Applepeels

When Apple, Google, and others can't agree, things can get messy

Apple is probably to blame for a fascination that I have had with video.  Sometime in mid-eighties when I was working for Apple, I won a Sony Video8 camera in an Apple sales contest.  I was hooked.

Like any good father, I took hours of soccer, hockey, and dance video over the years.  I still have some of the video of our children playing on the beaches north of Halifax, Nova Scotia, one spring in the late eighties.  I ended up with at least two other Sony video cameras over the years.  A few years ago I spent days going through video and putting some clips on a DVD using iDVD.  That DVD is now a family treasure.

I can also remember taking photos, movies, and music and creating a great prom video for my youngest daughter almost twelve years ago.  I used iMovie and eventually did a version in Final Cut Pro.

When Apple's original .Mac service came along and eventually offered the opportunity to post movies on the web, I was quick to try that.  Over the years Apple has changed .Mac and its descendant, MobileMe, so much that my early movies are no longer visible on the web.

I have long looked at the web as my filing cabinet, but Apple's propensity for change has made it a challenging storage partner.  However, I suspect the motives of other "clouds" on the web are probably just as suspect.  Google's motives are often especially hard to determine, and I'm not exactly excited about the somewhat forced connection between Picasa Web Albums and Google+ albums.

For almost four years I have been posting my videos to YouTube instead of Apple's cloud.  Some, like this simple one of a sail boat docking in Beaufort, NC have been viewed thousands of times.

I find it rather ironic that Apple, the creator of Quicktime, has made it so difficult to keep my movies created using their software and hardware in their own on line world.  With iCloud maybe things will get better, but Apple's track record doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Unfortunately, things have gotten even messier than a few early pages with Quicktime clips not working.  Apple's war against Adobe's Flash and other vendors' worries about the H.264 standard have created a mess if you want to do your own video and post it on the web on your own site.

It is to the point that the easiest way to do video on the web is to embed a YouTube video in a web page.  Today, except on an experimental basis and for mobile users, YouTube video is Flash based.

You can get an idea of the problem for web developers by going to this YouTube site which lets you opt into their HTML5 trial.  Depending on which browser you use and how your browser is configured if you use Internet Explorer, you will see different things.  Just taking the time to visit the YouTube HTML5 site with both Safari and Firefox will give you an idea of the challenges faced by webpage developers who want to use movies.

Being very geeky, on my Windows laptop I have Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer. On my Macs I have the same without of course Internet Exploer.  On my Ubuntu Linux machine, I have Firefox and Chromium.  I also have a Kindle Fire and a new LG Spectrum Android phone where I use Opera Mini.  I have friends with iPhones and iPads.

While all my browsers on most of my machines are the latest versions, there are plenty of old browsers out there.  Even my 2004 Dual G5 is running a very old build of Firefox.  Getting a web video to work on all of these is not easy.

I can remember when getting someone to see a video posted on the web was as simple as making sure they had installed a Quicktime plug-in.  Of course a lot of people never could figure out how to install plug-ins, and they do cause troubles.

All of this led me to experiment with posting some video on the web. Over Christmas I got a new beach camera, a Nikon COOLPIX P500.  I bought the COOLPIX so I wouldn't have to subject my Nikon D3100 and nice telephone lens to sand and surf dangers.  So far it has been a great beach camera.

It turns out that the COOLPIX P500 takes some really great long distance HD video as long as you use a tripod.

One of the reasons that I wanted to do my own movies on the web is that I have seen increasing difficulty in posting YouTube videos directly from either iMovie or Quicktime exports.  However, I can upload a movie directly from the Mac using the YouTube up-loader.  Unfortunately the Mac program connections seemed to be broken on my iMac.

I actually didn't learn how bad the video mess was until after my first efforts which involved using code directly generated from Quicktime using save for the web.  When I started testing that site with different browsers, I figured out there was a problem with most other browsers besides Safari and Internet Explorer.

