Accidentally Using Apple Photos

I just restarted my Mac and wasn't paying attention when I launched the new Photos app. It opened up with the new screen and so I figured, might was well check it out. I knew it was going to grab my existing iPhoto library and convert it, etc, etc, but I wasn't sure how I was going to like it.

My first reaction: Meh. Just say no to iCloud Photo Library.

My library is well over 100 GB which means I'd need the 200 GB iCloud storage option which would cost $48 to have access to all my photos. Until I ran out of space. And I just switched to shooting in RAW. And now I am using Lightroom for main editing and importing finished photos to iPhoto Photos. Sorry Apple, you need to drop the price here. I'm sticking with Photo Stream until I am forced to change - by using Lightroom, I don't really plan to use the Photos editing features.

My second reaction: How many bloody iPhoto libraries are now lurking?

Then finally: Urg, all my Events are jacked up in this nested album thing.

So, how to manage this... It's not too bad, but it will be time consuming. In typical Apple fashion, Photos works differently than iPhoto. First, it seems my default iPhoto library is now "migrated". But, it can still be opened using iPhoto, there is a simple pop up box that informs you what has happened. Go ahead and "Open iPhoto" for the familiar look.

Events are gone and we now are told to keep everything in an Album. Annoyingly, I managed to be very good at making discrete Events for every "event" and very few Albums. I used albums as a way to generalize events - so items in common from multiple disparate events could be viewed from a single album. It worked for me. But, now I have what looks like hundreds of these old iPhoto Events tucked away in a dedicated album. Can they be moved to be their own album? Why, yes...

Open up the "iPhoto Events" album, then right click (ctrl + click) on one of the Events. From the menu, there is an option to "Move Album Out Of "iPhoto Events". It works as advertised. Rinse, Repeat. 390 times for me.

So, do I like Photos? Yes. It's faster than iPhoto without doubt. The editing options are limited, but good at what they do, straight forward to use, and I expect more features to be added in the coming months/years. However, I can't use it as I hoped as it stands. Had Photos skewed more towards Aperture in capability and iCloud Photo Library was priced at half what it currently it is, I'd use it without reserve. As it stands, I would be willing to spend more time with it if it wasn't for the pricing structure of iCloud Photo Library (the promise of all your pictures anywhere you are is very appealing).

Unfortunately, I can see myself surpassing the 200 GB iCloud storage size in the next year especially combined with keeping my iPhone and iPad backups "in the cloud". Remember, the iCloud space you lease has to keep everything, not just photos. This is your device backups, your app data, and anything else that might get stored there now that it is more like Dropbox.

For now, I am relegating Photos to be a way to easily share pictures with my family and manage photos and videos that I take with my iPhone or have edited fully in Lightroom from my 5D. When I first started using iPhoto, it was my de facto photo management app. I had a Canon P&S and didn't shot in RAW. Any serious extra editing could be done in external apps as needed. But, with the announcement that Aperture and iPhoto were losing support, and having watched the FCP X fallout, I decided that there was no point in really investing time and effort into the ecosystem. If Photos gains capability as FCP X has, then I'll be able to easily move back to using it with more vigor. For the time being, I'll treat it as a half-way house.

Pricing
Flickr: 1 TB Free, limited uploads in a single session
Dropbox: 1 TB - $120/yr
iCloud: 20 GB - $12/yr, 200 GB - $48/yr, 500 GB - $120/yr, 1TB - $240/yr
OneDrive: 100 GB - $24/yr, 200 GB - $48/yr, 1 TB (plus Office 365) - $84/yr
Google: 100 GB - $24/yr, 1 TB - $120/yr

iPhone Rumors

I was searching around and saw more images of the poly-carbonate (plastic) iPhone. Everyone is claiming that this will be for the new, entry level (i.e. cheap), iPhone.

It would be hilarious if the next top tier iPhone is actually this plastic one. Just saying.

You can seem them here.

Older plastic shell pictures here.

Rumors about colored bodies here and here.

France Fines Apple for Making People Work

Any surprise why France's economy sucks?

French law states that night work, defined as the hours between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., is reserved for exceptional cases only and must thus be justified.

Nanny State. (via AppleInsider)

Now go drink some wine, have a cigarette, and eat some cheese. Don't forget to surrender to the Germans.

Apple and Greenpeace

One thing that surprises me about Apple is how they harass any group that they feel is not doing a good enough job to be 'green'. I personally would have thought that Apple is doing a rather excellent job, not that I particularly care about green-ness. However, I am surprised at how much lee-way Apple allows Greenpeace to have.

Apple isn't a company to let people "advertise" on their property, yet, here we have GP doing just that. They are projecting their disgruntlement onto one of Apple's buildings... Now, I don't know how long they were permitted to do this, but still. Someone got it a picture. Further, GP has continually complained about Apple not doing enough.

I mostly wonder about the moves Apple is making. For example, are they making their NC solar farm to acquiesce GP or because it was always part of the plan. For a company that is as focused on profits as Apple, intentionally making a solar plant doesn't seem to fit.

iOS 6: Low Hanging Fruit

I've got a few nit-picks that I would consider to be Apple's low hanging fruit for the iOS 6 update.

The first key item that always annoys me is how Apple has forced 3rd party devs to store in-app content. I listen to lots of audio books for when I am on the road. Often driving 2-3k miles at a time. At the same time, I will have my iPhone connected to a wifi hotspot in the car. Which means that I can get Photo Stream updates or other app purchases that will automatically install.

The issue occurs when large swaths of data decide to get sync'd automatically. Apple has decided that, for example, Photo Stream files will get precedence over existing in-app data. Such as audio books. So, on my last long road trip I intentionally cleared off lots of space on my phone in an attempt to mitigate the likelihood of my audio books getting deleted. But, I had failed to realize one key detail: I didn't turn off auto-upload of photos on my iMac. While driving, and listening to part one of my book, my iPhone was silently downloading gigs of photos. The next day, when I went to listen to part two, lo and behold it was not there and I received the lovely message that I was out of space on my phone. Suffice it to say, I think Apple needs to do something to improve where developers can store downloaded files. Other apps should not have the power to delete files without discretion. I should be prompted prior to anything being deleted without my express permission.

Which leads me to my next pet peeve. iCloud. And I really mean Photo Stream. Although I do wish  documents were handled in a manner akin to accessing a document in a Dropbox folder...

So, Photo Stream. As I alluded to above, I have a couple of Macs. One for work (MacBook Air) and one as my desktop at home (iMac). I have my iPhone that I use for both work and personal use. Let's ignore any iPads for the sake of simplicity.

I like the auto image uploads from my phone going to iPhoto. It's great! But, it needs to be smarter. Maybe location based? For example, if I were taking pictures at work, I should be able to configure Photo Stream to recognize this and only transfer photos to my Air. If I am at home, then go to my iMac. Things get dicey if we're travelling. The same goes for uploads from the full fat computers. I don't want pictures from my iMac getting sync'd to my laptop - it doesn't have the space to be honest (300 6+ MB images at a time is a lot of space!).  However, I do like them going to my iPhone (if it weren't going to delete my books!) as I know they are automatically scaled down in resolution.

Currently, Photo Stream is an all or nothing. My iPhone can either get all the benefits of Photo Stream or none of them. iPhoto can either upload all or nothing (it can receive separate from the upload). I'm not certain how to cleanly solve this without requiring a very manual process. But, we should be able to turn off automatic features, but still allow for manually sending photos to the stream. Or to be able to direct which device will get the pictures (and I am well aware of being able to sync selected photos in iTunes - but this doesn't help when working from an i-Device).

So, these seem like relatively easy items to resolve in iOS 6. Improved handling of Photo Stream configuration and a safe location for apps to store downloaded content. I hear Apple is supposedly working on some sort of photo sharing capability...

Liberals, Capitalism, and Taxes

There is a massive disconnect between Liberalism and Capitalism. It can be captured very easily under a single day-to-day activity: taxation.

(Side Note: Liberalism is decidedly different than Obama's Anti-colonialist mentality)

I found an article talking specifically about how Apple is managing to have a global 10% (or so) corporate income tax rate. I'll pull some quotes from this article and try not to be out of context.

As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent.

The disconnect is most obviously seen with companies such as Apple and other industry giants in that they are large enough organizations that it is advantageous for them to exercise as many options possible to reduce their operating costs. The various executives, CEO's etc have this fiduciary requirement to the share holders and the employees to do everything legally possible in order to maximize the growth of the company. 

Liberals, and many people who consider themselves to be social progressives, feel that a person's (and by extension, a business') responsibility is to their community and government. If a business is benefitting from a local university, then it should provide the funds necessary for the university to operate. 

“I just don’t understand it,” he said in an interview. “I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake. 

“But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible.”

If the government (local, state, fed) is in need of income to make impossible to keep promises to buy votes, I mean in need of income for their programs to help those in need, then it is the responsibility of those earning the income to pay the bill.

This is reminiscent of where unions were with the Big Three very recently. Unions felt they were entitled to a certain dollar amount that was not tied to the well being of the business. Thus, the Big Three have suffered. The US government (and state governments), tax recklessly without realizing that yes, businesses will leave if it becomes advantageous. Now, governments are feeling the pain of their poor tax decisions.

Liberals are disconnected from the business demand to be as profitable as possible. If governments (and schools, programs, etc) were run as a business, then we would all be better off. But, right now they are intent on blaming businesses for demanding lower rates which cuts into state "revenue".

