Mac Goodies

It was like all the Christmases coming together today: courier guy turned up on the doorstep in the morning with iLufe '09, and I'd no sooner installed that and begun to play around with the new iPhoto when I got an email to say my new external hard drive was available for pick-up. So, quite a busy day, almost totally spent in front of one of other of my pooters.

Getting iLife is really just another indication of my tendency to always have to have the latest and greatest, at least when it comes to software. Even though most of the apps in the suite will probably never be used (iMove, iDvd and GarageBand are really of no great interest to me), still I always feel it's good to be up to date with iPhoto and iWeb anyway. There's around 25,000 photos in my iPhoto library, so it took quite some time for iPhoto '09 to do its in-the-background face recognition thing (like, six hours or so!). I played around a bit with the new Faces and Places features, but I have to say that both are all well and good if you're beginning a library with the newest iPhoto: going back through 25,000 shots and identifying people and places is not exactly a rewarding process, even if later organisation will be handier once it's done.

[In passing, one little amusing thing happened while I was adding myself to iPhoto's 'Faces'. The facial recognition works by building up more and more confirmed examples of any individual. With each confirmed batch iPhoto goes on to offer another lot which it thinks may well also contain the same person, and you help it by confirming or not. At one stage I was amused to see that iPhoto had got a bit confused and thought that some from-the-TV shots of Michael Schumacher were also your truly. Ha ha!]

As to the new hard drive ... the main reason I got the new MacBook late last year was to use it as the workhorse for my music collection. I'd maxed out the internal drive at 250 GB when I got it, but by last week I'd already got to the stage where there was very little room left on it. So the new Western Digital Mac Book 1-terrabyte My Book Studio Edition was really a no-brainer, especially since it has multiple connection options and is designed to power down when the computer sleeps or is shut down. Now at last I'll be able to clear the MacBook's iTunes Music folder (and the iMac's as well). After playing with the new iPhoto for a bit, I turned my attention to the drive and consolidated my iTunes library with the My Book (pretty corny name) as the new location for my music files.

Lots more fun and games to come.