Why you shouldn't buy an Apple Mac

Bit of an obtuse title that, given the content-to-be of this post, but all will become clear towards the end.

First, here's a nice photo of the Lloyds Building from the other week:

The tree is blue too!

The Lloyds Building is a deliberate sprawl set in the midst of densely packed office blocks, and therefore impossible to photograph in its entirety. Except from above. I also have this problem with the emerging skyscrapers; as they grow bigger it becomes increasingly difficult to fit them in the frame.

Enter autostitch.

First it was developed by Matt Brown who, among other things:

• deems it necessary to include Vitamin I in his medical kit for mountaineering expeditions. I wanted to know what Vitamin I does, and answers.com just told me it's athletics slang for ibuprofen. It can also refer to vitamin B-7. Vitamin i is also "currently Ithaca's only club team". Google doesn't know enough about vitamin i yet.
• in his spare time can be found on his bike, in the mountains, or playing jazz.
• applies user specified trimaps to Llamas.

Most significantly for me though is the autostitch thingummy. Ina nutshell, you put this in:

and get this out:

And all you have to do is tell it which folder the photos are in. It's one of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever seen. Just think what it has to do: It has to work out which images overlap which others. The images could overlap to any degree, at any degree of rotation, so it then has to find where one photo's edge lies and at what angle in the photo it overlaps. It then has to warp the pictures to exactly the right degree to match up all the other photos it overlaps. And then it adjusts the colours so that the edges look OK. Good work Dr. Brown of the University of British Columbia, formerly of Cambridge!

But the demo is only available for Windows. And that is why you shouldn't buy an Apple Mac.

*edit* - It can even do this!!! The most amazing example of which is this.