It appears in Preview that there is GPS metadata support. In fact it says:

“Get real information from your photos. If your image has embedded GPS metadata, Preview will show you exactly where that perfect photo was taken. Open the Image inspector and select GPS. Preview pinpoints the location where you took the photo on a world map. From there you can even open the GPS location in Google Maps.”

Fantastic! I just hope they have iPhoto sorted so when editing photos it no longer ‘chews-up’ added GPS meta-data.

Get the GPS units fired up, and those photos tagged.

For geotagging of photos why not try: PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor from MMISoftware.

MMISoftware GPS Store | MMISoftware Camera Store

Well, MMISoftware will be testing all its programs against the final build of Mac OS X 10.5 as soon as possible. If any updates of our programs are required they will be released as soon as possible as a free update to all users.

And if you are wondering what all the fuss is about, check out the 300+ new features in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

I was some what surprised by this – and you may ask why was I searching Amazon for MMISoftware? Well, I wasn’t…

On the blog pages I have Amazon’s Omakase Links installed. This piece of Javascript scans the page for words, and then automatically links specific words to products in Amazon. Earlier today I was surprised to see MMISoftware linking to a product…. I was curious….

It turns out that the book in question is iPodpedia: The Ultimate iPod and iTunes Resource.

And MMISoftware is mentioned on page 431:

“… com) Tunes Menu searches the Web for online music stores that have the selected CD for sale (Mac, free, www.mmisoftware.co.uk/pages/tunes) …”

Unfortunately Tunes Menu is no longer supported (and is no longer available) at MMISoftware. Tunes Menu was a small menu bar add-on program that allowed searching of a number of CD stores in specific countries. The program was written when the iTunes Store only worked in the US, and there were no stores in other countries. The idea was, you listened to a song in the iTunes Store and then with one click searched a series of CD stores in your country for that CD and bought it on-line.

The program is no longer available, and the reasons for this are:

1. iTunes Store is now available in all the countries in which Tunes Menu worked, therefore why would anyone use Tunes Menu?
2. Support for Tunes Menu was becoming increasingly difficult as it used a number of ‘web-services’ to find CDs from many different suppliers and the suppliers kept changing how the information had to be requested and how the results were delivered!
3. Although Tunes Menu received a lot of downloads, it didn’t make much money and this tailed off as Apple rolled out iTunes Stores across the world. So basically the program became a train on resources.

Anyway, it was nice to see MMISoftware get a mention in a book…

A new version of Wordpress is out, bringing it up to version 2.2. The list of new features was quite interesting, but what caught my eye was:

What was that? A hook to support WYSIWYG editing of blog entries using Safari? I know that webkit (the ‘code’ behind Safari and the maps in PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor) can support ‘WYSIWYG editing’ of web-pages (although it is very flakey), but as far as I know this is not available in Safari… Maybe this will be added to the next version of Safari in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard? Interesting….

Now, if WYSIWYG support is coming to Safari then this could be good news for my web development work. At present I am Coda, which at version 1.0 is a good start for a new program, but lacks WYSIWYG editing… May be I will get WYSIWYG editing in Coda when 10.5 comes out in October?

Read about Wordpress 2.2 – details

Basically, it takes two clicks to view the meta-data (exif) of a photo.

1. Click the photo’s icon to select it.
2. Press command-I (that is, get info for the file)
3. Read the info (you may need to click on the small triangle next to ‘More info’ – that is your second click)

Here are some examples. The following photo was taken in Les Deux Alpes, France:

Les Deux Alpes, France
(if you save this photo to your desktop and then open it with Preview you can read more information stored in the by using the ‘Get Info’ command in Preview’s Tools menu.)

Before the file was processed with PhotoGPSEditor or PhotoInfoEditor the above ‘get info’ method would show:

Before addition of data – note that ‘get info’ for the file shows only the camera details.

After processing the file with PhotoGPSEditor or PhotoInfoEditor and using the ‘built-in’ mapping functions of the programs, the saved file now shows:

After the addition of the meta-data – the data was added by positioning a marker on a map at the location the photo was taken, and then the program ‘added’ Les Deux Alpes, France

The great thing about this is once the data is added it stays associated with the photo, and is searchable via Spotlight.

