I decided to stick with JPG when shooting and found that perhaps this might have been one time shooting RAW would have been worth it. Getting the white balance right in there was a case of checking in each different room as there’s just about every light source imaginable going on – fluorescent-style panels and tungsten is everywhere, and daylight pours through the glass ceiling in the courtyard and stairwells. Getting them home, I wanted to change the white balance on a bunch of them so some these have had some Levels and Curves tweaks just to get them looking sort of okay. I think a few of them would take really well to further processing but here’s my ‘raw-ish’ favourites.

For the last few months I’ve almost exclusively been turning to the fantastic Hipstamatic to tart up my iPhone photos and wrote a wee appraisal of it a few months ago. Since then the creators have released a second photo app called Swankolab which I played with for a few days and was going to write about. I ended up not bothering in the end as I didn’t really enjoy using it.

Briefly, Swankolab has a very attractive interface designed around a darkroom, with you combining squirts of developing fluid into a tray that your chosen photo is ‘dipped’ in to create unique effects, and the whole process unfolds with amusing animation of the chemicals pouring into the tray and the print sloshing around as it develops.

For me, immediacy is key with iPhone photo tweaking. Where Hipstamatic is pretty snappy, I found Swankolab fussy, and the processing itself very sluggish on my 3G (when I upgraded to the iPhone 4 the first app I tested was Swankolab and it was a little faster but not much). The animations and lengthy processing began to grate, I could never really remember what effect each ‘chemical’ had and the sheer depth of combinations ended up being daunting rather than inspirational.

It’s a beautiful app and potentially a lot of fun so long as you have a bit of patience. Sadly I didn’t – however, all of this sets up what I like about graf’s PictureShow (App Store link)

PictureShow has had a recent update to version 2. I never tried the original, but I found some references to it online and this update appears to have been quite the bumper pack of new features.

The presentation feels very much inspired by Hipstamatic, the icon and interface sharing a love for old school camera design. Processed prints slide onto the screen Polaroid-style over a classy black leathery background bearing the logo. It applies effects to both photo library images as well as those taken in-app (although there is no stylised viewfinder a la Hipstamatic) and almost all the effects are of the ‘toy camera’ ilk, featuring colour filters and Holga- and Lomo-alikes as well as some that play with cropping and faked multiple exposures (although these aren’t particularly good, more on this later).

The options available include 24 basic image filters, 20 frame styles, the ability to add text in a number of fonts and sizes, a range of light leak and grunge effects which add considerable character to your images, and individual red, green, blue, brightness and contrast controls that allow you to tweak the filter presets. There’s also an option to add either the date or your name to certain frames in addition to the text option (the date used is the date you processed the image in the app, not the date you originally snapped the source photo).

Here’s a look at those basic filters in a handy table:

Some really nice looks in there, but as you can see the last few filters are a bit weird, especially the quad styles as it’s a bit of a bodge. Rather than taking 4 images in succession to use, it takes your single shot and uses it four times, cropped and zoomed automatically. I think these filters are a nod to the likes of the SuperSampler plastic Lomo cameras, but if you’re after this sort of thing on your iPhone get QuadCamera, which is superb. Similarly the Multiple Exposure filters take your single shot and chop it up, flip it around and superimpose it on top of itself. It can be effective, but it’s a shame you can’t superimpose a selection of your own images.

But of course that’s not all. You can apply one of the 20 available frames to your filtered photo (or leave it naked):

Added to that are a range of ‘light leak’ and noise/grunge effects – life’s a little too short to make a table of all of those as well, but you’re sure to find something you like in there and as with the other features you don’t have to use them at all if you don’t want.

It’s easy to get exactly what you want without having to experiment too much with combinations. Preview images load quickly so you can flip through them manually, or pull down a handy list (that carries a thumbnail example of each) to jump straight to the one you want. There’s also a Shuffle button that quickly delivers a random combination for you to save or discard before hitting it again for another offering.

Here’s a selection of images produced by the random generator that I liked, including some light leak and noise effects:

Output and sharing options are generous, with options to send to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Blogger, your email or camera roll, and offering a range of image dimensions to suit all models of iPhone. An image processed at full res (2048 pixels tall, only available on the 3GS or newer) took about 8 or 9 seconds to save to my photo library. The next res down (1600 pixels tall and perfectly useable), took about 5 or 6 seconds, and lower than that (400, 600 and 800 pixels tall) you start to get into the realm of email and web-friendly resolutions that lack the detail you’ll want for your keepers.

