Here’s a list of cool stuff I use at the moment, none of which falls under any particular category. Consider it more of a Buffet of Cool. Fill your plate with as much or as little as you like and do feel free to pitch in with some of your own Discoveries of Cool.

Dropbox

I went on and on about Dropbox recently. It’s just awesome and the free version will probably be more than enough for you. Basically, you install their software and a special folder on every computer you want to use and whatever you put in the folder on one computer appears in the same folder on all the other computers in seconds (usually).

I used to use it for simple things like keeping callsheets available on every computer, even my iPhone, no matter where I was, but then I realised I could use it to sync my website code documents, 1Password keychain, Things to-do databases, even my Safari bookmarks. It’s absolutely fantastic. I can be editing my website on my iMac at home, grab my MBP, head out the door to work, then pick up where I left off on the laptop in my lunch break (provided it was able to connect to a network at some point to download the latest files in the background). When I get home, I can go back to using the iMac, without having to manually sync a single kilobyte of data.

It’s a total game changer, for me anyway. Try it, it’s completely free, and if you use my link we’ll both get a bit of extra space on top of the 2GB they start you off with.

Just Mobile Gum Battery for iPhones

Yep, the iPhone battery runs out pretty quick. I can’t argue with that. I would point out that of course it’s going to run out quick if you spend hours playing music and games on it and surfing the web and taking photos and running app and touching the screen and everything else the all iPhone users are understandably addicted to, and in that sense it’s got about the same lifespan as a laptop being used equally heavily, but hey.

So, what to do? Well, while you’re waiting for Apple to find a way to cram a few more hours of use into the thing, you’ll probably want to pick up an external battery pack/charger. There’s loads out there, some that rigidly stick out of the dock connector (which seem to me to be extremely prone to snapping off), some that are built into the back of a case the iPhone fits into and make the phone another half centimetre thicker. I plumped for the Just Mobile Gum which cost about £25 from eBuyer a few months ago. You charge it up, connect it to your iPhone using a standard iPhone/iPod USB-to-dock connector cable, and it can fully recharge your iPhone 1.5 times. So with this in my bag I’ve easily got enough juice to last a full day and then some. I suppose it’s not that pretty but at least it won’t snap off in my pocket.

Photo Mechanic

I came across Photo Mechanic while peering over the shoulder of a unit stills photographer on the set of Spooks. I’d been using Bridge to view and manage libraries of my photos from shoots, because that was all I knew about having just got to grips with Photoshop. However, I’d been unhappy with the way Bridge read my RAW files, as it seemed to apply a base set of RAW adjustments to the images which altered them from the way they looked on the back of my camera, and I couldn’t settle on revised base settings that matched the look I wanted. It seemed totally wrong to me that the software should apply any changes. I’m sure this has probably all changed now*, but I don’t think I’d move away from Photo Mechanic now.

It’s not cheap, but it’s my first port of call for everything after a shoot: ingesting from a CF card, renaming, applying IPTC stationary and copyright information, reviewing, colour and star-tagging, sorting, sending to pertinent photo-editing applications based on file-type, even exporting to a variety of web-ready galleries including the rather cool Flash-based galleries by Airtight such as Simple Viewer and Postcard Viewer. My preference at the moment is for the PM Classic gallery, a contact-sheet style HTML-based gallery that has the advantage of playing nice on iPhones.

* UPDATE: It hasn’t changed at all. I just gave Bridge CS4 a whirl (I’d not launched it once since installing alongside Photoshop CS4) and while it does have a very slick interface these days, with loads of filtering, organising, viewing and customising options, it also applies Adobe Camera Raw defaults to your RAW photos in the viewer, meaning that the custom Picture Control settings I set up on my Nikon D700 are rendered pointless. For this simple reason, Bridge is next to useless for me. Long live Photo Mechanic! (and Nikon Capture NX2…)

Crumpler bags

Why do the women get to have all the fun with bags? It’s a true fact that the more bags you own, the more of a Man Geek you are. I own four and they’re all Crumplers. I’d say they aren’t built with the photojournalist in mind really, unlike, say, a brand like Think Tank or Lowepro, but I was after something that was comfortable, stylish enough to not scream “Photographer carrying loads of expensive gear!” but sturdy enough to look after a body or two, a few lenses and my laptop and plenty of accessories (depending on the size you go for – tip: try to see them for yourself in a shop, or order the next size up!). Moreover, they’re very comfortable to wear – the backpacks in particular are great, with a groove in the padding on the back so it always sits well over your spine. I love details like that :)

They change the particularly quirky names of their bags quite often as they introduce new designs that are usually subtly updated versions of last year’s. While that makes for a frustrating experience trying to find the bag someone recommended to you last year and has since been rebranded, they tend to stay much the same overall and you can also pick up some bargains online when retailers offload their renamed stock.

