There are a heap of things I’m really liking about Snow Leopard so far… even though it turns out that my early 2007 MacBook Pro can’t take advantage of a lot of the under-the-covers enhancements

1. The new (configurable) Dock behaviour to have application windows minimise into their app icons – combined with the click-hold-Expose feature, this has made the Dock useful for me again. I’ve moved it from autohiding at the side of the screen, to permanent (but 2D) at the bottom.
2. Safari running Flash as a separate process. Far fewer browser crashes.
3. Nearly 15Gb of reclaimed disk space. Seriously! Could be the fact that I opted for a custom install and removed most of the language support I didn’t need, too, and also influenced by the fact that Snow Leopard reports disk space differently.
4. Scrollable, more intelligent grid views in Stacks. The Dock is even more useful.
5. Seeing the date in the menubar. Bye bye, MagiCal.
6. Setting Spotlight search to find in the current folder by default (in Finder preferences).
7. The default screen gamma setting is now 2.2 – at last.

If you want to dig a bit deeper to find some of these things, check out a couple of Macworld articles – I wouldn’t have known about them otherwise! All-in-all then, a minor upgrade with a bunch of welcome changes.

I’ve resisted writing anything on the recently-announced Google Chrome OS, for a number of reasons… the most significant one being that so far, we don’t know a huge amount about it. This hasn’t stopped reams of opinion being written or spoken about it anywhere else though, so a week on from the announcement, I thought I’d lay down a few opinions of my own.

First of all, I always felt that the Chrome browser itself kind of pointed towards an operating system, since the engineers were clearly thinking in terms that you’d usually associate with an OS – ideas like the threading model immediately made me think of the domain of the operating system. The “Google OS” has been one of those rumours that has consistently failed to die.

So what do we know? We know that Google Chrome OS will be based on Linux and will be largely open source, and that the initial target constituency will be the netbook market but that it has ambitions to the desktop. We know that it will have a new windowing system (bye bye X). We hear that Google has been courting various netbook manufacturers, and we know that it should be out sometime in 2010.

On the threat to the desktop

Scott Bourne was saying on MacBreak Weekly this week that he felt this meant it would be no real threat to Mac OS X, and I guess the ensuing discussion really sparked the majority of this post. Scott based his assertion on a straw poll of people who he’d asked “OS X or Chrome?” (a: OS X) for laptops, and “Chrome or Windows Mobile?” (a: Chrome) for PDAs. I just think that’s an impossible discussion right now. So far it’s vapourware. We don’t know what Google Chrome OS will look like and we don’t know what features it will have. It’s pointless to try to compare it to existing operating systems at this stage.

The other reason the MacBreak Weekly crew decided that Chrome OS wouldn’t be a threat was that it would initially be limited to netbooks but “will it actually be able to make the step up to the desktop?”. This is an interesting discussion, as it assumes that the granddaddy / holy grail of machines is the desktop computer. But… wait a minute. Haven’t Apple spent the past two years convincing the whole mobile market that they have to have fully-capable computing platforms on their handheld devices? Isn’t the netbook market exploding? Aren’t laptops outselling desktops? Aren’t computers and televisions converging via set-top boxes and streaming media? People want computing power and access wherever they are, in a form factor that fits. I think the suggestion that the desktop is still “where its at” is deeply, deeply flawed – the desktop is dying, and has been for a long time. The desktop is a place where people occasionally anchor themselves, but the rest of the time they are moving around and taking their platform with them.

So is it a threat? On netbooks, in my opinion, yes – probably to both Linux and Windows. As for Apple, they aren’t going to be keen to let anyone run another OS on their hardware, and they’re not currently in the netbook market, so it probably is not a big deal right now. Windows XP still seems to be an OS of choice on many netbooks, but Microsoft probably will finally kill that with Windows 7. There are too many Linux distributions around (Linpus, Moblin, Ubuntu) vying for a slice of that market. The Google brand, combined with an experience that is genuinely pleasant, could take chunks out of both sides of that market. From there, who knows… but if it is Linux-based, we already know that that scales from big to small machines, so there are plenty of places it could go. I personally think it will be interesting to see where they choose to go with the user interface, and this is the area that will determine the future.

