bitdepth

Graphic Converter 4.6

One of the applications that I have fallen in love with is Graphic Converter. I used it years ago and then I started using Photoshop and didn’t think that I’d use anything else. Then OS X came along and the Photoshop version took a long time to come out. Then I wasn’t able to upgrade to version 7, but I needed to do a lot of image processing as I was working on “When Voices Rise…” and I didn’t want to do a lot of work in Photoshop 6 in Classic as I was using Final Cut Pro 3 under OS X. I scanned hundreds of photos and documents and needed to resize and crop them to make them more manageable. I found Graphic Converter, tried it out, loved it, and bought it. Small, efficient and fast. I used the Browse feature to select images and resized and adjusted them for use. Then when I was authoring the DVD I had almost 100 images that I wanted to use in a slide show for the DVD, but I needed to rescale and resize the images in a non-proportional way and also to place them on a black background. GC’s Batch was able to save me a ton of time doing that. It’s what I use to resize and prepare images for the Web and iStockPhoto when I upload stuff there. It even takes a lot of Photoshop plugins!
There have been a few updates over the last year to GC and I dutifully download them, but I hadn’t been using it a lot. But for some reason I hadn’t poked around in it a lot. Then I had an image open I noticed that there was a new Stamp tool! That was the only thing that I really, really missed from previously using Photoshop as the colour-correction, levels, and other image adjustments work great in GC. The browser has also been updated (in an iPhoto-like way) and there is a neat catalogue HTML export that I may play with as well. I have to check out updates a bit more carefully!

April 30, 2003 graphicconverter, os x, photoshop, software

Whew!

It’s time for some updates to the site as I’m approaching my 1 year anniversary with bitdepth… soon I’ll probably update to blosxom 2.0 (maybe the beta, maybe the release) as I like the look of some of the plugins. Even though I’m using Movable Type at work, I like the more hands on approach of writing stuff up in BBEdit and uploading it for my own blog. I just don’t want to get too far from the raw content, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time coding.
Teaching Screen Arts is fun, but it takes up a lot of time during the school year (it is my job)… and it cut into my blogging, but things are easing off a bit now and I have to reestablish the routine of blog first, ask questions later. It reminds me of a video artist friend of mind who was frustrated with me with my film background and shooting style with a video camera…I’d carefully think about the shot and shoot very efficiently, but her aesthetic was to capture the moment. I’ve taken the same approach sometimes with the blog…not a lot of posts, but interesting stuff that I’ve thought about a bit more. But now I’ll try to rebalance it a bit.

April 29, 2003 blog, blosxom, movabletype, screenarts

iTunes 4

Wow! It was a busy day at work…end of the term and lots of marking and adding and wrapping up. In my brief glance at Apple’s Web site this afternoon I saw that they launched the music store and updated iTunes to version 4. Even though I’m in Canada and we (along with the rest of the non-US world) can’t buy songs yet, it’s a pretty amazing leap. One of those Apple things that you look at and say, “Hey, that makes sense.” I can see me impulse-buying stuff as soon as it’s possible. There are still some gaps in the music that is available, but they’ve got a lot and the presentation is great. The staff picks are idiosyncratic and I suspect that they reflect the folks at Apple. It looks as if the whole thing was a massive task. Over 200,000 songs, tons of album art and a whack of encoding. The other neat features of iTunes 4 are sharing via Rendezvous and AAC encoding (higher quality at lower bitrates…just the same as encoding audio for DVDs).

A very cool feature for iTunes 5 or maybe 4.5 would be “Upload My Songs” to allow independent musicians to make their work available via the Music Store. Now that would be the next step, but would the record companies allow it? The video that Apple has (in the new “Music” button on Apple’s site that replaces the “Switch” button) introducing the store and new iPods has a rather smarmy tone about the music industry, so maybe it’s not too far-fetched. I love the new ads for the music store… they feature people singing as they listen to music on an iPod. A neat exercise in contrasts.

April 28, 2003 applications, itms, itunes, music, rendezvous, software

Emergent Report

One thing that I’ve realized about my ‘blog (becoming self-reflexive in a very blog-like way) is that I try not to be in the blogrolling mode with links to other blogs as others do it better and it’s maybe a bit too meta for me…but anyway…I would rather blog the unblogged… but I started reading Steve Mallett‘s Emergent Technology blog which is now one of my NetNewsWire feeds (which I try to prune down to I find most useful and interesting). Alpha geek that I am, but without the free time or money to go to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference it’s a way to get a glimpse of some of the cool things that are developing.

April 13, 2003 blog, emergent technology, etech, oreilly, steve mallett

Graphic Converter 4.6

Whew!

iTunes 4

Emergent Report

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