I still think Hipstamatic has the edge in some aspects. For example, whereas two consecutive photos taken with Hipstamatic’s films and lenses will rarely have exactly the same vignette effects, in PictureShow most of the grunge and light effects appear the same from photo to photo, occasionally being rotated. This is most noticeable using coloured light leak effects when a B&W filter is used, as the leaking colour isn’t muted by the filter.

Another niggle is the inability to switch off the weaker filters when generating random effects. I’m thinking particularly of the ‘quadrant’ and mirror filters and the film sprocket frames, which I will never use. This is something that other apps such as CameraBag and ToyCamera allow and it would be a very welcome addition. The buttons at the bottom of the screen for switching between the editable parameters are a little fiddly to select, and placing any text precisely can be a pain as it appears directly under your fingertip, obscuring the exact placement. Finally, it could really do with updated visuals for the iPhone 4 screen as at the moment everything is a little pixellated, including the image you’re editing – although the images saved to the photo library look great.

Overall, the proof is in how much you use the app and how pleasing the results are and on that score PictureShow is a winner as I’ve been using it a lot. Packed with a good range of filters and effects, output and sharing options, as well as an appealing and fun attention to detail in the design, I heartily recommend it.

(Disclosure – I bought this app myself and decided to review it myself. No kickbacks here!)

Dear Owen,

Congratulations! Madison here, and your blog, My Glass Eye, was determined to be one of the best blogs to learn about your topic, and has received our 2010 Top 45 Photography Blogs award!

You can see your name amongst our winners here at:
www.onlineschools.org/top_photography/#My_Glass_Eye

Winners were chosen through a scoring system led by internet nominations,
which came from your reader base!

Cheers,
Madison Evans
www.onlineschools.org

Well that’s nice! Thanks very much to all those who voted. I had absolutely no idea!

Anyway, it’s a good excuse to re-post this cracking portrait of Neil that I took last year in the Coronet Cinema in Notting Hill, London. I was actually there to photograph Axelle but Neil fancied a couple of shots too. It’s lit with one SB-800 flash to camera right, with a Lumiquest Softbox III on it. Ideally I’d have liked another flash camera left to give a bit of rim-light kick but we had so very little time in the location.

A few weeks later I’m sort of getting the itch again. Just a tingling really, nothing to see the doctor about. Well, I had a little look in the photography section of the App Store the other day, not to buy anything you understand, just to see if there was anything new and exciting to play with and clicked on Hipstamatic (App Store link) almost by chance really. There’s quite a lot of Lomo and Holga style apps already, and I felt like I had got one of the best in ToyCamera. Hipstamatic’s icon isn’t flashy, but the name is catchy and it had a great rating, so I gave it a go and I love it.

It’s so fun to play with and use. The way it works is that you have the basic Hipstamatic ‘body’ and you select a combination of one lens and one film, then optionally charge up one of four ‘flashes’. The display has two ‘sides’, the front and back of the imaginary Hipstamatic camera, styled after the Instamatic range of cameras. Along the bottom of the front display are buttons allowing you to change the film, flash or lens, buy new packs from the shop or flip to the back screen. Alternatively you can swipe the lens to swap in the next available lens. On the back is a small squarish live viewfinder, the flash charger and the huge yellow shutter release button, and if you shake the phone you get a completely random setup.

So you select your film, lens and optional flash, take the shot, then wait a few seconds while it ‘prints’ the shot and saves it into the iPhone camera roll as well as the app’s own gallery. Tapping the gallery button takes you into a gorgeous gallery display where you slide through your recent prints. Tapping one flips it over to reveal the lens, film and flash settings. From here you can copy the settings for your next shot, share it through Facebook, Twitter or email, bin it or enter it into one of the regular contests the developers run.

A full kit comprises 8 films, 6 lenses and 4 flashes but the app comes with only 3 lenses (John S, Jimmy, and Kaimal Mark II), two flashes (Standard and Dreampop), and two films (Ina’s 1969, and Kodot Verichrome) as standard and further expansions cost 59p per ‘Hipstapack’. Each pack usually contains at least one lens and film, and occasionally an extra flash and purchasing them takes you into a custom-built store with it’s own gorgeous graphics. I really love all this attention to detail.

So it’s a pretty slick app!

