A 3GS hit-and-run

I hadn’t intended to spend any time at all talking specifically about the iPhone 3GS here on the blog, but following a comment by Per[1] I thought I’d jot down a few notes.

Firstly, given my previous comments about O2 and the upgrade issue… I should explain why I bothered. I got the 3.0 upgrade on the 3G when it came out last Wednesday, and liked what I found, particularly the option to install more than the 2.0 OS limit of 144 / 9 pages of apps. It’s now effectively unlimited, since even if you don’t have space on a home screen, you can search for the app using Spotlight. That’s nice. However, I was already hitting my space limit on the 16Gb 3G, so room to breathe was going to be handy. I also liked the improved navigation and possibility to get the TomTom kit in the future, and once I’d tried the camera in-store, I thought that was going to be a big deal as well (more on that, below). There was a small amount of peer pressure too, given our conversation on last week’s Dogear Nation.

In the end I opted to get a PAYG phone, swap in my contract SIM, and sell the old handset to Mazuma. If I’d waited to upgrade and then wanted the same handset I now have, I’d've ended up on another 18 (or 24) month contract with the same upgrade trap in June, and probably on a higher tariff to subsidise the cost of a new handset. This way my existing contract will run out in due course, I stay on the same tariff, and the handset doesn’t cost much more than it would have done come “upgrade” time in 3-6 months.

So what’s good? It’s very clearly nippier. Every operation is obviously faster and cleaner. I’m liking the camera and video recording (zoom would be nice, but variable focus and auto-adjusting exposure/white balance work for me). It was a great move to retain the 3G body and form factor – my Clarifi case still fits perfectly, and the macro lens seems to let me focus marginally closer still than the 3GS can manage on its own (it does a good job by itself, though). Amongst the sprinkling of other functions I like, not specific to the new model, are the landscape keyboard and the improved podcast playback features – did you know you can slide horizontally to scrub through a track, and slide down to scrub more finely? Neat.

The real revelation so far though, has been the screen. The new smudge / grease-resistant coating is a marvel. So far I’ve not fitted a screen protector, and although I’m loath to allow it to become physically scratched, the new screen feels and looks so much better and remains much, much cleaner. It’s just… almost magic.

In the “miss” column we have the voice control feature, which I’m not sure I’ll be using much; and shake-to-shuffle (is this actually supposed to work if the display is locked, by the way? seems not to do so for me, which makes it even more pointless). Oh, and battery life seems worse, but I suspect the compass and the notifications feature are contributing to that, as are the wider range of ways I’m actually using it. May have to think about a Mophie Juice Pack Air.

I used the video function in anger for the first time today, uploading one clip from the Hursley Tri-Department sports tournament directly to YouTube, and later grabbed a set of clips from the phone via iPhoto (yes, iPhoto manages video from the iPhone, go figure) and edited them together in iMovie. It’s not the best quality but probably still as good as my cheap USB camcorder – plus the screen and on-device editing features are nice additions. Rumours are that the chipset is capable of 720p video, but I doubt we’ll get to see that in the current generation of device. I’ve posted a bunch of sample photos to Flickr as well, if you are interested – the Blue Eyeball shot was taken at close quarters with the Clarifi.

Really nothing more to say here. There are more than enough people getting excited about the device and as I said, I hadn’t planned to write up any thoughts – blame that Danish guy

[1] just because I responded to audience pressure this time, don’t expect me to do it every time, m’kay?

The Great Address Book Cleanup

This was fairly tedious, so I thought I’d share it with you, my loyal blog readers

Over time, my address book has become unmanageable. Until today, what I had managed to achieve was a curious fusion of useful family postal address data, mostly from the pre-social network, pre-email, pre-mobile days of 10-15 years ago when I had loaded it all into Evolution on Linux; several personal and work mobile phone SIMs worth of numbers in various formats, covering probably a 10 year period judging from the names and numbers in there; and lots and lots of email addresses, covering a similar period, but recently bloated by the habits of Gmail and Apple Mail of storing some data automagically.

In short: a total mess. I had multiple entries for several of my close friends and family; original home addresses of university friends I have not been in contact with for 12 years (!); and outdated information for many other folks.

The iPhone was really the final catalyst for sorting all of this out. More than once recently, I’ve tried to find a number for a friend, and had several entries for that person, several of which were out of date. I’ve called a good friend’s brother on a phone he gave him more than seven years ago, twice in the past 6 months. That’s how useless I’ve become at managing this stuff.

Since the iPhone was core to the issue, and since it syncs with the Address Book, I decided to use that as my core tool for fixing the problem.

