The new Mail.app in Leopard has come out of it’s childhood and into adolescence. Even with just using it for 3 days now, I am noticing a huge difference in my productivity.

I’ve touched on a few things I really enjoyed about Mail.app in a previous post on Leopard. But after some further use and fiddling around in the program my enjoyment of it has increased ten-fold.

E-mail: This system hasn’t changed much. Aside from stationary and a photo browser. But why change something that already works great.

Notes: I haven’t stopped using this feature of Mail.app. The ability to quickly jot down notes and send them to people. Organize thoughts for an event. Or just plain right jot down notes from a meeting. This was one feature that Apple could have botched up bad, but they seemed to have made a great simple add-on.

To-Do’s: While this feature isn’t new to the Mac OS, it is new in Mail.app. There are a couple of ways to input a to-do. One way is to simply go to the “To-Do” tab and make a new to-do. The other is if someone sends you an email and they need you to do specific things, you can right click on the email and select “New To-Do”. This will create a new to-do within the email and add it to your list of to-do’s.

RSS: The addition of RSS feeds into Mail.app is a very useful addition to the program. Since you already use the app. to read e-mails, why not have it as your RSS reader as well? The layout of the feeds is exactly the same as the email part and is very similar as well to NetNewsWire. You can organize the feeds into folders for easier organization. Change how long it takes for Mail.app to update the feeds, etc. A strong, simple addition that I find very useful.

To be honest, these additions in mail have taken me to the point of deleting my GTD apps. from my computer. I have vouched for the simpler method, the minimalist method of GTD with the new mail. Sorry OmniFocus, but your gone.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X 10.5, Mail.app, Productivity

Here we have it, the new finalized website. With the portfolio switched over to the new server and the blog assembled, this shall be my new home for my photography. Not much has changed besides the domain name and the blog software. Now there’s just two things to remember:

Photos: jordannielsen.com Blog: jordannielsen.com/blog

Technorati Tags: Photography, Website, Redesign

It’s been done, the unthinkable. I upgraded my OS on the day of release! I was expecting the worst, backing up everything, double checking things, etc. I cautiously inserted the DVD install disk into the drive and committed to the install.One hour later and it’s done. I waited for it to reboot back into the new Leopard. And to my surprise it booted into a OS that felt different but a workspace that was exactly the same. The Leopard upgrade never even wiped my system as per usual.So after that initial shock of realizing that I now had all afternoon to dig into the OS, I have had a chance to mess with some of my most anticipated programs - mail, ical and ichat.

Mail: There were some much needed upgrades to this program. The most obvious for myself was the addition of RSS feeds, To-do’s and Notes. With these additions I hope to remove myself from 3rd party apps for organization, note taking and feed reading.

iCal: Opening up this program was a shocker! It felt useful and simplistic to use! Goodbye are the days of a clunky UI and terrible controls. It’s smooth, finished and integrates amazingly with Mail. The To-do’s that are created in iCal immediately go to the To-do’s in mail and vise versa. Finally some much needed integration of this program.

iChat: This program has disappointed me. I was expected a simpler polished iChat that felt useful. But all they seemed to have done is revamped the UI and that’s it.

As I was writing this I had a conversation with a fellow Qwanoes employee who reminded me of the screen share part of iChat. A feature which I have yet to use. This could be huge and possibly the best part to iChat.

There we have it, my first hour impressions of Leopard. I am sure this will change, but as for now, I’m really enjoying the snappier system! What have your experiences of Leopard been? Do you have any gripes as of yet? Any programs not run properly?

Where oh where do we start on this topic. This evening someone jokingly brought up the topic of me doing “birth photography” when they have their next child. I was on the floor dry heaving taken back by the comment. Who wouldn’t?

But that got me thinking. Do people actually hire photographers to take pictures of their babies being born? So I went to Google and typed in “birth photography services”. To my surprise this is quite the big business! But I digress…

I couldn’t do this type of photography. I think it takes a person of the female persuasion to even considering doing something like this. This is territory that I stay far away from. So in closing, no, I do not do this type of photography