The Apple Tip: link

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download:

Recently I had a ‘backup’ failure, we didn’t lose any data, but our back-up strategy failed.

Basically what happened was a new external drive was bought (we actually used the Apple Store as they had drives at a good price with a free ‘24 hour delivery’), and plugged in for a routine back-up.

However, the backup failed. Odd…. Tried again, same failure. Copy error. Copy error on a brand new disk. So what gives?

Well, it turns out that the LaCie drives that Apple sells are formatted for DOS, and every time the back-up reached 3 GB plus the backup would fail! Weird. Why would Apple sell DOS formatted drives? How many other customers are experiencing that problem? Very annoying….

Anyway, the problem was easy to fix. Fired up ‘Disk Utility’ and reformatted the drive for ‘Mac OS Extended’, and now everything works….

So, if you have a new external drive and are lovingly backing up all the photos you have geotagged, or added meta-data to, with PhotoInfoEditor or PhotoGPSEditor, and you keep getting a ‘copy failure’, you might want to check the format of the external drive….

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download:

Back on the 14th March (read post) I posted on how the Sony GPS CS1 was working with Mac OS X 10.4.9 on Intel based Macs, but not with PowerPPC Macs.

Well, the problem appears to be with IOUSBMassStorageClass in PPC (it users an older version that in 10.4.9 for Intels), and the guys over at macgpscs1.blogspot are looking for a developer to compile the Intel IOUSBMassStorageClass for PPC Macs and test it. Unfortunately this is beyond my skills so I can’t help. If you are a developer, and want to give it a go, you can find the source code over at http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/.

I have also had some people ask me if the setup went as easily as I claimed in A BT Home Hub and a Mac, yes, I can assure you it did, I was very surprised. In the Mac world we are used to plugging things in to our computers and everything working, however, as soon as we cross over to ‘peripherals’ that are not Mac orientated, and which have been produced assuming everyone uses Windows, things can go wrong. I have lost count of the number of times I have battled with wireless hubs from Macs (and on some times had to resort to using a Windows machine) in an attempt to configure them so they connect to the net, and/or allow Macs to connect, but with the BT Home Hub it just worked. We had one hitch, which was sorted out by the BT help-line in a matter of minutes, and the annoying problem of ‘registering domains’ (see earlier post for details and a solution using UK2.net) but the rest was easy…

The hub has now been working for just short of 2 months and it has been great. The client has experienced none of the annoying ‘internet drop-outs’ experienced when using the previous provider, and the hub gives a good strong signal.

All blog posts on the BT Home hub can be seen at here.

P.S. Since the initial report of the ‘blaster virus’ (see earlier post) it has not occurred again.

The Apple statement reads:

“iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]“

Bad news… a delay because of the iPhone…. Guess I won’t wait to get the new Mac (I was waiting for 10.5 and therefore get it pre-installed).

PhotoInfoEditor is free. It is a fully functional program with no time or ‘registration’ limited features. However, support for PhotoInfoEditor through donations, has been very poor (the same was true for PhotoGPSEditor – see earlier post). Therefore it was decided that a new ‘nag’ screen should be added to the program. This decision was not taken lightly.

The new ‘nag’ screen, unlike the previous version in the program (which was clearly not have the desired effect), does not have a ‘Do not show again’ setting (it, along with the ’service’ buttons on the main view only appear after the program has been used a number of times).

The PhotoInfoEditor ‘nag’ screen – to make it go away just make a donation (via PayPal) or use TrialPay

Now, the ‘nag’ screen can be made to vanish, and not appear again, by making a donation (via PayPal) or by using services, or purchasing goods at TrialPay (see earlier post on TrialPay).

How does this work? Well, if you do make a donation (via PayPal) or use TrialPay then MMISoftware will send you an ‘activation code’ that will stop the ‘nag’ screen displaying when you launch the program. As an added bonus you will also get a nice warm feeling as a result of helping to support the development of the program!

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download: