Our previous article discussed a convenient way to share photos on your Mac using iPhoto and the Picasa Web Albums plugin. But Picasa Web albums isn’t for everyone.

Flickr is one of the most popular websites for hosting and sharing your photos with friends, family, and the world. A new application, Flickery, aims at moving your photos to the web quick and easy.

Flickery: Main Features

Flickery’s main focus is to make adding photos to your Flickr account quick and easy. It shines its ability to resemble the features that Flickr users have grown accustomed to while adding photos using the web client.

When first loading Flickery, the application will ask you to Authorize your account with Flickr. This process was quick and easy and I really appreciate the Flickery developers adding a clear explanation of what I was doing when I authorized my Flickr account to work with the desktop application.

After logging into my Flickr account, Flickery quickly pulled forward a search of random recently added photos to Flickr from various random users. While a small feature, it quickly left an impression that the application was quick and capable.

I was a bit disappointed that Flickery wasn’t capable of integrating in my iLife media. I think that the ability to drag and drop Events from iPhoto would be a wonderful addition to the Flickery Application. At this time however, you can only add pictures by selecting upload and then dragging and dropping from iPhoto or a saved photo directory. Access the iPhoto package in your Photo folder is not currently supported.

Although adding pictures to upload to Flickr wasn’t as easy as I hoped, the ability to edit file photo names, descriptions, and add tags worked very efficiently.

Once I had described my photos I started the upload process. At the same time I launched Safari and navigated to my Flickr account page. As each photo finished uploading from Flickery, it appeared instantly in my Flickr account.

The only problem I had was grouping the photos I selected into a set before uploading… Once the photos had all been uploaded, adding them to a set worked perfectly.

Still in Beta

As I mentioned earlier, the application seemed to be messing some powerful features but I must remember the application is still in beta. In fact, the beta ends June 30, 2008. I imagine the little bugs that are still present in the system will work themselves out before the applications reaches v1.0

We’ve mentioned previously that Adobe Air allows you to bring some of the great functionality of Web 2.0 to your desktop. Now, Google has released Google Reader on Adobe Air and is calling it ReadAir.

The goal of the application is to allow you all of the great features you enjoy in the Google Reader in your web browser while still on the desktop and even offer access to your important RSS feeds while you’re off line.

ReadAir is currently an OS X Themed application and feels in many ways like a normal app and not one running on Adobe Air. Although the application is still at version .1 I wanted to see how things worked.

Performance

Speed and performance is always important for applications connected to the internet. I was surprised by how well ReadAir connected me to my Google Reader account and pulled down all of my feeds and information. Clicking from one article to the next populated instantly and at times had faster results than what I am use to on the web. I assume this is related to the application pulling all the feeds at once and not waiting for me to load them individually into my browser.

Still a bit buggy

Despite the fast performance ReadAir is not without its bugs. For some reason assigning a tag to a feed doesn’t work correctly and always assigns the feed the first tag/folder on my subscription list. I tried this a number of times and could not get it to work correctly, but as I mentioned this is still an early .1 release so bugs are expected.

Features still under development

While ReadAir connects you to your Google Reader feeds it still lacks some of the features you’ve grown to love with the browser based RSS Reader.

The ReadAir site lists these features as still being in development:

1. Continuation (Allow users to view more than 20 items per feed)
2. Offline mode
3. Keyboard shortcuts
4. Windows XP/Vista and custom themes
5. Unread count in Mac doc icon

But, despite its shortfalls the initial release of ReadAir shows a lot of promise and may already work well enough for your daily RSS reading needs.

If you’re not using Google Reader, what RSS Feed Reader do you currently use? Let us know in the comments, and what makes it great!

- tip from lifehacker

If you own an iPhone and love sharing photos, than the new website Natuba is just for you. This site was designed by iPhone owners for iPhone owners with the intent of providing an optimal place to share photos taken on your iPhone.