Here’s more-or-less what I ended up doing:

• Cleaned up multiple entries in Address Book, merging into a single entry for any one contact, including work and personal data, and adding company names where possible.
• Deleted redundant entries such as the university addresses which I knew were going to be wrong.
• Read through the various hints on this page for information on how I could get contact data from LinkedIn and Facebook and elsewhere…
• Exported my LinkedIn Contacts as a .vcf file for import into Address Book… imported and checked the merge information.
• Grabbed my Facebook Contacts phone details using a Greasemonkey script and a tool called AddressBooker (see the above linked hints page for details). At this point I had an issue. Downloading from AddressBooker as .vcf caused all the names to be exported as just FirstName fields, so when I tried to merge into Address Book everyone came up as a “new” contact. A better solution turned out to be to import directly from AddressBooker into Google Mail Contacts first; do any data merging and cleanup there (GMail Contacts has a nice “merge contacts” capability if you have multiple entries for one person); and then export as .vcf, and import into Address Book, checking the merge information as before with LinkedIn. Sounds long-winded, but it would have taken longer to manage manually in Address Book.
• At this point, Apple Address Book contained my “authoritative” contact list. To get it back into GMail, I scrubbed my whole GMail contacts list (slightly scary, but necessary), and then played around with the Automator action described in the Maciverse tips page, trying to use Numbers instead of Excel. Ultimately that was a disaster as it just couldn’t encode the tab-separated to CSV files correctly. The final answer turned out to be a brilliant little (free / donationware) utility called A to G. Get it. Use it. Donate.
• Result! And next time, I’ll try not to let this get so out of hand…

I see another wrinkle in this whole space. Although tools like Google Voice tend towards centralising all your contact details behind a single number you control (great idea – dear Google, when can we get it in Europe? hint hint!), the proliferation of social networks means that we all have multiple profiles and IDs. In particular, I find Skype and Twitter addresses hugely useful. Apple’s Address Book, of course, doesn’t provide “official” spots for those… there’s no entry for Skype in the IM drop-down list, and no space for arbitrary URLs, you have to edit and maintain a list of them. Something more extensible and easy to keep in sync would be very useful.

Update: the broken part
Google Talk appears now to have completely lost my contact list. Gah. So if you were connected to me on Gtalk then you may need to reconnect, or you may get a new connection request from me. Sorry about that…

TwtrCtr – Tracking Twitter followers with an iPhone

I’ve already mentioned this on Twitter, but so far I haven’t had a chance to write about the culmination of my first “proper” efforts to create a mashup: TwtrCtr.

For those not obsessed with Twitter or their follower numbers, there’s an application you probably haven’t heard of called TwitterCounter. The site provides tools, graphs and APIs for charting the growth of a user’s Twitter followers. It’s interesting, and if you’re slightly obsessive about figures and have a belief that such things “matter”, then you might already spend time checking it and looking at the pretty graphs. It also provides an element of “prediction” based on historical growth trends, and does cool things like allowing users to compare themselves to others and watch the graphs intersect or overlap.

There’s just one issue – although it looks great on the desktop, the site isn’t laid out very well for mobile browsers like Mobile Safari on the iPhone. It also uses a Flash component to display the graph, and since there’s currently no Flash on the iPhone, you get a big blank box in the middle of the screen.

The nice part is that TwitterCounter has a simple REST API which enables a developer to get the raw data about a user’s follower numbers. If you use Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, then you’ll see this in action.

Based on my previous experience of using the iWebkit framework to build an iPhone-optimised web wrapper for the data from my Current Cost meter, I thought it might be interesting to play around with using iWebkit to display the TwitterCounter stats.

iWebkit is a simple HTML framework which provides a set of CSS classes to make your web pages look like native iPhone apps. There are other frameworks out there like iUI and webapp.net, but they depend a lot more on knowledge of AJAX and some more advanced / dynamic coding, whereas iWebkit is all about simplicity – if you know your HTML basics, it is pretty straightforward. As it happens, you can extend it very easily as well – in my case, I combined it with some PHP functions which call out to TwitterCounter and echo the numbers into a table on a web page.

Although I worked with PHP a lot a few years ago, I hadn’t really done much with the language recently. The first thing I did was to create a simple piece of code to call the TwitterCounter API and get back the data for a specific user; and then I displayed it in a web page. Once I’d done that, it was pretty easy to get the whole thing wrapped into two pages of iWebkit template code, and style it all appropriately.

Revision one of the interface and app ran off my home server, and didn’t look fantastic. My initial thought for a name was “TwitterCounter nano”, but I changed it after realising that it didn’t fit so well as a name on the iPhone home screen

In the screenshot on the left, you’ll also see that the first form I came up with was far from “iPhone native-looking”… the current version of iWebkit didn’t have form CSS classes, so I had to tweak things a little. I also found it was worth digging into the Apple Web Development Guidelines for the iPhone, which gave some hints about how to make some iPhone-specific tweaks like turning off auto-capitalisation for the text entry box (since most usernames are all in lowercase), and how to add a text hint, for example.

