Some of you know that in a past life, I was one of the faithful Linux zealots And to this day, I still like Linux alot for what it can do and the possibilities. Not that you will ever get my Mac from my cold dead fingers, you wont. But in that life, I wrote and self published a book on using Linux for network security. I had been a published author before with Syngress and some freelance stuff but this was the first time I took a book from concept to published form all on my own. I did the writing, the editing with my wife’s help, the screen captures, layout, style and final production to a PDF proof. I then used a company called “lulu.com” (started in part by one of the founders of Red Hat) to provide my book as a “Print on Demand” or POD book. The entire process took me over six months of hard work but I learned alot about publishing along the way. The book is still available from Lulu but in all truth, it’s a bit dated now and I really dont have the motivation to bring it up to current standards.

Now, as a vet of self publishing and also someone who has done several picture books on my Mac using Apple and MyPublisher, I thought it was a good time to put some thoughts down as I embark on yet another publishing adventure using Blurb who another internet based publisher for aspiring authors. Each of these sites has a different audience in mind but I will hit the highlights. And there are other sites to be sure, but these are the sites I have personally used.

The picture books you can make from iPhoto are ok, not great, not bad but just ok. They do what needs to be done for alot of people which is given their vacation pictures, family snaps and the odd event a nice way to be presented. The print quality will never match LIFE or National Geographic but it’s better than most home inkjets and they have a nice cover. But the iPhoto software is, shall we be kind and just say limited.

MyPublisher which I used in the Windows world before I went over to the light side was a step up. Nicer layouts, better covers but they used the same printers and I have read where they will not confirm or deny they are the printers for Apple’s iPhoto books. If you put them side by side which I have done, there is very little to separate one from the other. And MyPublisher is not known for being Mac-friendly, they finally got around to getting a Mac client released and surprise, instead of a real application like their Windows version, it was this BS plugin for iPhoto that offered about 1/4 of the capabilities of their Windows product.

Blurb is some ways is a much more Mac friendly world. They offer a real application called “Booksmart” that is very easy to use and now has iPhoto integration and Flickr integration which worked very well. The layouts are professional but not as “fun” or scrapbookie as the Apple/MyPublisher versions. But to do a portfolio or a very elegant big sized picture book, Blurb is the winner hands down. They even have a bookstore where folks that have made a book will sell them to you or anyone else that might be interested in their trip photos or art. Yes, some folks scan or digitize their paper art and print a book of it, just like the big boys and girls. The buyers could be family who want a nice book of wedding photos, someone may have done some really nice trip photos or it might be an interesting photo essay. There are other photobook sites like Picaboo but they are windows only and Shutterfly which does their books online so they are platform agnostic.

With any site, yo can always make your own cool pages by using software like Photoshop, iScrapbook or Photoprinto and print off the pages as PDFs. Then by using a full bleed page, you can have a cool page without having to use the crummy templates. This is just one trick to work around some stupid limits of these software packages. Why can I not have custom templates? Every editor lets me have templates, Photoshop will do templates and yet, these book publishers have a small canned selection of marginal templates and leave us to suffer in mediocrity. So we work around it

To really get your money out of these services, you have to have a camera that can take a decent picture of at least 2.1 megapixels (like my old Nikon 950) for small images like 3×4 and if you are very lucky, you might get a 5×7 but most times the software will reject the low res shots for the full page prints due to the use of 300 dpi (dots per inch) printing. Most cameras shoot at 72 dpi so when you crank up the dpi to 300, the “size” of the image shrinks. I shot my first books on a 8 megapixel Sony 828 and my current camera is a Nikon D80 which shoots at 10 megapixals. Even at 10mp, sometimes after cropping, the software will whine on a full page print about not enough resolution. So you can use some software like SizeFixer which can upsize without screwing up your image. Photoshop can upsize to a degree but it really doesn’t work well for anything of size. I used SizeFixer to upsize a image that could print at 300 dpi to 8×10 and took it to a 24×20 at 300 dpi without any noticeable degrading of the image.

Right now I am having great fun working with the new VMware Fusion beta with a technology called “Unity”. In direct comparison to Parallels, VMware is the winner in my book for several reasons. Unity is much more polished than Coherence in Parallels is. For example, I want to use IE Explorer in a seamless window. No sweat in VMware, just start it up and then click on Unity. Presto, there is a IE on my desktop in seamless format and not a VM session to be seen. Click on it and tell it you want to load on start up and OSX will load and start up Windows for you and then present you with IE. Even something as simple as sharing a USB device in Parallels is problematic with the infamous “device is busy” error. In VMware, you have all the USB widgets lined up on the bottom and you select which one you want to use in the VMware session, no mess, no fuss. Did I mention speed? Even in debug beta mode, VMware is significantly faster than Parallels is.

