According to a mathematician and his student, violins are hard to play, and they go on explaining why.

FreeBSD’s maintainability has been measured according to an index suggested by Ioannis Samoladas et al.

Merging two old photo libraries (one that constantly made iPhoto crash that worked well when upgraded to iPhoto 5 with other old ones that I used to make iPhoto 2 quicker) I came across Cleaning iPhoto and Mac::Glue. So a quick:

<br /> perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Mac::Glue"'<br /> gluemac /Applications/iPhoto.app<br />

and off I was using his scripts to compare MD5 hashes. I’ll be using Mac::Glue to do the same cleaning up for iTunes where my duplicate count is getting higher quickly.

And in case you’re one of my friends who know I don’t like perl, I still don’t. But the alternative was AppleScript

The TNT delivery guy was here and delivered my iLife ‘05 pack which I bought solely because of iPhoto. (Apple refused to give me a student discount for the software, even though I ordered via the net. I’ve heared people don’t get student discounts in Apple’s stores.) I use my Canon Ixus, Canon EOS 20D, HP Scanner and Nikon negativescanner much, so being very annoyed about the sluggish performance of iPhoto 2 but loving its way of interacting with my blog and organising pictures, and hearing good thing about performance on iPhoto 4 and that iPhoto 5 would be better performance wise, I decided to upgrade after they threw in RAW handling (which seems to be a total fake).

First impression: the DVD was filthy. I opened the box, took it out of its envelope, and had to clean it before putting it in my drive. Wow, I’ve never had that happen to me with new software before. Was the packaging done by hand or something? Anyways. iLife takes a whopping 4.7 GB, or 5% of my harddrive. The installation took 45 minutes, the converting of my iPhoto 2 library of 800 photos took 2 hours! (I run a 1Ghz iMac with 1GB ram)

Scrolling is indeed much faster. Not as fast as f-spot, but still fast. Opening a 8 megapixel picture takes 3 seconds, opening a 20 megapixel picture takes 6 seconds. Saving a slightly cropped 20 megapixel picture took 37 seconds! Saving a slightly cropped 8 megapixel image took 8 seconds. Each edit must be saved before proceeding to the next picture, no option to make changes on previews and then batch them together in one go. Meaning I won’t be using iPhoto to edit my 20 megapixel photos that my filmscanner makes.

RAW: (what we’ve all been waiting for) No camera color profiles to load, no spot white balance to set. Just lots and lots of impresise sliders so you can see what it looks like and choose a setting based on that. In other word, it’s no replacement for ufraw (or whatever RAW converting application you use). Even Canon’s bundeled software handles development from RAW images nicer, and I really don’t like that bundled software. So even though I have iPhoto, I still want to keep working on RAW support for f-spot, and you might want to stick with your favourite RAW processing software.

Good thing: getting to continue my work while it does the importing. Bad thing: doing so led to my first iPhoto 5 crash, after under an hour of usage. Wee. I hope we’ll see Apple updating this one quickly. Bug report sent.

Preferences: why can I not choose Thunderbird as my email program?

So, based on my first impressions, this is my wishlist for Apple to improve iPhoto ‘05:

• REAL RAW support
• Batch handling for editing
• No crashing
• Faster image handling

Apple sent me a mail saying my iLife copy has been dispatched. In the mean time, California Fox reports that iPhoto’s RAW support is, well, fake. It imports RAWs, but rather than use the RAW files as a source when modifying brightness, temperature, exposure, saturnation etc, it uses an intermediate JPG copy. And as we all know, this just isn’t the same. This is not what we asked for when we wanted RAW support, and just not mentioning this and waiting for people’s reactions seems just irresponsible on Apple’s part.

In the mean time, I’ve come across f-spot and I’m currently tracking its CVS and looking at integrating Udi Fuchs’ ufraw into it. This’ll be my first shot at C#, so I’m wondering both how the task will be and how people will respond to it. I do NOT, however, plan to settle on intermediate JPGs.