Going through the macbook that I bought recently and saying my opinion on parts which I love and parts that I hate (there are more parts that I love than hate btw). I thought the obvious place to start was iPhoto. This isnt as cut and dried as the hardware, but I believe that this application solves a big problem for a lot of people and it does it in a clever and simple way. So I reckon it might resonate with a lot of people.
When I opened the macbook up the first time, I found that there was this app which would run when I would plug the N85 phone, or my girlfriends iphone into the usb. This is an example of what 99% of people want with their machines. An application that can be left on, or turned off, that does exactly what it is supposed to do AND MORE.
When you plug it in, iphoto is auto-set to start running, this can be configured off if you dont like it, but I do, when it starts up, it’ll mount the camera and has options to import the new pictures. You can choose to show only the new pictures, also after importing them, you can choose to delete them from the device to free up space.
When you think about it, this is exactly what people want, they want to do just this, it’s really simple, it’s really easy and it gets better. You see, importing into your mac isnt the only thing they have done, they have shortcuts to EXPORT to online services built right into the application.
Select a group of images, click the facebook icon, enter your details, it’ll create an album in facebook for you, no fuss, no messing around, quick, easy, simple. Same with flickr I’ve been told but I aint tried it, I dont have an account. Also, the fantastic MobileMe is right there.
This is an application that blows what I see of the competition to bits, on linux? f-spot perhaps? if you like being anally raped by microsoft, go for it, but what else? This is built into the macbook without any fuss, I can start uploading my pictures where I need to put them, MobileMe is a great way to keep control of your data, if you don’t trust that facebook will do what you wish when you mean DELETE THE FUCKING PICTURE. But I guess thats always going to be a problem when you start using online services. If you are that paranoid, you could just write your own gallery, or use Gallery2 which can be installed on your webserver (if you have one).
The other cool thing is, I can select some photos and create a calendar of them right away, I can also print that to PDF and take it to be professionally printed, quick and easy, you know, I tried to do this on linux, I found about 12 dozen crap windows utilities which basically were macros for excel and nothing else, you had to pay, with macbook? nope, you just use the built in tools.
Also, if you create an online gallery, iphoto keeps a connection with that gallery in iphoto, so you can basically update it with more pictures, I guess like a “folder”. This is really handy if you want to add-remove photos from an already created album, you can even rename the album inside iphoto, but I had some problems with this, because it keeps reverting to the facebook album name, maybe they are fighting over it and facebook keeps winning.
The only gripe I have, is that playing videos, opens an external quicktime video window and doesnt play inside the iphoto interface, this I guess is a limitation of the system, or maybe just lousy programming, but I would like to see the next version has this fixed.
Also, if you want to create a slideshow, you can just select some files and do it right there and then, bingo, instant slideshow, WITH MUSIC (which some people see as retarded music, my dad would be very impressed with what he would do in a short time if he needed it, he isnt going to hunt for mp3s and shit like that).
Another great thing, is the information for each photo, if like you, I have GPS on my camera, iphoto will import that information and if you click the info button, it’ll flip over and show you where in the world that photo was taken (of course, depends on whether your photo recorded it to begin with). And then of course, the other extended data.
Additionally, you get a faces browser, where it’ll do some facial recognition based on what it knows about faces and the more faces you identify, the more faces it will try to select you, you get the choice of overriding the selection, entering a new one, moving the “square around”, etc, etc. This can be handy if you want to show people pictures of your brother, for a birthday party, you can just select his “face” and bingo, instant personalised photo album.
It’s hard to estimate how great this application really is, but one of the problems that I had in the past is that I have thousands of images on my computer and I needed to organise them just into simple folders. Apart from f-spot, which I won’t touch, I couldn’t find any solution that would work on my fedora linux installation and windows? Neither, perhaps it’s just because the internet is a big place and I just couldn’t find it, but seriously, I turned the machine on, one of my biggest archival problems, eliminated, before I even opened the machine. That just makes this one of the macbook’s biggest selling point, how many of you have thousands of images that you need quickly organising? Macbook’s have it all built in, you want to go and buy a substandard laptop from HP, go right ahead, then please tell me how you managed to catalogue and archive all your pictures on it, document some steps, I bet you that your list of things in order to do it are larger than mine.
Just another reason why Apple has got things right. Next up, Time machine.
(I took the images from http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/what-is-iphoto.html, hopefully nobody will sue me 
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