So, the second iteration of the UI looks a lot nicer. It’s also possible to hit the bookmark button in Safari and add the app as a shortcut on the iPhone home screen… (see the icon at the top of the post)… if you do that, and launch TwtrCtr from there, it will act as a full-screen iPhone app with no Safari controls, giving a much more native experience. The user can then navigate by using the controls in the header bar rather than the forward and back buttons provided by the browser.

I added an FAQ page, too, so if you want to know more about the app you can check that out directly on the site. In these days of heightened concern about Twitter security I also thought it would be a good idea to add a note on the front screen to point out that it doesn’t ask for anything more than a username, and it doesn’t log that anywhere, it just passes it on to the TwitterCounter API.

OK, that was a rather long explanation of the evolution of the first page! The important part is actually how the data is displayed. Once you’ve entered a valid Twitter username and hit “Get User Stats”, you get a single-page representation  of the TwitterCounter data for the given user.

The top 2 or three rows are links which will open the user’s profile page, homepage/URL (if one is set… otherwise that row doesn’t display), or display a simple graph / chart which is generated by the Google Chart API. The latter is something high on my list of enhancements, because it looks a little dull at the moment; also, I’m generating the Google Charts URL myself rather than using one of the PHP wrappers to the API, which would probably be a lot simpler.

Don’t look too closely for the rough edges… right now, it doesn’t actually make any effort deal with cases where a user doesn’t exist, or TwitterCounter or Twitter is down…. I know about those small issues

In a nutshell, then – that’s all it is. A mashup which allowed me to explore a bit more iPhone-specific web development, some PHP / REST / XML coding, and a bit of Google Charts stuff as well. I have to say that the TwitterCounter folks (Boris and Arjen in particular) have been brilliant and very helpful and supportive, despite their app having an issue with the Twitter API while I was in the middle of developing this mashup on top of their API! iWebkit is a lot of fun to play with, and very simple as well – I know the developers are working hard to add new features into that framework whilst keeping it simple and aiming it at “non-techies”.

Oh, and incidentally, although the stylesheets make it look like an iPhone app, it should work perfectly well in any desktop or mobile browser – it’s plain old HTML.

I’m not making any claims about how this might develop in the future, but I’ve got a couple of ideas for tweaks that I might make. In the meantime, if you’re an iPhone (or other mobile device) Twitter user, do take a look at http://andypiper.tv/twtrctr and see how it works for you. Let me know what you think, or any ideas for additions you might find useful! Feel free to follow me on Twitter and @ your suggestions and comments to me, too.

Update: TwtrCtr is now linked directly from the TwitterCounter home page! Follow the iPhone link in the page footer!

iPhones, iPods, headphones

Although Steve Jobs described the iPhone as the “best iPod [Apple] ever made” back in January 2007, I have to say I’m not sure.

I previously owned a 2nd generation nano, and loved it. Light, easy to use… OK the screen was tiny and the capacity was limited, but it did the job.

The iPhone has that nice big screen with video playback going for it, and now it also has the new (and very, very cool) Genius playlist feature. Just a small number of issues, then…

1. No search? the 2G nano had search! Am I missing something?
2. No ability to read the notes for podcasts. On the nano I could press the button to cycle through time / cover art / lyrics or info display, and on the iPhone I get lyrics or the “back” of the album cover. Nothing useful for podcasts.
3. The time slider is way too difficult to control with a finger. On a longer podcast, say over an hour, skipping over a minute or two of the duration is almost impossible. The click wheel definitely wins there.
4. Finally, and most annoyingly: no external skip / pause control. I have to take the phone out of my pocket, potentially unlock the screen, and then skip to the next track. Really not the best idea when travelling on the London Underground (“that’s right folks, I have a 3G iPhone, please mug me at the next station”).
   OK – time for a confession here. I never unpacked the iPhone headphones until last week. I didn’t realise that they have a mic on the wire with a click switch which gives the forward/back/pause control. Why? Because I’m so used to the poor audio quality of the Apple earbuds that I switched to Shure ones several months ago and I’ve been using them since. So it seems to me that what is needed is some kind of cable which can fit in between third-party headphones and the iPhone’s headphone socket with an external switch on them.

I think the iPhone is an awesome device, but for me, it just isn’t the best iPod I’ve ever had.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,iPod,Apple,nano,touch,headphones,audio

MacWorld: space, time, air

Having followed the MacWorld news (go look at Maholo’s fantastic 60-second summary of the keynote), I’m left feeling a little annoyed.