On the cloud

I think the idea that Chrome OS could be a lightweight system with the majority of content hosted in the cloud is particularly interesting. How secure are we all feeling this week about the safety of the cloud? In the light of the Twitter hack, I imagine that people are rethinking the security of the public cloud, anyway. Paired with a secure behind-the-firewall private cloud, a lightweight OS like this makes a lot of sense. That’s not to say I don’t like the flexibility that cloud/web-based services offer me – I use many of them, including things like Google Docs. Of course, you need a network connection for it to be effective, and it’s true that bandwidth is becoming pervasive, although if you take a look at 3G coverage for various UK mobile operators (hint, look at the PDF and the maps *per operator*, not the overall coverage map), you might want to rethink your dependence on that, too.

On the image

Will Google be able to get away with labelling Chrome OS “beta” to start off with? I think that in order to get people to use it, beyond the Google brand name, it will have to be really good, polished, and / or flashy and convincing enough as an initial experience for people to base their computing lives on it. I think it will probably have to have had more testing than many of the existing Google cloud web products.

Final thought

Right now, all we can really say is: “well, this is interesting”. We can speculate, but frankly, I don’t think we know enough to say anything more. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Continuing some of the posts about Mac software and tools I use, this might be of interest – a few of the applets you’ll find in my menubar. The vast majority of these are free.

View full size

1. LittleSnapper – handy for taking annotated screenshots or grabbing webpages. I don’t run this all the time, but it was running to take this shot.
2. Google Quick Search Box – I’ve been a Quicksilver user for a long time, currently I’m trying out QSB instead.
3. Camouflage – hides the icons on the desktop. Great for recording screencasts, or just for tidying up.
4. DropBox – handy for sharing files between Windows, Linux and Mac.
5. Caffeine – disable screensaver for watching movies and presentations etc.
6. iScrobbler – for Last.FM support
7. Skitch – my screen capture utility of choice, which I do have running all the time. Not as good for annotation or web page capture as LittleSnapper, but quicker to use.
8. Evernote – todo lists and note taking (syncs with iPhone)
9. Eject applet
10. Canon printer/scanner utility for the MP620
11. SoundSource – very handy tool to select input and output sources, great for podcasting etc.
12. Displays (enabled from System Prefs) – useful for presentations and viewing video on the TV.
13. Language (enabled from System Prefs) – quick access to language, special characters, keyboard viewer, etc.
14. MagiCal – pop up monthly calendar

I’ve posted a couple of times now about my experiences creating audio and video on OS X. A couple of weeks ago, I had a brief conversation with my friend Ian Hughes, aka epredator, who was trying to get himself setup:

Good one. All I knew was that DIVX AVI files were playing on my machine fine, through QuickTime.

The answer, which I’d evidently missed before, is Perian. This is a really simple, installable package which enables support for a whole range of “other” file formats in QuickTime. You’ll also want to install Flip4Mac, which gives support for Windows formats like WMV. It’s also worth adding the Xiph component for formats like FLAC and OGG. Once you’ve got those in place, you should be fine to import, play and edit in iMovie and other QuickTime-based applications.

My earlier post on some of the tools I use in my video workflow was pretty popular, so I thought I’d post an update on some of the latest developments.

Software

I’m now using VideoMonkey for some transcoding tasks. I mentioned in my previous post that VisualHub is now defunct – it was more-or-less the de facto free transcoding tool on OS X. VideoMonkey is also free and is based on a similar codebase… currently in early development, but it works and is looking really promising.

Since I wrote the previous entry in February, iMovie 09 has been updated to 8.0.1 (and, today, 8.0.2). Amongst the “hidden” / undocumented additional features is proper HD export, which had been a bit hacky via QuickTime export before. That’s particularly handy for dealing directly with YouTube’s HD option.