I had an Apple friend runs some tests, and he also was surprised at the challenges.  I did some searching on the web and came up with the site Video for Everybody.  It has a pretty good discussion of the issues.  Even more useful to me was an automatic code generator.

Of course Quicktime is no help in generating the new formats that some of the browsers are using so I ended up using two video converters, the Miro Video Converter and a video to Flash converter which I can't remember.

Based on all that I created a site with several movies in different formats of a Pelican preening itself.  While I was working on all this, I put the Pelican movie up on YouTube.

After a little tweaking, I now have this Pelican Movie site which seems to work on all computers using all browers including Firefox and Chromium on Ubuntu Linux, my Kindle, and my Android phone.  However, in order to get the Pelican movie working on the iPad and and iPhone I ended up creating another site done with Apple code and a reference movie.  It also works with many but not all browsers.

This was an interesting experience, and certainly convinced me that embedding a YouTube movie into your website is the easy way to go.  It does appear to me that most of the other vendors are lining up against Apple, but in the world of technology, today's enemy is often tomorrow's strategic partner.

On a side note I use Picasa on my Windows computer to manage most of my photos and video clips. So far I have had no problems directly exporting video from it to YouTube. That shouldn't be too surprising.

This summer I used a small Sony pocket camera to take some ACVHD video including the clip that I exported to YouTube for this great run down the White Oak River in our skiff. 

However, the only way that I could deal with AVCHD video was through Sony's movie software.  My Mac using Apple software didn't recognize the movies.  Picasa on Windows was also no help at the time.  I have noticed some conversion utilities recently, but I am using the Nikon with HD format now so the problem went away for me.

Perhaps these issues will get better over time, but someone is going to have to give in, and none of these large technology companies like to do that.  My personal bet is that however YouTube goes, so will go the majority of the web.

If the end of January has you thinking about nice places to visit, read my post on why Beaufort, NC is such a nice place to visit.

Perhaps my tales of Beaufort's uniqueness might convince you to vote for Beaufort in Budget Travel's Coolest Small Towns of 2012 contest.  Those of us living on North Carolina's Crystal Coast would greatly appreciate the votes of technology folks interested enough to read about the challenges in posting web video.

You are even welcome to join us during the fantastic weather that has given us some magic moments on the beaches even during the heart of winter.

 

 

A Quick Take on Apple's part in Kodak's history

It was the spring of 1994, just before things really started to get interesting at Apple.  I called my higher education team together for a spring meeting at Mountain Lake Resort not too far from Blacksburg, Virginia.

We were planning for back to school at universities and colleges from Maryland all the way through North Carolina. It was still in the days when college students could get a real deal by buying their computers on campus.

As an Apple manager, I never bought into the idea that Apple reps should focus on marketing by brochure.  I believed that my people needed to know what they were selling so I always managed to set aside some dollars for demo equipment.

That spring, I ordered Quicktake 100 cameras for my team.  They had revolted when I had suggested an overnight camping trip and a hike on part of the Appalachian Trail as a prelude to our meeting.  We settled on a digital scanvenger hunt around the trail at Mountain Lake.  It gave them a chance to get familiar with their Quicktake cameras.

The first Quicktake was actually manufactured by Kodak.  It was a revolution in its day.  I can remember using both the Quicktake and Kodak's earlier Photo CD product.  My oldest daughter did a Hypercard project for a high school science project, and we had a Photo CD created.

In a little over three years, Steve Jobs would be back at Apple.  Apple would focus on just computers.  Cameras, scanners, printers, and even the Newton would disappear from the product lineup

For a time I thought Apple had made a mistake in abandoning cameras, but within a few years, it was clear that to win in the digital camera business took a focus that Apple didn't have if you will pardon the pun.

Apple's next great contribution to the world of photography would be iPhoto which was released in January 2002.