Maybe the feeling will pass, but the implication is that you need a Time Capsule in order to do over-the-air backups using Time Machine. When Leopard came out I got myself an Airport Extreme… currently I plug a USB disk into the side of the Macbook in the evenings, but it would be far neater if the machine automatically found an Airport disk and backed up to that (in a supported manner).

So the question is, have Apple killed the “backup to an Airport disk” feature originally touted for Leopard in order to sell Time Capsules, or will they now release some kind of Time Machine and/or Airport Extreme update to support the use of disks attached to AE base stations…

The Leopard Experience

A slightly-delayed post on my experiences with the new Apple OS…

The complete experience

As people who follow my Twitterings and Flickr photos will know, I went for the full-on Leopard experience by waiting in line at the Southampton Apple store. There were some good reasons for doing so (complicated logistical reasons involving airports and overnight stays away from home, but still wanting to get my hands on a copy for the weekend). It was slightly amusing to have people come up to the queue to ask “what are you all waiting for” and have teenagers shouting “geeeks!” at us. Whilst waiting I got to try out an iPod Touch, and had some interesting conversations with others in the line, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

Just before the store opened, Justin commented on my blog that the feature to perform Time Machine backups to an Airport disk had been pulled at the last moment… I spent a little while checking out various blogs and forums and it did seem like the feature had been removed. Once inside the store I asked a member of staff, who assured me that Time Machine would work with the Airport Extreme and an attached disk… how wrong he turned out to be!

Pictures from the launch event are on Flickr.

Interlude: MacLive Expo

On the way home from the airport on Saturday, I popped in to the MacLive Expo event that was going on at London’s Olympia. The event was surprisingly quiet and low-key, I thought, especially given the launch of Leopard the night before. In fact one exhibitor said that it was the worst Expo in several years… I replied that it was the first one I’d ever been to, but I was slightly disconcerted by an exhibitor actually saying that to me themselves!

Really the best part of the show was the opportunity to catch up with Nik Fletcher from Realmac Software and TUAW’s token UK blogger. I first met Nik at random at the Flickr party at Tate Britain in the summer, and have been following his Twitterings. He showed me Realmac’s RapidWeaver product, which looks like a really nice application for creating websites… certainly far nicer than iWeb, and I guess it would be a great step up from that for people who wanted something easy-to-use but slightly more powerful. I suggested a few enhancements like the ability to output ATOM feeds for blogs… who knows, I may have said something useful

Cleanup, backup, install

Back at home, it was time for an upgrade.

The first thing I did was a cleanup of any cruft from applications that I no longer use, as recommended in various online articles.

After that, I wanted to make sure I was as up-to-date as possible with Leopard-capable versions of my favourite applications. I found a really nice application called AppFresh which scans your disk for applications, widgets, preference panes etc. and then attempts to check whether you are running the latest version… once it has found out, it will then download, and optionally unpack and install the updates. For the most part it did a great job, including discovering various application updates that were several months old which I’d failed to upgrade to, so I’ll definitely be keeping it around.

I did a complete backup using SuperDuper! before doing the upgrade, so that I had a bootable copy of my system on another disk in case something broke. Lovely piece of software, and impressive that it is so easy to make a bootable image of a Mac – it’s a nightmare on Windows.

My installation method of choice was an upgrade, in the end. I could have gone for the clean install and migrated my stuff from the backup, but I figured that a) it is a relatively ( < 12 months old) system, and b) I wanted to see how well an Apple OS upgrade works. So far, no problem… the installation time was estimated at a couple of hours, but in fact it was less than an hour and everything went perfectly smoothly. Impressive.

Impressions: good and not-so-good

Once I’d booted, it didn’t take long for me to try out most of the major new features. The first sign of something new was the galaxy/nebula background, and the Forgotten Password button on the Login screen. It is quite surprising – the things that I’d most been looking forward to (Time Machine, Stacks) have turned out to be underwhelming, whilst some of the lesser features and enhancements have been, for me, by far the best ones.

For example, Stacks. What a lovely way to clean up the desktop, right? Well the first thing I did was reconfigure Firefox to drop downloaded files into ~/Downloads instead of ~/Desktop. I also dragged the stuff that had been on my desktop, into the Downloads folder. The only trouble is that now, I have more than “a full stack worth” of files in the stack, so I get a “xx more in Finder” button at the top. Worse, the icon shown for the stack on the Dock is the same as the bottom (newest) file – so if it is a disk image, the stack icon on the Dock shows a .dmg file, for instance. Oh, and the Applications stack which opens into a lovely grid doesn’t work brilliantly, either – it always shows Address Book as the icon (since that’s the first application in my Applications folder), and the grid view only gets as far as the “O”s before I have to click the button to open the Finder to see the other 44 installed programs. Thank heavens for Quicksilver!

