Shiny New i7 MacBook Pro

Finally, after a long wait for the next MacBook Pros to come out, my patience has paid off: I went down to the Apple store in Chermside, Brisbane, to pick up a brand spanking new i7 MacBook Pro. My previous MBP gave the ghost a couple of months back, and like many people keeping an eye on sites such MacRumours I “knew” that the updated MBPs were imminent.

Wanting to make a near complete switch from desktop to laptop for all of my work, I decided to wait for the faster and relatively cheaper machines to come out.

After buying and swapping a new hard drive, my machine now is a 15″ 2.66 Ghz i7/8gb RAM/7200 rpm (16mb cache) beauty that deals with virtualisation just fine while running every other application that I throw at it.

iGTD Dead?

Is it time to call the wonderful iGTD software project dead? I’m afraid so. Further development seems unlikely at this stage. It’s a shame—it was one of my favourite Mac applications.

The project hasn’t been updated for nearly a year now. There are some forum posts on the subject: Bartek the developer has gone through a rough patch and has been unable to work on the project.

I don’t want to speculate much about the nature of his woes, but I have always wondered about the incredible speed of the updates & upgrades of the application. I deemed it unsustainable for a single person to update an application several times a month. Guess it all became too much for him.

Perhaps it is time to set the project free and allow others to take over? In any case, I wish you well Bartek. You’ve delivered wonderful free software, but it came at a price…

Exif, IPTC, XMP & The Mess We’re In

Adding proper support for Exif, IPTC & XMP data to the gallery application that powers my Eyeballism site proved a lot more tricky than could be considered healthy by any stretch of the imagination. We quickly found ourselves trying to decipher the image meta tag soup mess we’re in.

Some of the issues we encountered:

  • data may or may not be present in Exif headers
  • data may be present at different locations
  • data may be present in different formats
  • data may be present in different formats at different locations with different values

(more…)