The fact that you can combine any film with any lens means that theoretically you’ve got 48 different looks available, plus even more variations on those by using one of the different flashes which basically just apply a splash or wash of colour or ‘light’ depending on what you use. In practice, however, a few of the different looks are all but identical apart from the frame applied. On the other hand, something I really liked is that while other apps often have a set vignette effect that doesn’t change much if at all from shot to shot, Hipstamatic appears to have quite a variety available meaning it’s rare to get exactly the same vignette effect on two consecutive shots using the same settings. That’s a nice touch and really adds to the realism of the effect.

In the name of testing these effects, I spent 20 minutes crouched in Hyde Park trying each and every combination on the same scene. You better appreciate this:

Rows are the lens effects, columns are the film effects

If you’d like to see it in much greater detail, the original is available to download from Flickr here – a 12MB download but each image is original resolution.

As you can see, the first three films are identical except for frame, and I hope you can see what I mean about the slightly naff Kodot frame! B&Ws are also pretty similar, and although the blurb for the first BlacKeys film says it prints the date on, the only date I’ve ever seen is MAR 80 so I’m not too sure what’s happening there. Nice frames though, and my favourite film of all of them is the last one, Float. I love the smudgy contrasty vignette and artifacts it produces.

In terms of the lenses themselves there’s a good selection of looks no matter your taste, although John S is the one I find myself going back to most often. Don’t forget to experiment with all the films though. For example, the severe yellow look of Jimmy doesn’t do much for me until it’s paired with the Float film and you get a nice slightly faded off-green look. On the other hand, Kaimal turns everything a bit too red, and again the Float film saves the day, pulling it all back a bit.

It’s almost churlish to moan about something with such variety and charm, but… as I touched on above the two films that come with the basic pack and a third from the premium packs are exactly the same in terms of colour processing with the only difference being the frame they apply. The premium of these, Kodot, has a really fake looking scrappy frame which I think is the poorest of all 8 films. While I’m being picky, the two B&W films also seem pretty similar except for the frame despite implying in the name that one offers more contrast.

I only noticed when having a look close-up that several of the lenses (Jimmy, Helga and Lucifer) aim to recreate the imperfect toy-camera look by ghosting the image and you end up with what looks like camera shake on a long exposure. I’m not a fan of that as I’d rather they just slightly softened the image around the edges rather than make me look like I’ve got the shakes. It’s a shame as Helga and Lucifer in particular produce some lovely colouring.

I’m critiquing on a very personal level but hey, I’ve used a lot of Lomo-like camera apps and spent many an hour tinkering in Photoshop creating similar looks for own DSLR images so I knows what I likes. So I’ve got a couple of reservations, but I love this app as much for it’s fun interface and the huge variety of looks it produces as for getting me back into iPhone photography. This is well worth your cash, folks, and to give you a flavour of how it performs on scenes other than Hyde Park, here’s a few more shots I took the same day.

Cheers for reading!

Anyway, they have a really archaic way of registering my ownership. Rather than sticking a bit of invisible HTML in my site like some other blog-scrapers, they actually require me to place a ‘code’ in a post, essentially requiring me to make a completely pointless post like this one and then leave it up for as long as it takes them to pull their finger out and notice, which I gather can take months.

So, here it is: JBVXANH9Q3NP

And now I wait. And wait. And wait… Isn’t blogging cool?

Here’s a list of cool stuff I use at the moment, none of which falls under any particular category. Consider it more of a Buffet of Cool. Fill your plate with as much or as little as you like and do feel free to pitch in with some of your own Discoveries of Cool.

Dropbox

I went on and on about Dropbox recently. It’s just awesome and the free version will probably be more than enough for you. Basically, you install their software and a special folder on every computer you want to use and whatever you put in the folder on one computer appears in the same folder on all the other computers in seconds (usually).

I used to use it for simple things like keeping callsheets available on every computer, even my iPhone, no matter where I was, but then I realised I could use it to sync my website code documents, 1Password keychain, Things to-do databases, even my Safari bookmarks. It’s absolutely fantastic. I can be editing my website on my iMac at home, grab my MBP, head out the door to work, then pick up where I left off on the laptop in my lunch break (provided it was able to connect to a network at some point to download the latest files in the background). When I get home, I can go back to using the iMac, without having to manually sync a single kilobyte of data.

It’s a total game changer, for me anyway. Try it, it’s completely free, and if you use my link we’ll both get a bit of extra space on top of the 2GB they start you off with.