Time Machine is very nearly a complete waste of time for me. My Mac is a laptop so I don’t plug it in to an external disk very often. Since Apple removed the feature to backup to a network drive at the last minute, I can’t just get home in the evening and let the machine connect to the wireless and start syncing the Time Machine backups, I have to remember to put the thing on the desk and plug in the USB disk. Yes, I know there are some workarounds that claim to get Time Machine working with an Airport disk, but I’ve tried them and they simply aren’t working for me. Time Machine will see the backup disk when it is plugged in to the network, but it won’t let me restore files from it. On top of that, the default hour interval for performing incremental backups is slightly awkward for me as a photographer, since a typical use case for me might be to import a bunch of photos from the camera, and then rapidly delete ones I might decide I’m not sure about – I guess they will be in the trash until I empty it, but basically Time Machine isn’t going to catch those files since they are created and deleted within the hour… not a big deal but a limitation worth being aware of. I’d still like to use Time Machine, but it is just a bit of a pain at the moment. Here’s hoping they restore the Airport disk feature before too long.

I wasn’t impressed to discover that the firewall is switched off by default, either. Soon fixed that (once I did realise, anyway!). Oh, and I’ve switched off the 3D Dock, which looked pretty enough but was just a little more eye candy than was strictly necessary.

So what does work? Well for one thing, the consistent UI is great. I’d previously complained that applications on OS X were a horrible mix of Aqua, Brushed Metal and other styles, and Leopard has unified things nicely – albeit in a fairly grey way, but the look has definitely grown on me. Quick Look is lovely, and Cover Flow in the Finder (something I’d mentally dismissed as annoying and pointless) is absolutely lovely, particularly for images and documents, and it works beautifully over a network and to non-Mac machines, too.

As a Linux user I’ve been a fan of virtual desktops in the past… and Spaces is a lovely implementation. I can tap Ctrl-arrow to switch between them; Ctrl-number to go straight to one I want; and I’ve setup a hot corner at the bottom right of the screen to invoke the Expose/Spaces view so I can see all of them and move windows and apps between them. Wonderful. So now I have 2 columns and 3 rows of Spaces; from top-to-bottom, column 1 is for mail/web/blogging and column 2 is for entertainment/photography/coding. Great stuff, and much cleaner than things used to be.

The new Front Row looks really nice – Andrew Webb has a nice write-up of that one, but I’ve not played with it much yet.

What’s left? Well I’ve not tried iChat theatre or screen sharing, which I saw as a killer feature prior to launch. Oh, and the Last.FM client is crashing really horribly – I think that’s the last piece of essential software which isn’t working quite right for me.

Finally

I’ve been using Leopard for over a week now, and it really is a nice-looking upgrade which has improved my productivity. Not as revolutionary in all areas as I was expecting – in fact probably pretty disappointing in several areas, not least Time Machine – but the things I never expected to impress me, really have.

I’ve had one crash, and I can’t say what that was about. That was annoying.

Probably the best parts for me are the consistent user interface, Spaces and cover flow. I’ve shown the new OS off to a few people in the office, and I’m not sure what the general consensus is… but I’m glad I made the change already.

Technorati tags: Apple, Mac, OS X, Time Machine, macosx, Leopard, Spaces

Rationalising email: Gmail, IMAP and Mail.app

The current setup

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of email addresses… and a proportionately large amount of spam to go with them.

For the past five or so years, my mail processing system has looked like this:

1. Linux server running fetchmail which fetches from a total of… um… 8 (!)POP3 accounts.
2. All mail run through SpamAssassin which catches probably 90% of the junk, and scripts run every month that clear down and learn from the spam.
3. SquirrelMail on the same server to provide web access.
4. Dovecot IMAP on the same server to let me manage the aggregated mail from Thunderbird on various laptops at home.

This has worked well, but it has also meant that I’ve had to maintain a Linux server at home, and I’ve not opened up IMAP access to it over the Internet. So, with Google’s announcement of IMAP support in Gmail, I thought I’d give it another go.

How am I using Gmail now?

It took about a week for Gmail IMAP to appear on my account, as those who followed my increasingly-frustrated Twitterings will confirm.

It’s a progressive process, but I’ve decided to try to use Gmail’s ability to suck mail from my other accounts. The problem is that I have 7 of them (the eighth is Gmail itself), and Gmail will only let me pull down mail from 5. That actually turns out to be OK, since a couple of them were essentially unused or spam-only accounts, so I’m cutting down on those too.

