Welcome to October
I have finally found the answer to "breezebrowser" for the Mac. It's been my quest for the last week since I first got this thing, and it's the reason for my relative silence and lack of new pictures :-)
After toodling around on the Internet looking for "Breezebrowser for the Mac", knowing full well that is not actually what I would find since I had already read the support pages for Breezebrowser and they said in no uncertain terms they do not now, nor do they have plans, to build a mac version.
But the blogosphere is full of mac users who have had to figure something out. Because iPhoto / iWeb for all the two's relative easiness is rather lacking in sophistication needed to actually produce a custom web site to be published to a custom blog that is not a ",mac" web site. . You just can't get in and modify the templates to the extent that you need to and have them look any halfway decent. And so it is through the mac blogosphere - in particular the subset of mac users who used to use PCs and have found themselves suffering severe withdrawal for lack of breezebrowser, complaining and whining and wheezing to all who will listen (and I will, because I suffer the same trauma) - that I found the closest thing I've come to an answer yet. And it's free. It's called Galerie, and if the name doesn't give it away, the interestingly formal style speak and not quite comfortably english manual , along with the little link at the top right that lets you view the french version of the site should inform you that it is developed by a French company located in Toulouse France. Which is just a cool little side fact, but kinda fun.
What really matters is that I was completely able to build my custom templates for my photo albums in this, and have it publish it into a folder I can then FTP up to my server. My workflow from getting photos off my camera, onto my computer, and into my web is about the same as it was when I was using breezebrowser on my PC. And it's cost me the same amount of money.
To do my HTML editing I use Amaya, which I've found to be suffient for what I need. Not bad.
To FTP I use CuteFTP for the Mac - I was using the PC version prior to my recent technology life shift.
So - I get them off my camera straight into iPhoto where I dump them into Albums. I select the album I want to publish and I open up Galerie, select my template, hit the publish button and poof, it generates everything. Then I upload the entire directory to the web site. Pretty much the same stuff I did before.
But I can't tell you how relieved I am, because I was NOT having a happy time using iWeb and .mac. Even though I got close as you can see from my first test post using that process, it was really really really hard to manipulate all the stuff I needed to and kludge it all together, since I didn't have direct access to the template source to be able to modify it.
I've heard this from Apple users before and I'm starting to feel it myself. It has a great surface - shiney, pretty, fun little apps to do fun little things. But the minute you want to go deeper, you realize there is no deeper. You're in shallow water as far as they eye can see. Total sand bar. Which is comforting in one way - you know you're not going to get in over your head. But frustrating in another, because you also can't really have as much a say in what you do. What if I WANT to go scuba diving? What if I want to explore the coral reef that is HTML and XML and cascading stylesheets? I'm stuck on this sandbar. The view is nice, the temperature is right, it's pleasant and my feet feel nice. But I need more.
Anyway, it appears now with the following additions to my mac mini I've been able to start to get back down to the business of being a semi-creative computer semi-geek.
- Firefox (It's just so much more like IE than Safari. Yes, I hear myself. I know what I sound like.
- CuteFTP
- Amaya for editing web pages
- Galerie for creating web galleries from photos
Of the stuff that came on my mac, I find so far that the main things I use are
- itunes
Uh... and that's about it, actually. I do want to check out iDVD and iMovie - see how creative I can be in there. Those are two places where I'm not as saavy and actually would be the target user for applications - can't get into too much trouble but can still do some pretty fun and cool things. At least, that's what I'm expecting.
Anyway - without any further ado, I proudly announce the first publication of Bobbin's October 2007 photo album. Check it out and let me know what you think. There are a couple of nits I need to work out - like why the center part stays white all the way down to infinity despite the fact I'm using the same stylesheet and much of the same code that I did in the old albums. Wacky. I'll figure it out though. The point is - I CAN POST PHOTOS AGAIN!
So... Enjoy! :-)
Comments
Of course, OSX is all based on UNIX, so it's more like a shallow pond on top of an ENORMOUS CAVERN OF POWER for former unix nerds like yourself :-)
Posted by david adam edelstein on October 8, 2007 10:09 AM.kitty!
Posted by ejuana on October 9, 2007 9:53 AM.