Wasted Continuum

Adobe has just released a beta of Lightroom 2.0. I’m a big fan of Lightroom. It completely streamlines my photography workflow when it comes to importing, organizing, processing and distributing. It’s an amazing piece of software. I have on many occassions sifted through a 50 plus shot photoshoot and was able to tag and reject the bad ones in around 20 minutes. It makes everything convenient. As a photographer, Lightroom is just a massive timesaver. It’s difficult to think of reasons why one should not use it.

The new features that Lightroom 2.0 is touting are localized corrections, improved organization tools, multiple monitor support, more printing functionality and 64-bit support. When Adobe was working on version 1.0 of Lightroom, they released the beta to the public too. It was a tremendous success and I’m really glad that they are doing it again for this release. I will definitely check out the 2.0 beta soon.

Download Lightroom 2.0 beta

WordPress v2.5 was released the other day. I have not had time to upgrade Wasted Continuum yet. I will probably upgrade this weekend at the latest. It’s looks like a lot of features have been added. Definitely a major update. I’m excited to play with the new features.

Download WordPress 2.5

I’ve been looking for a desktop blogging editor for a while now. I’ve lost a few posts using the online WordPress editor. The last time, I wrote a fairly extensive post only to find out that my connection was down and my progress was not saving. When I hit the publish button, I got a server connection error. When I went back a page, I lost everything I wrote since my last save which was only one sentence.

Being that I don’t want to repeat such an event, I decided to look for an application that allowed me to edit offline. The options that I found were MarsEdit and Ecto. After reading some reviews on both, MarsEdit looks more tempting. First of all, it looks prettier, very important. Second, it has a lot more features. Both apps are trialware. Ecto costs $17.95 while MarsEdit costs $29.95.

I’m liking the MarsEdit interface so far. The main blog window looks very much like Mail. Any Mac user should feel at home with it. One cool feature that I’m excited to try out soon is the Flickr integration. I should be able to insert my Flickr photos into my posts easily. I’ll try to give a more in-depth review when I put more use into it. I am writing this post in MarsEdit right now. We’ll see if this posts properly in a minute. I guess I’ll see if it does. If it doesn’t, you’d probably wouldn’t know it.

I finally had a little time today to connect my guitar to my new MacBook and mess with GarageBand. I realized something today. I’ve completely lost my rhythm. I couldn’t hold a steady beat if my life depended on it. I was much better before when I used to jam with other people. I just kind of suck now. I need to spend less time playing the guitar and more time practicing the guitar. GarageBand is a solid program. It doesn’t have a massive amount of features, but I was able to just connect my PodXT to it without any issues. I just need to get used to the interface a little. I’m actually more used to using Soundtrack Pro. I think GarageBand will do what I want for now which is to do some multi-track recording quickly and easily.

I’ve recently started using FeedDemon as my RSS aggregator since they starting offering it as a free app. They just released a new update. I’m liking it so far, but I’m still a little hesitant. It works great. I just have some minor annoyances with it. First off, I don’t like how folders don’t expand when you click on the name of it. You have to click on the little arrow next to it. Second, if the feed is really long, FeedDemon splits it into pages which is great. The thing that bugs me is that you have to go down to the bottom right corner and click on the little next button. It’s really small when you’re on a 1920 x 1200 desktop. There may be a keyboard shortcut for it, but I don’t see it or know of it. Last, it browses with IE. It’s not the biggest deal since I force it to open in Firefox when I click on a story.

Overall, I’m happy with FeedDemon, but there’s probably something better out there. Maybe I’ll give Google Reader a try. If I get too annoyed by FeedDemon, I’ll probably go back to using Sage, a Firefox Add-On.

Ok, I’m a few days late on this post, but my database server was down. There’s already a lot of coverage on everything that was announced at the keynote at MacWorld 2008 so I don’t need to go into details about everything. Here’s my quick take on the announcements. Continue Reading »