Using Gmail as the front-end to all of my mail is good for a couple of reasons, and bad for another:

Good - I will eventually be able to decommission the Linux server.

Good – Gmail has good spam filtering, labels and all that good stuff around search, and is mostly accessible.

Bad – it isn’t accessible from everywhere, and my last client actually blocked access to Gmail explicitly, whilst I could still get to my home server very easily. I think this is likely to be the greatest annoyance.

I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to configure Gmail to pull my other POP3 accounts… generally I only had to name the provider and my account details, not enter all of the server information manually. Good stuff.

Changing mail clients

I was listening to the MacFormat weekly podcast the other day and discovered that the new version of Apple’s Mail.app has some very interesting features. Amongst them are some very cool data scraping capabilities (called Data Detectors) that allow todos, addresses and iCal entries to be intelligently created from analysis of the message body. Here’s an example, featuring Roo’s IET lecture next week:-)

My default mail client up until now on the MacBook Pro has been Thunderbird, but that has been largely a matter of familiarity… I decided that it was time to give the Apple alternative a try.

So far, it has been an intriguing experience. I can’t say I’ve found Mail to be the most intuitive application. For a start, configuration for Gmail IMAP was not very easy (here is some useful additional information that wasn’t on the Gmail FAQ). Not only that, but in Thunderbird and Gmail, I’m used to hitting a key for the next unread email, but Mail inexplicably doesn’t allow this. Two solutions:

1. An Applescript that causes Mail.app to jump to the next unread. I used Quicksilver to bind this to Option-` and it now pops up Mail and switches to the relevant Space as well as moving to the right message.
2. Probably an even simpler option, that Andrew Webb suggested via Twitter: a Smart Folder which only shows the Unread messages.

Now that I’m getting used to it, I’m quite liking Mail… particularly the ability to jump straight into Quick Look to view images and documents.

Trials and tribulations will be reported as the experiment continues.

Technorati tags: Gmail, IMAP, Google, Apple Mail, Mail.app, Thunderbird, SpamAssassin, SquirrelMail, email

Video imperfection

I left a previous blog post about my adventures with presentations and video on OS X hanging slightly, by not explaining whether I was successful in crunching a Quicktime video out of my Keynote presentation.

The story so far: I wanted to create a video slideshow + audio track from a Keynote presentation. I had an MP3 of the audio (thanks to Roo), and was trying to glue that together with a Quicktime stream of the slides and transitions. I’d found Keynote’s Quicktime export unsatisfactory, iMovie 6 editing facilities inadequate, and import of static images of the slides into iMovie produced low quality material.

In the end, I was successful. I exported images from Keynote; purchased Still Life to create an iMovie project; downsampled the MP3 track to a lower quality but still acceptable 8kbps using Audacity [NB this step was crucial to creating a final file that was of a reasonable size]; imported the MP3 track into iMovie and then copied each slide frame enough times to cover the time I was speaking over it. Finally, I bought QT Pro and VisualHub to give me more control over the Quicktime file output. The key things in reducing the video size turned out to be downsampling the audio and not worrying too much about compression since the slides were basically static images.

Result: a 45 min presentation which is about 70Mb in size, including speaker audio and audience questions. I’m happy with that.

A week or so after all of these shenanigans, Apple released iWork 08. I’d only bought iWork 06 four weeks previously, and was told that there was no upgrade pricing. The first time Apple has significantly upset me in my 6 month relationship with them.

Anyway, Keynote 08 contains a new Voice-over Recording mode. I gave it a quick try in the Apple Store on Regent Street before I bought iWork 08, and it seemed OK. Unfortunately, my fellow IBMer and Apple zealot Ian Smith has taken a closer look at it, and reports that it gets out of sync. Not good news. I had been hoping to revise my presentation and re-record it so that I could put it up on Slideshare. I might still try to do that just to see whether I suffer from the same problems that Ian discovered.

There has been a lot of controversy over iMovie 08 – it doesn’t open projects created in iMovie 6 by default, and I’m not sure that I’d even be happy trying to do what I did before with the new version, having heard about its deficiencies.

Ian has taken a look at the issues around HD video and the Mac, too… it sounds like there’s still no nirvana here, even though iMovie 08 now supports AVCHD and HDD-based video cameras, there are still a bunch of limitations.

I’m not into video work into a big way, but Ian is. Check out his analysis of the current state of play. He’s worth listening to.

