Over the last year or so, I have been slowly scanning my father’s large collection of photographs. He was a bit of a stickler for collecting his negatives in an orderly fashion so I am able to work my way through numbered folders of negatives, each of which generally contains the content of a single roll of film. This post covers my journey to find software and process that yield the best and most efficient results.
It is a much maligned feature of macOS but there are times when LaunchPad are useful. Such as when I want to scan my apps for recent additions that warrant a review. Sure, I can just open the Applications folder, but LaunchPad is a much easier presentation.
But, it does have its issues: for one, the inability to delete non-Mac App Store apps. This is a quick post on a method I found that allows you to do just that.
I’m a recent convert to Affinity Photo, so when a special offer came up for Affinity Designer, I leapt at the chance. I’ve not done much more than mucking around to learn Designer, but while doing so I figured it’d be a great tool for designing the type of strong, bold icon I need for my (planned) iOS apps.
That got me thinking about the standard icon grid of golden ratios and the all important squircle corners. Having used a Photoshop template in the past, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted. I ended up basing it off an SVG design from German software company Kodira.
I was recently taking part in a discussion about the relative merits of different software packages in a photography forum when one of the other Mac users said he managed his images in Aperture (for now) and then manually moved selected photos to the new Photos app for sharing.
Given Aperture is on death row, I have long since moved to Lightroom and I wondered whether I could automate the moving of selected images from Lightroom to Photos. It only took me 10 minutes and one extra piece of software.
Further to my post on installing fonts on iOS devices, I came across a slight problem when attempting to include the ever popular Century Gothic font in my font payload. When I located the font it was in a Font Suitcase file which the Apple Configurator didn’t want to know about. I spent some time trying to work out a way around this and eventually hit on a simple method using only an OS X command and a simple piece of free software.
While I was mucking around last night trying, again, to figure out the much talked about “per app VPN” that iOS 7 supposedly offers, I stumbled across a rather glorious discovery. You can install any TrueType or OpenType font on your iOS devices and use those fonts in iWork across iOS and OS X. Hallelujah!
Despite an idea of going paperless – eventually – a current reality is that my wife pays the bills and right now most of them arrive on paper. So one of the bills that arrives electronically usually gets printed in order for it to get paid and I got to thinking – can I use the same, going-paperless techniques to automatically print a document? Turns out yes, I can. It’s pretty easy, too. When you know how!