I just spent two hours connected to my office using the Cisco VPN client on OSX and using Outlook via the VMware Fusion OSX product. Outstanding performance with a pig like Outlook running. I created a new mail box and sync’ed it up which took about 30 minutes but it worked with all 3,000 messages accounted and present. I ran Outlook as a seamless window at the same time I had IE running. My preferred choice of virtual desktop manager which is “YouControl: Desktops” works well Fusion. The snapshot technology is ok, I wish it would let me have multiple levels like VMware workstation will but still, having anything at all is good. I also wish it had an easy way to clone off the virtual system from within VMware.

-UPDATE-

I just installed VMware Fusion on a 1.6Ghz Intel Mini/2Gig RAM and I have to say I am impressed all over again. The install went flawless even though I had already installed a slightly older version of the beta. VMware found the old one and upgraded it without problem. And it did not screw with my existing Windows image. I worked a bit with the full screen today. Works great, completely full screen and it puts the top most menu bar into a “hidden” format so that you just have to mouse over it to get it back. And my virtual desktops work great with the full screen AND it adjusts the screen size properly. Lets be honest, the Mini while cute, really suffers from a lack of video ram and power but in this application, you would never know it. Now, I am not trying games or high res graphics, just plain old business apps which work fine. Everyone in the office was very impressed with the floating screens using Unity. For a beta product, VMWare has really turned up the heat on Parallels to HIGH. The shared folders work very well, even when I have mounted it to my SAN using CIFS. Parallels has always had issues on my Mini trying to keep the local shared folders mounted and it ALWAYS whines about the Intel chip’s virtualization not being set right. Either VMware found a way around the problem or they just dont care because it has never once complained about it. I have not yet tried to see if VMware supports a real disk partition like Parallels does but I just dont have the need for that aspect. My networking works well and it solid, I was able to shift from NAT to bridged without a reboot and a simple ipconfig /release and /renew got my new IP address in Windows without any fuss. It uses my OSX VPN tunnels without batting an eye and the only app that seems to be “Sketchy” in seamless mode is Microsoft’s RDP which is not a big deal since I use the X-Windows version anyways. The sketchy comment comes from the slightly ragged handling of the screen updates for it, the app itself worked fine.

I just completed a new article for Macinstruct site but since they are in the middle of re-making a goodly portion of their site, I have posted my article here for the time being. The article describes a way to recycle pictures or images that normally would be tossed due to technical flaws or they just do not look good. This type of article has been written before but not to my knowledge has someone written it using iPhoto as the tool set. Normally, the authors use something expensive like Photoshop or Aperture. But in my piece called Making Art Using iPhoto, I use the lowly iPhoto software to really dress up a below average image into something that you could be proud of.

I also wrote the article using the newest version of Neo OpenOffice for OSX which is the same basic word processor I used to write my last book. The newest OO is very nice and they are getting the aqua interface to work well with the OO application unlike some of the earlier versions which were a half breed of OSX Aqua and X-Windows.

I also have been using a web based photography training website called “Web Photo School” and I have found useful enough to even give a gift subscription to my brother who is a novice at photography. They offer several free lessons of decent quality and the price for all the lessons is reasonable (under 80 bucks). My only gripe is that they push a single brand of equipment but product placement is a small price to pay for decent lessons on things like using studio flash, portrait shots, large product shoots(I just used this in real life) and more. A second cool site for photography is called “TableTopStudio.com” and they offer a myrid of lessons and ideas on how to shoot small objects like jewelry, glassware etc using flash and lights. They also use the lessons to push their own products but their lessons are free and the information is accurate despite the brandname focus.

I have become addicted to several podcasts on photoshop and photography. I have seen quite a few BAD podcasts but there are some real gems. One of my current favs comes from Germany and is called “Tips from the Top” and can be found on iTunes or their website which really needs some help in spite of the cool podcast. There is the “Russell Brown Show” with tips for Photoshop again on iTunes. A third is called “Photoshop Quick Tips”. For the podcaster, go get “Inside Home Recording” which is full of podcsating tips, equipment reviews and more. Very useful site for anyone with an audio bent.

With the news of AppleTV now supporting You Tube I got very excited as there are several free videos on Final Cut Pro, Avid and Photoshop that I would like to see in a higher quality and I HOPE that Apple will do during the re-encoding that I keep hearing about. A sample on Final Cut Pro can be found here at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myPR5CHbJfw