I’ve been playing with the Photo Booth application in my MacBook. It really is a lot of fun. So I’ve made yet another photo gallery with pictures taken using the iSight camera built in to my MacBook.
[tags]MacBook, Apple, notebook, Photo Booth, Applications, Reviews[/tags]
My MacBook arrived this morning. So far I’m completely thrilled with it. I love the glossy display. It seems to get about as warm as my 15″ G4 PowerBook, which is not terribly warm.
I like the size, I like the keyboard, so far I like everything about it. There are pictures here.
[tags]MacBook, Apple, Hardware, Reviews, OS X[/tags]
It will probably never go back to Asia again, but my new MacBook has left Suzhou, China on its way to its new home. Apple sent me a tracking number, and FedEx estimates delivery by Tuesday May 23rd.
The glossy screen, the easily upgraded RAM, the user replaceable hard drive, these are all factors in what I expect will be huge sales numbers for Apple on this new product line.
To help other people find these great computers, I’ve added the MacBook to one of my own stores.
Is it here yet? Is it here yet? Is it here yet?
Apple is estimating that the new Macbook I ordered this morning will ship by May 23rd. I selected the basic model, then increased the hard drive size to 120GB. I’m going to get the basic memory configuration of 512MB in two SODIMM sticks and replace them with the 2 1GB sticks that I ordered from NewEgg.
It’s true. Apple finally released their long awaited Intel-based replacement for the iBook, and all three models feature the Intel Core Duo series that already is used in the MacBook Pro, the Mac mini, and the Intel iMac. The form factor, 13″ widescreen, is wildly popular, and the smaller LCD compared to the MacBook Pro models may help with battery life.
Apple wanted $500 to take the notebook up to 2GB of RAM. NewEgg is only charging me $185 after tax and shipping for the same amount of memory. I’ll open a little door and replace the RAM myself to save $315.
I’ll certainly be posting my impressions of this new toy here very soon after it arrives.
[tags]MacBook, iBook, Apple[/tags]
Last weekend I photographed the Breatlhess Agony Ride, a cycling event. Today I tried making some movies for the web based on last week’s photos.
I ended up exporting the photos from iPhoto to a Quicktime movie. Then I wanted to see whether a Flash version of the same movie might be smaller in file size, or better in viewing quality. I configured Quicktime and Flash to create 800 by 533 video files. The 1464 photos from that shoot produced a 107 megabyte Quicktime movie and a 90 megabyte Flash file. The Flash video file3 looks pretty good too, you can see it here.
Both the Flash and Quicktime versions seem suitably sharp and clear, so I selected the Flash 8 file to post online.
I used Macromedia (Adobe) Flash 8 VideoEncoder, Quicktime 7, iPhoto 6, and my Canon EOS 5D for this project.
[tags]Quicktime, Flash, Video, Applications, Reviews, iPhoto, Canon EOS, EOS 5D [/tags]
Yesterday I received a Canon EOS 5D digital SLR as a birthday gift. This is a very high-end digital SLR, with a full 35mm size sensor it produces 12.8 megapixel images. And the camera also has a 60 shot buffer for full-size JPEG fine images, or 17 RAW images. Combined with a 3 frames per second rate, your chances of getting an action shot just went up by about twenty fold.
As I was unpacking my camera I found that the camera to USB cable was wrapped in a bright red warning label, “You must install the software on the CD before you connect the camera” or words to that effect. But I was using a Mac, not a PC. So I connected the camera to my Mac without installing any software, and of course it just worked. Mo rebooting, no warnings about drivers, no dialog boxes. iPhoto started up and said that 22 photos were ready to be imported.
I did have to click on the Import button though.
[tags]Canon, EOS 5D, iPhoto, OS X, DSLR[/tags]