1Password

1Password is really nicely designed Mac and iPhone software that remembers all your online passwords for you – I didn’t think I had much need for this as there’s plugins for most browsers that do a similar thing but after a year of using it I’d find surfing the web considerably less slick without it.

It’s standalone software, but once installed it inserts a button into the chrome of your preferred browser (I only really use Safari or Firefox and those are supported) and whenever you’re on a page with a login field and you have those details saved in the application, clicking the 1P button will automatically fill and submit them once you enter the master password. Alternatively if you enter login information on a page it doesn’t recognise it offers to save that info for you. Therefore you only ever have to learn one password… geddit?

(Oh, and combined with Dropbox I never have to think about passwords no matter what computer I’m on!)

Graph Paper Press

See the cool template this site is running? That’s a modified version of Modularity, by Graph Paper Press (and that’s my affiliate link!). Put simply, they make damn good looking themes for WordPress, designed with photographers, film-makers and other media-based bloggers in mind, and are highly customisable from the WordPress Admin page, so you wouldn’t even have to touch an HTML/CSS/PHP editor.

There’s a selection of themes available for free, or you can sign up for a quarterly or yearly subscription which gives you a lifetime license to use the premium themes, and access to their superb support forum for as long as your sub lasts. I consider myself to be a competent amateur hacking CSS and HTML around but WordPress and PHP is a different world, and every single question I’ve posted in the forum has been completely resolved by their team within 48 hours. That’s impressive!

If you fancy getting a sub, sign up for their newsletter first as there’s often a discount code available.

Rivet

This is one of those pieces of software that just sits quietly in the background and gets on with it’s job, which is serving media files from the iMac to my Xbox 360 (I think it does the PS3 as well). I was using Connect360 but it just started getting weird with me; it kept telling me there was an update which I already had, and sometimes the control panel completely failed to start if there’d been a network disconnection.

So I tried Rivet and found it a smoother experience. For one thing it deals with folders well so I can have a more organised library view on the 360, and it also displays a thumbnail next to each file. Plus it seems to catalogue my drive quicker, which is nice.

AppZapper & Hazel

Two bits of Mac software that do exactly the same thing: help out with deleting stuff you don’t want any more.

AppZapper is brilliant: at it’s most basic you launch it, then drag your evictee application into it’s dropzone. It magically identifies all the pesky preferences, libraries and other support files and asks if you want to delete them all, then zaps them with a supercool sound effect. However, flip a switch in the top right and it changes to a filter based system that analyses your applications, widgets, preference panes and plugins for the potential to be deleted based on user-created rules.

Hazel is one of those background ‘always on’ applications. It does a whole bunch of things as well as sweeping for application support files. You can tell it to listen to certain folders and then apply housekeeping rules to the contents automatically, such as moving downloaded music files to Music, or delete all duplicate and incomplete downloads after a certain time, and there’s a whole set of rules applicable to the Trash can.

So why do I have both? Well, Hazel does all the hard work but Appzapper is pretty fun to use and it’s got a cool icon. Plus the irony of uninstalling the coolest uninstaller I ever saw would be unbearable.

Coda & Transmit

I love the Panic software company. They’re one of those small homely sorts of companies with a commitment to their products and an attention to detail that gives you a warm glow after giving up on some bloated frustrating corporate software mess. Not that this really happens much on a Mac, but perhaps that’s what they best embody: great Mac developers.