One piece of weirdness I’ve encountered… I’ve been using Keynote for animating certain intro and closing sequences, and exporting as QuickTime for import to iMovie. I did that the other day, and iMovie reported that the movie file could not be imported as the format was not valid. I ran the .mov file through VideoMonkey to get a .mp4 h264 encoded video, and that imported into iMovie as required. I hadn’t come across that before, so maybe an iWork or iLife update changed something there.

Oh, and I’m no longer a stranger to GarageBand – I used that the other day for building some sequences for Dogear Nation. Ironically I still ended up exporting the “song” to iTunes, getting the .aif file, and chopping it up and re-exporting pieces as MP3 using Audacity! However, it worked very nicely for applying real-time effects and applying volume ducking etc.. Once I got my head around the interface, I was very happy.

Hardware

Latest acquisition is a Blue Eyeball USB HD microphone and camera. It’s the evolution of the Blue Snowflake that I’ve been using, but with the addition of a tiny (and I do mean tiny – the iris is really small!) HD 1280×1024 webcam which pops out of the side.

This was mentioned on MacBreak Weekly a couple of weeks ago, and being a fan of the Snowflake I expected to be blown away by this product too. The truth is – I do think it’s a lovely piece of kit, and the audio quality is great. The problem I have is around software compatibility on OS X! It turns out that iMovie can record from the internal iSight, or from a Firewire-connected webcam, but not from a generic USB webcam. This is an insane limitation that I hope Apple fixes soon! (surely no-one is going to try to persuade me that they use this as a differentiator between the consumer and pro line of products, or that there’s some inherent limitation, given that other native tools can capture the video?). The workaround, as described in the Blue Eyeball FAQ, is to use Photo Booth to do the video capture and then import and edit in iMovie. Oh, and although Skype works flawlessly with the camera, any Flash tools (like, say, Viddler and 12seconds and TweetDeck) don’t seem to want to see it. Video and still image wise, the camera is a definite step up from the iSight, but it still leaves something to be desired on the part of Apple and Adobe software support. On final thing is that it auto-adjusts image quality based on light levels, and there’s no software support for tweaking white balance etc – a bit of a shame.

As I’m sure regular readers are aware, I’m producing a wider range of media than ever before, now that I’m a regular podcaster and creating a range of video content as well. I thought it would be useful to talk a little about the range of tools that I’m using – far from professional level Final Cut or anything!

Hardware

The hardware is pretty varied. The core of the whole “system” is the MacBook Pro, which I use for pretty much all of my editing. That also has the iSight camera, which is adequate for videos which need to include my face, although I’d like something higher quality (any recommendations?). I’ve mentioned iGlasses before, which is useful for adjusting the iSight input. From an audio perspective I use a USB headset and also a Blue Snowflake USB microphone, which is absolutely great – compact, convenient, and it captures excellent quality sound.

If I need to capture video away from the computer, my current camcorder of choice is the Kodak Zi6 which can take HD 720p footage, albeit at a quality limited by the rest of the hardware (lens, sensor etc). I’ve yet to do a proper review of this, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a step up from either the Flip Mino or the older disgo Video Plus which I’d tried. I also sometimes grab snippets of video on my compact Canon camera.

Screencasting

For screencasts I use ScreenFlow. This is just a wonderful piece of software which is capable of recording both the screen, and from the iSight simultaneously. This allows the video to be overlaid into the screencast if required, so you can personally narrate what is going on. Even better than that, ScreenFlow lets you zoom in on windows and desktop features, and is really a general purpose compositing application… if you look at this video I made when I talked to a friend recently, you’ll see there are no desktop elements at all, just the video stream from the camera, a picture of him, and the audio, with some nice image tilt and reflection effects applied. ScreenFlow has also recently added text annotation features, which are really useful.

I’ve yet to use it for any practical purpose, but I also just downloaded OmniDazzle, which is now free. OmniDazzle lets you highlight areas of the screen with visual effects using a single keystroke – I can see this being useful in combination with ScreenFlow in the future.