Just Mobile Gum Battery for iPhones

Yep, the iPhone battery runs out pretty quick. I can’t argue with that. I would point out that of course it’s going to run out quick if you spend hours playing music and games on it and surfing the web and taking photos and running app and touching the screen and everything else the all iPhone users are understandably addicted to, and in that sense it’s got about the same lifespan as a laptop being used equally heavily, but hey.

So, what to do? Well, while you’re waiting for Apple to find a way to cram a few more hours of use into the thing, you’ll probably want to pick up an external battery pack/charger. There’s loads out there, some that rigidly stick out of the dock connector (which seem to me to be extremely prone to snapping off), some that are built into the back of a case the iPhone fits into and make the phone another half centimetre thicker. I plumped for the Just Mobile Gum which cost about £25 from eBuyer a few months ago. You charge it up, connect it to your iPhone using a standard iPhone/iPod USB-to-dock connector cable, and it can fully recharge your iPhone 1.5 times. So with this in my bag I’ve easily got enough juice to last a full day and then some. I suppose it’s not that pretty but at least it won’t snap off in my pocket.

Photo Mechanic

I came across Photo Mechanic while peering over the shoulder of a unit stills photographer on the set of Spooks. I’d been using Bridge to view and manage libraries of my photos from shoots, because that was all I knew about having just got to grips with Photoshop. However, I’d been unhappy with the way Bridge read my RAW files, as it seemed to apply a base set of RAW adjustments to the images which altered them from the way they looked on the back of my camera, and I couldn’t settle on revised base settings that matched the look I wanted. It seemed totally wrong to me that the software should apply any changes. I’m sure this has probably all changed now*, but I don’t think I’d move away from Photo Mechanic now.

It’s not cheap, but it’s my first port of call for everything after a shoot: ingesting from a CF card, renaming, applying IPTC stationary and copyright information, reviewing, colour and star-tagging, sorting, sending to pertinent photo-editing applications based on file-type, even exporting to a variety of web-ready galleries including the rather cool Flash-based galleries by Airtight such as Simple Viewer and Postcard Viewer. My preference at the moment is for the PM Classic gallery, a contact-sheet style HTML-based gallery that has the advantage of playing nice on iPhones.

* UPDATE: It hasn’t changed at all. I just gave Bridge CS4 a whirl (I’d not launched it once since installing alongside Photoshop CS4) and while it does have a very slick interface these days, with loads of filtering, organising, viewing and customising options, it also applies Adobe Camera Raw defaults to your RAW photos in the viewer, meaning that the custom Picture Control settings I set up on my Nikon D700 are rendered pointless. For this simple reason, Bridge is next to useless for me. Long live Photo Mechanic! (and Nikon Capture NX2…)

Crumpler bags

Why do the women get to have all the fun with bags? It’s a true fact that the more bags you own, the more of a Man Geek you are. I own four and they’re all Crumplers. I’d say they aren’t built with the photojournalist in mind really, unlike, say, a brand like Think Tank or Lowepro, but I was after something that was comfortable, stylish enough to not scream “Photographer carrying loads of expensive gear!” but sturdy enough to look after a body or two, a few lenses and my laptop and plenty of accessories (depending on the size you go for – tip: try to see them for yourself in a shop, or order the next size up!). Moreover, they’re very comfortable to wear – the backpacks in particular are great, with a groove in the padding on the back so it always sits well over your spine. I love details like that :)

They change the particularly quirky names of their bags quite often as they introduce new designs that are usually subtly updated versions of last year’s. While that makes for a frustrating experience trying to find the bag someone recommended to you last year and has since been rebranded, they tend to stay much the same overall and you can also pick up some bargains online when retailers offload their renamed stock.

1Password

1Password is really nicely designed Mac and iPhone software that remembers all your online passwords for you – I didn’t think I had much need for this as there’s plugins for most browsers that do a similar thing but after a year of using it I’d find surfing the web considerably less slick without it.

It’s standalone software, but once installed it inserts a button into the chrome of your preferred browser (I only really use Safari or Firefox and those are supported) and whenever you’re on a page with a login field and you have those details saved in the application, clicking the 1P button will automatically fill and submit them once you enter the master password. Alternatively if you enter login information on a page it doesn’t recognise it offers to save that info for you. Therefore you only ever have to learn one password… geddit?

(Oh, and combined with Dropbox I never have to think about passwords no matter what computer I’m on!)

