First iPhone App Store purchase

I made my first purchase from iPhone App Store today. Indeed, I pondered overnight and plunged down $0.99 of my hard earned money on a game called Ace Tennis Online. My hesitation was because:

• I am not a hardcore gamer. One of my more regrettable past purchases is the PS2 and the few games.
• There is no try-before-you-buy option in iPhone App Store.
• This purchase could be the start of a downward spiral for me.

In the end, I am happy with my Ace Tennis Online. It’s a fun game, despite being in 2D. I am glad I didn’t spend $10-15 to buy an used PS2 tennis game, as I once considered.

Thumbs up to Firefox 3.0, so far

I just tried Firefox 3.0 RC1 this afternoon at work (Firefox 2.x was getting intolerably slow). Let me just say that Firefox 3.0 RC1 is so much better that I started to installed it at home as well.

My IM history up to Digsby

Two days ago I started trying out Digsby as my IM software of choice. It looks beautiful and works well as a multi-protocol instant messenger. The downside are its big memory footprint and the required online account registration (although the online account is then used to synchronize your customizations across different Digsby instances on different computers). There are small bugs here and there, but finally I no longer envy the Mac crowd for their Adium software.

VS2008 installation gone haywire

I spent a better half of the afternoon and evening installing Visual Studio 2008 over my old VS2005. It went something like this:

1. Uninstalled VS2005.

   • Mistakenly uninstalled VS2005 Tools for Office before VS2005 itself. VS2005 uninstall failed miserably afterwards.
   • Had to ‘repair’ VS2005 prior to continuing.

2. Uninstalled other VS2005 and .NET components, excluding .NET 2.0, which never showed up on Programs list in Vista.

3. VS2008 installation attempts 1 to N.

   • VS Runtimes MSI (Runtime Pre-Requisites) and .NET 3.5 installed smoothly.
   • Installer then crashed and burned when setting up Document Explorer 2008, with MSI error code 1603 and zero reasons.
   • Attempts to reinstall and uninstall whatever it took to fixed the problem didn’t fix the problem.

4. Located and ran Document Explorer installer (WCU\DExplore\DExplore.exe).

   • Finally returned a meaningful error, turned out .NET 2.0 was required.

5. Manually installed .NET 2.0 even though it supposedly came with Windows Vista.

6. Manually installed Document Explorer.

7. Finally managed to install VS2008.

Well, that was harder than I expected. Who knew Document Explorer 2008 required explicit .NET 2.0 installation?

VS2008 and .NET 3.5 released

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 have been officially released. Woohoo, new ‘toys’ to play with.

Photo management software

I have experimented with a few photo management software in the past few years, starting with Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 and ending (for now) with Adobe Lightroom 1.2.  Here is a summary of my thoughts on each.

Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0

(Photoshop Album is now part of Adobe Photo Elements and is no longer available by itself.)

I bought my first digital camera, the Canon A80, in 2004 and started looking around for a photo management tool in that same year.  I don’t remember how, but I came across Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 and was happier with it than its competitors at the time.  Photoshop Album allowed me to easily tag my photos and view them by dates.  Photo adjustments were never made on the original, instead physical copies were made, typically with filenames like ‘Photo1_Edited.jpg’.

So far so good, but I was not happy with how Album would take over the physical photo location management and make it difficult for me to find them on my own.  Also I don’t think the tags were embedded in each photo’s EXIF fields.  These two issues mean that it would be harder for me to manage my own photos should I decide to ditch Adobe Photoshop Album.

Google Picasa

Ditch Adobe Photoshop Album I did, and I did it quickly enough so I wasn’t deeply attached.  I switched to Google Picasa after Google bought the original publisher and released the software for free.

Compared to Photo Album, Picasa offered the same tagging ability but its user interface felt more responsive.  What I liked most, though, was that file locations were the same as in file explorer.  It was easy to still manage my photos outside of Picasa.

Still, I left Picasa because it didn’t (and still doesn’t as of version 2.5) use EXIF to store tags and other information, so my tagging effort would have been a waste if I ever moved away from Picasa.  In addition, Picasa’s editing features were too rudimentary for a ‘budding’ photographers like myself. 

Microsoft Photo Gallery

Earlier this year I upgraded to Windows Vista, and with Vista I started using the bundled application called Photo Gallery.  It’s basic, sure, but it did every big thing I wanted.  In a way it’s just a more photo-friendly UI on top of File Explorer, so I knew exactly where and how the photos are stored on disk.  Tags and information are stored in EXIF and IPTC, so if I wanted to, I could bypass Photo Gallery and still manage my photos without any hiccups.