Video editing

A few weeks ago I blogged about iMovie 09. I know a lot of people really dislike both iMovie 08 and 09, but I’m totally comfortable with both versions now, and I have to say that 09 is just beautiful. I’ve had no issues with it – it’s great for rapidly mixing and editing video, still images and audio. Watch my introductory series on YouTube or the whole thing as one movie on Viddler. I wrote a bit more about my use of iMovie back in December, too.

Here’s a tip: have you ever wanted to create some animated titles of your own? I have one word for you – Keynote! When I created the Home Camp TV title sequence it was a simple matter of creating a slide with some animated elements in Keynote, and exporting it as a Quicktime movie (which I did without sound, allowing me to overlay a choice of audio on the title sequence in iMovie). It’s great for quickly creating JPEG stills with text for titles, too.

In terms of finding audio to accompany videos… I’ve used both the pre-canned loops that come with iMovie, and also used some audio from Podsafe Audio. I do find that site a bit cumbersome to search though, so I’d be interested to know of any other useful, royalty-free resources.

Audio editing

I’ve not done a great deal on the audio-only side of things, but my essential tools here are Audacity for editing and cleanup; and Levelator for post-processing. That’s a really important point, by the way: only levelate your audio once everything is mixed together, the whole point is that it’s going to analyze everything and modulate the volume equally… if you have a bunch of snippets of audio and levelate them separately, then edit them together, you may well still end up with volume variations.

Another quick tip at this stage: to avoid issues with VBR MP3s showing up as weird (and incorrect) lengths in some tools, I bring the audio file into iTunes and do the MP3 export in there.

Imaging

For “proper” RAW photo editing and management, regular readers will know that I’m a huge fan of Lightroom. I use Pixelmator for finer adjustments on exported images.

Beyond that, I find that iPhoto is useful for quickly grabbing snapshots from the digital compact camera for compositing into iMovie clips. Skitch and LittleSnapper are both very useful tools as well as they enable me to rapidly take, resize and annotate screenshots or clips of web pages. For diagrams and so forth, there’s nothing that can beat OmniGraffle.

Extras

Finally, a couple of other useful bits and pieces. Transcoding to different formats is through either VisualHub (now defunct) or ffmpegX. QuickTime Pro is an essential (and highly cost-effective) upgrade too, since it lets you make very quick edits to QuickTime movie files and control the output format more finely.

There. Now, I imagine this may attract a range of “have you heard of…?” “why aren’t you using…?” and other responses, but that’s how I’ve currently settled things. Hopefully some of the tips and thoughts here will be useful to other amateur content creators, too!

A lot of the iMovie 09 reviews I’ve seen on YouTube have been pretty much “standard” coverage of the basic new features. I’ve been using it for a while now and put together a number of different videos with it… along the way, I’ve found a couple of handy tricks like how to incorporate on-screen logos or information, or how to zoom into a map. Interested? Take a look at my screencast.

(I would have posted this on YouTube as well, but need to re-edit it first as there’s a 10 minute length limit!)

Oh, and another really interesting resource if you want to get more out of iMovie 09 is the Unlocking iMovie 09 blog – some great material over there!

Regular readers will know that one of the things that I’ve been getting more into this year is video editing (see the page that I’ve just added as a teaser for things to come in 2009). This has been driven by the increasing ease-of-use of online services, the capabilities of the machines and software I have, and the gadgets I’ve been playing around with. In January I looked at a cheap USB video camera, and since then I’ve had even nicer toys to look at

Interview

Back in October I was invited to talk to the EMEA President of Flip Video, Ray Sangster, at the press launch of the Flip Mino in London. I imagined at the time that my earlier blog posts about this category of devices was at least partly responsible for the invitation.

Before the visit I’d canvassed some questions from my friends on Twitter, and I had some ideas and thoughts of my own that I wanted to discuss. For instance, why bother with a USB camcorder like a Flip when mobile phones are increasingly able to record video and connect to the Internet? Why are the Flip cameras later coming to Europe (typically several months behind the US launch?). Would the Flip cameras get external mics, or other accessories to make them more useful to journalists?

