iPhoto ’09 – Overview

I have to say, I’m very impressed with iPhoto ’09.

“Faces” has been added to iPhoto as a way to organize and tag your photos. Once you’ve started assigning names to photos, it automatically “recognizes” photos with those other people, and labels them accordingly. Facial recognition is something I’ve seen in other software, but to see it added into iLife/iPhoto is nice.

When you have a new photo or an unidentified photo, it pops up a “corkboard” that shows the faces for people you’ve already named and suggests matches for the new/unidentified photo.

“Places” has also been added as a way to organize and tag your photos. While they emphasized the geotag aspects (GPS coordinates added to a photo’s EXIF information by your camera), it’s also handy to manually do it, and it plots out your photos on maps.

They’ve also added a “Travel Books” feature where you can have books printed out with maps and photos of the places you visited or are interested.

Both of these features could end up being very useful to genealogists in the long run. I have my doubts about how accurate the facial recognition will be when it comes to older or smaller photos, but even if you have to do some manually, it seems like a good way to keep track of everything.

HoudahGeo 1.1.5

HoudahGeo version 1.1.5 is now available. HoudahGeo is a “geocoding” application for Macs – it allows you to embed latitude, longitude and altitude information into photos (“invisibly – no impact on the photo data). The photos can then be used in combination with Google Earth

It requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 and a digital camera.

Note: HoudahGeo is normally $34.95, but until version 1.2 comes out, it’s $29.95. A 1.x license is valid with all 1.x releases.

This version corrects two issues:
- Image loading – HoudahGeo could skip images when dragged in bulk to the application.
- Camera setup – HoudahGeo 1.1.4 would crash when the camera setup was modified after having loaded images.

MacFamilyTree 4.4.6

MacFamilyTree version 4.4.6 has been released, with a major new feature – integration with Google Earth.

MacFamilyTree is a Universal Binary and does require Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. It can be downloaded here (OnlyMac.de).

Changes:
* Google Earth Integration: Reveal places from your family tree in Google Earth directly from within MacFamilyTree
* Coordinates (Latitude and Longitude) from one place can be assigned to other places with the same name
* Other minor problems solved

Meander 0.5

It’s almost hard to categorize this free Mac OS X utility, but here goes: Meander is a way to measure things on your screen, using a piece of digital string. Shiela Dixon’s (the developer) description: How long is a piece of string? As long as you can see it on your screen, you can now find out! Meander is a little application which can measure routes, or shapes, or anything which you can see on your screen.

The major change in version 0.5: Scale can now be measured at any angle, so calibration can be made from a vertical scale, or any known distance between two points.

It’s a neat little application if you have messed around with trying to gauge distance on your display.

Metes and Bounds 1.4.1

Sandy Knoll Software’s Metes and Bounds 1.4.1 is now available. Metes and Bounds is a Mac OS X land mapping or plotting applications that turns metes and bounds data into a plot map. Genealogists might be able to us it for plotting cemeteries, homesteads, other locations or items of geographical interest, etc. Version 1.4.0 was released in January and for some reason we missed it.

Changes in 1.4.1:
* Added the decimal angle to degree converter.
* Improved manual data entry.
* New help system.

Changes in 1.4.0:
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