LAUG 2.0 News

For $50, Apple will gladly sell you a copy of iPhoto as part of it’s iLife suite. iPhoto is a great program;if you have a digital camera, it will easily let you organize, edit, and share your photos. For most people, this is all you will ever need. However,if you are a professional (or semi-pro) photographer, or if you are a graphic designer or web editor who needs to keep track of thousands of digital photos, clip art pieces, or graphics (and possibly share them with others in real time), iPhoto’s limitations will quickly become apparent.

Software developer Extensis has stepped into this void with their application Portfolio which is designed for the professional – or pack-rat amateur who has moved beyond iPhoto. Portfolio is not a replacement for the consumer features of iPhoto. It doesn’t include any editing functions (as a pro or semi-pro, you use Photoshop or something similar, right?), or the ability to order prints, or automatic easy web sharing with dot.Mac. What Portfolio does offer is the ability to easily classify tens of thousands of files in a wide variety of graphics formats, to share these files with others, and to quickly search and find files based on numerous criteria, including custom tags.

Portfolio is very fast, even with several thousand files. As a test, I imported about 2000 digital photos and about 3000 other graphics files, and the searching and moving among the various folders was much faster then iPhoto. Searching for a needle in this digital haystack is quite easy. You can of course tag files based on their type or subject, but Portfolio also tracks files based on several dozen other criteria, making it easy to create customized searches and find the exact file you are looking for. Portfolio also contains support for advanced functions such as integration with third-party SQL databases, workflow automation, file format conversion,and Adobe’s Digital Negative file format.

When it comes time to share your database - either with other members of your team or potential clients — Portfolio gives you several options. At the simplest, you can export selected items to a web site, and Portfolio provides several nice templates and more flexibility in this task then iPhoto’s built-in reliance on dot.Mac. For a more sophisticated approach, you can publish a live version of your entire library or selected items to the web in real-time using a companion program, Portfolio Server, which does cost extra.

Finally,you can burn your library to a CD or DVD both for backup or to share with others. Extensis provides a free read-only version of Portfolio (useable on both Mac and Windows) to make sharing and distribution of your images easier.

Portfolio is not perfect. The user interface has some glitches and in many areas is non-intuitive, and it is missing many consumer-level features like the ability to order prints and do basic photo-editing. However, if you are a professional designer, photographer or artist with thousands of files to keep track of, Portfolio may be just what you need. Portfolio 7, published by Extensis (www.extensis.com) $200.00, Requires a G4 processor and MacOS X 10.3 or higher.

Pros: A powerful and full-featured professional image management application
Cons: Rough interface in spots, missing some beginner features.

4 out of 5 dogcows

I hate spam. I have lived on the Internet for years without it and then in the past year it seemed to explode on my desktop. I know my problem isn’t as bad some people’s but I get on average about 30 spam messages a day, including some really nasty stuff too that would make a sailor blush. While I like the spam filter in OS X’s mail program, I really love Eudora and have used Eudora for 15 years.I tried using a filtering system called Spamnix for Eudora and also Eudora’s own junk mail filter but found them difficult to use. The biggest problem with these programs was clearly sorting good mail from spam.

For this column, I first tried a program called Spamnix.I didn’t end up writing about Spamnix because I either couldn’t get it to work or couldn’t figure it out. Either way it didn’t work for me. Then I tried Spamfire and fell in love. Yes,I truly love this program. Spamfire runs with practically any email program because it puts itself between your email program and your ISP. Instead of having your email program retrieve the email from your ISP, Spamfire instead gets your mail and then your email program gets it from Spamfire.

Doing so prevents the spam from ever reaching your inbox.For me, it has the added bonus of sorting my spam while I’m on the road. I can leave Spamfire running and when I check my email via my cell phone or a website, no spam is wasting my time because Spamfire has already removed it from my mail server.

Spamfire scores each email based on Bayesian principles and it’s own proprietary filter system, which you can choose to pay for yearly updates. I noticed practically no difference in the amount of spam sorted after I paid for the updates. I’m not sure I’ll pay for them in the future. Spamfire sorts all your email in one of three basic categories: Good email, borderline email, and Spam. Spam is then subdivided into definite and probable. This allows you to quickly check the borderline and probable categories for any good emails that slipped through. I’ll check the definite folder every so often, and the probably and borderline once a day. Spamfire can either hold, delete, or pass along to the email program. I have mine set to trash anything it marks as spam and hold anything that is borderline. I like the fact it keeps me in complete control of how to deal with the mail, because in the beginning I didn’t let it trash anything until it got more accurate in determining what I personally considered spam. Most junk filters, like the one built into OS X mail, don’t give you that level of control. It’s either junk or not junk and life, like email, isn’t that black and white all the time. As I have used the program over the past few months, it has gotten much better at identifying the difference between spam and good emails, although when I started buying and selling on ebay, it got confused and some of the good emails got mistakenly marked as spam.