Ray kicked off the conversation by showing me some sample video made by college students in the US… and immediately also pointed out that the target audience for the camera is primarily the 14-25 age group who use the web more than TV, and also particularly with the Mino (which is slimmer and sleeker than the previous Flip Ultra) more slanted towards women, who capture “memories” more than “video for editing”.

The answer to my core question around the value of the device compared to, say, a mobile phone was a great one – Ray offered me his phone and suggested that I try to find the controls for recording video. It’s true that right now, it is relatively difficult to do that (and impossible on the iPhone, which still doesn’t support video, or have a decent resolution)… The very simplicity of the Flip is the selling point. It is reflected in the design of the hardware (big lens, big record button, flip-out USB connection, that’s about it!) and the use of the software, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

The time-delay on release was put down to the time needed to convert to European standards and languages, which is fair… although I remember when the original Flip came out, I got very frustrated waiting for the UK release. It would be great if they could reduce that window for future models.

The accessories include tripod, underwater casing (for the Ultra… I’ve not seen that for a Mino yet but I’ve not looked hard)… but it doesn’t seem likely to me that items such an external microphone are coming along, given the focus on simplicity and the consumer market.

I was interested to learn that the Mino is being used, in the words of the PR company, “from the catwalks to Kandahar” – they are being used to record fashion shows from people like Stella McCartney, and covering war stories in Afghanistan for upload back to the UK over a telephone modem.

A very enjoyable afternoon!

Hands-on

The Flip Mino itself is delivered in a smart box reminiscent of Apple packaging (particularly that of the iPhone). You get the camera, a soft carrying pouch, and that is it – all you need to get going.

You get a simple camera with no batteries to fiddle around with. It’s a fixed 2Gb capacity (60 minutes recording time), unlike some other devices on the market which can support additional storage like SD cards. You record your clips, plug in to a computer, and the software can upload directly to YouTube and MySpace… I was somewhat surprised that it doesn’t support other services like Viddler and Facebook too, given their growing popularity.

If you’re curious to see what I thought of the hardware and the Mac software, take a look at the short clip below.

A number of small things bother me about the Mac support for the Mino, some of which I mention in the video. Firstly, I notice that the software is PowerPC and therefore runs in Rosetta on an Intel Mac – why not ship a Universal binary? It doesn’t support logging in to YouTube with a Google ID (iMovie 08 does). The Save to Album option puts the videos into [homedir]/Documents/My Flip Video Library – which seems strange – why not use the Movies folder, or just use drag-and-drop on a Mac to copy the movies straight off the USB drive (which is actually what I ended up doing, and editing with iMovie). Generally, I’m left thinking that they could have done a better job of the Mac support. It works with OS X though, and that’s a step forward from previous models.

I also took the camera out with me on a weekend break with friends in November. It was a good opportunity to see how it performed outdoors, and also to see what others in the target age group thought about it. Here’s a chance to see what kind of audio and sound quality you get.

As for opinions: generally, friends were commenting that the screen was too small, and shared my impression that phones are moving into the same space, so many were doubtful that they would buy one… but they also don’t make many videos at the moment anyway. In all honesty, their reactions were not strongly positive.

By the way, you can also see those videos on my YouTube channel, along with some other examples of footage shot with the Mino.

So where is the “but”?

So far I’m probably sounding reasonably positive, and the fact is that I do like the Mino, despite the faults I’ve observed. It’s small, convenient, and “good enough” in most respects. My issues with it are that I think it’s somewhat expensive given the competition from alternatives like the bulkier and AA-battery-driven, but 720p-capable Kodak Zi6 HD; and that right around the corner are some other rather nice-looking HD devices. DSLRs are also increasingly getting HD video recording capabilities, so the market space for these devices is potentially narrowing. That said, there will always be something better on the horizon!

My overall feeling is that if you want a simple, straightforward video camera that is easy to use, portable and “good enough” then absolutely, check out the Flip Mino. And if you don’t want my opinion, then Scoble reckons the Flip was the best gadget he “stole” in 2008… although commenters on his post also note that the Kodak is a contender. You can also take a look at Julia Roy’s video review.

Available from Amazon in black or white (which, weirdly, is slightly cheaper!)

I’ve written before about a little app I utterly love on the Mac called Skitch. It’s a really nice tool for taking and annotating screenshots, and I often use it to add an image to my blog posts, or simply to record interesting events in my gallery.

So what if you need to make images of web pages? I’m fairly certain that my new favourite application is going to be LittleSnapper, from my friends at Realmac Software. It looks simple, and gorgeous. They recently posted a demo of some of the features on their blog.

Incidentally, although I’ve not had any cause to use their RapidWeaver software before, I’ve had it demonstrated to me and it also looks like a fantastic tool if you are into web design. I think LittleSnapper is going to be the product that gets me on the hook, though

disclaimer: I know one of the guys from Realmac, but I’ve chosen to post this independently, and the opinions here are firmly my own

Recently I’ve been trying to build a C application on OS X. It actually worked first time for me on an Intel MacBook Pro on Leopard (10.5) just via gcc *.c -o [outputfile] … but yesterday it was pointed out that the resulting binary is useless on a G4 Mac Mini.

The nice thing about Apple’s move from PowerPC to Intel chips is that they have this concept of a Universal binary – the same binary file can run on both PPC and Intel. The slightly complicated part is that you have to actually build your binary as Universal, it doesn’t happen automatically.

So it turns out the the corresponding magic-fu is:

gcc -O2 -Wall -force_cpusubtype_ALL -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch i386 -arch ppc *.c -o [outputfile]

At a high level I’m telling the compiler to build for both i386 and ppc architectures. Note that I’ve also set a flag here to specify a minimum OS X level of 10.4 (Tiger).

Of course there are sometimes some coding changes required to support both processor architectures. Apple’s Universal Binary Programming Guidelines should help there.

Here’s something I’ve wanted to get my hands on for a while now… an Eye-Fi SD card. If you don’t know about these things, essentially they are standard 2Gb SD cards that fit into any camera that will take the format (or others, with e.g. a Compact Flash/SD adapter). The good part is that they make the camera wireless-capable….

So I picked up my Eye-Fi card and the first thing that I noticed was the cool packaging… pull on the tab on the right-hand side of the box, and the box slides out to the left, revealing a USB dongle and the card already inserted. You need the dongle, because you need to use the computer to configure the card.

Once I plugged the dongle into the machine, an Eye-Fi item appeared on the desktop… it was pretty simple to just install the Mac software. Once I’d done that, I hit a small snag… I got a message about the Eye-Fi Manager software being unable to initalise the card. I tried running the Eye-Fi Manager a few times, but the same thing happened… until I took the dongle out of the USB port on the right-hand side of my machine, and plugged it back in on the left. That time, I got a set of dialogs enabling me to register an account. Not sure what happened there!

Actually this seems to be an issue on my MacBook Pro… for some reason the Eye-Fi Manager software will never “initialize” the card when the dongle is plugged in on the right of the machine (although it still shows up as a mass storage device, and Lightroom sees it and offers to import images from it). Worked fine over on the left, but then the dongle is a bit too wide to enable the Magsafe power plug to be connected at the same time. Actually it seems a little random, unfortunately. I raised a problem with Eye-Fi support and they basically talked me through steps for checking that nothing else is using the port, plugging and replugging – nothing specifically useful. YMMV.

Right, so here’s how this thing works. You start the Eye-Fi Manager software, which opens a web page to configure the card. Here, you can add wireless network details (it supports a whole range of network settings including WEP and WPA keys), rename the card if you want, and configure a huge variety of online services. I have configured mine for Flickr… but the software supports Facebook, SmugMug, WebShots, SnapFish, Picasa, Photobucket… and a gazillion others that I’ve not heard of before (oddly, Movable Type, Vox and Live Spaces, but not WordPress – hmm!). Once you’ve done that, you put the card in the camera, and it will automatically connect to the network and start uploading shots any time you take them.

