'cause it just works
Fanboyish it may sound, it's still a jaw-dropping experience - from time to time - how easy and convenient some tasks are when using a Mac. My last example is uploading the photos to my gallery, which mainly includes selecting the ones I want to publish then resize them from their original 8 megapixel monstrosity to something more webspace-friendly and finally ftp them to sesamhu. So this time I temporarily imported the pictures to iPhoto and weeded out the ugly ones. Temporarily, because the poor MacBook's 80G hard drive is far from enough to hold all my pictures. Currently my music is stored on it and it's close to full already. Anyway, then came the magic called Automator. It's a nifty little tool that lets you select a bunch of preset tasks and create a workflow for easily repeatable and otherwise time consuming chores. So I just added "Get selected iPhoto items" with "Copy items" and then "Scale images", which promptly resulted in a bunch of neatly resized photos in a separate directory ready to be uploaded by CyberDuck. Everything I used either comes with the OS bundle or it's a GPL licensed free software. I'm really curious as to how this could have been done in Lala Land without buying anything...