Capture One 3.7.8 Brings Leopard Compatibility
OSX Leopard was released in October, 2007. It has lots of new features, some of which are very useful to photographers. Capture One 3.7.8 brings full Leopard compatibility to Phase One shooters. As with any change to your workflow, it is strongly suggested that you set up a dry run; it is never a good idea to have an important job or shoot as your first test.
Here are several of the features in Leopard most likely to help photographers.
Time Machine [Automatic Incremental Backups with a Space Themed User-Interface]
There are only two kinds of data: data that is backed up, and data that hasn’t been lost yet. Time Machine is a very simple to use backup solution. It has limitations, and it is not unique, but if you don’t have a backup solution yet, or aren’t happy with the simplicity of your current solution, Time Machine may be for you.
Time Machine will make a Backup your entire hard drive (or if you wish, only selected folders) to an external hard drive. Any external hard drive that is connected to a Mac running 10.5 can be used, even over a network. An automatic backup will be created once an hour for the most recent 24 hours, once a day for the most recent week, and once a week after that. Once the backup drive is full, the oldest backup will be deleted. If you are using a laptop and are only plugged into an external hard drive some of the time, Time Machine smartly puts backups in a queue to be executed the next time you are connected to the external hard drive.
The backups made by Time Machine are incremental, so only files that have changed are included in the next backup. This also means that you can recover not only deleted files, but files which were overwritten. Recovery of backed up files is built into the operating system, both in the finder and in selected applications such as Mail (i.e. if you delete an important email, you can “go back in time” within Mail and find it). It is reasonable to speculate that programs such as Aperture and Lightroom will incorporate this technology into custom interfaces that make sense for photographers.
This will not be a replacement for off-line-off-site archiving which protects against catastrophic failures (see our article on archiving). Also, it appears Time Machine can only be used to back up one drive at a time. What Time Machine will allow you to do is to easily make a backup of your working hard drive which will guard against single drive failure as well as accidental deletion/overwrite, thereby reducing down-time and data loss.
iChat Presentations & Screen Sharing
iChat already lets you video conference with up to three people. Leopard will add the ability to present photos, videos, PDFs, and other documents across an iChat session. This turns your iChat window into a virtual “projector screen” which the rest of the participants in the chat can see. This will be very useful for presenting images to art directors who are at another location. It remains to be seen how high of resolution and at what quality the image will be transmitted, so it may not entirely replace the practice of sending a 100% JPG by email/FTP.
A related feature is the ability to share your screen and/or control of your computer with someone via iChat. This will be useful for tech support; if both you and the person supporting you have Leopard, you will be able to show them your screen and/or allow them to remotely control your Mac. Similar solutions have been available both on Mac and PC before, but this is the first time the simplicity and price will allow it to come into the mainstream. We have also tested screen sharing as a means of communicating with an art director in a remote location and have found it effective as long as your internet connection is fast enough.
Boot Camp
For those who need to use Windows, Boot Camp will be included by default with Leopard (bring your own copy of Windows). I still recommend Parallels, which lets you run both OSX and Windows at the same time, unless you use Windows extensively.
.Mac Syncing
Currently .Mac Syncing can be used to sync iCal and Address Book. Leopards .Mac syncing will add System Preferences, Application Preferences, Dock Items, and Widgets. Basically, the look and feel of your computer can be synced across any macs you use. If Application Preference syncing works as advertised this could go a long way to reducing the frustration of using Photoshop, Capture One, and other programs on multiple macs; stay tuned for an evaluation.
Mail
The Program Mail, the default email client in OSX, is faster. Those with average sized archives of messages won’t notice much of a difference, but those who built up massive archives from years of heavy email traffic will find Mail significantly faster in Leopard.
No More Network Hangs
A bug-fix can be a feature if the bug was annoying enough! OSX 10.4 has a big problem working with network discs which 10.5 fixes. In 10.4 if you connect to a computer across the network (including iDisk) and something unexpectedly interrupts the connection OSX will hang for several minutes. 10.5 will instead, gracefully disconnect just as you would expect it to. For photographers who use a network to backup or share their files, this will lead to many less screaming and broken keyboards.