A. Most of Mac OS X's digital-media experiences hold up pretty well when compared to those in Windows XP, but one glaring exception is digital photography. OS X ships with a fairly lame Image Capture application that does bare-bones image acquisition but offers no organizational or editing capabilities. Well, that situation has changed with Apple's recent release of iPhoto, a free OS X-only add-on that gives OS X exciting digital-photography features. If you're running OS X, it's a must-have.
I'll review iPhoto in Connected Home EXPRESS soon; in the meantime, here's a quick rundown of some of its capabilities. In addition to image acquisition, iPhoto organizes your photos into digital photo albums that you can arrange several ways, with on-the-fly image thumbnail resizing. You can crop, scale, rotate, and edit images using red-eye reduction and black-and-white effects, then upload the images to a digital photo-printing service or print them on your own printer. A particularly cool feature lets you assemble and order a hardcover book of photos and text. And you can export photo slide shows in QuickTime format for easy distribution on the Web. For more information and the free download, visit the iPhoto Web site.