Transmit is my FTP app of choice. I like the layout of the windows and the user interface, there’s plenty of customisation available in the Preferences, and it does the job. I mainly use it to upload PhotoMechanic-exported galleries, that sort of thing. Coda is what I graduated to coding my websites with after starting out using a combination of BBEdit and CSSEdit. Looking at those two applications now I daresay you can do much of what I do in Coda using just one or other of them, but a couple of years ago you had to use both, and moving to Coda consolidated it all in one easy to use piece of software – it even automatically uploads updated files to their correct place on the server, eliminating the need for firing up Transmit. You can probably tell from the way I talk about Coda that I’m not a power user and I know I’m not pushing it nearly as hard as it wants to be pushed, but I’m just a sucker for the Panic stuff.

They make cool t-shirts too. I’ve got a Mac spinner shirt I wear at least twice a week.

Things

Things is a task-management application. There’s a version for both the iPhone and OSX. The two versions sync with each other over WiFi but are also designed to work great as standalone applications. I love it for just helping to sort out the individual stages within a large project, and also just noting unique unrelated things I need to do. It’s got a beautiful interface and you can get pretty detailed with your tasks, setting tags to filter related types of task together, adding notes and a due date, even syncing them to iCal.

I must admit I’m not exactly a power user – mind you, there are ‘Getting Things Done’ applications that have way more granular control than Things, such as Omnifocus, but Things has it just right for my level, with room to get more detailed if I want it. Ultimately, the real pleasure comes from the way it’s been designed, visually appealing and intuitive, and anything that helps soothe the frustration of having a bunch of niggling disorganised chores weighing my brain down is worth my money.

Well, that’s all folks. A bunch of stuff I use almost every day that I couldn’t live without now. Hopefully you’ll find something here you like and want to pay for, and if there’s some cool stuff that you think I’d like to know about, feel free to chip in.

Thanks for reading!

My Christmas treat to myself was to spend the evening geeking out with my Dropbox setup. It’s a free service that basically allows you to keep certain files constant across multiple machines. You create an account, download software to the machines you want to use and it creates a folder called ‘Dropbox’ on those machines. Whatever you put in the Dropbox on your computer is uploaded to the server space (where it’s secure unless you mark it ‘Public’), and is subsequently downloaded to the Dropbox folders on all the other machines you’ve set it up with, maintaining consistency no matter what machine you use.

It’s probably easier to understand if you just try it. It’s completely free, works with Macs, PCs and iPhones – sign up via my links and you’ll even get 250MB extra space on top of the standard 2GB, as will I. Plus, if you follow five of the six ‘Getting Started’ tips once you’ve signed up you get another 250MB free!

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure what to use it for at first. However, combined with the free iPhone app that accesses your server space, I found it was useful for syncing work documents like callsheets or scripts, as well as being a simple and free way to distribute large files like zip archives of photos for friends and clients.

Finally, I started using it instead of the Sites folder for storing the local copies of the code that runs my websites so that I can make edits on my iMac and be able to pick them up later on the laptop, with no effort copying the files between the two machines.

However, I felt like I was missing out on some cool uses, so I started investigating syncing the settings of regularly used applications ike Safari, iCal, Address Book, Things and 1Password, and this is how I did it.

using Dropbox to sync Macs

In all cases the iMac has the most recent and more complete files so I want to sync them to my laptop and from that point on have any changes made on either machine sync to the other. Therefore, for each application what we’re going to do is:

- find the files on your ‘master’ Mac;

- move them to the local Dropbox folder, which will subsequently copy the files to every other machine using Dropbox;

- then issue a ‘redirection’ to each application so that they can find the files in the Dropbox instead of where they ‘should’ be.

In principle, this is pretty simple. In practice you’ll usually need to use either Terminal to issue the ‘redirection’ information to your Mac’s Finder, or download a bit of software for your Mac that will issue the exact same redirection using the OSX graphical user interface you’re probably used to. I went with the latter option as Terminal scares me.

the key to syncing: Symbolic Links

This redirection information is called a Symbolic Link. What you’re basically doing is moving the settings information that the application uses, but leaving behind a signpost in the original location that points to the new location (which is in the Dropbox) so that the application can continue to read and write to those settings files. The Symbolic Link is similar to what you may know as an ‘Alias’ (especially old-school Mac users who remember System 7!) but they are significantly different and should not be considered interchangeable. Stick with Symbolic Links if you want this to work!

If you want to use the GUI Symbolic Link creation tool I mentioned above, get it here – please do take the time to have a read of the information on that page, it explains it in more depth than I did and it’s quite interesting in a geeky way.

