Geir's Blog - !hctiwS

!hctiwS - Update

[ geir ] 07:47, Wednesday, 28 December 2005

Thunderbird

How do I get Thunderbird to spell-check as I type? Seems like the obvious thing to do. Also, why won't it always update it's display when it gets new mail? I've noticed that I can see that I have an unread message in my Inbox in the account/folder tree, yet no messages in the inbox are bold. Compress the folder and boing! there it is! Sometimes it won't seem to admit there are new messages. If I close and open tbird, it then shows them.

Windows XP

Is it common to have the whole UI just freeze up? Sometimes, like when something is working hard - oh, like an installer (!) - the whole UI can be momentarily unresponsive. Can't alt-tab to other apps. I am using something called TaskSwitchXP so maybe we can blame it on that. I'll remove and try again.

Misc

What is good photo management software? I now have a Canon RebelXT and between the 8M pixel images and the fact that an SLR can shoot much faster than the canonical "digital point and shoot", we are generating a significant amount of image-bits. (At least comared to what we used to do... I think we took about 300 on Christmas day...) I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 and Picasa. Picasa is really fast, and very smart, but it doesn't feel quite the same wrt editing pictures. Adobe has a lot more features if you bother to look past the "consumer workflow" interface, but, boy howdy!, is it slow. I only have 1GB of RAM and of course, the World's Slowest Disk, but when sorting pictures to take for printing, my wife keeps asking "What's wrong with it? Why is it so slow?" And when she's at that stage w/ a computer, I've moved to the point where I'm seriously trying to decide if there's a better chance of making it into the pond when thrown from the master bedroom window when the laptop is open or closed.... I also get the heebie-jeebies when using it because it always wants to apply editing changes to the original photo. A friend recommended ACDSee. I'll give that as we're trying to get our photos organized for the year....

Another UI gripe - hitting escape in a dialog box should make that dialog go away if "Cancel" is an option, on any Windows program. Ok?

Nice Things To Say

On the upside, it's refreshing to have a change of interface. I've been working on the Mac for the last 5 or so years steadily as my main machine, and it's always refreshing to go to something new.

TrackBack

(You can tell I'm on a vacation 'till end of the year as I have too many time to comment on all your latest blog entries :-) ). It's funny how your hctiws coincided more or less with my switch. Yes, Esc for "Cancel" should indeed work everywhere, agreed. If it doesn't, the program is way lame. I OTOH can't yet get used to the fact that on Mac I can't quickly navigate menus and dialog box items universally using underlined letters as keyboard shortcuts (like, if I have a "Tools" menu and an "Appearance" item in it, I can't get to it quickly using Alt+T,A. If you think it's not a big deal, then let me tell you that having a contact list with comparable quantities of Hungarians and non-Hungarians quickly made me wish I could access the "Swap First/Last Name" in the "Card" menu in the Address Book when I was bulk-populating it using, say, Atl+C,S.

ACDSee is nice for organizing, but isn't actually too strong on editing - well, last time I saw it, that is, could have been improved since. I used it until Picasa came out, which I found really fit for my needs. I find iPhoto quite similar to it now on the Mac, so you might decide to stick with Picasa as it should be a more-or-less familiar territory.

Finally, for unusual activities with an IBM ThinkPad (like, tossing it in a pond), go see http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/hardware/soa/Photo_gallery_Wacky_laptop_tricks/0,39023759,39218626,00.htm

--Attila Szegedi, December 28, 2005 12:34 PM