Wish list for iPhoto: Make Faces Smarter!

Ever used iPhoto and thought to yourself “I wish it did…”, well I just installed the new iLife ’11, which includes iPhoto 9.

I decided to play around with Faces, and update a few photos… not exactly the quickest process! Anyhow, I found a tip to speed things up: make a smart folder which shows “Face is unnamed”. Now you can go in and name faces, and once you do it jumps to the next photo. You can use tab to goto the next name field in a photo (or shift-tab to go backwards) put the name in, hit enter and it will goto the next photo. I have also been deleting face fields where I do not want to deal with identifying people.

So what is my wish? Simple: if the photo is dated before the birth date of a person in your Address book, then do not show that name.

Yes I could type it in manually, but don’t show it as an autofill option. It would make filling names in so much easier for me.

Ok, ok. I’m biased, both of my kids names start with a J!

I’m guessing the opposite would be useful as well, for someone who has passed away. Mind you Address Book does not have a field for that!

Have you found any tricks to make using Faces easier?

Controlling iTunes from the command line

I had a little fun the other day, making a script that would pause iTunes, from the command line. In the end I made ones to pause, play, and go forward a track.

All of them use a slightly modified version of a line of Applescript:

tell application “iTunes” to play

You can also tell it “to next track, to pause, to stop, to previous track”, which all work as expected.

To get it to work on the command line you’ll need to turn it into a script, which is a plain text file with some command line options in it. To get Applescript to work on the command line we need to use osascript, with the “-e” option.

Here’s what you should have in your file:

#!/bin/bash
osascript -e “Tell application “iTunes” to pause”

Note the the quotes and slashes? You need to wrap the Applescript command in quotes, and since you have quotes in the middle of it, you need to escape them using the slashes so the whole applescript is parsed.

Next step is to save the script to somewhere useful. In my case I have set my command line environment to check for scripts in ~/bin/ , so I saved it there as ‘pause’. After that you will need to make it an executable, so pop into the terminal and do “chmod +x ~/path-to-your-file/pause”, at which point you run it.

Go play something in iTunes, and then go over to the Terminal and type “pause” and hit enter. If your script is in your environment path then iTunes just paused…

Here are the other scripts I used, just to make your life easier 😉

#!/bin/bash
osascript -e “Tell application “iTunes” to play”

#!/bin/bash
osascript -e “Tell application “iTunes” to next track”

Feedback is appreciated!