Once you’ve installed the Dropbox software on your various machines, as well as downloaded and installed the version of the Symbolic Link tool that’s appropriate to your system, we’re ready to have a go!

syncing Safari bookmarks & history with Dropbox

Pick the machine that’s got the most up-to-date bookmarks/history and start there.

First, quit Safari – open this page in a different browser if you need it. The bookmarks and history file are kept in ~/Library/Safari (where ~ is your User folder). There’s a few other items in there too, but my understanding is that you’re going to need to move the whole Safari folder, not just the bookmarks and history .plist files.

Open two Finder windows. In one, navigate to the Safari folder as above. In the other, navigate to your Dropbox folder. Create a folder called ‘Library’ in your Dropbox. This is where we’re going to keep your Dropboxed settings for all the apps you sync up, so it helps to be organised.

The original Safari folder, moved into the Dropbox

Now move the Safari folder from it’s current location into the Library folder in your Dropbox (if your Dropbox is on an external drive, the Safari folder will copy as opposed to simply move – in this case you’ll need to delete the original once the copy is complete).

You should see the Dropbox icon in your menu bar start to work as it uploads the Safari folder to the server. At this point all your Safari settings are now in the Dropbox and if you were to launch Safari it would not be able to find them and would start over, creating an all new’Safari’ folder in the expected location. We don’t want this, so don’t launch Safari yet! We need to tell it where it’s settings are first.

Select the Safari folder in your Dropbox. Now follow the instructions for your version of the Symbolic Link tool to create a Symbolic Link to the Safari folder. It will most likely create a folder called ‘Safari symlink’, with an icon of a folder and an arrow at the bottom. This is the signpost we need. Move it out of the Dropbox folder and into the original location of the Safari folder, ~/Library.

The symbolic link, renamed and moved to the original location

If a copy of the Safari folder still remains in the original location, delete it. Rename the symlink to ‘Safari’ (without the quote marks). You should now be done for your first machine. Just to double check, launch Safari. To all intents and purposes, nothing should look different as Safari is being redirected to it’s settings via the symlink you made.

Now head to your second machine, in my case my laptop. Check your Dropbox folder on that machine and you should see your Library/Safari folder downloading from the server. Once it’s complete, follow the symlink creation instructions from above: create a symlink to the Dropboxed Safari folder and move it into ~/Library on your machine, renaming it and replacing the existing Safari folder.

Now launch Safari on that machine and if all is working well it should have all the bookmarks and even the history from your original machine. These should now also sync back and forth.

Once caveat: I don’t think it plays too nice if Safari is actively running on both machines. I haven’t tested that really, but it’s not often this happens in my situation. Either way, quitting and reloading Safari should update the software with the latest changes.

syncing iCal and Address Book with Dropbox

I was very nearly tempted to have a go with the MobileMe trial this week, mainly to have all the cool security stuff for finding or wiping my iPhone if it’s lost, but also because it would allgedly sync my iCal and Address Book between Macs. However, Dropbox offers a free way to achieve almost the same level of syncing, which will be more than enough for most casual users.

The process is exactly the same as with Safari – find the iCal and Address Book files you want to sync, move them to the Dropbox, create a symlink to each in its new location, then move the symlink back to where the original locations where the application expects to find them.

This is what my Dropbox looks like to achieve iCal and Address Book sync

I synced up my iCal calendars by moving the Calendars folder from ~/Library to Dropbox/Library on my ‘master’ computer, then creating the symlink and moving it to the ~/Library folder after renaming it from ‘Calendars symlink’ to just ‘Calendars’. Once the folder has distributed to your other Dropbox-enabled machines, repeat the symlink process on those machines.

Similarly with Address Book, move the folder named ‘AddressBook’ from ~/Library/Application Support to your Dropbox location (in my case Dropbox/Library/Application Support), create the symlink, rename it and move it to the original location. Repeat the symlink process on your other machines once the Dropboxed folder has propagated.

syncing Things with Dropbox

Things is the rather lovely ‘to-do’ software from Cultured Code, and they actually describe how to sync up multiple copies of Things using Dropbox on their wiki. However, their method uses the Terminal to make the symlink. If you’re feeling confident, go ahead and follow their instructions – you won’t mess anything up if you just type the specific codes they give you.