What appears to happen, is this: the camera uploads to Eye-Fi’s site, which then transfers to your chosen / configured photo service. The next time the Eye-Fi Manager sees the Eye-Fi site, it then mirrors the photos to the local disk (you can specify a location in the Eye-Fi Manager). I’m not 100% certain that this is how it works, but that’s what I’ve observed.

So now what about the downsides to this? Well for starters, the only supported file format is JPG. That’s OK, but of course Flickr now supports video too, for instance. Oh, and by the way, this is going to upload all your photos, anytime you take any, so I’ve set the default privacy option to private for Flickr uploads so I can review and tag etc. before publishing. The photos are obviously not titled or anything when the Eye-Fi uploads them, and they get a simple tag “Eye-Fi” set, but that’s all. So you will want to go and change title, tags, description, potentially rotate and so on once the image has been uploaded. Now that Flickr has Picnik integration, you can of course do some simple editing later as well. This does all bypass my “standard” photo workflow of Lightroom import, catalog, edit, and then upload, though.

One thing that the Eye-Fi does not support is wireless networks with certificates. Other than that, Open, WEP, WPA/WPA2 are all OK. It’s only going to work with networks it knows about, too (although you can configure more than one) – there’s no UI on the camera for configuring the card, you have to use the Eye-Fi Manager software while the dongle is plugged in to the camera.

Also, because there’s no UI on the camera side, there’s no visual indication as to what is happening… the Eye-Fi will silently upload your shots, and there’s actually no way of knowing that it is doing it, or when it has finished doing it. Of course it would be amazingly difficult for this to integrate with every camera if the makers had tried to build the Eye-Fi into the camera’s user interface, so I understand why this is the case – it’s just a little bit disconcerting! One nice feature is that there appears to be support for “interrupted” uploads, I see there’s a “Receive interrupted” comment in the Eye-Fi manager UI, so I think it will support partial upload and then resume.

Overall, it’s a neat idea, and certainly pretty cool for quick shoot-and-upload scenarios. Of course I often want to catalog my shots and touch-up on the computer first, but I can see cases where this could be really cool. Very handy for conferences etc. (oh, and that USB dongle can act as a reader for any SD card, too – handy). A qualified thumbs-up!

Here’s a link to a nice review, and here’s some news about the new models coming soon.

(post updated 14th May 2008 – a couple of additional details about workflow, the card initialization error, and the screenshot of the local machine import was added)

Until recently I’d hankered after one of the higher-end Intuous graphics tablets from Wacom, but a few friends have bought Bamboo models lately so I began to think that this might be a good option for me[1]. So far, it seems that way. What’s this all about? Well I’ve wanted a tablet for a while to help with photo / graphics work, and to try out sketchcasting (see below).

The product

The Bamboo Fun is a bundle which includes the tablet and stylus, plus a mouse (slightly redundant given I have a Mighty Mouse already) and Photoshop Elements – only version 4 for the Mac, annoyingly, but I guess I could always upgrade. To be honest, I’ve not even installed it yet.

The Bamboo comes in very stylish packaging reminiscent of something Apple would make… the box unfolds neatly, each item is wrapped in that thin foam bag packaging, and the driver CD is in a square box exactly like the ones that Apple uses for OS X CDs! So, first impressions are good. After that, basically it’s just plug-and-play… there’s a driver to install which provides some System Preferences to customise the tablet sensitivity and behaviour of the shortcut buttons, but that’s it.

Negative marks go to Wacom for having their registration page (and most of the website, it seems) “temporarily unavailable” for over a week. Not cool, and they are ignoring my emails too.

Usage – OS X and a tablet

In use, it’s been something of a mixed experience so far. The tablet itself is great, but it takes a lot of getting used to over a mouse (which is something I fully expected). The issues have been around the software support, and specifically in my case Lightroom. Two major annoyances – one that the zoom wheel at the top of the tablet doesn’t work in Lightroom, and secondly that although a single tap/click will zoom in, it is then really hard to get Lightroom to zoom back out with the stylus (should just be a simple tap/click again, that’s how it works with the mouse anyway).