Technorati tags: Ian Smith, Apple, iMovie, Keynote, presentations, video, video editing, Quicktime, Mac, OS X

Trying out ecto 3

The alpha version of ecto 3 was just released. Here’s a first post using the new version. I’m particularly impressed that it has picked up all of the various Technorati tags I’ve used in the past, although I note that it has mixed up WP.com categories with Technorati tags in the sidebar, so I’ve no idea what will happen when I post this

Unfortunately it doesn’t work with Roller / Lotus Connections yet – that supports Atom Publishing Protocol, but I can’t see an option for AtomPub in ecto 3 so far. I did manage to configure it using the MetaWeblogAPI but it crashed when I tried to post an entry. Such is the nature of alpha software of course.

Image created in Skitch, dragged straight into ecto 3, uploaded directly to the blog.

Apple, Mac, OS X, atompub, ecto, ecto3, Lotus Connections

Augh. Video editing torture…

Earlier this week I gave a talk at an internal IBM conference.

I broke with tradition by using Apple Keynote to produce the slides, rather than Powerpoint. I love Keynote. The application is a joy to use; the rendering is beautiful; the slide transitions are lovely. It does seem to encourage me to think about not using bulleted slides, which can only be a good thing. Oh, and the presenter view is amazing – you can drag and drop different elements and create your own customised display, something that PPT does not offer.

So, presentation done. Roo was kind enough to use his voice recorder to record the session… OK, so it was in WMA format, but iTunes quickly converted that to MP3 for me. Slides, plus audio. Looking good.

On the audio side, I was able to use Audacity to balance the levels where the audience questions were a bit faint, and to cut out a few extraneous umms which trimmed the length of the talk a bit. It is a shame Audacity isn’t slightly more OS X-like, but I guess things like the lack of drag-and-drop support are largely the fault of the wxWidgets toolkit that Audacity is built on.

I really wanted to export the slideshow from Keynote as a Quicktime presentation, preserving the nice transitions. As it happens, that is possible, but you can only set a defined transition time which is the same for each slide. That meant that it would be hard to match the audio to the slide transitions, since obviously the length of time for each one, varied. I tried this anyway, loading both the video and audio into iMovieHD, and then had a go at cutting the movie up and matching it with the audio cues.

There’s a problem here. You apparently can’t stretch the duration of each video segment. So, I then thought about making still frames to go in between each slide transition. Another problem – the quality of the still frames created by iMovie was awful. OK… so then I tried exporting from Keynote as static images, and importing those into iMovie. Same problem – even after I’d got past the Ken Burns effect thing which was zooming each image as I added it as a movie frame, the still images themselves were an order of magnitude uglier than the main video.

At this point I was getting seriously frustrated with Apple’s flagship, easy-to-use, included-with-the-OS, just-buy-a-Mac-video-editing-is-a-breeze, iLife suite.

It turns out that iMovieHD uses some poor quality encoder to import and export still images. I don’t know whether this is to encourage users onto the £199 Final Cut Express, but it sucks. I tried exporting a slideshow from iPhoto, but that has limitations on the duration of each frame, too. Oh, and the transitions available in iMovie are not the same as those in iPhoto, which in turn are not the same as those in Keynote. Argh.

Next I downloaded Still Life, and had a play. This is a relatively cheap ($25/£15) application which is intended to build simple slideshows with more advanced panning, whilst retaining decent quality in the stills.

In the end, I exported my slides as images from Keynote, imported them into Still Life, set a duration for each slide of 5 sec, and then exported from Still Life as an iMovie project. Result: I had an iMovie project which had a series of 5 second frames. I imported my MP3 commentary track, and then repeatedly copied the frames so that each slide lasted for the relevant length of time whilst I was speaking on the audio track. Tedious, and I lost the pretty transitions, but it has worked.

My final challenge has been exporting the movie. iMovie provides some defaults, like full quality (estimated to produce a 9Gb file in my case – a lot for a 45 min slideshow with a bit of audio), DVD or Web. The Web version is pretty small and crunches my slides into a 320×240 frame, but it does come in at an acceptable size of 40Mb. The larger size I exported, at 640×480 frame size, ended up at 600Mb. Cote recommended VisualHub, which I’m also going to take a look at. I mean, it’s not even as if this is complex video – it’s a series of still frames with some audio underneath. I would have liked a bit more complexity, in all honesty, but it seems that was too hard to achieve with built-in tools.

I guess there was an alternative to all of this… I could have cut up my audio file into sections for each slide, attached them in Keynote, and exported in a format of my choice (Flash or QT, I suppose). It assumes that Keynote is smart enough to show each slide for the duration of the attached audio file. Maybe I’ll try that next time. Or maybe some Mac, presentation, and video editing guru will just slap me down and tell me what I did wrong. This whole thing felt a lot harder than I expected it to be.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iMovie, iPhoto, keynote, Mac, OS X, presentation, visualhub, Still Life, video, video editing

Safari on Windows

I was initially excited about Apple’s release of Safari for Windows.