There is, however, another way that doesn’t require the use of any Symbolic Links at all. This is because Things handily gives you the option to tell it where the database files it needs are without the need to set up signposts using symlinks. However, we do still need to move the master database files into the Dropbox manually. First of all, remember to quit Things on the machines you’re syncing.

The path to my Dropboxed 'Things' database folder

The folder you want to move is called ‘Things’ and should be located in ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code. Now, where you chose to keep it in your Dropbox is up to you but to keep things ordered I created a new folder in Dropbox/Library called Application Support, then another new folder called Cultured Code inside that, and I moved the Things folder into there.

Redirecting 'Things' to the Dropboxed database folder

Next, fire up Things while holding the Alt key. This will bring up an option to select an existing database or start a new one. Direct Things to the location in Dropbox that you moved the database folder to, and that should be that. Now head over to your other machine, check that Dropbox has downloaded the Things folder from the server and once complete, fire up that copy of Things the same way and direct it to the Dropbox as before. Once confirmed to be working, you can go ahead and delete the original Things folders from that machine too.

Just like with Safari (and most other apps you sync this way) there can be confusion if you try running and amending multiple copies of Things at once, but that’s not much of a hassle really. Also bear in mind their comments about issues with using this to sync todo’s with iCal.

syncing 1Password with Dropbox

How you achieve this depends on what version of 1Password you’re using, I think. I’m on v3 and have moved onto their ‘Agile Keychain’ way of doing things. In this instance, all the passwords I use are kept in a file called ’1password.agilekeychain’ and were stored in ~/Library/Application Support/1Password.

However, 1Password is one application that makes it super easy to sync up with Dropbox, in that the preferences pane actually lets you not only point the application to wherever you like to find the keychain file, but will actually move it to wherever you like as well.

1Password 3's Preferences window - we'll be using the Data File section

Assuming you’re using 1Password 3, fire it up on your master machine (or whichever has the fullest 1Password keychain) and open the preferences. The very first thing you see should be the Data File options. Click on the rightmost button, ‘Move…’ and set the location in your Dropbox that you want to use. Again, for ease of use I created a file hierarchy that matched the original location – Dropbox/Library/Application Support/1Password and moved it to there.

Then on every other machine I use 1Password, I went to the same preference pane and this time clicked the ‘Choose Another…’ button, and pointed it to the freshly-downloaded 1Password.agilekeychain file that was sitting in the local Dropbox. Quit, restart, job done!

syncing other applications with Dropbox

As you can tell from the screenshots above, I’m experimenting with using Dropbox to sync a few other applications too, namely some Popcap games (Peggle Deluxe, Peggle Nights and Plants Versus Zombies). In doing so I’ve experienced a couple of situations where Peggle Nights in particular will give me the ‘application quit unexpectedly’ alert, even though I did specifically ask it to quit.

I can’t tell if this is because of my Dropbox setup or not, because it seems to do the same thing even when I put all the files back where they should be. Perhaps the game is just buggy on this hardware, because the sync does seem to be working across my Macs – save files from play time on one machine load when I fire up the game on the other machine.

Overall, a lasting caveat for all these syncs are that they can be a bit flakey if applications are run on more than one machine at the same time. If you can work around that, it’s a fantastic use for some free software, and a superb advert for purchasing an upgrade to 50GB should you need it. I’m finding that so far I’m within my limits on the free account, but if y’all would like to sign up with my link we’ll all get a bit more for free!

Cheers for reading, and have fun Dropboxing!

The Ultimate Mac Setup for Photographers is a nice collection of apps that you’re bound yo find handy when it comes to your digital workflow on your Mac. (and I nicked the image on the left from their site – credit where it’s due!)

There’s a couple of things I use that aren’t on there at all, surprisingly. First of all, in ‘Organizing and Editing’ (damn their American spellings!) they’ve tragically forgotten Photo Mechanic which to my mind is by far the best organisational tool for professional photographers. Of course, I’m biased because I don’t use Bridge, Aperture, Lightroom or iPhoto.