Graph Paper Press

See the cool template this site is running? That’s a modified version of Modularity, by Graph Paper Press (and that’s my affiliate link!). Put simply, they make damn good looking themes for WordPress, designed with photographers, film-makers and other media-based bloggers in mind, and are highly customisable from the WordPress Admin page, so you wouldn’t even have to touch an HTML/CSS/PHP editor.

There’s a selection of themes available for free, or you can sign up for a quarterly or yearly subscription which gives you a lifetime license to use the premium themes, and access to their superb support forum for as long as your sub lasts. I consider myself to be a competent amateur hacking CSS and HTML around but WordPress and PHP is a different world, and every single question I’ve posted in the forum has been completely resolved by their team within 48 hours. That’s impressive!

If you fancy getting a sub, sign up for their newsletter first as there’s often a discount code available.

Rivet

This is one of those pieces of software that just sits quietly in the background and gets on with it’s job, which is serving media files from the iMac to my Xbox 360 (I think it does the PS3 as well). I was using Connect360 but it just started getting weird with me; it kept telling me there was an update which I already had, and sometimes the control panel completely failed to start if there’d been a network disconnection.

So I tried Rivet and found it a smoother experience. For one thing it deals with folders well so I can have a more organised library view on the 360, and it also displays a thumbnail next to each file. Plus it seems to catalogue my drive quicker, which is nice.

AppZapper & Hazel

Two bits of Mac software that do exactly the same thing: help out with deleting stuff you don’t want any more.

AppZapper is brilliant: at it’s most basic you launch it, then drag your evictee application into it’s dropzone. It magically identifies all the pesky preferences, libraries and other support files and asks if you want to delete them all, then zaps them with a supercool sound effect. However, flip a switch in the top right and it changes to a filter based system that analyses your applications, widgets, preference panes and plugins for the potential to be deleted based on user-created rules.

Hazel is one of those background ‘always on’ applications. It does a whole bunch of things as well as sweeping for application support files. You can tell it to listen to certain folders and then apply housekeeping rules to the contents automatically, such as moving downloaded music files to Music, or delete all duplicate and incomplete downloads after a certain time, and there’s a whole set of rules applicable to the Trash can.

So why do I have both? Well, Hazel does all the hard work but Appzapper is pretty fun to use and it’s got a cool icon. Plus the irony of uninstalling the coolest uninstaller I ever saw would be unbearable.

Coda & Transmit

I love the Panic software company. They’re one of those small homely sorts of companies with a commitment to their products and an attention to detail that gives you a warm glow after giving up on some bloated frustrating corporate software mess. Not that this really happens much on a Mac, but perhaps that’s what they best embody: great Mac developers.

Transmit is my FTP app of choice. I like the layout of the windows and the user interface, there’s plenty of customisation available in the Preferences, and it does the job. I mainly use it to upload PhotoMechanic-exported galleries, that sort of thing. Coda is what I graduated to coding my websites with after starting out using a combination of BBEdit and CSSEdit. Looking at those two applications now I daresay you can do much of what I do in Coda using just one or other of them, but a couple of years ago you had to use both, and moving to Coda consolidated it all in one easy to use piece of software – it even automatically uploads updated files to their correct place on the server, eliminating the need for firing up Transmit. You can probably tell from the way I talk about Coda that I’m not a power user and I know I’m not pushing it nearly as hard as it wants to be pushed, but I’m just a sucker for the Panic stuff.

They make cool t-shirts too. I’ve got a Mac spinner shirt I wear at least twice a week.

Things

Things is a task-management application. There’s a version for both the iPhone and OSX. The two versions sync with each other over WiFi but are also designed to work great as standalone applications. I love it for just helping to sort out the individual stages within a large project, and also just noting unique unrelated things I need to do. It’s got a beautiful interface and you can get pretty detailed with your tasks, setting tags to filter related types of task together, adding notes and a due date, even syncing them to iCal.

I must admit I’m not exactly a power user – mind you, there are ‘Getting Things Done’ applications that have way more granular control than Things, such as Omnifocus, but Things has it just right for my level, with room to get more detailed if I want it. Ultimately, the real pleasure comes from the way it’s been designed, visually appealing and intuitive, and anything that helps soothe the frustration of having a bunch of niggling disorganised chores weighing my brain down is worth my money.

Well, that’s all folks. A bunch of stuff I use almost every day that I couldn’t live without now. Hopefully you’ll find something here you like and want to pay for, and if there’s some cool stuff that you think I’d like to know about, feel free to chip in.