Like most folks I have a history with Kodak cameras and film.  We even used Kodak disc film and some of their multi-format cameras.  When I was in college in the sixties, I actually had a Kodak SLR camera that I carried with me on a trip to Alaska.  It didn't have interchangeable lenses so in 1969/70 I switched to Nikon which is the camera line that I still use the most.

As someone who sometimes takes a thousand pictures a day and still sells a few prints, I am a dedicated camera user and not particularly interested in the cameras in devices like the iPhone.  I am certain you can take great pictures with them, but they don't meet my needs.

Apple has been a company that has been able to re-invent its business a number of times.  There are myriads of reasons why Apple and Kodak are different companies on completely different trajectories.

I am also not sure if the world of digital photography would be much better if Apple had gotten serious about the camera market.  However, I do think Apple deserves some credit for helping create the bridge between the world of photography and computers.

I know that I have a very rich history of digital images which I probably wouldn't have except for the Quicktake, iPhoto, and actually the Apple OneScanner and its Ofoto scanning program.  All of these gave me an early start in the digital world and likely a path away from Kodak.

While I can live with Apple not being my digital camera supplier or the source of my scanner and its VueScan software, I certainly do miss Apple in my world of printers.  Actually I can live without Apple in the world of laser printers, but I certainly do miss Apple's genius in the world of color printers.

I keep floating between Epson, Cannon, and HP color printers, but none have the magic of Apple or even work much better with Apple's OSX than they do with Windows 7, but that is fodder for a post another day.

Aside from complaining about the death of common courtesy, that is it from the Crystal Coast where winter never stays very long, but we are enjoying some brief winter beach time.  If you are using Safari for your browser, you can check out my belted Kingfisher movie.

Perhaps he had a comment on being photographed about three quarters of the way through the move.  The movie was done with a Nikon Coolpix 500.  I might have some comments soon on the pain of movies and browsers in 2012.

 

My wishes for Apple in 2012

To start I want to get off the plate my perennial wishes for Apple that I know will never happen. 

The first is for a nice $1,000 mini-tower that has room for a couple of hard drives and an optical drive.  All it needs is an I5 processor but an I7 would be a nice option.  It doesn't have to be designed to survive a nuclear holocaust like the current Mac Pro. Just a simple elegant case will do.  I don't need to elaborate on the specs since this does not appear to be anywhere on Apple's radar.

The second wish that I know will never come about is a reasonably priced 15" laptop.  I don't expect Apple to compete with low cost laptops but it sure would be nice to be able to get a 15" laptop from Apple for only 50% more than the competition instead of more than double the cost.

My third never-going-to-happen perennial wish is that Apple would establish real communication with customers. While I know that customers can be a pain in the rear when you are the most successful company in the world, I really think both customers and Apple would gain from having a dialogue instead of mostly one way communication.

I have no idea whether or not my last wish from previous years has been fixed since I still haven't figured out how to access iCloud without spending money for an upgrade that I don't want or becoming best buddies with someone using Mac OS X Lion.  The holidays did not help in this respect since my adult children gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas.

Now that my old wishes are out of the way, what do I really hope for Apple in 2012.

Well the first thing that I would like to see Apple do is to focus on making things work really well instead of adding things that might be of questionable value. Changes to iPhoto are what I have complained about the most but there might be significant issues in OS X Lion.

While I wish I had hands on experience with OS X Lion, I don't.  What I have heard from my valued testers has not been very positive and has kept me from installing it on my I5 iMac.  This recent article in Slate confirmed what my tester-friends have been telling me, that Apple perhaps has stretched a little far with Lion.  I'm not saying the direction they're headed is completely wrong, but it would be really nice if things just worked really well.  That is usually the case on a Mac, and that is why most of use Macs.

My next wish is that Apple would quit playing the game of forcing people to buy more expensive products just to get what they want. Now I will give credit where credit is due.  You no longer have to buy the iMac with the largest screen to get an I5 processor like when I bought mine in October 2010.  My desk really didn't have room for the large screen, but I had no choice at the time if I wanted an I5 processor.

