This site is the online companion to my book/DVD, "The Macintosh iLife '05", published by Peachpit Press and Avondale Media. If you like this site, you'll love the book and its nearly three-hour DVD-Video disc. Learn more. Have news, tips, comments, or links? Send them along! How to contact me. Get an iLife. Get your own copy of "The Macintosh iLife '05". Patronize your local bookstore or buy from Amazon for just $23.09 (34 percent off). Learn more about the book and DVD. Find out what all the buzz is about: view samples of this beautiful book and watch QuickTime excerpts from the DVD. Upcoming Appearances June 21. Apple Store, San Francisco, 6 pm June 25. Northeast Ohio Apple Corps, 9 am July 23. iLife seminar, Santa Rosa, CA Photo gallery. I love the Flickr photo sharing service; here are some recent shots. (Newsreader users: To subscribe to my photostream, drag this link into your newsreader.)

Export those iPhoto 5 Slide Shows Faster (and Yeah, that's a Bug)

Forrest Corbett is bummed. Over at Macintouch, he complains that "On my PowerBook G4 500, a slideshow of 150 800x600 images takes nearly an hour to export. In iPhoto 3, it only took a few minutes."

Setting aside the fact that there was no iPhoto 3, we can help Forrest through the trees. The problem deals with the exact same topic I addressed a while ago: the two different flavors of iPhoto slide show.

When you want to create fancy -- cinematic, Apple calls it -- slide show, use the Slideshow button at the bottom of the iPhoto window. But note that exporting this kind of slide show takes more time, since your Mac must render a lot of video frames.

When you want to create and export a basic slide show -- with no custom Ken Burns moves and with the same transition and duration between each shots -- don't use the Slideshow button. Instead, simply toss your photos into an album, then saunter up to the Share menu and choose Export.

This lets you export the photos using the techniques that earlier iPhoto versions provided.

Forrest goes on: "Setting the slideshow to be the same length as the music, sometimes results in one photo being drawn out for a matter of minutes while the rest are just a few seconds."

That's a bug. In iPhoto 5.0.1, the "fit slideshow to music" option doesn't work. It's that simple. Hopefully we'll see an update that addresses this.

That fresh-baked book smell. It ships to the printer next week: the newest, biggest edition of the original digital hub book and its companion instructional DVD (now over 2.5 hours, with 45 minutes on iPhoto 5 alone). And Amazon is still offering a whopping 34 percent discount. Pre-order The Macintosh iLife '05 for $21.

The Vinyl Word Covers The Latest in Disc Technology

Got vinyl? I do, and as soon as I ship my book to the printer (soon! real soon!), I'm going to resume digitizing those bad boys.

This morning, I stumbled on a site that may serve as a great reference: The Vinyl Word, a column that runs on SoundStage!, a site for high-end audio lunatics -- er, buffs.

The latest installment of The Vinyl Word features a review of a $2500 turntable that's more beautiful than any CD player could ever be. The Thorens TD 2010 features a nine-pound -- nine pounds! -- turntable platter, among its many other magnificent attributes.

I'll take two!

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Really old stuff (before February 2003)

©2002-2005 by Jim Heid.