Thanks for reading!

Many folks use the internet as a valuable tool for research and connectedness, but also as a dubious source for ego-validation. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. How many of the following questions do you care to know the answer to?

How many people are following me on Twitter?
How many hits on my home page?
Has any high-profile blogger linked to me recently?
How many people are @responding to my tweets?
How many comments on my latest blog post?
How early does my name show up in a Google search?
How many people are buying my app/t-shirt/CD/craft?
Who left positive feedback on eBay/Amazon/iTunes?

If you’re interested in the answers to these questions, it’s probably because you are concerned on some level about whether you matter or not. But more specifically, when it comes to the internet and other people you may reach by way of it, all these questions boil down to whether you have pleased anybody lately.

I ticked ‘Yes’ to five of those, but only because the last two don’t really apply to me. Ouch.

Anyway, it was an apt article to come across as I started to feel very similar to Daniel a couple of months ago. I took a hiatus from the likes of Facebook and Twitter so as to get out of the cycle of checking and updating. I stripped down the number of RSS feeds I was subscribed to, sorted out email folders so I can keep the Inbox to single figures, got my most used files syncing automatically between computers; basically a whole bunch of stuff to reduce the amount of digital and online ‘noise’ distracting me.

The proof in the pudding has been that I haven’t missed the stuff I got rid of and can use the time saved overall far more rewardingly. Life was just peachy 5 years ago before the steadily growing methods of communication and my personality is far too addictive to look after them all. Plus, retrospectively I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on anything that’s arguably essential to my modern life.

I miss the variety of interesting links that can come up on some Twitter feeds, but there’s a very high level of noise and sense of having missed something amongst it all. Same with Facebook really – all that status update stuff can get addictive but it’s ultimately just pointless and, well, more than a bit attention-seeking at times, and that’s not a good look on anyone – least of all me. On the other hand, for a lot of folk it’s now practically the only network they use to keep in touch with each other, and it is pretty handy for finding and stalking long lost friends, enemies and relatives. I may have to reluctantly reactivate my account soon and see how strong my will power really is.

No real hurry though, eh? Let’s not rush into it.

But the benefit of the other tidying up has been great too in that there isn’t all that other digital junk that an online lifestyle attracts; unread news feeds, email clutter, file management, all those bloody passwords… I think the sense of calm that came from a practically empty Inbox was the most satisfying, though. I highly recommend it!

I still spend an obsessive amount of time using digital devices, of course, they’re just far too much fun to play with. And now I have much more time to do it. Win!

All these shots were made using the D700′s B&W mode, something I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole on other cameras but which works quite well on the D700 due to the options available for tweaking the tonality and the contrast. I personally prefer my B&W shots a little bit punchier than I was able to muster using those options so some of these have had their shadow and highlight levels tweaked in CS4, but otherwise as shot.

Enjoy!

My Christmas treat to myself was to spend the evening geeking out with my Dropbox setup. It’s a free service that basically allows you to keep certain files constant across multiple machines. You create an account, download software to the machines you want to use and it creates a folder called ‘Dropbox’ on those machines. Whatever you put in the Dropbox on your computer is uploaded to the server space (where it’s secure unless you mark it ‘Public’), and is subsequently downloaded to the Dropbox folders on all the other machines you’ve set it up with, maintaining consistency no matter what machine you use.

It’s probably easier to understand if you just try it. It’s completely free, works with Macs, PCs and iPhones – sign up via my links and you’ll even get 250MB extra space on top of the standard 2GB, as will I. Plus, if you follow five of the six ‘Getting Started’ tips once you’ve signed up you get another 250MB free!

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure what to use it for at first. However, combined with the free iPhone app that accesses your server space, I found it was useful for syncing work documents like callsheets or scripts, as well as being a simple and free way to distribute large files like zip archives of photos for friends and clients.

Finally, I started using it instead of the Sites folder for storing the local copies of the code that runs my websites so that I can make edits on my iMac and be able to pick them up later on the laptop, with no effort copying the files between the two machines.

However, I felt like I was missing out on some cool uses, so I started investigating syncing the settings of regularly used applications ike Safari, iCal, Address Book, Things and 1Password, and this is how I did it.

using Dropbox to sync Macs

In all cases the iMac has the most recent and more complete files so I want to sync them to my laptop and from that point on have any changes made on either machine sync to the other. Therefore, for each application what we’re going to do is:

- find the files on your ‘master’ Mac;

- move them to the local Dropbox folder, which will subsequently copy the files to every other machine using Dropbox;

- then issue a ‘redirection’ to each application so that they can find the files in the Dropbox instead of where they ‘should’ be.