That being said there are still some nagging issues like having to buy a 13" MacBook Air to get a SD slot and having to buy an external CD drive for the MacMini.  Just about the time the Mac Mini got updated enough for me to consider buying one, Apple takes out the CD-ROM drive

Now I understand Apple wants everyone to go to their online app store which most people seem to think has reduced prices but having an external CD-ROM sort of defeats the elegance of the Mac Mini.

Beyond that I don't have a lot of complaints about Apple, but that might be because I don't have both feet in the world of Apple.  If I want to transfer photos from my Android phone, I just plug it into my computer and drag them over. I don't have to go through iTunes which I hardly use.

If I want to share files across multiple computers, I use DropBox which is a drop dead elegant solution that works on everything.  My pictures are in Picasa Web Albums, and I am even giving Microsoft Skydrive a try since it also works on everything and seems very fast.

I know that the life blood of Apple is innovation, but I am hoping that the reign of Tim Cook becomes know as much for refinement as it does for the latest technology. 

There is already an overwhelming amount of technology out there. Apple's core strength has always been making technology easy even when not everything was built by Apple.  I hope to see that direction revitalized this year. It is something desperately needed in our world.

Finally I would love to see Apple take some of their cash horde and figure out how to help jump start the American economy.  Certainly Apple can't do it alone, but by the same token Apple could become a leader in helping America retool for the future.  Other Silicon Valley companies are used to following Apple's leadership, and this would be a great place for Apple to use it's influence.

If you are wondering about the donation button that is now on the Applepeels blog, you can read details in this post. It is just an effort to generate some cash to be able to review more products which will then be auctioned off to readers. Any donation from a buyer will be credited towards a purchase.

 

 

 

Apple's "free iCloud" services? Not really.

I guess that I am guilty of not paying enough attention to the world of Apple.  However, I have been a loyal and long suffering paying member of Apple's .Mac and MobileMe services.  I lived through all the changes such as my web pages coming down and my photo albums disappearing into incomprehensible folders.

My account was also one of those whose renewal coincided with the announcement of the new free iCloud services.  That meant that my account got extended until summer of 2012 which is probably why I have paid so little attention to iCloud.  The other reason is that the cloud that has my attention is Google's.

However, when I got the notice below last week, I thought perhaps I should spend some time investigating iCloud's free services.

Actually it turns out to not be so easy to move to iCloud unless you have already jumped onto Apple's newest bandwagon with both feet.

Apple's "free" services are actually free only if you already own an IOS device or have already upgraded to Lion.  Apple doesn't hide this fact, but I have missed any discussions that you have to be running Apple's Lion operating system to enable iCloud from a Mac.

Since I saw Windows 7 mentioned, I thought that I might be able to sneak by with that, but I had forgotten that this was Apple that was offering a "free" service.

I though surely this must not be the case so I contacted one of my favorite Apple system engineers, and he confirmed that you do indeed need to be running Mac OS X Lion.

Now I am not exactly out of date on my Macs.  I did buy an I5 iMac about fourteen months ago.  However, I have seen no reason to upgrade to Apple Lion's operating system, and a couple of good reasons to not upgrade.

First I don't like the on-line upgrade process, and second, I am afraid it might break the older version of iPhoto which I am using.  I quite like the older iPhoto, and as you can see from my posts, I detest the newer version of iPhoto. 

So I have happily stayed on Snow Leopard. While it is not perfect, I no longer have to enjoy the latest and greatest to get my work done.  I am even a version behind on Microsoft's Office on my Windows laptop though I do have the latest Office on my iMac.

It is interesting that Apple's new "free" services are only available to Apple customers with the latest and greatest operating systems.  I might sound like a technology party-pooper, but I have a very usable dual G5 tower that I bought in December 2004.  It has a couple of one terabyte drives in it, and I still use it almost daily.  I can't upgrade it to Lion.