Original photos are supposedly backup (somewhere) when changes made through Photo Gallery.  The program offers ways to revert back to the original should you change your mind.  I like the fact that I can view the edited photos even without Photo Gallery, unlike Google Picasa and Adobe Lightroom (below).

Earlier this month Microsoft released another version of Photo Gallery and made it available on Windows XP for the first time.  The new version added fancier importing and editing features.  Previously the auto correction in Photo Gallery was completely unusable, but the one in the new version is somewhat acceptable.

As much as I like Photo Gallery, I find it a bit too basic at times.  As I mentioned earlier, photo correction tools are superb.  Also the tagging process can be streamlined.

But hey, Photo Gallery is free.  I still use it.

Adobe Lightroom 1.2

About a week ago I was listening to a photography podcast while jogging.  Throughout the show I kept hearing references to Adobe Lightroom.  Being a software guy and a gadget person, I decided to download the trial and give it a whirl.

Adobe Lightroom is a $299 program, though the download is only around 45mb.  It is leaps and bounds beyond Photo Gallery, but then so is the price.

Like Photo Gallery, metadata changes are stored right in the photos themselves in the form of EXIF and IPTC.  Keyboard shortcuts are abound, and the workflow is geared towards real photo-heads like unlike myself.  There is plenty of photo editing options – not Adobe Photoshop plenty but more-than-Photo-Gallery plenty.    Using Lightroom presets, I was able to edit a normal picture of a dog into the ‘antique’ version you see here.

Like Picasa, Lightroom does not directly edit the original photos.  Instead Lightroom records your operations and applies them when you view the photos via the program.  This is flexible if you are using Lightroom.  However, it means you have to export the processed pictures using Lightroom if you ever want to see the above ‘antique’ dog photo outside of Lightroom.

Right now Lightroom is my favorite.  I hope I can figure out a better workflow to persist the edited photos.

Test post from Windows Live Writer

There is no real content in this post. This is a test post from the ‘new’ Windows Live Writer. It’s much improved over the old old version I had played with months ago.

This map thing is pretty nice.  At least the Live Writer adds something new that I couldn’t easily do before.  By the way, I took the above picture of the duck at the dock shown in the map.

Flickr Tags: duck

Tools and more tools

I love tools that help me enjoy my computing more. Typically I run across them by chance followed by comparative research, that’s how I discovered and settled on Console, Xplorer2, and Launchy. My point is, it isn’t everyday I see a compiled list of recommended tools for power Windows users, but I saw one today and I was ecstatic about it.

Here is the link. It covers general computing all the way to hardcore programming.

And yes, Console, Xplorer2, and Launchy are all on the list, along with Notepad2 and Notepad++.

Turn off that TrustedInstaller.exe

My laptop has been running sluggishly for the past 2 days. The culprit seems to be a TrustedInstaller.exe process that’s hogging all the CPU cycles. A bit of Googling reveals that iTunes on Vista is bad: iTunes/iPhone syncing touches lots of files and Vista’s indexing services forever plays catchup.

I have now effectively turned off indexing on all but 2 static directories.

Trust the ‘TrustedInstaller.exe’ not to have a CPU-usage threshold.

Cranky about Outlook 2007

Since I am no longer able to sync my iPhone directly with my company’s Exchange server, I need a way to get my work calendar into my home Outlook to be synced with iPhone. Guess what, syncing calendar with Outlook means I have to sync work emails. Redundant data, but acceptable for now.

The actual sync set up was pretty painless. Outlook 2007 took care of everything once I gave it the email address, user name, and password. I went ahead and also added my GMail account so I can email photos using Vista’s Photo Gallery.

I immediately noticed that Outlook 2007 presented these two email account in the same Inbox. Why?!?! It was fine in Outlook 2003 where I was presented with a separate inbox under each account. Try as I did, but I couldn’t find a way to ‘unmerge’ the mess. Granted, the ‘merge’ is only at the UI level, but WHY?!

This morning I realized that all the contacts have disappeared from my iPhone. I guess the Outlook 2007 set up must have broken iTune’s link to Outlook. I don’t know whose fault it is, so I am not overly cranky towards Outlook on this.

Later I found 8 of my GMails in Outlook 2007 at work. Somehow.

[Update @ 2007-08-20T23:59-8:00] I learned from a friend/colleague that the way to separate the 2 email inboxes is to create 2 data files (.pst) and use one for each email account. That worked.

However, what didn’t work elegantly was the contacts issue. Outlook 2007 sets the Exchange account as default, and my Exchange account does not have any contacts – all of them are stored in my own .pst file. Unfortunately iTunes is too dumb to sync from anything besides the default Outlook account, so now my contacts exist in 2 locations and I am the ‘smart’ bridge between them.