In principle, this is pretty simple. In practice you’ll usually need to use either Terminal to issue the ‘redirection’ information to your Mac’s Finder, or download a bit of software for your Mac that will issue the exact same redirection using the OSX graphical user interface you’re probably used to. I went with the latter option as Terminal scares me.

the key to syncing: Symbolic Links

This redirection information is called a Symbolic Link. What you’re basically doing is moving the settings information that the application uses, but leaving behind a signpost in the original location that points to the new location (which is in the Dropbox) so that the application can continue to read and write to those settings files. The Symbolic Link is similar to what you may know as an ‘Alias’ (especially old-school Mac users who remember System 7!) but they are significantly different and should not be considered interchangeable. Stick with Symbolic Links if you want this to work!

If you want to use the GUI Symbolic Link creation tool I mentioned above, get it here – please do take the time to have a read of the information on that page, it explains it in more depth than I did and it’s quite interesting in a geeky way.

Once you’ve installed the Dropbox software on your various machines, as well as downloaded and installed the version of the Symbolic Link tool that’s appropriate to your system, we’re ready to have a go!

syncing Safari bookmarks & history with Dropbox

Pick the machine that’s got the most up-to-date bookmarks/history and start there.

First, quit Safari – open this page in a different browser if you need it. The bookmarks and history file are kept in ~/Library/Safari (where ~ is your User folder). There’s a few other items in there too, but my understanding is that you’re going to need to move the whole Safari folder, not just the bookmarks and history .plist files.

Open two Finder windows. In one, navigate to the Safari folder as above. In the other, navigate to your Dropbox folder. Create a folder called ‘Library’ in your Dropbox. This is where we’re going to keep your Dropboxed settings for all the apps you sync up, so it helps to be organised.

The original Safari folder, moved into the Dropbox

Now move the Safari folder from it’s current location into the Library folder in your Dropbox (if your Dropbox is on an external drive, the Safari folder will copy as opposed to simply move – in this case you’ll need to delete the original once the copy is complete).

You should see the Dropbox icon in your menu bar start to work as it uploads the Safari folder to the server. At this point all your Safari settings are now in the Dropbox and if you were to launch Safari it would not be able to find them and would start over, creating an all new’Safari’ folder in the expected location. We don’t want this, so don’t launch Safari yet! We need to tell it where it’s settings are first.

Select the Safari folder in your Dropbox. Now follow the instructions for your version of the Symbolic Link tool to create a Symbolic Link to the Safari folder. It will most likely create a folder called ‘Safari symlink’, with an icon of a folder and an arrow at the bottom. This is the signpost we need. Move it out of the Dropbox folder and into the original location of the Safari folder, ~/Library.

The symbolic link, renamed and moved to the original location

If a copy of the Safari folder still remains in the original location, delete it. Rename the symlink to ‘Safari’ (without the quote marks). You should now be done for your first machine. Just to double check, launch Safari. To all intents and purposes, nothing should look different as Safari is being redirected to it’s settings via the symlink you made.

Now head to your second machine, in my case my laptop. Check your Dropbox folder on that machine and you should see your Library/Safari folder downloading from the server. Once it’s complete, follow the symlink creation instructions from above: create a symlink to the Dropboxed Safari folder and move it into ~/Library on your machine, renaming it and replacing the existing Safari folder.

Now launch Safari on that machine and if all is working well it should have all the bookmarks and even the history from your original machine. These should now also sync back and forth.

Once caveat: I don’t think it plays too nice if Safari is actively running on both machines. I haven’t tested that really, but it’s not often this happens in my situation. Either way, quitting and reloading Safari should update the software with the latest changes.

syncing iCal and Address Book with Dropbox

I was very nearly tempted to have a go with the MobileMe trial this week, mainly to have all the cool security stuff for finding or wiping my iPhone if it’s lost, but also because it would allgedly sync my iCal and Address Book between Macs. However, Dropbox offers a free way to achieve almost the same level of syncing, which will be more than enough for most casual users.

The process is exactly the same as with Safari – find the iCal and Address Book files you want to sync, move them to the Dropbox, create a symlink to each in its new location, then move the symlink back to where the original locations where the application expects to find them.

