SmileOnMyMac Blog

We spend a lot of time with our MacBooks on this cruise. A close second for favorite geek toy is the camera. I think there are a few reasons for this:

1) A good portion of the conference is devoted to photography-related subjects. Lesa King has given several sessions on how to take the best pictures and then make them even better in Photoshop. Josamir King has introduced us to the finer points of iPhoto, iMovie and Aperture. Randal Schwartz’s talk “How to Handle 1000 Photos a Day (and Publish 300 of Them)” was especially welcome after spending a day in Egypt at the Pyramids and camel-riding.

2) The subject matter is captivating. The desert light. The colorful food. The infinite number of geometric angles of the ship itself.

3) There’s so much geek fun to be had in Photoshop.

I’m one of the more modest photographers with my Canon Powershot. According to iPhoto, I’ve only taken 407 photo since I left on this trip. You can check out the good ones at Flickr in my MacMania group, and find others by searching on the tag #macmania8.

Here’s a little sample of what I’m talking about

A shot of the Costa Atlantic bow, docked in Marmaris, Turkey:

Same shot using 3 different Photoshop adjustment layers on selected areas of the image to correct the lighting and color:

Costa Atlantica smokestack. The ship offers incredible composition possibilities:

Upper deck, lonely waiter, clock in foreground:

Hookahs in Marmaris:

Turkish lamps:

Apparently, one of my favorite subjects is other photographers. That’s David Pogue shooting me shooting him during our wild jeep ride in the Sahara:

The ship has sailed.

After two days in Milan, I met up with the Geek Cruise in Savona. I ran into Shawn King. (If you know Shawn, you know it’s hard to miss Shawn in a crowd.) Shawn’s wife and co-host, Lesa Snider King, was working furiously on her forthcoming book, Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual while we waited to board. And waited. And waited. Imagine being at the gate for a plane that holds 2600 passengers. And multiply that by 3, because everything seems to be three times as complicated on a cruise.

The first morning, Don McAllister did a great presentation called “Mastering Your Inbox.” I had to laugh at this dictum of his:

“Don’t live in your inbox.”

I know that I usually do, but being on this cruise will probably help cure this unhealthy obsession. We have internet access, but it is slow and not 100% reliable. I can’t live in my inbox now. (And no, it has nothing to do with being distracted by all the fun non-geek cruise activities…)

Don talked about using TextExpander for speeding up the process of replying to emails and processing your inbox. He also showed off an interesting program called MailTemplate from MailTank, which lets you build very useful templates. I am going to definitely check it out, when I have the bandwidth to download anything.

Lesa took a break from editing her manuscript to give a workshop on Digital Photo Workflow: How to Shoot and Edit Like A Pro. She’s great at pointing out simple things you can do to take better photos and at making the behemoth known as Photoshop into useful pointers for the amateur user. I love her tips on using grayscale and sepia filters to make otherwise blah photos into something really interesting.

(I need to give a plug for Lesa’s book here. She is working so hard on this. It wasn’t part of her plan to be editing during the cruise, but book publisher schedules wait for no one. If you want to know everything worth knowing about Photoshop, be sure to pre-order a copy NOW and support the hardest-working person on the Geek Cruise.)

The highlight of my day, aside from finding the perfect pizza in Naples, was David Pogue’s iPhone presentation. I am an unabashed Pogue Fan Girl. He’s been one of my favorite writers since I read Mac OS 9 for Dummies years ago. His columns and videos for the New York Times are not to be missed, especially when he draws on his background as a Broadway composer to spoof technology.

Great speakers, like great performers, know how to improvise. David thought he’d discovered a device that would project his iPhone to the screen, but it only worked for video. He then tried to use the iSight camera to get the image up, but the iSight flips the video to be a mirror-image. He finally hit on the solution of using iMovie in iSight capture mode. iMovie does not flip the video. All David had to do was face his MacBook Air away from himself and hold the iPhone in front of the iSight, facing him. Check out the photo below.

