Burning Pics to a Disc; Toast to the Rescue

Q: I returned from a trip with lots of photos I’d like to share in slideshow form. But I really don’t want to spend time fooling around creating a slideshow. What’s the quickest way to create a slideshow without a lot of editing or a learning curve?

A: If you have the time, iPhoto is the best choice. It does require a small learning curve, but its results are most impressive. If you would like to learn how, go here:

http://www.apple.com/support/ilife/tutorials/iphoto/ip4-1.html

However it sounds to me like you want a quick drag and drop, quickie method.

You’re best bet is the application Roxio’s Toast. Toast has been the preferred CD/DVD app for many years. It has a little known feature called “Photo Disc”.

First, make a new folder with all the pics you want in your slideshow. Make sure the pics are NOT nested in other folders. Review all the pics and confirm they are the correct orientation, that is, rotated right side up. (Use Apple’s Preview application to correct the orientation.)

Open Toast 9 or later. 

To make a Photo disc:

1. At the left side of the Toast window, click Data and choose Photo Disc.

2. Choose optional disc settings.

3. Add pictures to the disc by dragging and dropping them into the Content Area from your hard disk or the Photos section of the Media Browser.

4. Insert a blank, recordable CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Note: The Media Browser provides immediate access to photos in your iPhoto and Aperture libraries.

5. Click the red Record button, choose a recorder from the list, and configure recording options, such as Number of Copies.

5. Click Record to continue.

Toast displays a progress bar and status information as it records your disc.

To play back your images as a slideshow (using Mac OS X v10.4 or higher):

1. Insert your Photo disc into a Macintosh computer.

The disc folder opens.

2. Double-click the Slideshow icon to begin the slideshow.

Always Back Up and have your Mac maintained,

Steve

A Hard Drive Divided; Partitioning

Q: Steve, I’m having a new hard drive installed in my MacBook Pro. Since it’s a larger drive, a friend said I should partition the drive into two volumes. One volume would be for my normal system, applications and documents and another volume for a spare system to boot from should I have problems with my main volume. Someone else I consulted thought that was a bad idea but couldn’t explain why, at least in a way that made sense to me...

Can you shed some light on this?

A: In my opinion, taking a new drive and partitioning it is a bad idea. 

For those who don’t know what a partition is, it’s when you take a new drive (or wipe out a hard drive and restore it “data free” to its original state), then cut it up into virtual pieces. For example, you buy a 500Mb hard drive. Most of the time it’s partitioned as one drive; 500Mb. But you could cut it up in to two or more drives, a 250Mb partition, a 125Mb partition and a 125Mb partition. All three parts equal 500Mb. You would see 3 Hard drives on your desktop although you only have one hard drive inside your machine. You could do this, but why?

Note: Many PC’s are sold this way with a hidden “D”, “E” or “F” drive. It’s called a “recovery partition”, but note that a lot of computers today are sold with a smaller partition that has the operating system recovery on it.  Often this is in place of providing the recovery on another media like CD or DVD.  Often you are given the opportunity to make at least one copy of that media on CD or DVD as well.  These recovery partitions sometime show as another drive, or are sometimes hidden, and are usually four to eight gigabytes in size.

In my view, making another partition is another potential problem that can go wrong. Backing up to the same drive also is not a good idea. If the drive dies, then all the partitions are gone. You lose everything. Having a divided drive now requires double the maintenance and double the risk something could go wrong. Also you won’t have the full size of the drive you’ve bought.

So unless you’ve got a unique reason to partition a drive, I say “no”.

Snow Leopard (OS 10.6 ) is HERE!

From Neighbors Paper Issue 86, Sept 09

Surprise! OS 10.6 Snow Leopard has been released early—today, August 28! I am very excited about Snow Leopard, even though Apple is not heavily promoting its launch with pre-press, etc.

Snow Leopard is designed to make day-to-day tasks on your Mac easier, faster and more accessible. It delivers a wide range of enhancements, next-generation technologies, out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server, and new accessibility features. Snow Leopard is the most powerful and refined version of Mac OS X ever.

Our Favorite Features

Some of the most exciting new features and overall system enhancements in OS 10.6 Snow Leopard include:

64-bit support, the next big step for the Mac. All key system applications are now 64-bit so they can take advantage of all the memory in your Mac. Translation: Your applications will run faster...

Out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange. Mac OS X Snow Leopard delivers built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server, something even Windows PCs don’t have.

Smaller footprint. Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you—enough for about 1,750 more songs or a few thousand more photos.

The Finder has been completely rewritten using Cocoa to take advantage of the new technologies in Snow Leopard, including 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch. It’s more responsive from top to bottom, with snappier performance throughout the Finder.

Quicker Time Machine backup. Snow Leopard makes Time Machine up to 80 percent faster and reduces the time it takes to complete your initial backup to Time Capsule. (Time Capsule is Apple’s backup hard drive.)

Faster to wake up and shut down. Your Mac wakes from sleep up to twice as quickly when you have screen locking enabled. And shutting down is up to 80 percent faster.

QuickTime X: As the next generation of media players, it’s built on new core technologies and advances modern media and Internet standards.

More efficient file sharing.

Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models. All Mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads now support three- and four-finger gestures.

A new technology called Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage of multicore systems by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors.

Universal Access: Every Mac comes with built-in technologies designed to help people with disabilities experience it. Innovations in Snow Leopard advance accessibility even further..

How to Purchase and Upgrade to OS 10.6 Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard is an upgrade for Leopard users and requires a Mac computer (duh) with an Intel processor, 1GB of memory (though at least 2GB is highly recommended), 5GB of available disk space, and a DVD drive for installation.

If you’ve purchased a qualifying Mac or Xserve on or after June 8, 2009 that didn’t include Mac OS X Snow Leopard, you can upgrade to Snow Leopard for $9.95 exclusively from Apple via the Mac OS X Up-to-Date Program.

If you have OS 10.5 Leopard installed on a Mac purchased before June 8, 2009, you can upgrade to the Snow Leopard Single User Edition, on sale for $29.99.

If you have multiple Macs running OS 10.5 Leopard, you can upgrade to Snow Leopard with the Snow Leopard Family Pack. This can be installed on up to five Macs and is on sale for $49.99.

If you have Mac OS 10.4 Tiger or earlier, the only way to upgrade to Snow Leopard is with the Snow Leopard Mac Box Set. This includes OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, along with iWork ’09 and iLife ’09. Purchasing those separately would cost $289! See the Snow Leopard Mac Box Set on sale for $169.99.

Amazon.com has some great deals on Snow Leopard (last I saw it was $29 shipped) and also Best Buy had the upgrade for $25 with in store pickup. They were sold out so they shipped it for free...

Be sure to tune in next month about how I lost 3,000 pictures from my iPhoto library using the critically hailed “fail safe” back up utility called Time Machine. Yes even backing up isn’t fool proof. I’ll tell you how it happened and how you can prevent it.
Learn from my emotionally costly mistakes next month...