Until late last month, I was still using my 2006 MacBook. While it isn't completely dead, it doesn't run for more than a few minutes before dying on me.  I even tried a new hard drive, but beyond backing up all my data, I had no luck in fixing the MacBook which happens to be our only other Intel based Mac.  I should mention that we still have a very usable white half moon iMac at our other home.  Our youngest daughter is also using one of those.  I bought three of those one summer.

So I guess I am stuck trying to figure out the best, or more properly, the cheapest way that I can enable Apple's new "free" iCloud services. 

When my MacBook died, I was actually thinking about perhaps buying a new laptop of some sort from Apple.  I have been carrying an Apple laptop since Apple started shipping them.  It feels a little funny to not take one into a hotel room when we are traveling.

However, I got a quick reminder of why I am sometimes hesitant to buy Apple products.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I am writing a book about about my career at Apple.  In the fall just before my MacBook died, I sent Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, an email congratulating him on re-instating Apple's charitable match.  I saw it as a very positive change at Apple.  I mentioned in the note in passing that I was writing a book about Apple and would send him a copy when it got to market.

The next week, the day my MacBook died, we got an envelope from Apple's legal department reminding me of all the non-disclosures that I had signed with Apple.  They also included copies going back to the first one that I had signed in 1984.  I took the letter as a not very subtle attempt at frightening me into dropping the book.

However, I sent Tim back a note thanking him for the reminder, but also telling him that I have been writing about Apple for over seven years and until I pulled down much of the content in preparation for my book, I had over 1,000 pages of articles about Apple on-line.  Not once in the seven years did I receive a note from Apple complaining about the accuracy of my posts or about my disclosing any proprietary information.

I did tell Tim that the letter from his legal folks had convinced me that there might be more friendly alternatives to an Apple product such as a Kindle Fire.

So here I am stuck between some family members who would like to keep their old email addresses that go back to the .Mac days and Apple which is requiring me to buy something before I can use their "free" services.

It is hard to believe that even Microsoft is better at free than Apple.  Microsoft's Skydrive which is truly free now even works on Firefox.  Of course Google has a host of free services which seem to work from just about any platform.  Actually Google pays me more in my Adsense account each year than I pay them for the extra storage that I need on Picasa.  They also host one of my domains for free, and their email has become a favorite of mine.

The truth is that Apple is one of the most proprietary companies in the computer business. They are also among the best at mining their customers and accumulating a huge pile of cash.  Much of what Apple does is dedicated to getting you to buy their latest gear and only their latest gear.  I don't have a problem with Apple making money, but I find it wasteful to throw away perfectly good hardware that is still doing the job.  Perhaps that is one reason I love what Ubuntu is doing.

So I am wondering how Ubuntu can create a very simple distribution disk that I can download from their servers and use to install the latest and greatest flavor of Linux on my old Dell Pentium III while Apple wants me to go to their store?  The obvious reason is that Apple wants to lock me into their store and only their store.

Well I might have to figure out if I can buy an iPod touch and use that to migrate my Mobile me services.  That might be the cheapest and least painful of the solutions that are out there.

Any suggestions from others facing this dilemma would be appreciated.  I am not giving up my Android phone because I love the integration of the mapping apps with Google Maps. Besides I like the choice that the Android world gives me.  Also my Droid won't be two years old until March, and it is still doing a good job of keeping me connected.

My Apple book is now being edited by my trusted family staff, my wife and my oldest daughter.  At this stage, it is 295 pages and covers the time from September 1982 when I started selling Apple IIs in an Atlantic Canadian dealership to July 2004 when I left my position as director of Apple's federal sales in July 2004 just after sitting in a Senate hearing with Avie Tevanian.

I feel like I have done a commendable job describing life at Apple, but it has taken me seven years to get far enough from the situation to write a book, so I will await the judgment of others. I am glad that it is all down on paper.  Some of it is still hard for me to believe even though I lived it.

