Thud, another one falls

[Cantisani]

Thanks for your help. This is clearly an oversight on Apple’s part, I mean, it’s absurd one can’t organize existing albums and drop them into a folder, but at least now I know this can’t be done as of today. Let’s hope they fix this in iPadOS 16.

[Andy Hewitt]

Yes, I agree. Funny that I've used Photos so much, yet never really came across this issue. I guess I used my iMac more than I realised for the management of the library.

I would recommend buying that book though, they do make a good selection of them for various Apple products.

https://www.takecontrolbooks.com

[Cantisani]

Yes, I agree. Funny that I've used Photos so much, yet never really came across this issue. I guess I used my iMac more than I realised for the management of the library.

I would recommend buying that book though, they do make a good selection of them for various Apple products.

https://www.takecontrolbooks.com

Thanks for the suggestion.

It’s not very often that I find myself not knowing how to do things on my Apple devices. Most of the time they’re extremely easy to use and whenever I need to do something I haven’t done before, things work as I expect them to so I succeed the first time I try. This was clearly not the case this time. I’ve been an Apple user since the Apple IIe times..

But for example, the first time I tried to do some ShortCuts programming, I found that I needed to learn a bit of RegEx. I guess that falls into the “power user” category and books like these could help (I don’t know if “take control” sell a shortcuts book but if they do that will be great).

[Cantisani]

BTW this is the Shortcut I made on that occasion. This will take a set of images on a given folder (jpg and/or png) and rename them with an index like this:

Name_0001
Name_0002
Name_0003

This is helpful for me when clients send me a bunch of photos that I then use to create a video slideshow and the photos need to be ordered from older to newer. Since my video editing app can’t order the photos by date, I rename them in one go with this shortcut.

You can see the RegEx expression in there (in the Replace command)

[Andy Hewitt]

I've been an Apple user since the 'Performa' models (I started with a 5200), but was using Atari 8bit and 16bit since 1984 and various computers at work since 1980.

But, I still find those book useful, even for the odd snippets of info, sometimes it's just a matter of "oh, I hadn't thought of doing it that way!".

Yes, they do have a Shortcuts book - which I don't own yet, and might well do so. Although I might wait until the UKP to Dollar is a little more favourable .

[Cantisani]

Wow, the Performa days. I used to have a Performa LC 475 and later a Performa 6400 lol..

They really sucked. I mean, they were great in a time when Windows PCs were even worse, but I remember that the Performa 6400 was very expensive, but I wanted to edit video in it, and it came with an Avid Cinema card. It was awful but I still loved the thing. That mac (the 6400) was only sold in North America. Good old days.

[Andy Hewitt]

Yes, the Performa 5200 (that was the all-in-one version prior to the iMac) was not a great introduction to the world of Mac, I must admit. I remember reading the details on LowEndMac later, only to find they'd built the Performas using non-syncing clock speeds on all of the components, so everything bottled-necked each other. The screen was terrible too, and looked like it was a fish bowl

[Cantisani]

Those were the dark days of Apple, after they got rid of Steve Jobs. They completely lost their mojo and were producing shit. It was only after he was back as CEO that the company could bounce back to deliver great stuff.

[Andy Hewitt]

Yes, Gil Amelio was a bit of a nightmare. Although it took a while for Jobs to really make a great improvement. I followed that up with an Indigo iMac (the G3 400Mhz "DV" model that had dual USB ports nonetheless ). It was supplied with OS 9.0.4, which was also pretty awful, and crashed a lot. This was just before OSX arrived. Although that machine did serve me well, and other family members for a number of years.

I actually found that all variants of OSX were, in reality, much better than 'Classic' OS was in it's later stages - OS7 was plain awful (where I started using Mac OS), and OS9 was generally not good either. Although I found OS8.1 was pretty OK, and could run stable for long periods.

I see so many whingers over each new OS release now, but most issues with each release are usually minor, and short lived, and nothing like as bad as we've had in the past. As you say, Windows has usually been an even worse option, and they have more often taken backwards steps (XP to Vista comes to mind).

Cheers.

[Cantisani]

I believe my first “Steve Jobs 2nd period” mac at home was an eMac, the white ones meant for education, probably right before the transition to OS X. I also had a few PowerBooks. True, OS 7 was awful, and OS 9 too. Even OS X was not that great, I mean it was, but it ran very slowly initially. The Motorola G3 chips were not up to the challenge. The G4 was good though.

My last G4 mac, was a PowerMac G4 tower with two G4 chips, two internal hard drives and so on. By that time I had a small video production company and we had 3 of these machines. We ran Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, etc. Those were great computers that delivered every time.

It surely took sometime for Steve to get the company back in shape, but indeed he did a great job.

[Cantisani]

Wow.. I also had one of these
I can’t believe I didn’t remember all these machines. Thanks for the trip back in time lol.

[Andy Hewitt]

I bought one of those second hand a few years after for a family member. But after the iMac I was in a position to buy a PowerMac G5 dual processor. That was a phenomenal beast. I loved the build with the aluminium case, and it sounded like a Boeing 747 if you got all of the fans running . I even added an upgraded GPU I bought from OWC.

Since then I’ve been using a Mini G4, MacBook Intel, and my iMac 27” (still going ok at 9 years old).

Over the years I’ve bought many different models for my family, from an old Quadra, to early PowerMacs (7100 I think it was), and even one or two ‘Books. I used to enjoy all that playing around with setting them up, and even pulling them apart to add new HDDs and RAM etc.

I still fancy buying an old machine, just to run Classic OS, I had a couple of games I really miss still (Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, remember that?).

[Cantisani]

Never played that game.. doesn’t sound familiar!

Aah the G5 sliver towers.. THAT’S what we had at the Video Production company I had, not G4’s. My memory fails lol.. those were the beasts that delivered every time, for every job. We did a lot of TV commercials and corporate videos with them.

I wish I had an older mac, just for the fun and nostalgia.

[Cantisani]

Here’s one simple 3D and motion graphics commercial we did with the G5s. I made the 3D buckets and UFO in Electric Image Animation System. It included distributed rendering, so I could render on all 3 machines at the same time.

[Cantisani]

If it’s not showing, click here

https://cantisani.smugmug.com/CGI/Vario ... -LKFC4XL/A

[Andy Hewitt]

Nicely done, but don't ask me to watch that again