On Sunday we went to Jonna’s company picnic and had forgotten the camera. Jake had his camera and we took some pictures there. When we got home I smugly hooked up Jakes Kodak EasyShare C330 4MP Digital Camera to the Mac and oddly got the message “No images to import”.
Checking the iPhoto camera compatibility list I found that the Kodak EasyShare C330 4MP Digital Camera is not compatible with iPhoto. You know what this means … time to boot up the Windows machine upstairs. It goes without saying that my puffed up chest deflated just a bit.
I put it off for a couple of days, but this morning I decided to grab the pictures off the camera to upload to Flickr, using my Windows machine. It literally took about 5 minutes for the machine to boot, if not more.
I’m extremely spoiled with the Mac. While I’ve done no official timings, it feels to me that I’m up and booted in about 20 seconds. A five minute wait for a system to boot and load all of its start up applications is just something that I now find intolerable.
Before grabbing the Mac, I used to come downstairs in the morning, hit the on button on the gateway, say good morning to Jonna, go to the garage to smoke, come back in, make a pot of coffee, hit the washroom — and by the time I was done the hourglass was just fading away and the machine was ready for me to finally hit my email.
Ed Gibbs wrote a post on Saturday about how fun PhotoBooth had been with his kids on visit to the Apple store, and mentions how this little application enriched the Apple Store experience. He mentions a number of positives he experienced just in the Apple Store itself, all true.
But I tell you, a key piece of the Mac experience for me over the past few weeks has been the complete rearrangment of my schedule in the morning. All of that stuff that I used to do in the morning still happens, but in a completely different order. Now I hit the on button on my Mac, run into the living room to say good morning to Jonna, come back to my desk, log in, check email, check my daily feed, and maybe get up at some point to make coffee.
The Mac has eliminated a LOT of wait time in the morning. For me, thats worth the price of admission. Photobooth is pretty damn fun too though.
Bieber Labs 
I love Macs just as much as most Mac users, but have you ever thought about that what makes your PC boot up so slowly is because it’s old? 🙂
An old Mac can also take a while to boot, especially when running modern OS.
If you use a card reader instead of directly plugging the camera into your Mac, you can import the images easily.
I believe some variant of Easyshare software is available for Mac, and probably a free download from Kodak. It may have usability baggage versus iPhoto.
If iPhoto isn’t working, you can always revert to the older Image Capture to see if it can do its magic. I never use iPhoto to import, preferring my own file structure and then having links to the images in iPhoto. See, sometimes Graphic Converter’s browse is the way to go, and iPhoto names things horribly…
I’m surprised that while iPhoto doesn’t recognize the camera you still don’t get a mounted drive from the memory card. Just navigate the folders, find your pics, and drag them to your iPhoto library.
You are so funny 8>D. That darn computer you and your brother have will be my NEXT computer. Am I jealous? You betcha.;>)
Love y’all
Mom
EasyShare is available for Mac and it works pretty darn well. I’ve used it once or twice and found it easy enough to use. Actually booting up even an older Mac usually takes less than 2 minutes. 🙂
If you look online in various Windows/Mac comparisons you’ll usually find comparative boot times as one of the metrics used to judge which OS is “better.” The schema of testing is almost always “Boot to the desktop” meaning that when the desktop appears, the test is over. In this regard Windows PCs are often faster than their Mac counterparts, but there is this process that I call “The boot after the boot” that happens after the PC gets to the desktop but before you can actually do anything with it, where it is loading background tasks and things into the task bar and doing who knows what. This time is usually spent by me disgustingly clicking on the FireFox icon waiting for something to happen, only to then have 15 instances of the application launch after the PC is finished with whatever it is doing while the hard drive sits and grinds.
The point I am trying to make is that there is a big difference between the numbers you sometimes see and the overall usability of a system. The Mac tends to get you to the point you want to go faster, even though on paper it might appear to be slower.
Why do you need to boot your Mac at all? Just put it to sleep in the evenings, and wake it up in the mornings. The only time you should need to shut down a modern Mac is if you’re going to be away for more than a few days…
–R.J.
1. I did think about the age of the PC, but its just over a year old.
2. Card Reader – didn’t check to see if the camera had a card or if it was using internal memory. Have to check it. Thanks!
3. Given that this was a one off, I didn’t check for EasyShare software. If it happens again, I’ll definitely check though. Thanks!
4. I’m not familiar with Image Capture – cool, something new to learn!
5. Mounted drive – thought I checked that — I’ll have to check again.
6. Yuh!
7. I’ll definitely check out EasyShare.
8. I do find that most of the time is actually spent once the desktop is up. I have the same “clicking FireFox” irritation, which was actually what I was talking about. The Mac is responsive almost immediately as the desktop is displayed.
9. I’m not sure why I don’t do that. I’ll have to try it out sometime. I used to leave my machines on all the time, now I got into the habit of shutting down all of the time.
Ron — Before the latest security update from Apple, my iBook uptime was at 33 days. I just put it to sleep, as Robert Jung suggests. Unless there’s some major malfunction, there’s no reason to turn it off at night.
-Todd
My wife just purchased the C330 and I had the same problems with iPhoto. The camera would display, but not the card. Just for kicks I turn the camera on first then plugged in the USB cable. The camera appeared in iPhoto told me I had the images to download and the downloaded. Try it, it is worth a shot.
I’m fairly certain I went through all of the iterations on which sequence to plug everything in and turn things on. It didn’t work. I definitely have to look at this again sometime though. Its encouraging to hear that you got it to work.