I am grateful that I wrote down about twenty-five pages of thoughts the fall after I left Apple.  That and a habit of using a daily planner have helped me nail down many of the important dates.  Not so surprisingly, the more I wrote about the old events, the more that I remembered.   Somehow I still haven't remembered any secrets, but that might be because I didn't know any even when I worked at Apple.

I have talked to a number of ex-Apple employees to get refreshed on a few things, but the story is mine.  Next week I am talking to agent recommended to me by someone well known in the Apple world.

Beyond that fishing has been good here this fall on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  We were still in shorts weather through December 16 when I had a spectacular afternoon over on the beach.

While there have been signs of the seasons changing, somehow, the warm weather has managed to help us forget last winter.

With all the great weather, I am glad that I still have the ability to focus, or I would never have gotten my Apple book written in this fall to remember.  Hopefully my next post will have some details on how the book is going to published.  However, after the letter from Apple legal, Tim Cook will have to buy a copy if he wants one.

 

 

The saga of Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa with some tests

I got a few interesting comments on my decision to move to Google's Picasa on my MacBook instead of using the newest iPhoto version 9.1.5.

Perhaps the one comment most illustrative of what I like least about the Apple world said that the whole thing was my fault because I had an issue with iPhoto and I couldn't solve the issue.  That is perhaps the best example of Apple thinking that I have seen in a long time.

The same people who think it is my fault because iPhoto 9.1.5 wouldn't run would be the first to rant and rave and blame Microsoft if Microsoft shipped a program which didn't install properly.

Somehow Apple gets a free pass from many of its users no matter what it does.  Unfortunately that just feeds the arrogance that has often been Apple's downfall. However, they have such a big cash cushion now, it is hard to imagine what they would have to do to screw up, but I have been surprised before.

I try to hold Microsoft, Google, and Apple to similar standards.  When they provide software free or otherwise, I expect it to work which includes installing without screwing up my data.

When I have paid money for a piece of software and the company ships me a piece of software to update it, it is reasonable to expect it to work.  I have been around Apple hardware and software for twenty-nine years this month which is the anniversary of my Apple II+ purchase.  September will be the 29th anniversary of the first Apple computer that I sold, so I have seen the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly.

Perhaps what I should have said in my most recent post is that I was a lover of iPhoto until the version that came out last fall, and I was willing to put up with some blemishes, but now I feel like that I have lost a valued tool since it has grown some ugly warts.

In the interest of putting some facts behind my assertion that Picasa is a better piece of software than iPhoto 9.1.5, I decided to once again try to get iPhoto 9.1.5 running.  I tried another repair of the library and actually left that running all night.  In the morning iPhoto was unresponsive so I forced iPhoto to quit and threw the whole iPhoto package in the trash and emptied it.

Next I got out my firewire drive and copied over a small iPhoto library that I was sure had been untouched by the most recent versions of iPhoto. It was around 9 gigs of photos, and I made it the main iPhoto library.

Then from the DVD, I reinstalled iPhoto 9 which came with iLife 11.  Of course I ended up doing all the updates and eventually got to the screen which asked me if I wanted to update the library which I did.  Finally iPhoto 9.1.5 decided to work.

As a bench mark I checked my old dual G5 system downstairs, it has over 50,000 photos in one of several libraries, but of course it is running iPhoto 8.

Having gotten iPhoto 9.1.5 running on my MacBook, I decided to run some tests.  While I tried to make it as fair as possible, Picasa ended up being a little handicapped.   The iPhoto library that I used for the tests has about 2,600 photos in it and came in at a little over 9 gigs.  Picasa because it was managing all the photos on my MacBook which includes several libraries, all my jpeg downloads, and even screen captures had 46,000 photo and over 30 gigs of data.

One of my assertions about the newest versions of iPhoto is that the program is flat out slow. To test that I wanted to see how long it would to take to upload photos.   I have two cameras with me on this trip, my Nikon 3100 and my Sony DSC-HX7V pocket camera.  I formatted both their SDHC cards and drove down to the Roanoke River and then visited a local farmer's market.  From the two spots I got about 50 pictures with each camera and made a couple of movies with the Sony.

