New Apps for the New Year
I am back in North Adams with Dan for the holidays. spending quality time and checking out the amazing Sol LeWitt retrospective at Mass MoCA. The combination of downtime, photography and the new year inspired me to upgrade my computer with some new useful tools. Searching them out, installing them and figuring out how they work isn’t all that easy (am I really getting that old?) … but I am hoping that a little internet-style elbow grease will save time down the road. Here’s a shortlist for those of you trying to minimize your computer time in 2009:
WordPress 2.7: Actually, Dan upgraded my blog to the new version. So far, so good. Haven’t had much time to check it out yet, but if installing widgets is easier, I may give it a try and mess up the design (!). Wordpress also has an iphone app. Still trying to convince Dan to use his superior talents to design a blog for SOMArts.
RSS Readers: I am surprised that many of my contemporaries and older colleagues still don’t use an rss reader. For me, it saves a lot of time that used to be spent navigating from site to site looking for updates.
I still use Netvibes as a home for all my rss feeds, but am no longer sure this is the best option for me. In Connecticut, I was trying to “keep tabs” on arts activity and friends’ blogs around the state. Now that I am in San Francisco my internet habits involve more “search & explore” activity. I am trying Delicious as a way to categorize things until I figure out what updates and blogs are truly of use.
Plug-ins: When I had an academic discount through Wesleyan, I splurged on the photo editing and organizing software Aperture, then didn’t use it because Green Street had lots of wonderful volunteers who took great photos. Now that I am at SOMArts I am again taking photos, and have discovered a few plug-ins that make the process of uploading and emailing them WAY more efficient.
Plug-ins literally plug in to your existing applications to increase their usefulness and efficiency. The first plug-in I installed referred to a folder in my library that didn’t exist, but I simply created a new folder and it worked fine. Here are a few pics and pans:
-Flickr Uploadr: The first uploader I tried. Uploads large batches of photos to Flickr. Warning to arts organizations—there is a defect in this program which marks the photos as private no matter what public option you try to select. This means people cannot see your photos without logging on to Flickr. Very annoying.
-Aperture2Gmail & FlickrExport. Self-explanatory plug-ins which allow the user to export photos directly from Aperture to flickr and gmail. No doubt similar plug-ins are available for other photo editing programs … but until I had these I had to export my photos to the desktop then email them or upload them, then create all new sets and descriptions. Redundant, not to mention time consuming.
-Since I am not an IT person or particularly tech savvy, I am not sure if the Flickr app for Facebook or Amazon’s Universal Wish List are technically plug-ins. But I am all for uploading SOMArts photos once (to Flickr) and then linking them to the SOMArts Facebook page (rather than uploading photos twice). Also … I can see the Amazon wishlist becoming a helpful budgeting tool, allowing organizations to easily compare and contrast prices from many websites for, say, office equipment, with more info at their fingertips than there would be on a spreadsheet.
Of course, all my saved time will be wasted if I then use it to blog about saving time. It is very hard to get a sense of what is new and what’s already outdated. If you have any suggestions to share, please do.
Tags: Arts Marketing, Flickr, Photography, Technology
December 29th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Re: RSS Feeds
I went from using Safari as my default RSS reader, then Apple Mail, then Netvibes, eventually settling on Google Reader, which I think is hands-down the best option. Once you get used to the key commands and figure out an organizational system that works for you, I think you’ll like it, too.