thomas fitzgerald.net

Since the iPad was announced pundits have been jumping at the chance to declare the Kindle dead or dying. Amazon themselves have reacted, perhaps preemptively by announcing an SDK for the kindle. Analysts have declared that the Kindle’s market share will dramatically drop and so on. The thing is though, I don’t quite understand why Amazon has to fear for its life because of the iPad. If anything, the iPad is a great opportunity for Amazon.

I got a text message from O2 today with some good news. If you’re an iPhone customer here in Ireland you can now enable tethering on your phone with O2. You’ll need to update to the latest version and also install the new carrier settings that come up. You’ll also need to sign up to a tethering add on, which ranges from €12.50 a month for 1gb of Data to €19.99 per month for 15gb allowance. While a little expensive, the prices are consistent with most other companies stand alone 3g modem rates here. More details are on the O2 website.

I’ve been playing around with the new adjustments options in Aperture 3 and I’m really impressed. Here’s an example. It’s a pretty bland image to start with.

Note the sky is completely burned out. The recovery slider would only bring it back in so far, but thanks to the new extended range curves adjustment I was able to recover much more of the sky. Here’s the final result after playing around for about half an hour:

I’ve only had a little time to play around with Aperture 3 (as I’m still recovering from a fairly serious illness) but I thought I’d post my first impressions. I had installed the trial version on my laptop and when the boxed version came in the post I put it on my main machine. I should point out that both are about two years old. My laptop is a core2duo 2.4ghz and my desktop is a 24″ iMac 2.4ghz. In no particular order then here are some thoughts on the software:

Credit where credit is due, Microsoft have done a good job with Windows Phone 7. It has to be one of the most original interfaces for a Phone I’ve ever seen. What’s more, they resisted the urge to blatantly copy the iPhone  like everyone else. It certainly looks a hell of a lot better than most of the Android Phones out there. While I’d never give up my iPhone I think Microsoft have taken a good step in the right direction. Of course by the time this is released, Apple will have released iPhone OS 4 and the goal posts will have moved again, but it’s good to see someone else thinking outside of the box for once.

And now for something completely different….

Aperture 3 is an amazing upgrade. People had begun to worry about the future of the software, as it was two years since the last version came out, but I can see now that they’ve been doing some major work under the hood. I feel silly for doubting Apple’s commitment to the product now. What I find interesting though is that some of the features Apple has chosen to highlight as part of the marketing bumph, namely places and faces, while understandable from a marketing point of view, are not the software’s greatest additions. They really have put a lot of thought into this release and it addresses pretty much all the concerns most people had about it. It more than bridges the gap with Lightroom. There are so many new features though that it can be difficult to get your head around all of them. So then, here are my top ten, in reverse order !

After a two year wait Apple has finally released a new version of Aperture. The release has over 200 new features and I’m still absorbing all the information, but it looks like a great upgrade. It addresses the two biggest concerns people had about the previous version, which were the lack of a curves editor and the lack of adjustment presets. Both of which it now has, but goes one step further by having an “extended range” curves tool which lets you work with the full range of raw data.