When I got back, I set iPhoto to the default Photo application on the MacBook, I did a trial upload of another SDHC card just to check that everything was working.  Then I took one of the SDHC cards from my trip and timed with the stopwatch app on my Droid how long it took for iPhoto to launch and import all the photos on the SDHC card in the USB reader that I plugged into the MacBook.  It took just over 50 seconds to import the 50 photos from the Sony formatted card.

I quit iPhoto and set the default photo application to Picasa, once again did a trial import, and then timed how long it took to launch Picasa and import all fifty photos.  It was less than 30 seconds until completion.

I repeated the tests with HDSC card from my Nikon. It had only 49 photos, but they were larger files.  This time I did Picasa first.  It got the photos from the Nikon formatted card in 35 seconds.  I switched to iPhoto 9.1.5, and it took 53 seconds.

Just out of curiosity, I did the Sony card on my HP I7 laptop.  It took 32 or 33 seconds for the import, but it did take a couple of seconds to click and quit the Sony app that imports my movies.  With that said the times for Picasa were a dead heat on both platforms.

One thing that I did find out in all the changing of settings is that there is a setting in the new iPhoto that allows you go back to using Apple Mail for the default way to email your pictures.  As the next tests show, that is a very good thing.

I set the default picture size to be small and "shared" a photo by email.  With both Picasa and IPhoto set to use Apple Mail, it was a dead heat with both programs coming in at close to 4 seconds.  However, when you change the setting to iPhoto using its own email program and Picasa using Gmail, the results were very different.  Picasa took 3 seconds using Gmail, while iPhoto took 8 seconds using its email program.

Next I tried to run some tests of taking a picture, cropping it, applying an auto enhance, and uploading it from iPhoto to MobileMe Gallery or from Picasa to Picasa web albums.  I thought the tests looked pretty even, then when I tried to quit iPhoto, it told me that it was still updating the gallery.  I gave up trying to come up with a consistent way to see which was faster.   From what I could tell it looked like Picasa took 41 seconds, iPhoto 46 seconds, but again I am not sure iPhoto was finished.

I upload a lot from the iPhoto on my I5 iMac to Picasa web albums.  Of course you have to add something to iPhoto to make that happens since Steve has a holy war going on against Google.  I have long had the perception that it takes much longer to upload from iPhoto on my iMac to Picasa web albums than it does going from Picasa on my Windows I7 laptop to Picasa web albums.

This morning I took the same photo, cropped, auto enhanced, and uploaded to Picasa web albums using the I7 laptop.  It only took 24 seconds seconds and was clearly faster than either program on the MacBook.  Both computers are on the same wireless G class network.  My guess is that the difference was not in the editing but in the uploading.

I tried one more test.  I added some photos to one of the cards I used for the previous day's test and went through the uploading to the library test again except this time, I also tested the Windows laptop using the same external USB reader as I use on the MacBook.  Picasa on the MacBook took 29 seconds to get the photos.  iPhoto on the MacBook took 61 seconds, and the Windows laptop took 50 seconds.  The one caveat is that the way I have the Windows laptop set up, a Sony program launches for an optional import which is what I use for movies so I have to cancel it before Picasa on Windows can do its job.

From my tests I don't think that there is any doubt that Picasa is a faster program on the Mac.  It will remain my choice of a photo program on my MacBook while I will continue to use an earlier version of iPhoto on my iMac for as long as I can get away with it.  I will also continue using Picasa web albums since I believe it is a far better solution for my needs than MobileMe Gallery or its successors.

Your needs might vary, but here are some thoughts beyond speed that have gone into my decision.

Number one, I spent much of the last five years of my nearly twenty years at Apple preaching to enterprise customers that it was a very bad thing to let an application or a vendor hold your data hostage.  The biggest example in the enterprise world is Microsoft Exchange mail which at the time was certainly not standards based.  We preached IMAP which lets you use any standards compliant mail client that you want.

