There may be all sorts of things that are wrong with the new version of Mac OS X but they fixed the one thing that really bugged me, so it has my blessing. If you are bothered by the lame and pedantic geekiness, then you should skip the rest of this posting. :^)
SO... I have this absolutely beautiful 30" apple cinema display. It's computer geek heaven. Buying it has made my two 20" LCD displays at home redundant, so I took them to work. Taking those displays to work made my two 19" LCD displays at work redundant, so I brought them home. Now I have these two (well really three - I had an extra one on a different machine) 19" LCD displays. It turns out that one of them makes this nasty buzzing sound after 5 minutes of being on, and another is inexplicably fuzzy, so really it's just one usable one. I have been looking enviously at these 8" digital frames at costco that cost likr $270 and I decided that I would like to use one of these 19" displays as a digital frame. The easiest way to do that would be to hook it up to an existing machine, and run a photo slideshow. I tried that. One of the features of iPhoto that makes it not work so well for this purpose is that whenever you move the mouse while a slideshow is running, iPhoto shows the onscreen controls. Pretty LAME if you want to actually use your computer while it is running. The second idea was to use the mac's inbuilt ability to automatically change your backdrop every few minutes. In the previous version of OS X, this was limited to A) some pre-selected mac backdrops or B) a physical directory. While kind of useful, it means that you can't remove some of the lamer pictures that don't belong in the slideshow, or use pictures across directories without copying the files.
Getting to the point... the new version of OS X added the ability to use an iPhoto album as the source of your backgrounds. Now I can use this screen as a digital frame as well as an extra screen for whatever suits my fancy.
Cool. I therefore officially bless OS X Leopard (even though I might do a fresh install this weekend just for the sake of keeping things tidy)
ok, extreme geekiness over.
Duane
