Patient Joan's Intuitive Instruction

I had my 3rd One to One Apple course today, and the second one with my instructor Joan Vasconcellos at the Mission Viejo Apple store, and indeed it was a productive training session.  After my stumping of Genius Paul on several fronts at the beginning of this month, I dubiously went back for a 2nd class the day before my birthday, and had the luck to get Joan as my instructor.

Joan patiently listened to my Microsoft-centric paradigm and practices, and showed me better ways to do things on my new MacBook Air.  It was an hour long session 2 weeks ago, and a learned a great deal - and she corrected some of Paul's previous points, which impressed me as well.  Today's session was inspired when I took a bunch of pictures over the weekend of wine and beer bottles (to be posted soon) and wanted to water mark them, crop them, and post them without taking 20 or 30 minutes per picture to manipulate them in iPhoto.  So I set up a 30 minute session on Monday for today after work.  I got there 5 minutes early, and created my wish list:

iPhoto Notes

• Importing Just the pics I want, Not EVERYTHING from my camera memory card
• Saving in a name I want, not DEFAULT name
• easily cropping 
• easily changing to Black and white 
• how to Blur / make fuzzy localized areas (like a face or an address) (or ANTI re-touch)
• easily changing border size 
• easily saving to PICs Folder (not an album, not a card, not a folder or smart album or library…  just "SAVE AS")

Note:  I used to use MSPhotoEditor, and I was very good with MSPhotoeditor.  I could "import as new image", crop, rotate, touch up, change color to gray scale, and SAVE AS in less than 2 minutes (or 90 seconds) per image.

Well, as Joan showed me, iPhoto LOVES drag-and-drop.  To and from iPhoto to the desk top, to a folder, etc.  The retouch feature is about 10X better than MSPhotoeditor.  The "rotate" and crop feature is easy and seamless.  Color modification is simple.  Not needing to use MSPowerpoint is liberating.  There is some kind of bug in Mountain Lion that doesn't want to save to a new named file, but that's fine, I can 'rename' very easily.

I very productive and fun training session it was.  I used JustJoeP for material from which to copy, modify, and start to reblog.   Joan encouraged me to come to the Apple Store and blog from there, in the group learning area, so that if I ran into more issues I would be able to seek instructor assistance easily... but I had other stops to make after the training session in the Mission Viejo area.   Thanks Joan!

Fun fact about the Mission Viejo Apple store:  Bill Gates stood outside of it, for 3 hours, watching everyone go in and out, leaning against the outside wall of the Banana Republic across the mall from the Apple Store, before he opened up the very first Windows Store about 4 doors down from the Mission Viejo Apple store.  As smart of a guy as Bill is, and as nice as his Windows stores look, the ones I've walked past typically have more employees in them than customers, and the few customers who are in them (in Glendale AZ & Mission Viejo CA) are often working by themselves on a computer without any Microsoft employee standing nearby.  It is sort of the inverse of what you see in any Apple store.