In a certain sense, iPhoto with its libraries also holds your data hostage.  Once you have used a library with a new version of iPhoto there is no turning back.  It there is a problem with the library, you need to have a back-up. I think the iPhoto library is a bad idea.  I like Picasa's method of just finding the jpegs and keeping track of them.  If I have a folder of jpegs, I can take it to a Linux computer, a Mac, or a Windows computer and find something that will look at them just like various email clients will look at an IMAP mail server.  I think we are really fortunate to have a free program like Picasa that to certain extent frees the data in an iPhoto library.  It certainly saved me lots of time when I needed to print some pictures.

What I love with the older versions of iPhoto is that I don't have to do a lot of switching around to get my tasks done.  When I have a batch of photos that need the same adjustments, it is easy to apply those exact same settings. I could click on a photo and click again and be back to the main library. That has all changed in the latest versions whose interface I find dumbed down for lack of a better phrase. iPhoto was a better program than Picasa for editing, but no longer.  It adopted some of the things I don't like about Picasa and added some of its own truly ugly interface changes.

The only thing that I do to my photos is to try to make what I see on the screen look like what I saw when I was taking the picture.  Since I live at the beach and shoot in lots of difficult light, a good auto contrast is worth a lot to me.  Picasa has a very reliable one that works most of the time in a way that gets me close to what eyes and memory caught when I took the picture.  I also like to put a watermark on a photo and sometimes I like to put a frame around it.  Picasa does the watermark easily when I want and with access to Picnik's online services does a better job of framing than what I get using iPhoto and Pixelmator.  I can get the same results with both, it is just easier and faster with the Picasa/Picnik combination as long as you have a fast Internet connection.  I pay $25 a year or so for the enhanced version of Picnik.  I think it is a good value for the money, and certainly a better value than I have gotten out of MobileMe.

Another area where I believe that Picasa is substantially better than iPhoto is the touch up tool.  There are photos where I might want to take a stray branch out of the finished picture.  For many years I would resort to Photoshop for that task, but the touch up tool in Picasa, once you learn how to use it properly, does an exceptional job.  I can't even remember when I have had to resort to Photoshop.  I find that the iPhoto retouch tool does more smudging than anything else.

Another really big point for me is that it is very easy to share a single photo using Picasa web albums. I get the link for sharing, embed it into my blog post, and I am off to the races. I also like that I can choose in Picasa whether to use Gmail or AppleMail to send my pictures by email without going to the preferences.  Of course Picasa syncs automatically to my the photo gallery on my Droid.

I always try to use the best tool for the job.  I have Aperture and have tried Adobe's Lightroom several times, but I don't need their features.  That said, there are days that I take 500 to 1,000 pictures, and it would be a rare day when I don't take fifty or sixty pictures.

I use Nikon, Panasonic, and Sony cameras.  I use Apple, HP, and Dell hardware along with OS X, Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux.  I have Epson, Canon, and HP printers.

Sometimes a different camera lets me see a scene in a different way, and there are tweaks that are better done in one program or the other.  The results are highly subjective.  I still prefer the editing on the iPhoto 8 that I have on my iMac. Sometimes now I use Picnik with it for watermarking and framing.

Your needs are going to vary from mine, but I have given this a lot of thought, applied some tests, and come to the conclusion that Picasa is far better software for my needs than iPhoto 9.1.5.  All the tests were done on my July 2006 Intel MacBook running Snow Leopard.

This settles the issue for me, I might run some more tests when I get home to my I5 iMac just to see how fast it is importing, but I won't be upgrading to iPhoto 9.1.5 ( or LIon for that matter) since the newer iPhoto just doesn't meet my very demanding needs.

This isn't the first time I have had comments about iPhoto and interface changes.  Share has once again moved.

That said I am probably going to need some more Marsh time after all this thinking about computers.