It was a great presentation. David is so enthusiastic about the iPhone on so many levels, it’s contagious. He showed off lots of iPhone Apps. Must have: “Fake Phone Call.” With it, your iPhone can simulate a phone call coming in. Great for those meetings or dates where you need an excuse to get away. It’s also apparently great for pranksters: David’s son even faked him out to think that Steve Jobs was on the line.

The boat is just pulling into Messina, Sicily as I am typing this, so I’ll close here for today. (If it’s any consolation to those envying us on this cruise, just know that it has been pouring rain with lots of lightning all night and it looks like a lousy day to get off the boat.) Tomorrow we’ll be at sea all day en route to Alexandria, Egypt, so I hope to have lots more to share from all the great presentations that are scheduled for that day.

Me, outside the Nike Store in Naples. A little piece of Oregon away from home…

I’m in New York City this week, and decided to take a detour up to Connecticut to visit with Shawn and Lesa King, co-hosts of Your Mac Life, the Mac talk show of which SmileOnMyMac is a proud sponsor.

I had the fun of being a live in-studio guest on the show, talking about SmileOnMyMac, how we got started and my favorite products. I also got to experience the thrill of riding around the backroads of Connecticut on the back of Shawn’s motorcycle. We took a long tour from Danbury down to Westport. It was a beautiful day, not too cold. I borrowed riding gear from Lesa, in which I felt ready for a cameo on Battlestar Galactica.

The show is available as a streaming audio file at the Your Mac Life site until April 22nd. You can also subscribe to Your Mac Life at Audible.com, which makes it possible for you to download episodes to load onto your iPod.

I just got back Miami this week on a combination work/personal visit. I was born and raised here, and I never pass up a chance to come down to Florida during February.

I gave a presentation to the Gold Coast Mac Users Group, showing off PDFpen and DiscLabel primarily. Several members of the audience chimed in to share their happy SmileOnMyMac customer stories. What a fine and intelligent group!

I also gave a demo at the Apple Store at The Falls in South Miami. The demo coincided with the enormous power black-out that we had in Florida last week. The demo was postponed for the 45 minutes the power was out.

Apple Store customers are sure dedicated. Lots of people waited outside the store waiting for it to reopen. It was crowded almost before the computers had booted back up!

For the release of TextExpander we wanted to update the product logo to be more in keeping with our existing product logos. We also wanted to keep familiarity with the previous logo, so we kept its clean, simple geometry. Ultimately we wanted a smooth-shaded 3D look. Since the design is fairly simple I decided to render it myself. I’ve been interested in 3D for many years, and this provided a great opportunity to learn and get up to date.

The first step was selecting a modeling product. In my web research I came across this really incredible tool: Cheetah3D. I used it both to model and render the product logo. To my amazement it can also save a rendering as a Mac OS X icon!

The model is influenced by the look of an old-fashioned typewriter key. It’s rendered using radiosity and reflection, so that the outer edge looks something like reflective metal. Getting the lighting and color just so for a scene is never easy. One of Cheetah3D’s advantages is, being a Universal Binary, it performs very well on my MacBook Pro. Tweaks and repeated renderings are rapid.

We’ve had some feedback on the new logo, most of it about the TextExpander menu icon in the menubar. Some people are passionately attached to the old menubar icon, so we could make that an option in the future.

A few weeks ago, I was perusing the North Coast Mac Users Group (NCMUG) website in advance of presentation Philip (SOMM co-founder) was scheduled to give. The site shows a great line-up of Mac luminaries speaking at their meetings, including fabulous photos of everyone – except Philip, who is at least as good-looking as any of the rest.

As the recently-hired marketing/PR person, I put “get publicity photos” on my to-do list, and asked Philip and Greg to send me some.

Here’s what I got: an excuse from Philip, and this from Greg:

Great publicity photo… if you’re auditioning for “Flipper 2: Return to Coral Key”.

I guess I’ll have to take my own photos. Watch this space….