Technorati Tags:Photography, Birth

I find that I all to often praise Lightroom for all the great things it does. Often featuring it’s wonderful abilities in tutorials, but today will be a different post. We will be focusing on five “beefs” that I have with Lightroom 1.2.1. Folder OrganizationI find that I all to often am getting frustrated with the lack of folder organization there is in Lightroom. The simplicity for a user that shoots a couple hundred images every couple of months is great, but if you shoot thousands of images every week the the folder system tends to fall over on itself from complexity.I feel that Lightroom should start moving in the direction of Aperture when it comes to folder organization.2. Export QualityDo you ever export an image from Lightroom and wonder why there are these weird “halo” lines, even when you export at 100% quality! This is one of my biggest beefs. Lightroom needs to be able to export a better quality image then it is now. An export from Photoshop will not yield this bad quality, so why should Lightroom?3. Catalogue SystemMaybe it’s just me, but the new catalogue system that was but in place in 1.1 has been the bane of my existence. I have had roughly 4 versions of my “master” catalogue go corrupt because of Lightroom crashing. Makes me feel very fortunate that they have a back-up catalogue feature that can run every time Lightroom opens.The quality and functionality of the catalogues need to improve. It is off to a decent start, but not for the mainstream. A feeling I keep coming back to is that they should set in place a “Master” catalogue and then off that catalogue you can create “Sub” catalogues. A “Sub” would be used for on location style shots, organizing smaller number of images for one specific client, etc.4. Bridge vs. LightroomI really am starting to feel the crunch to move straight over to Bridge and stay there. It is offering just as many features if not more then Lightroom is at the moment. Adobe needs to separate these products enough to keep people purchasing it. At the moment the only thing holding me into Lightroom is the promise of a great product to come…someday.5. Vignetting a Cropped ImageThis has to be one of my pet peeves. Sometimes certain images look better in a different crop then how you shot them. So you go into the develop module, tweak the crop and continue editing. Later you want to add a vignette. Slowing moving the sliders over to bring in the right vignette you soon realize that the vignette is only showing on one side of you image. This perplexes you! Being the smart human that you are and a great problem solver, you try and figure out what happened.After a couple minutes of frustration you start to realize that the Lightroom vignette tool will always vignette the entire image, not just the cropped on. Thus if you crop an image to the far left, you will only get a vignette on the left side and none on the right of the cropped image. “Oh the joys!”, you exclaim!Please Adobe, fix this!This was from a small list of things I hope gets fixed or tweaked in the coming patches / months. Time will tell if Adobe really keeps Lightroom a frontrunner.

Searching the web for who knows what this eve and I come across this amazing website filled with thousands of desktops wallpapers. Not only does it have amazing wallpapers but it also has some amazing tutorials.

Vladstudio.com is the website. It’s interesting looking at and experiencing different techniques within photoshop. Some of this stuff looks so easy after reading a tutorial.

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Taking a hard right in left field. Last night I asked my roommate if he would draw a picture of what “post modernism” meant to him. I was pleasantly surprised by what he drew. As a background on my roommate, he is from Brazil and is currently working at Qwanoes as a general maintenance person.

Can you draw post modernity?

After a couple of delays and not releasing any news on the new upgrade to OS X, Apple has finally announced that it will be released on October 26th! For us Canadians, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it will be $129 in price, the same as the American pricing.

Who’s going to be the bleeding edge techie this time round?

Edit: Ok maybe I was the bleeding edge techie this round…again! Just pre-ordered Leopard along with a new keyboard.

I have sent off my 30D nearly a month ago to get it repaired. Finally just last week I received a repair status and a quote as to how much it costs. Unfortunately for me, they seem to charge for writing up a letter…Not to happy about this. Considering there are things that need to get fixed that all they seem to be doing it looking to see if it’s all in the box.Ok, rant over.

Recently I have been messing around with vector desktops and creating some great ones. I think I have come up with 4 that you will really enjoy. Check them out!

I will definitely credit brusheezy.com with the great selection of brushes to create these desktops.

What an amazing trip we just had with the Kaleo students. We went for a 3 day surf trip to Tofino, BC. Unfortunately the weather did not work well in our favor so we did not get much surfing in, but we did get lots of site seeing in. I grabbed the waterproof bag before we headed out so I came back with some fun surfing pictures as well.

The second day of the trip we got to experience and watch 20-30′ waves come crashing into the shore line around the Ucluelet lighthouse and the infamous “blowhole”. What a site to see! More photos to come…

While surfing the net for some Photoshop tutorial website I came across this amazing website called PSDTuts. It seems to be a fairly new site, but don’t let that fool you. If you have ever wanted to spruce up a photo to make it into a desktop background, this website has some amazing tutorials on how to do just that.

I highly recommend this site if you are getting into some high quality design work for your business logo or just want to know this jazz. I’m very impressed with the quality of the work and the thoroughness of the tutorials.

It’s been a while, a long while since I last did a Lightroom tutorial so today you are about to experience a new tutorial. This specific tut. (I did that cause it sounds like something else hehe) will deal with a feature that is similar to the export plug-ins in Aperture but are setup in a different way.The first step to creating a post pro export action is to find a program that you want to export to. For this example let us use the Flickr Uploadr program for Mac. You’ll find the program in the Applications folder. Once found, right click on the app. and go to the menu option that says “Make Alias” and click. You’ll notice that you now have a duplicate of the icon named “Flickr Uploadr Alias”. Now is the fun part, finding where to put this alias so it shows up in the export window of Lightroom.

You will find the export actions folder in the Lightroom folder hidden in a special place. That special place is as follows: user > library > application support > adobe > lightroom > export actions. Once you have moved the alias to this specific spot you will now notice that when you go back to Lightroom it shows up in the pop-down menu on the post pro export actions menu.Now you know how to create custom export actions in Lightroom. If you are wondering what programs work with the export actions, almost any program will work that opens an image file (photoshop, mail, camino/safari/firefox, etc.). Creating many export action alias’ will speed up your export workflow to the point of wondering how you ever worked without them!

After 5 months of planning and brainstorming, the plans have come to a head with reality. The all new redesigned digitalexplorer.ca is live! With a sleek version of Fluid Galleries behind the hood, and Typepad still running the blog. Please feel free to head over and check out what is new.