sdmsol.com

View results

(Credit:
Apple)

Apple’s Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

Correcting lens problems is a real issue, though, and Lightroom has a chromatic aberration correction I find very useful. It lets you fix some of the magenta, red, yellow, and blue fringes that show up in high-contrast areas, especially near the corners of images, and it also can alleviate the purple fringing overall. Aperture lacks this.

I like Lightroom’s targeted adjustment tool (TAT), which lets you adjust the tone curve as well as color saturation and luminance by clicking on the relevant portion of the image directly and dragging the mouse up and down. And Adobe was smart to actually employ user testing to determine which colors are individually adjustable–orange has more psychological importance than most software, including Aperture, gives it. And I’m a big fan of tone-curve adjustments, though I sometimes wish Lightroom divided the curve up into five or six subranges instead of four.

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software to purchase, and not just because of the necessary investments of time and money. Unlike applications such as Photoshop, which can easily be substituted or used in conjunction with other software, Lightroom and Aperture are equipped to extend their tentacles to manage your library of images.

News.com Poll Which software is better: Lightroom or Aperture?
With Aperture 2.0, Apple is back in the game when it comes to editing and
cataloging raw images. But Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom works on Windows and
has been evolving faster. Which do you think is better?

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

In essence, that means the software can be a gatekeeper to your data–not the original images, but the editing settings, titles, captions, tags, and organizational structure. For me, having a rich, searchable catalog is definitely worth it, but tread carefully before you commit, because it’ll be difficult to extricate yourself.

(Credit:
Adobe Systems)

Speaking of metadata, though, one option I like better with Lightroom is the ability to assign five colors to photos (but where’s the keyboard shortcut for purple?). The one- to five-star ratings that both packages offer is dandy, but I use colors to classify photos in other ways.

Apple Aperture
Adobe Lightroom

Apple was first to enter the higher-end photo software market with Aperture in 2005, but the software languished at the same time Adobe Systems released and rapidly updated Photoshop Lightroom over 2007. But now Apple is back in the game with Aperture 2.0, which reproduces some features in Lightroom, boosts performance, and has a price tag $100 less than Lightroom’s $300.

Performance is better with Aperture 2.0 (it was faster on the dual-core iMac I played with than Aperture 1.5 was on a quad-core
Mac Pro I used for Aperture 1.5), and a particularly nice feature is the ability to work in a preview mode that employs only JPEGs–either the images built into the raw image or an Aperture-rendered version. You can’t edit with it, but it’s good enough at least for the first pass through a photo shoot to delete the duds and add tags and titles.

Pros and cons
Both packages are solid overall, but there are some features I preferred with one or the other. Here’s how I see things stacking up–be warned, though, that I’ve used Lightroom for countless hours but by comparison only dabbled with Aperture 2.0.

One major edge Lightroom has had is much earlier support of the raw image files of new cameras. Apple said it was held back by an overhaul of its raw-processing engine and that things should now go more swiftly, but it’ll take real work to win back the hearts of disgruntled Nikon D300 owners. In the meantime, Apple now can make use of Adobe Systems’ Digital Negative (DNG) format as an intermediate step to handle raw files Adobe supports and Apple doesn’t.

But I think Aperture makes smart design decisions with a few interface options. Its movable panel isn’t very obtrusive, and now in 2.0 you can toggle it easily between editing, tagging, and file management modes. For me, editing and adding metadata such as titles, captions, and tags are much closer operations than the big divide between Lightroom’s develop and library modules would suggest, and I don’t like switching back and forth between editing and tagging.

One unknown is the plug-in future of both applications. Right now Lightroom has a software development kit for export options, and there’s work of unknown scope to come. Apple said it’s future SDK will permit editing plug-ins, too, which Adobe says is a difficult challenge. On the other hand, Adobe’s already got some editing plug-ins of a sort, with the ability to import custom settings for all manner of adjustment options.

Something Aperture does better is vignetting, the darkened corners that once were a lens deficiency but now have caught on (altogether too widely in my opinion) as an effect to focus attention on the center of an image. Lightroom can fix lens vignetting or add it to a full image, but if you want to apply the effect to a cropped version of the photo, only Aperture offers that mechanism.