I’ve been a long-term Phoenix Firebird Firefox user and I use it as my primary browser on both Windows and OS X. I love the fact that I can install extensions to enhance what I’m doing. In particular I like Greasemonkey, which lets me hack the pages I’m viewing using small scripts.

However, Firefox seems to me to have lost its way a bit. It seems to have sprung some pretty serious memory leaks (as I type this it is sitting at ~460Mb real RAM and ~500Mb VM) and doesn’t feel as snappy as it once was. As I’ve said numerous times before, this could be due to the way I use it – I’m lazy about managing the number of tabs that I keep open, and I do use a lot of extensions.

More annoyingly, Firefox doesn’t currently use colour profiles to display images. This is quite upsetting on the Mac, where I can quite happily use Lightroom to edit my images; export them as JPEGs; and view them on Flickr in Safari, and they will look just as rich as they did in Lightroom…. switch to Firefox on any platform, and they appear washed out. Progress is being made on improving this situation – in fact it looks like a possible fix has been checked in to the Firefox code base recently – but right now, Safari on OS X is my only way of seeing the colours I expect.

I had high hopes that Safari on Windows would do the same thing for me – display my photos as I want to see them. So, I installed it. Unfortunately, it looks like it is rendering images in the same way as Firefox - so clearly there’s something magic in the underlying libraries it is using that hasn’t come across from the Mac version.

A wider question remains though – without forced bundling (IE), advertising and word-of-mouth (Firefox), or hardware (as with iTunes/iPod) to drive it onto the OS, what will make a Windows user choose Safari? Cool factor? Well, the release made a small piece on the second page of this morning’s Metro newspaper, so maybe UK commuters will rush to download it. I’ll follow the size of the install base with interest.

Technorati tags: Apple, web, browser, Firefox, Safari, OS X, Windows, Greasemonkey, extensions, addons, color, colour, ICC profile

More on handy Mac apps

Yesterday I did a little playing with various applications on the Mac to see if they were going to be helpful…

endo
I have been using using Vienna as a feedreader, and it works fairly nicely. I was reading that Maria Langer uses endo (from the same stable as ecto, which I use for writing my blog entries on the Mac), and since there’s a trial available I thought I’d give it a go. I’m not entirely convinced by the layout… the subscription groups are in a bar across the top, and I would rather have them running down the side, but that’s a comfort thing. There are a couple of nice features, though… it supports microformats like hCard, so if I’m viewing Upcoming events, endo will offer to put them into iCal for me. The setup wizard offered to set up a number of personalised feeds for me, for example the comments that people had left on my Flickr photos, and Technorati links to my blogs – a nice touch.

TextMate
So far, I’ve been through TextEdit, Smultron and TextWrangler as editors on OS X. Last night Al was telling me about TextMate, and that also has a free trial, so I’m giving it a go. TextMate appears to be a bit of a hardcore programmer’s editor… and since my choice of editor on Windows tends to be gVim, I think this might work for me. There’s a lot to learn, though. I’ll see how I get on.

Keynote
I’ve heard lots of people say that Keynote is far better than PowerPoint, and then I realised that I have a trial version of iWork on my MacBook Pro, so I can give it a go before choosing to upgrade to the full version. So far it seems nice… I have a number of presentations to give in the next few months and I’d like to see how I get on with Keynote. The animated slide transitions are particularly lovely, and I read that the visual quality of the slides is better than on Windows… it is certainly very easy to use.

Twittervision screensaver
The latest version of the Visionary screensaver runs either FlickrVision or Twittervision (real-time Flickr and Twitter postings popping up on a Google Map), or the 3D version of Twittervision. It’s just a bit of fun, but pretty cool.

And now, a few via Lifehacker…

Ejector
Really simple – Ejector is a menubar app that provides a drop-down menu to eject any device, including disk images. The default Apple version only lets you eject CDs.

AppDelete
People had previously recommended AppZapper to completely remove applications from the machine – AppDelete is essentially the same thing but freeware.

RCDefaultApp
Whenever I plug a camera into my Mac, it launches the Canon CameraWindow software. I spent quite a lot of time trying to stop it from doing this. The RCDefaultApp preferences pane lets you adjust the default behaviour when devices are plugged in, or the default app used to launch various file types. Handy.

Finally…
So i discovered yesterday (via some Twitterings) that you can hold down ctrl and use the scroll button on the mouse, or the two-finger scroll movement on the trackpad, to zoom the screen. Very cool.

Technorati Tags: appdelete, Apple, ecto, ejector, endo, flickrvision, keynote, Mac, OS X, feedreader, rcdefaultapp, screensaver, software, textmate, twittervision