I’m not a fan of what iPhoto does to my filing system. I think Aperture does the same thing, I might be wrong. iPhoto’s default system is to take your photos off your memory card and store them where it wants to see them, in a folder within a folder within a folder within iPhoto’s own folder in your Pictures folder. Then if you make edits to the image it stores another copy and keeps the original untouched (good move). I don’t like this because it ties me into using iPhoto exclusively so that at least all my photos are in one place – but that’s iPhoto’s place, and if I want to use other apps, it becomes messy. Which one do I edit? Where do I save it?

And what if I have other shoots in different places but I want to start using them in iPhoto? It copies them from where they are to it’s own folder again, creating more duplicates. No, I vastly prefer to have complete control over my photos. I use iPhoto only for the occasional calendar or photobook from Apple, or to create albums of images to put on my iPhone. That’s it. I realise I can now set iPhoto to not move/copy photos to it’s own location, but that’s by the by as it’s simply a consumer tool – it might be great for you, but it’s not for me.

Photo Mechanic, which I use, doesn’t have any editing capabilities, focussing just on organisation and tagging. I ingest a whole shoot into my computer from a card using the app – it adds my IPTC info to each photo as it arrives. Then I can tag using stars (1-5) or colours; view or edit EXIF and IPTC metadata; preview full screen; move photos around the computer; batch rename; all the usual organisational stuff. It can show me previews of my RAW files almost instantly, rendering a preview JPG from the RAW data without any latent interpretation of the data by the app – the settings I shot at are what it shows me so I can make a judgement call. I can also export images to a web-gallery automatically, with a choice of several different packages – I use the SimpleViewer package almost exclusively as it’s so simple and classic. Finally, the colour or rating tags I apply can be set to be recognised by Nikon Capture NX2, my RAW developer of choice.

Which is the second big omission in my eyes. They list Lightroom, Capture One Pro and Aperture, but no Capture NX2. I know Lightroom, Capture and Aperture are the big boys with the big marketing bucks, but Capture NX2 is the only software that can do proper justice to a Nikon RAW file, in my opinion. It’s the only RAW converter I’ve used where the image I saw on the LCD is exactly what I get on the screen when I open the RAW file up. Other converters apply their own baseline values to the RAW files which necessitates setting up your own defaults that match what you thought you were shooting at the time. NX2 also gives you all the controls you’re used to on your Nikon camera, such as the Picture Control and Active D-Lighting settings. It’s also up to a useable speed on my aluminium iMac (the first of the new line of iMacs that came out a couple of years ago).

Other than that, it’s a great list with a lot of great apps in there. Have a look and see if there’s something you’re missing out on.

Then you set the prices for every conceivable permutation of print, select which photos you don’t want to sell for any reason, and you’re done. Fotomoto take 15% of any sale, and you automatically get sent a cheque every time you accumulate over $200 in profit (although if you haven’t made that much you can still request an early payment). The toolbar also allows people to send e-cards of any image for free. Finally, it tracks what images have been bought as prints or sent as e-cards, which you can check out when you log into their site.

All in all, there doesn’t seem to be a downside really, as it’s a completely free service to sign up to with Fotomoto’s 15% commission only being taken when you actually make a sale. Hopefully it will stay that way – although there’s a slightly ambiguous line in the Quick Start documentation:

Thereʼs no subscription fee for using the beta version of Fotomoto. This means that adding Fotomoto to your site is free!

Will they start to charge a subscription fee once it’s out of beta?

The only other caveat is that they currently only accept US Dollars and the printing service they use is in North California. At present I’m not sure what the standard delivery charges are around the world* so that might discourage UK or EU customers – although they can always just get in touch directly and I can order from my UK printer.

Having said that, according to the Mint statistics for my site currently 26.45% of my visitors are from the US and 16.29% are from good old Blighty, so I suppose it makes financial sense to appeal to the largest market…

Anyway, to celebrate the incredible ease of buying a print I’m offering 50% off all prints for the next month – just use this code at the checkout: 0A0D5C

Enjoy!

• UPDATE: I’ve just checked out the ordering process for myself and for a limited time Fotomoto are doing free delivery to the UK – so get yourself a bargain!

I put a lot of the code for my websites together myself, either by pinching bits from other places and reverse engineering it to learn how it works and fit it to my own design, or editing existing template code (for example, my glass eye runs on Pixelpost templates).