On to editing. For sophistication, I’d give the edge to Adobe, though to be fair I haven’t looked in detail at important aspects of Aperture, namely noise reduction and edge sharpening. I sometimes find those wanting in Lightroom.

Let’s start with the interface. I like Lightroom’s pull-out panels–as many as four–that can be deployed or tucked away as needed. Most of the time I only have zero, one, or two showing.

The good news is that there’s some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

Looking beyond editing, my expertise thins out because I don’t do much in the way of exporting photos to Web galleries or printing at home. But I will note one Aperture advantage: Apple expanded its book-export options with 2.0, and Lightroom has no answer so far. That’s a drag for wedding photographers and amateurs (like me) who want to whip up a quick birthday present for the grandparents.

Of course, one of the biggest advantages Lightroom has is a Windows version, and that alone is likely to ensure its market dominance over Apple. And where Apple has a lot going on with iPods and iPhones, image editing is Adobe’s bread and butter. Should those externalities be factors, too? Weigh in.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

It looks to me like Aperture has a better search interface, especially for complicated operations that combine multiple parameters such as keywords, date ranges, and the handy photos-I-actually-edited filter. I’ve sometimes gotten bogged down swimming through Lightroom search. And I love the smart folders feature, which automatically updates a folder that’s been set to watch for a particular attribute. For example, with Lightroom, I would love for the software to automatically add a photo with a specific recurring tag to a particular collection.

On his blog, Brockmeier said he wants to use his position to attract Windows users to Linux. “I’m…going to be focusing my attention on getting the word out about OpenSuse to more potential users, and trying to bring in more new users to OpenSuse Linux. And by ‘new users,’ I don’t mean people switching from another Linux distro–if someone is using another distro and is happy with Linux, that’s great. I want to reach the masses of Windows users who are looking for a better computing platform, and find ways to address their needs with Linux.”

OpenSuse is a free Linux version Novell uses to test out new features it puts into its supported product, Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server. Brockmeier, who has written about open-source software for many technical publications in recent years, will work on OpenSuse marketing, expanding its developer and user base, and on relaying community feedback to Novell, the Waltham, Mass.-based company said.

Brockmeier also said he wants to emulate what Max Spevack has done in helping to make Red Hat’s Fedora project more independent from Red Hat.

(Spevack has just left his role as Fedora project leader, with Paul Frields taking over in January.)

Novell has hired Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier to be community manager of its OpenSuse Linux project, the company said Monday.

Jobs, 54, has been the subject of heated speculation regarding his health since last June’s Worldwide Developers Conference, when he appeared to have lost a great deal of weight. At the time, Apple insisted that Jobs’ health was a private matter but revealed in early January that its chief executive was suffering from a hormone imbalance that was impeding his body’s ability to absorb certain proteins.

More headlines

Buffett’s criticism–which joins a growing chorus–resonates more than others perhaps since he has dual roles as the face of his company as well as an investor in others. In this case, he’s clearly taking the side of the investors. A material fact, as he references, is information necessary to make an informed decision.

•  Apple iPhone 3GS: The sum ($) of its parts

The surgery, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed with Jobs’ approval by the hospital where the procedure occurred. Methodist University Hospital added that Jobs received the liver because he was “the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available.”

Free Windows 7 won’t last forever Just a reminder that you only have until August 15 to download the free release candidate version. Also, life is going to start getting annoying for those still using the
Windows 7 beta.

•  Windows 7 pricing, upgrade programs set

•  More on Windows 7 upgrades

Facebook wants you to do it live Site adds new bells and whistles into the “stream”–extra privacy controls and embeddable streaming status-update widgets for developers and site owners.
•  Facebook’s load-balancing act by the numbers
•  New Facebook blog: We can hack into your profile

•  Facebook, Twitter coming to Vizio TVs

•  Facebook movie pinning down director, cast

Although Apple has chosen to remain quiet about the health of CEO Steve Jobs, a prominent investor criticized the handling of the situation. In an interview on CNBC, Berkshire Hathaway CEO and iconic investor Warren Buffett said Apple should have disclosed the seriousness of Jobs’ illness, describing it as a “material fact” for shareholders of the company.