Right now, I get zero good emails marked as spam and maybe a spam message slips through every other week. Spamfire also has a revengefunction (with a screw icon believe it or not). It allows you to report phishing attempts to ebay or paypal and general spam to the FTC and the ISP. It’s a nice idea,but probably doesn’t do much good. My major complaint about Spamfire is it seems to take a lot of processor cycles. In activity monitor,it’s usually sucking up the most CPU time. I also think their system of paying for filters is a bit confusing. I bought an upgrade from an old version, and the upgrade didn’t come with filters, but the full version did. In the long run, I paid more for an upgrade and filters than I
would have for a full version. Tech support has been intermittent, sometimes I got responses, sometimes I didn’t.

Overall, anyone that is having a problem with spam should strongly consider the program as a way to regain control over their inbox. Price is $39.95 LAUGmembers $24.95 by going to : http://www.matterform.com/mugoffer/

Pros: Outstanding method to keep spam from my inbox.
Cons: Confusing costs and purchase options.

4 out of 5 dogcows

Dave Greenbaum opened the meeting at Signs of Life bookstore and told the attendees that we were experimenting with recording the meeting for possible podcasting and asked attendees what podcasts they were subscribed to.

Matt Kappenman gave the Apple news, where we learned that Apple will no longer make the iPod Mini. It has been replaced by the iPod Nano, which uses flash memory instead of a harddrive, and displays color photos on its viewer screen. We also learned about the iTunes Motorola® ROKR phone which holds over 100 songs, and iTunes 5, which has an updated interface, more in line with Tiger apps. The Harry Potter iPod was mentioned, which has a Hogworks engraving on the back, and comes with all Harry Potter audiobooks.

Joshua Montgomery, one of the founding directors of Lawrence Freenet (http://www.lawrencefreenet.org) was the special guest speaker. He talked about Lawrence Freenet, a 501c non-profit organization formed to create a broadband umbrella over Lawrence with an ultimate goal of expanding that umbrella over the entire state of Kansas. Their system uses new frequency-hopping technology called WiMAX
that promises a 30 mile range with speeds of 75 to 100 mb/sec and is twenty times faster than DSL. The city-wide network operates in a mesh network that has antennas on water towers and beams to individual neighborhoods “like a chain link fence,”Joshua said.

Joshua explained how conventional broadband internet is overpriced. His service charges $180 to install the device that receives the signal. This is only if the resident can afford that. Otherwise it’s free. The users are asked to donate $15/month to help keep the service available for those who can’t afford it. He said that so far 80% of the users have been making monthly donations.

He asked the rhetorical question, why bother? In identifying the need of the project, they did some “war driving” in Lawrence where they drove around and looking for wireless computer networks. They found that the south west area of Lawrence had approximately 400 wireless hubs per square mile. In North Lawrence, only 113 wireless networks could be identified per square mile. He said his findings were not very statistically accurate but that it demonstrates that folks in NorthLawrence have less access to it. He said that problems can arise for people when they apply for jobs and companies like Boeing only take applications from the internet, or to apply for financial aid at a university.

The all-volunteer group that has come together to build the network is working with various agencies, the IRS, and city officials to explain the organization’s goals. But selling that idea hasn’t been easy. “We’re a community networking project… and we are fighting various battles on a legal front to establish ourselves as a legitimate non-profit that performs a valuable service to the community.” Joshua said.

In addition to providing internet to the community, his organization provides a place for at-risk teens to volunteer their time and help keep them “out of trouble,” Joshua said. Joshua said its a great opportunity for people to volunteer to help the local community. In that spirit, to market the service to neighborhoods they have block parties and show movies while educating citizens about their service. As the discussion went on, Joshua passed around antennas and receivers that are used in the system and answered various questions. He said they have had seed money in placed to start up the service, but a donation of $20,000 would have the city covered in a matter of months.

After Joshua’s presentation on the Freenet project, general Mac questions were taken from the group. What can you do about increasing spam? The spam filter built into the OSX Mail program gets smart enough to remember spam. Dave Greenbaum also suggested using Spamfire, a program that works with any email client. The website is http://www.matterform.com. Someone said they were having a lot of kernel panics.Kernel panics are always hardware-related. Ram is a likely cause. Try running the hardware test cd that comes with the computer.

Another person was having trouble using Safari with their online banking service. It was suggested to try to use Firefox. The best way to find the latest version is to go to http://www.verstiontracker.com. A question was asked about trouble getting Yahoo email on a G4. Suggested to try to reset Safari. Then,if that didn’t work, trash preferences for safari. A general troubleshooting strategy for problems like this is to create a new user profile. A group member had an older G3 ibook. Errors keep coming up. Everyone suggested that he reformat the hard drive and start fresh. Another question pertained to a G5, where Safari,Address book and several other applications wouldn’t run. Try cleaning caches,leave computer on. Try a new user profile. A lot of free programs like Yasu and Cocktail let you to run maintenance tasks. The drawing was made for the door-prize and after Matt Kappenman forfeited the prize, Micah Rolfs won a license for Spamfire. The next meeting is on how to repair your Macintosh.

A Podcast of the September meeting of the Lawrence Apple User Group. Check us out online at http://www.laugks.org. Subscribe to the podcast RSS Feed.

 

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