After getting iPhones, we began taking photos on the go and soon realized we needed an easy way to share them with our friends. Although there were plenty of photo sharing sites on the web, none of these sites were designed specifically for iPhone users. So we created Natuba, a site for uploading, sharing and viewing photos from your iPhone.

-Natube

The site is a quick and easy way to upload and share the photos you’ve taken on your iPhone and discuss them with friends, family, or other individuals that browse through the site. Adding comments to pictures is quick and easy for account owners.

If you don’t have an iPhone and are interested in the quality of pictures the phone takes then head over to Natuba and click the ‘Surprise Me’ button to randomly be displayed a photo upload by an iPhone owner. The site also provides search capabilities to find photos of certain topics and includes displays of related photos to the image you’re currently looking at.

So go ahead and check out Natuba and their iPhone photos.

A couple of weeks ago I was testing out some software updates on my shiny new Mac Pro. After I was finished testing things out I noticed that the Mac was slow, very slow. I fired up the Activity Monitor to see what was going on. Turns out a background process called syslogd was running up the CPUs. Syslogd is the Apple System Log Server. It gathers logging statements from all the various running applications and saves them in case you need to look at them later. If you open the Console Applications from the /Applications/Utilities folder, you can read the logs created by syslogd.

What I couldn’t figure out was why syslogd was using an enormous amount of the Mac Pro’s resources. A little Googling revealed that syslogd stores the most recent log statements in a database file so they can be searched quickly. This database file has the property of fast access for reading, but it is slow to update with new entries. In fact, if an application logs too much information in a certain amount of time syslogd can no longer update the database file in a reasonable amount of time and it begins taking up more and more resources. Most people noticed this problem when using time machine as time machine does log changes to your file system (which can add up). The software I was testing was sending more log statements than syslogd could handle.

Now that I’ve found what was going on, I still had to do something about it. Syslogd can accept additional start up information that controls what kind of log messages it will accept, how often the database file will be purged of old log messages, and other options. These settings are located in a file in the System Folder of your Mac. If you’re feeling lucky (or geeky), you can edit this file directly. However, I recommend Lingon, a free app that does all the heavy lifting for you.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Lingon, you can start it up and it looks something like this:

On the left hand nav menu, there is an item that says System Daemons, go ahead and expand that item and then scroll down the listings until you find com.apple.syslogd. Once you click on the com.apple.syslogd item you will be presented with a warning that looks like this:

Go ahead and click OK. You are then presented with the syslogd startup information, such as it’s name, the path to the application (i.e. /usr/sbin/syslogd) and other startup information. You can add startup parameters to the application as command line arguments. I changed /usr/sbin/syslogd to /usr/sbin/syslogd -c 3 -a and then saved the file. You will need administrator rights in order to save the changes. Once you are done, it should look something like this in the “What” field:

The -c 3 tells syslog to ignore less important messages. There are 8 log levels with 0 being the highest (or most important) and 8 being the lowest. With -c 3, syslogd will only log messages with a log level of 3 or less. The -a parameter tells syslog to archive the database, clearing out entries over 24 hours old.

I haven’t had any syslogd problems since I’ve added these new options. However, with Lingon I can go back and adjust if I need to. So if your Mac slows down, it’s probably not spyware or anything like that, just a little logging application with a hungry appetite for CPU cycles. Lingon lets you tell syslog, “you on a diet.”

Microsoft made available today their most recent update to their MSN Messenger service for Apple Computers. You can find the free download at the Mactopia site, Microsoft’s Mac software website.

So, if you’ve decided that Adium and iChat aren’t the Mac messaging clients for you, MSN Messenger for Macs might just fill your Instant messaging need.

After some initial experience with the new Microsoft software I was impressed that they left out the advertisements and countless pop up windows that appear in their Window’s version of MSN live messenger.

But, the MSN Messenger 7 for Mac is not without flaws. I was unable to edit my profile picture as the application rejected the countless number of .jpg, .gif, .png images I tried to select. It even failed to let me select one of it’s default pictures as clicking the ‘OK’ button did absolutely nothing…

Microsoft does test their software before release… don’t they?