Survey: Teens ’sext’ and post personal info A new study finds that nearly two-thirds of teens post personal information online, a third are “engaged” in cyberbullying, and 20 percent admit to sexting.
•  Road test shows texting slows reaction time

•  Kids cheating with tech, but are schools cheating kids?

Tech giants deny helping Iran eavesdrop A Nokia-Siemens joint venture denies allegations that it provided Internet wiretapping gear to Iran, leaving many to wonder who’s aiding the Internet snoops. Or are their Net restrictions entirely homemade?

Also of note

•  Microsoft dials Hohm to cut home energy use

•  Will more competition finally mean better TV?

•  Google Voice takes a step toward launch

•  News sites swamped following Michael Jackson’s death

U.S. asks China to drop censoring-software requirement for PCs Trade representative, Commerce Sec. in a letter to Chinese Ministry of Commerce say the requirement may violate World Trade Organization rules.

•  Green Dam exploit in the wild

•  Expert: China’s Green Dam software is unsafe

Photos: Cracking open the iPhone 3G S In his first public statement since early this year, Apple’s CEO said more than 1 million iPhone 3GS smartphones were sold in the three days since the new model hit the stores last week. In addition, 6 million people have downloaded the new
iPhone OS 3.0 update in the five days since its release.

Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple for the past six months, received a liver transplant at a hospital in Memphis, Tenn., two months ago. Earlier this year, Apple’s CEO was reported to be relocating from California to Tennessee, which has a shorter waiting list for patients seeking organs.

Still in flux are ads on the service. You won’t find many floating around right now, but the company is experimenting with what Raman calls non-annoying formats like small overlays that self-remove. It’s also trying to steer clear of pre and post-roll ads to keep users from skipping the video entirely.

Howcast is a great new how-to video service that launched back in early February. This morning I met with co-creator Sanjay Raman to talk about what they’ve been up to in those two months. The site already has a wonderful, and fast growing collection of videos that teach you how to do all manner of things in just a few minutes, and has some really great features just around the corner.

The second component to Howcast is the video player, which has been designed like a DVD player with chapter markers to separate the steps. Users can skip back and forth between each steps, and read little tool tips that gives them a bird’s-eye view of what they’re about to see without actually having to watch it. Raman walked me through how content creators add and edit these markers in the video, and the process is dead simple. You can play around with it yourself with the video embedded in this post.

Part of the site’s success is due to the novel approach to the somewhat tired medium of how-to videos. People can still throw up their 5-minute shaky cam footage of how to plug in speaker cables, or cut up onions the right way, but Howcast is doing something very different from the rest by building itself up as a platform for fledgling self-proclaimed experts or videographers who want to put together slick, professional looking videos that don’t suck. It’s also got some great video player technology that blows the competition away.

In addition to video content, Howcast has an integrated wiki. Right now there are more wiki posts than videos, but that’s because they’re far simpler to make. Every video starts out as a Wiki, and that the ones that go into production are fact-checked in house by a Howcast staff member and linked up to the video post. One big thing that differs from Quamut, which I checked out last week, is that these wiki guides are printer friendly, so you can take them with you when it’s time for semi-complex tasks.

Going forward Raman alluded to moving away from Final Cut and giving people a way to create videos using alternate tools. My guess is that it’s a Web based video editing tool the likes of JumpCut or EyeSpot. Such a feature would let people create content without the need to shell out a few thousand dollars on hardware and software. Raman said the feature was coming in the “near future.”

I think this service is really top-notch. I’ve been a subscriber of the iTunes feed for several weeks now, and the bite-sized format is wonderful. Verizon subscribers can also find the clips on their Vcast phones or FiOS home pages on their computer. The clips also make their way to YouTube and MySpace where they’ve been featured. Today there’s also a selection of how-tos for April Fool’s pranks. If you’re looking to do some workplace mischief, this is definitely worth checking out.

