TNT: DYN-O-MITE TIPS AND TRICKS by Paul Sahner

September 27, 2002

Automate Your Digital Lifestyle

You're a very busy and important person. Your time is worth dollars and cents. You don't have time to be messing around with playlists or photo albums. You want your media organized and you want it done now. You need to have the ultimate in efficiency. You're in luck! Apple thought of those things when creating their digital lifestyle suite.

iTunes:

Apple's digital music player, iTunes is one of the easiest apps to use when you want to just rock out. But it can also save you oodles of time. Not only is iTunes scriptable, but it also has some very unique and powerful features to help speed up your music organization.

For instance, iTunes allows you to store your favorite music in playlists. All you have to do is drag a song from the main library into the new listing. But what if you have a playlist that is going to need constant updating? Say you have a list of Beatles songs. Right now it has 57 songs in it. But then all of a sudden, you decide to import Abbey Road...what's going to happen? Are you going to have to drag the entire song to the playlist manually? Not with a new feature in iTunes 3 called Smart Playlists.

With Smart Playlists you just sit back and watch the music sort itself out. They work a lot like "Rules" in email applications. Begin this procedure by going to File in the Menu Bar and select Smart Playlist. Then, you select a condition (ie: If artist is "The Beatles") and choose an action for that condition to take (ie: Put into Playlist "Beatles"). It's a very simple system that can prove very powerful. Not only can you organize Artists, but you can also do it by play count, genre, star rating (a new feature in iTunes 3 that allows you to rate a song by 1-5 stars), date played, date added, and others.

Since I got iTunes 3 a few months back, I converted about half of my playlists to Smart Playlists. It does save time. Especially if you have an iPod.

iPhoto:

iPhoto is definitely the coolest thing to come to digital photography since the digital camera. iPhoto is a VERY versatile app that allows you to import, organize, edit and share digital photographs all from one window. This sounds like it can be very daunting, but iPhoto makes it mindlessly simple.

First things first. Get the pictures into the computer. Most times, iPhoto will recognize the camera without any help. All you have to do is connect the camera, open iPhoto, and click Import. iPhoto will grab all the pictures on the camera and put it into a nice "Roll."

A Roll is made every time you have an import session. Each roll contains the date you imported as well as any other information you want. Now, just like iTunes, you can create Playlists (called Albums). They show up just like their musical counterparts and are just as easy to use.

Unfortunately, there is no equivalent to Smart Playlists in iPhoto. But there are a few extras that will have you listening.

Now, lets head over to organize. Say you are a digital photo maniac - you have 12,000 pictures and 43 albums! It will NOT be easy to find what you want...or will it? Apple once again thought things out and allowed you do organize ANOTHER way! You can assign subjects and keywords to every single photo in your library. This way, you can view just your "Kid" pictures or just your "Vacation" pictures. It's very easy and a lot of fun. Here's how you do it:

To edit your personal "comments" of each photo, click on the Organize tab (lower mid section of iPhoto), and then click on a picture. Then, below the Album list, click on the teeny-tiny "i" button. This will reveal the Comments box. Once you're done taking notes about all 12,000 of your photos, you can move on to putting them in to categories:

Once again we'll be working in the Organize section of iPhoto...

Click on a photo (or group a photos) and select "Assign" down at the bottom laeft-hand side of the window. You can then start clicking on the category buttons to the right. (Quick trick: under the Edit menu, select Edit Keywords. You can then change their current ones, or make your own!!!)

Oh yeah, you can also use AppleScript with iPhoto...SCORE!

iMovie:

Though not much automation is built into iMovie, here's some things to keep in mind when editing:

- Get a HUGE hard drive...that way when you go to import you can just click Import, walk away, not worry about space, and come back to a nicely organized tray of clips.

- Get a G4. What can I say? Things are blazingly fast on a G4.

- Hire someone else to do it.

iCal:

iCal is still very early in it's stages of life, and I don't know nearly enough about it to give you a ton of tips, but this does look promising for automation. iCal's alarm system is one of the most obvious.

After you've created a new event in iCal, click the small "i" button (Just like in iPhoto) to bring up an options window. The second button on the top of that options window looks like a small ringing bell. In that area you can set up various types of alarms. Just set it and forget it (as they say). Did I mention it too is scriptable?

Other:

The entire digital hub is designed to save you time. Everything from the ability to script iDVD to the one click ease of use iSync will bring to our lives.

Want some more time-saving fun?
Check out some of the other apps that can be used in conjunction with AppleScript:

Address Book
Apple Works
ColorSync
DVD Player
Finder
iCal
iDVD
Image Capture
Internet Connect
iPhoto
iTunes
Keychain
Mail.app
Print Center
QuickTime
Speech
System Events
Terminal
Text Edit
Finder Toolbar
URL access
And the Mac OS itself!