I also learnt a lot from reading Dan Cederholm‘s two books, Bulletproof Web Design and Web Standards Solutions. They might sound like a dry read but if you’re interested in creating simple, strong, flexible websites using CSS and HTML they’re actually a very good read, the skills you need delivered with humour and clarity and plenty of fully worked-through examples.

I digress!

One thing I came away with more than any other from reading them and putting my sites together bit by bit is getting little personal details right. I’ve always been unsatisfied with the basic 404 error page and the ‘No Flash detected’ error text I had on my portfolio site, so yesterday I had a little fun in Photoshop and made something a bit more personal.

I’m certain hardly anyone will ever see the Flash error image as according to my Mint statistics only 2% of all the visitors I’ve ever had to the site don’t have any form of Flash installed, and I’d bet most of those were me visiting my own site on my iPhone to see how it rendered!

So that leaves the 404 error pages, which you get if you follow a bad link to a page on my site that doesn’t exist any more, or you type in a wrong address or something. I have no idea how often that happens really but all the same I whipped up a 404 page by using the front page as a template and cutting back the navigation to the bare minimum. Then I made some custom 404 images and used some Javascript to randomly call one of the images whenever the page is reloaded.

Which I think is kinda cool in a terribly geeky way. :)

If you fancy a peek, here’s a link to a page on my website that doesn’t currently exist and never will, which should generate a friendly 404!

So here at mge towers we’re still devoid of connection to the real world, er, I mean The Internet. My iPhone has been pushed to the limit in the meantime and has needed charging a couple of times a day! It’s still by far the most incredible gadget I’ve ever owned, despite the numerous shortcomings (copy & paste, MMS, SMS forwarding…). It’s as a ‘take everywhere’ camera that it’s been proving most useful lately, though. Here’s a little run down of the apps that get the most use when it comes to photography and blogging from my iPhone.

I generally take photos with a view to putting them through the Camerabag app, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog. For a couple of quid its trenendous value. You can load any iPhone photo into it and it will apply an effect of your choosing, including Holga and Lomo looks, two mono conversions and a number of other retro colour effects.

After taking my photos and tweaking them, I want to upload and share them with the world. I can either download them to my Mac and then upload to somewhere like Flickr or Facebook or, especially useful when like me you’re currently being denied your digital umbilical cord, there are a number of apps that will upload directly from your iPhone. Obviously you can upload directly to Facebook using their own app, but for Flickr (and other photo hosting sites) there are many third party apps available, most of which can upload to multiple sources. I tried ShoZu and Exposure (now renamed Darkslide) but it seemed to me they were downsizing the photos before upload. Apparently this is a limitation of the iPhone system software, although having said that I did find one app that does seem to upload full size iPhone photos – PixelPipe.

Pixelpipe first requires you to set up what sites (and accounts) you want to upload to. I just wanted to send to Flickr but the list of other sites it supports is huge, including WordPress, Moveable Type, Blogger, Bebo, Photobox, smugmug, Youtube, Vimeo… If you can upload images to it, Pixelpipe seems able to connect one way or another. I can set tags for it to automatically apply to all uploads to Flickr (such as ‘iPhone’), give any images from my Camera Roll a title, description and individual tags, then choose which to upload.

Finally, I might want to blog those images somewhere. Now, although Pixelpipe can upload to WordPress (which runs this blog), I’m using the WordPress app in the absence of my usual high speed onramp to the information superhighway as it allows me to draft a post without access to the cellular data network (such as when I’m on the tube, as I am now!).

On my desktop Mac I generally create posts with third party software called Marsedit, which allows for almost complete layout control of my post, as much as if I signed into my WordPress control panel to post. However, there is no version of Marsedit for iPhone as yet, and the WordPress app (which as far as I can tell is not ‘official’ as such) does not have as much control, particularly where image size and placement is concerned. As such, all the images I want to post are going to appear at the bottom, instead of in re midst of the text.

Mind you, I’m not a seasoned mobile WordPress blogger so perhaps there is a better way to post on-the-go that does allow for more formatting control. If you know of a way please let me know in the comments for this post!

And there we have it: photography, blogging and the iPhone – at least according to me ;)

And now finally, have a gander at what was supposed to be the focus of this post, some photos I took while wandering the hallowed halls of London’s newest church to capitalism, Westfield.