is one of the most gorgeous and enjoyable iPhone Apps i've seen and purchased in a while. It's so simple in it's conception, take your favourite social networking sites (so far they have integration with Facebook, Twitter, Last.Fm and Flickr), let it download your feeds from those sites and display them to you in diary form.

From there you can add your own private diary moments, star rate your entry, tag people from your contact list and geo-tag an entry. It's a joy to use and i've found it really interesting going back through the previous years calendar within the application and reviewing it through my social feeds.

I've heard the developers are quite active on enhancing the application on a regular basis, i'd personally like to see integration with any RSS feed (like a blog) in a future update

Momento is available via iTunes for £1.79

iTunes 9 Media Organisation

When looking for a solution to the Time Machine backup problems I have been experiencing lately I came across an option in iTunes 9 that was asking me if I wanted to 'upgrade to iTunes Media organization' (in iTunes 9.x, selecting File->Library->Organise Library gives you this option).

After some digging around to find out more about what this option actually meant it seems that iTunes 9 has finally got it's act together in terms of how it physically stores different file types in the file system. Once the option is ticked there's no going back but it's worth doing (after backing up your iTunes folder beforehand) as the new folder structure it creates is a lot neater and certainly more sensible, no longer do you have TV Shows and Movies etc tucked away with all your music in the iTunes folder.

It does leave a few remnants of files behind but out of my 5000+ music files and movies, I only had around 4 or 5 folders to check and then delete once I knew iTunes had also moved them to their correct and proper new location but now it puts TV Shows, Movies, Ringtones and everything else in their own top level folder within the iTunes Music folder.

Large Backups with Time Machine

I've noticed very recently that Time Machine is producing regular and abnormally large backups, so over the Christmas period I recreated my Time Machine backup set from scratch (just in case something had corrupted along the way) but in the space of one week of setting up this new backup plan i've had another three large (70Gb+) backups already. My initial backup is just over 130Gb, so something is clearly not right.

BackupLoupe

In an attempt to diagnose exactly what was going on with Time Machine i chose to download BackupLoupe for Mac  It's a really nice piece of software and only €1.49 (although you do get a full trial before buying). Upon launching for the first time it scanned my Time Capsule backups that had taken place previously, giving me a clear idea of the size of each one, to which i can drill through to get a good picture of what's causing these large backups each time.

BackupLoupe states the larger one's that occur every few days are down to my iTunes folder, particularly movies and tv shows. This still doesn't explain to me why Time Machine decides to take, what seems like, full backups of this folder, particularly seeing that the files within them haven't changed for a while but it's a first step to diagnosing exactly what's going on and how Time Machine makes it's decisions.

Hopefully i'll get a bit closer to an answer in the coming weeks.