This is what my Dropbox looks like to achieve iCal and Address Book sync

I synced up my iCal calendars by moving the Calendars folder from ~/Library to Dropbox/Library on my ‘master’ computer, then creating the symlink and moving it to the ~/Library folder after renaming it from ‘Calendars symlink’ to just ‘Calendars’. Once the folder has distributed to your other Dropbox-enabled machines, repeat the symlink process on those machines.

Similarly with Address Book, move the folder named ‘AddressBook’ from ~/Library/Application Support to your Dropbox location (in my case Dropbox/Library/Application Support), create the symlink, rename it and move it to the original location. Repeat the symlink process on your other machines once the Dropboxed folder has propagated.

syncing Things with Dropbox

Things is the rather lovely ‘to-do’ software from Cultured Code, and they actually describe how to sync up multiple copies of Things using Dropbox on their wiki. However, their method uses the Terminal to make the symlink. If you’re feeling confident, go ahead and follow their instructions – you won’t mess anything up if you just type the specific codes they give you.

There is, however, another way that doesn’t require the use of any Symbolic Links at all. This is because Things handily gives you the option to tell it where the database files it needs are without the need to set up signposts using symlinks. However, we do still need to move the master database files into the Dropbox manually. First of all, remember to quit Things on the machines you’re syncing.

The path to my Dropboxed 'Things' database folder

The folder you want to move is called ‘Things’ and should be located in ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code. Now, where you chose to keep it in your Dropbox is up to you but to keep things ordered I created a new folder in Dropbox/Library called Application Support, then another new folder called Cultured Code inside that, and I moved the Things folder into there.

Redirecting 'Things' to the Dropboxed database folder

Next, fire up Things while holding the Alt key. This will bring up an option to select an existing database or start a new one. Direct Things to the location in Dropbox that you moved the database folder to, and that should be that. Now head over to your other machine, check that Dropbox has downloaded the Things folder from the server and once complete, fire up that copy of Things the same way and direct it to the Dropbox as before. Once confirmed to be working, you can go ahead and delete the original Things folders from that machine too.

Just like with Safari (and most other apps you sync this way) there can be confusion if you try running and amending multiple copies of Things at once, but that’s not much of a hassle really. Also bear in mind their comments about issues with using this to sync todo’s with iCal.

syncing 1Password with Dropbox

How you achieve this depends on what version of 1Password you’re using, I think. I’m on v3 and have moved onto their ‘Agile Keychain’ way of doing things. In this instance, all the passwords I use are kept in a file called ’1password.agilekeychain’ and were stored in ~/Library/Application Support/1Password.

However, 1Password is one application that makes it super easy to sync up with Dropbox, in that the preferences pane actually lets you not only point the application to wherever you like to find the keychain file, but will actually move it to wherever you like as well.

1Password 3's Preferences window - we'll be using the Data File section

Assuming you’re using 1Password 3, fire it up on your master machine (or whichever has the fullest 1Password keychain) and open the preferences. The very first thing you see should be the Data File options. Click on the rightmost button, ‘Move…’ and set the location in your Dropbox that you want to use. Again, for ease of use I created a file hierarchy that matched the original location – Dropbox/Library/Application Support/1Password and moved it to there.

Then on every other machine I use 1Password, I went to the same preference pane and this time clicked the ‘Choose Another…’ button, and pointed it to the freshly-downloaded 1Password.agilekeychain file that was sitting in the local Dropbox. Quit, restart, job done!

syncing other applications with Dropbox

As you can tell from the screenshots above, I’m experimenting with using Dropbox to sync a few other applications too, namely some Popcap games (Peggle Deluxe, Peggle Nights and Plants Versus Zombies). In doing so I’ve experienced a couple of situations where Peggle Nights in particular will give me the ‘application quit unexpectedly’ alert, even though I did specifically ask it to quit.

I can’t tell if this is because of my Dropbox setup or not, because it seems to do the same thing even when I put all the files back where they should be. Perhaps the game is just buggy on this hardware, because the sync does seem to be working across my Macs – save files from play time on one machine load when I fire up the game on the other machine.

Overall, a lasting caveat for all these syncs are that they can be a bit flakey if applications are run on more than one machine at the same time. If you can work around that, it’s a fantastic use for some free software, and a superb advert for purchasing an upgrade to 50GB should you need it. I’m finding that so far I’m within my limits on the free account, but if y’all would like to sign up with my link we’ll all get a bit more for free!

Cheers for reading, and have fun Dropboxing!