The crux of the service revolves around the directors program. Howcast provides reasonably credentialed enthusiasts with a zip file full of goodies to create how-to shorts that follow a certain format. Included are overlays, bumpers, templates for Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and voiceovers. There’s also a growing repository of over 100 tracks to use as background music. Directors get paid $50 a pop for the videos they create, and have the option for further revenue sharing if their clip gets over 40,000 views. Raman says no video has yet to reach that height yet, but that they’d be offering something similar to YouTube with the creators getting a fair percentage cut.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Last February we took our first trip to the GSMA World Congress. While in Barcelona we saw a gallery of new snazzy cell phones that put to shame most anything we see in the United States. And while we were excited to see them, we knew that it would be a long time before they arrived in the United States. Fortunately, that time has come, as the first GSMA model, the Sony Ericsson W980, arrived on our desk this week.

catch some tunes with the Sony Ericsson W980

Like other Walkman phones before it, the Sony Ericsson W980 promises a full media player, but it offers a unique design that we hadn’t yet seen. With at least one notable exception, Sony Ericsson has done a decent job with its Walkman phones (the recent Sony Ericsson W760a won the CNET Editors’ Choice Award), so we put it through its paces to see how it would fare. The design turned out to be both interesting and intuitive, and the varied feature set largely lived up to our expectations. Performance was also satisfactory, even if some calls sounded a tad harsh and the phone was slow to start up. Check out our full Sony Ericsson W980 review and the W980 slide show.

Browse to the folder holding your Office templates in the “Import from” text box, choose a destination folder for the templates (you can also import your Office files), and click Next again. Do the same for Excel and PowerPoint on the next two screens, review the files that will be converted on the following screen, and click Convert.

For example, you may find that you don’t have the same selection of fonts available in Writer as you did in Word, nor will you have access to the templates you used in Office. This doesn’t mean you have to do without, though. There are plenty of free resources available that let you use OpenOffice without sacrificing functionality.

Convert your templates
To import Office templates to OpenOffice’s Writer, Calc, and Impress programs, open one of the programs, and click File > Wizards > Document Converter. Select Microsoft Office, choose all three Office applications, and click Next.

Add productivity-enhancing extensions
You’ll find dozens of useful add-ons for OpenOffice applications on Sun Microsystems’ Extensions page (the link leads to the most popular extensions).

The templates will now be available when you click File > New > Templates and Documents, and select the appropriate application. Note that the templates may not look and act exactly as they did in Office, and PowerPoint templates will likely have to be renamed because the conversion changes all their file names to “PowerPoint Presentation.”

For more on making the switch to OpenOffice, see Solveig Haugland’s great article, which includes links to OpenOffice training sites and other resources (scroll a little past the middle of this long page to find them).

Find free fonts
If you stick with such tried-and-true fonts as Times New Roman, Arial, Garamond, Courier New, and Calibri, you probably won’t need to add any types to Writer’s roster. People who rely on a wider range of typefaces may find their favorites missing, however. To supplement the fonts built into OpenOffice, visit 1001 Free Fonts, HighFonts.com, or Mike’s Sketchpad. Place the new fonts in the C:Windows\Fonts folder to make them accessible in OpenOffice applications.

(Credit:
OpenOffice.org)

One of my favorites is Andre Schanbel’s Template Changer, which adds an “Assign new” option to the File > Templates menu. This lets you assign a template to the currently open file. Also, Sun offers the Professional Template Pack that includes cover pages, presentation backgrounds, certificates, business letter templates, and personal-finance templates.

Convert your Microsoft Office templates to OpenOffice via the Document Converter wizard.

It’s much easier to notice the similarities between the programs in the free OpenOffice.org suite and their
Microsoft Office counterparts than to see their differences. Unfortunately, it’s the differences that can slow you down as you make the switch from Word to Writer, Excel to Calc, and PowerPoint to Impress.

Now choose Tools > Options, click Paths in the left pane under OpenOffice, select Templates in the right window, click Edit > Add, navigate to the folder you placed the templates in, and click OK three times.

