Photo Booth - The Turtle App from 10.5

With the release of Leopard, many of us that have old macs finally got access to features that the newer Macs are shipping with for quite some time now, namely Front Row and Photo Booth. One of the first things I did after I installed 10.5 was to test out these "new" apps and see how they performed on my PowerBook.

Front Row runs amazingly well. All the features from the current Apple TV software (not the one demo'ed at Macworld) are available for use. Although the lack of a remote to control it from a distance, kinda kills the whole point of the application. Don't get me wrong, I can navigate the Front Row menus no problem using keyboard arrows and the Escape key..but...it's not the same.

Then we have Photo Booth. The whole premise of Photo Booth is pretty cool, I must say It's basically the photo booth from the Mall brought home, meets the House of Mirrors from the fair, best of all: -Free!. Since my PowerBook does not ship with a built-in iSight, i had connect my Sony DV-Cam via the firewire port. The camera works great, sadly Photo Booth does not.

Blame it on the under-performing G4 processor within, but the real-time Core video filters proved too much for the little 12 in. PowerBook that could. And this is why, with this type of hardware, Photo Booth gets the Turtle App award. The machine struggles to keep up with the live camera feed and apply those nifty Core filters, it's a beach ball frenzy. Maybe Photo Booth performs admirably well on my PowerMac with dual G5 processors, but on this machine its just not going anywhere.

So there you have it, my first Leopard report: Photo Booth on a 12-inch PowerBook is a no-go.

Labels: 10.5, Leopard, OSX, Photo Booth, PowerBook G4