Most operating systems include a number of built in applications, Apple’s OSX is no exception. Some of these are ok while some like iPhoto, Garage Band and iTunes are truly great examples of applications that showcase OSX.
The articles here are about those built in applications.
If you take a lot of digital photos, you know how challenging it can be to keep them organized. iPhoto, a free photo library application is included with Mac OSX. It does a great job helping you keep your library organized.
In iPhoto 9, Apple introduced a new featured called Faces which tries to identify and tag people in your pictures. With a little bit of training, it does this very well.
In this short video, Apple introduces Faces and shows you how you can start using it to track the people you love in your photos.
If you have a portable media player that isn’t an iPod, you know how frustrating it can be if you own a Mac. Apple has done a great job creating an iTunes, iTunes Music Store ecosystem. This is great if you have an iPod or iPhone but it is really frustrating for the millions of other people who own Blackberrys, PSP, Android and other devices.
Now, new software is availalble from a company called doubleTwist which will let you use your devices on your Mac, in iTunes.
A quick video demonstration of it’s capabilities are below.
The software was developed by Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon). He is the same guy who cracked the DVD copy protection scheme. If anyone can figure out the interoperability problem, it’s him.
iTunes 9 has added the ability to share recommendations to your Twitter and Facebook social graphs. This is handy if you come across a cool song that you want to tell your friends about.
In this brief video tutorial you are shown a demonstration on how this feature works.
People have had a love hate relationship with iTunes since it’s inception. If you own an iPod you are pretty much tethered to using iTunes. If it didn’t have features you wanted too bad.
One feature that was missing for years is the ability to share files among multiple computers on your machine. Let me explain the scenario. If you and your wife have a Mac or in my case, you have three Macs in your house you may want to share songs on your iTunes library with her and vice-versa. To do this you had to share the appropriate music folders on the network, find the file, copy it to the new machine and import it into iTunes. Not an easy process.
With iTunes 9, Apple has finally offered a feature that should have been there since version 1.0, the ability to easily sync files between computers on your home network. This feature called Home Sharing is super easy to setup as you will see in this video from engadget.