When the conversion completes, you’ll see the files that were converted. Click Close to return to the OpenOffice program.

Tomorrow: Perform any operation on your PC without using your mouse.

AMD is starting to right its ship after a disastrous 2007, with the fixed versions of its quad-core Barcelona and Phenom processors about to ship, a well-received integrated graphics chipset already out in the market, and the pending debut of its first designed-for-mobile notebook chip. But it’s had to scramble to get to this point, and the effort to correct the mistakes made on Barcelona and Phenom might have caused problems in other parts of AMD’s business.

The Inquirer said AMD is about to miss its quarterly earnings targets as well, but the AMD representative likewise declined to address that statement. AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has promised to get the company back to break-even by the second half of the year, and continued losses might force the company’s board of directors into making a move.

AMD denied Thursday that it has started laying off people amid an economic downturn, but it declined to comment on whether it was about to do so.

A report from The Inquirer Wednesday said that AMD has already started cutting workers from its payroll, with plans to shed 5 percent of its workforce across the board. An AMD representative denied that any cuts have taken place as of Thursday morning, but when asked if cuts were impending, declined to comment on “rumors and speculation.”

On the advertising front, Brooks said Microsoft’s pitches will start to get more concrete in about a month, centering on the notion that “Windows stands for living on your own terms.”

Microsoft is setting up store-within-a-store locations at major retailers like Circuit City and Best Buy, a concept that Apple employed at both Best Buy and CompUSA. Microsoft is also hiring between 100 and 200 “Windows Gurus”–Microsoft employees that will be positioned at retail stores to help customers learn more about the operating system. Like Apple’s Geniuses, Windows Gurus won’t be paid commissions. Instead, Brooks said, they will be compensated in large part based on customer satisfaction.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

But Microsoft’s Brad Brooks looks at it this way: Even if people aren’t talking kindly about the new Windows ad, at least people are talking about Windows.

The software maker also has a new engineering team that Brooks said is working “hand in glove” with computer makers to reduce the time it takes Windows PCs to boot, wake from sleep and to initially get up and running out of the box. Systems that have gone through Microsoft’s new process will start showing up this fall from all the major computer makers and get highlighted on Microsoft’s Web site. Microsoft considered having some sort of logo to highlight the machines that got the extra attention, but opted against such a move, Brooks said. The company has also revamped its Windows.com site.

Brooks acknowledges it will take more than just ads to improve Windows’ image. The key, he said, are the substantive changes the company is making, such as trying to improve the experience for buying Windows PCs as well as getting machines up and running. Here, Microsoft appears to be taking a page or two from Apple’s playbook.

Microsoft’s efforts come at a critical time for the software maker. It has seen its still-dominant market share slip amid strong gains by Apple. At the same time, the ever increasing power of Web applications has increased the threat from Linux-based machines, seen most poignantly with the appeal of cheap, low-end portable computers like Asus’ Eee PC.

“You decide what color of PC you are going to have,” Brooks said. “You decide what services you are going to use. That was the vision that we had behind our entire model over two decades ago.”

Microsoft has set up this "retail experience center" at its Redmond HQ as a means to learn more about how people shop for Windows PCs.

It’s been about 18 hours since Microsoft started running its Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ad and the negative comments continue to pour in.

“We don’t get to come in after being silent in the marketplace for so long and just start saying, hey, here’s what Windows is, and here’s what it stands for, and here’s the specific products we want you to try.”

If you want more from CNET News’ Ina Fried, check out her Twitter feed at twitter.com/inafried.

“It’s got a lot of people talking and that’s exactly what we wanted,” said Brooks, Microsoft’s vice president of consumer marketing for Windows. For too long, he said, Microsoft has been silent. And as a result, the only dialogue has come from competitors, namely Apple.

As for the rationale behind the teaser ad, Brooks said it would have been a mistake, after being silent for so long, for Microsoft to have just come out swinging with a bunch of shop talk.

Although the ads are unlikely to mention Apple by name, they will target some of the
Mac’s limitations and highlight the breadth and choice that Windows allows.

