RomanT.net

Throughout the last few years, it has been evident that the only way that a company is to make it ‘big’ is to allow people to create and add content themselves.

This is evident through the likes of Google with their Map mashups, SecondLife and ability to create businesses and ‘own’ land, and more recently Facebook and the now open API for developing applications which live within peoples profiles.

As it stands, according to Google Trends, Lightroom is far ahead of Apple’s Aperture.

I’m sure there are points for each - but at the moment I’m using a PC with Vista on it, so am limited to Lightroom, although I must say that I absolutely love it!

The workflow from the camera to getting the photo printed an up into a frame on the mantel piece is now a half-minute job. This will include any modifications that are required on the photo due to the poor lighting conditions or otherwise bad photography to start with.

One downfall of this application is as yet the unfortunate lack of an open SDK for third party plugins. Many within the blogosphere have been asking for an integration of a ‘publish’ action to their blog or even facebook photo library.

Apple on the other hand, already has an SDK out and about, so perhaps the demise of Lightroom is imminent - although I very much doubt it.

Common Adobe - get on with it! I want a Flickr action out of my Lightroom.

Am an avid supporter of multi-monitor set-ups. Once you end up using two or more screens - it’s very hard to go back down to one.

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At the moment my set-up consists of:

2x Samsung 940B’s
1x IBM/Lenovo Advanced Mini Dock
1x T60 [ATI Mobility Radeon x1400]

Works quite well, as soon as it’s docked, it recognises the two monitors (one plugged in using VGA, other DVI), and off it goes.

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In Windows™, it’s quite simple - plug in another monitor, and through Display Settings - select where each screen is relatively to the others.

Unfortunately, even in Windows Vista™ - 5th Version of the monolithic, GUI - OS [95,98, 2000,XP, ->Vista), it is has yet to cater for a spanning taskbar, one that would cross all monitors.

That and other shortcomings are fixed by a nice program called UltraMon™. It allows for a multitude of features concerning multiple monitors. One’s that I use:

• the spanning taskbar
• Windows Title Bar

Puts icons near the close button of the window, that allow you to quickly with a click, move the windows to another monitor, or stretch it across all monitors

• Wallpaper

Finally - a tool which looks at setting distinct wallpapers for each screen, that is easy to use, and is persistent across reboots as well as docking/undocking my T60

Now with UltraMon™ 3 Beta - you can finally use it in Vista™.

Several problems though:

• Docking the laptop

Causes multiple taskbars to be rendered on the secondary display

• Freezing whenever some applications are launched - ie. FileZilla

With all these, am still a hapy camper, and absolutely love the app. Just hope they hurry up, and release the final.