Such lost revenue is one reason California now faces a budget crisis, with a shortfall of more than $9.2 billion in the coming fiscal year alone.

A business has no room for wastefulness. It cuts into profit, employee efficiency, product realization, public opinion. If a company overlooks the slightest of gray spots within its walls, then there is a potential that the area could release a product the leads to poor public reaction which can manifest itself with reduced sales, reduced profit from extra work required to fix a problem area, reduced profit from unsold inventory, reduced profit from expenses which cannot be recouped. 

The US government is the perfect model of wastefulness. 10's of millions get lost in appropriations, campaigning expenses, "deal making" for a bill to pass, random projects receiving funding which have no need, nearly complete projects being cancelled, etc, etc, etc. This extends to state governments to a lesser extent, but it is still the same. But, law makers have resorted to these various projects as their way of winning votes. They call fiscal conservatives criminals, haters of the elderly, people who want to make the poor suffer, racist. And it works. Rant over, sorry.

There are genuine liberals out there who do not see the government as the problem, but the solution. Fine. But, they feel that the way to give the government its funding is through raising revenue through increasing taxes. Corporations, the creators of jobs, have it as their duty to figure out how to avoid as many taxes as possible. So, when the tax rates start rising to fund the programs Liberals are after, businesses start moving the jobs to where taxes are lower.

This includes Nevada, Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland… They open offices in states and countries with low tax rates. The corporations are going to do their business. They are going to make money. And they are going to do it in a way that is as advantageous as possible. Liberals don't get this idea. 

“Apple, like many other multinationals, is using perfectly legal methods to keep a significant portion of their profits out of the hands of the I.R.S.,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And when America’s most profitable companies pay less, the general public has to pay more.”

Solution: Make government more like business. A simple idea is to just be competitive tax wise! How much more money would California have if it wasn't in Apple's interest to open a business in Nevada for tax reasons? Look at Cupertino - Apple threatened to move away from the city if they didn't allow Apple to build their new campus. It wasn't blackmail, it was a reality of doing business. Cupertino realized this and backed down from demands of Apple. They now get to keep their tax income. And remember, tax income is more than tax from the sale of goods - it includes income tax from the people employed in the state.

If the US government lowered corporate tax rates to be competitive with Ireland or other countries which have become tax havens, how much more money would the government now have in its coffers? Or, how about if the elected officials were less concerned about being re-elected and more concerned with making the government as streamlined and efficient and a positive force in the life of individuals, wouldn't we be better off?

But no. Apple (and others) are dubbed as villains for being wise and shrewd. For not doing their "fair share" in giving the government the un-checked funds that it feels it needs (for election purposes). 

America, we need change.

As typical... great iPad review at Anandtech

Updated: Here is the full Anandtech review of the new iPad

What's the point of doing a review when you know that there is someone out there who will do a completely thorough and well executed review of a product you are interested in?

Anandtech has their in-depth review of the Apple TV (3) posted and it's tempting. The addition of 1080p and the very smooth Airplay mirroring make it appealing. However, I still lean towards the Roku solution if only for the more diverse support of streaming sources (such as Hulu).

We also have the "new iPad's" display detailed and quite a significant breakdown of the changes vs the iPad 2. I'm enjoying my iPad, but its my first, thus making the desire to compare against the older releases not so crucial as this isn't an upgrade. Basically, the battery life and the display are what won me over.

The Future of Apple

There have been a number of pundits around claiming that since Steve Jobs is no longer running Apple, that it will simply be a matter of time until they completely lose their direction.  The company is fated wander back to some evidently natural way of operating which is defined by the previous SJ absence in the late 80's and early 90's.

Here is Venture Beat's evidence.
ABC's noncommittal opinion.
Cult of Mac: Over time, however, Apple will and must gravitate toward normalcy, toward average, toward mediocrity.

Right.

I won't even try to make the case that Apple won't change. That's neurotic. Of course it will change. But, I think the key indicator of how good Apple will be since the passing of the iconic Steve Jobs can be seen in the companies that are ran by former Apple employees.

Nest is doing great. Their product definitely shows their Apple roots. The thoroughness. The attention to detail. The packaging. Spot on.

Both Twitter and Flipboard have strong Apple influence. PayPal and LinkedIn had founders who came from Apple.

Finally, just look at who is still at Apple. Tim Cook is largely responsible for the backend of the entire company. He has re-defined product line efficiency and has found ways to lock-up key components preventing competitors for being able to match the prices Apple can get.

Jony Ive. I don't think much needs to be said here.

Scott Forstall is leading iOS development and some of the new applications, such as iPhoto on the iPad, are brilliant.

The DNA is now in Apple to continue doing what they do best: making great products with attention to detail that no other company can match.