INSERT, the Information Security Research Team, has created a proof of concept that exploits the “trust hierarchy” that exists between mail service providers. By exploiting a flaw in the way Google forwards messages, a spammer can send thousands of bulk e-mails through Google’s SMTP service, bypassing Google’s 500-address bulk e-mail limit and identity fraud protections.

INSERT’s report notes that no extraordinary Internet expertise is necessary to exploit the flaw:

A “serious security flaw” in Gmail turns Google’s e-mail service into a spamming machine, according to a recent security report.

In this regard, this document presents a vulnerability report and a proof-of-concept attack that demonstrate how anyone with no special Internet access privileges other than being able to connect to SMTP (TCP port 25) and HTTP (TCP port 80) servers is able to exploit a single Gmail account in order to be granted nearly unrestricted access to Google’s massive whitelisted SMTP relay infrastructure.

The report notes that with the rising volume of spam, e-mail providers have turned to whitelists and blacklists to help root out IP addresses of known spammers. Because Gmail falls into the trusted-whitelist category, messages are allowed “carte blanche” to bypass spam filtering.

Google has offered no official comment on the report.

This isn’t the first Google tool to appeal to spammers. In April, my colleague Elinor Mills reported that spammers were now using Google Calendar.

So the new Socialtext will let users subscribe to wiki pages and to the activity stream of other users, to see when files are edited, and when tasks are accepting and finishing. The product also displays comments left on wiki pages. But the feature that lets users ask free-form questions to their workgroup is missing.

You can't have it yet.

(Credit:
Socialtext)

Mayfield told me Socialtext will eventually release a standalone, desktop version of Signals that lets users “Twitter” to their co-workers. A private beta of the app is entering testing now.

I’m not sure Socialtext’s delay is due to a lag in development or if it’s strategic. I suspect the latter. Mayfield, who speaks in somewhat Delphic riddles regarding the nature of work, says, “The updates box (in Socialtext Signals) is less about trying to have conversations. It’s about surfacing conversations that people are having in workspaces.”

Related Webware reviews:

Yammer: A ‘Twitter for the enterprise’

Present.ly is smarter than Yammer

Socialcast is FriendFeed for your business

Mayfield says that just giving users a Twitter clone doesn’t solve the dual problems of information overload on the one hand, and personal isolation at work on the other. He believes that the most important communication between workers in a company is what they are doing. “When I work,” Mayfield says, “I’m sharing knowledge as a byproduct of getting work done. In the enterprise, what someone does is more important than what they say.”

These functions, plus a revised and streamlined user interface, will be embedded in the Socialtext suite, along with a new feature that records a running stream of who’s doing what and where on the system, which users can subscribe to from their profile pages or their dashboards. It’s almost, but not quite, Socialtext’s own Twitter for enterprise customers. Missing is the capability for users to post free-form, Twitter-like items into the stream. That function is coming later, according to Ross Mayfield, chairman, president, and co-founder of Socialtext.

Socialtext 3.0 gets a social network and a quasi-Twitter function.

What’s the hold-up? Mayfield showed me a prototype business nanoblog called Socialtext Signals, as if to prove that the company could make such an app. (It didn’t take long, he admitted). But he said of the app, “We’re going to throw it away”–the code, that is–and start over to build a more robust business nanoblog that offers what people in a workplace really need.

Enterprise social software company Socialtext is releasing Socialtext 3.0, with the features we previewed here in April: the corporate social network Socialtext People, and a revised home page for business users, Socialtext Dashboard.

I’m glad to see a contemporary groupware company like Socialtext taking the longer view of the Twitter concept than upstarts like Yammer and Present.ly. In this space, I’ve been a fan of Socialcast more than those apps, because it’s based on the larger vision of integrating information from numerous group applications. That’s what Socialtext is doing, too, and it’s the right thing for business. “The end state for this kind of application is a connected collaboration platform, not standalone microblogging, which is relatively shallow,” Mayfield said. But I still believe that the company should hustle up and get its Twitter-alike product into the hands of its customers. Not everyone appreciates the long view.