On the plus side, it works beautifully well in Pixelmator.

Although OS X has handwriting recognition built in (the “Ink” system), actually I’ve not found this entirely reliable so far. [For éampe ltd to intSome word Son tbeTABLET] For example, I tried to write some words on the tablet just then, and you can see what happened. There doesn’t seem to be a way for the system to learn handwriting styles either. There is some software called inkBook that looks promising and somewhat more functional than the in-built software in OS X, but I don’t think I need it just yet (here’s a review). Handwriting was never going to be the primary focus of this purchase.

Oh, and it turns out that there are some issues with Ink and 64-bit apps in 10.5.x … I found that iScrobbler started to crash, and it looks like Ink is responsible. Weird.

Sketchcasting / sketchblogging

One of my main interests with the Bamboo was trying out Sketchcasting. Dave Briggs blogged about this a couple of months ago, and I’ve been fascinated since then. My first effort, though, was not the best… it’s way over-long (mainly as I fumbled around to work out how to get the thing to work) and not as well-planned as it might have been. Actually I think the Sketchcast site is somewhat limited… there’s no way of making things private, no friending, few social features at all. So instead, I picked up ArtRage and will try using that and Screenflow to create sketchcasts, and probably share them via my Viddler account, which will at least enable things to be embedded on WordPress.com.

More recently I’ve also noticed that Sacha Chua has been sketchblogging… using her Nintendo DS. Sacha is very creative and this seems like a really cool way of using a DS, although it looks like you need a bunch of homebrew software to make it work. Worth a look if you are interested, though.

[1] and, evidently, the only way I’m going to get a custom header image is to MAKE ONE MYSELF. This comment is aimed at no-one in particular. That is all.

Update: treat the contents below with caution!

It looks like I could have been mistaken… see the end of the post…

Wireless Time Machine?

OS X 10.5.2 dropped yesterday and after the frenzied upgrading, I’ve been exploring the changes. I can’t say that Apple’s release notes are particularly detailed… for instance, they don’t mention the fact that Time Machine now ’sees’ disks attached to an Airport Extreme base station as valid backup targets.

I’ve been wanting this for a long time (with “long time” being relative in the tech world!). Over-the-air backups seem like an obvious idea… when I get home with my MacBook Pro I just want it to sync against the network storage. Why shouldn’t that work? Apple seems to agree, given that they’ve now released a product which enables just that.

I attached the USB disk I have been using for Time Machine to the Airport and mounted it. Sure enough, Time Machine can now see it… but when I set it to use that disk for backups, they fail. Time Machine also can’t see the existing backups on the drive. I’ve also tried moving the Backups folder into the Andy folder (my Airport Extreme is set to use User security), but that doesn’t work either. I’m thinking it might be related to the security setting on the Airport… should I be using User, Disk or Base Station password for the disk? Who knows?

Here’s a quick look at what I’m seeing:

Apple haven’t updated their support article yet, so maybe this isn’t really supposed to work, still. Any advice appreciated.

In other news

The other fixes in 10.5.2 seem fair… I’m not going to switch off transparency in my menubar, but the Stacks changes make sense, and Finder seems more reliable at seeing my network. I’ve had Mail freeze on me once, though

Update! Maybe I was wrong?

Back when Leopard first came out I was casting around for solutions to this and came across the hack that suggested setting a hidden option to get Time Machine to show unsupported network disks. The last time I tried it, it didn’t work… but I don’t remember whether I “unset” the option afterwards. Today, Maria Langer reminded me about that tip, and on a hunch I checked to see whether that option was still enabled. It was, so I unset it… and now Time Machine cannot see the Airport Disks.

So – can anyone tell me whether 10.5.2 is “supposed” to backup wirelessly with Time Machine? I saw some leaked screenshots prior to yesterday’s release, which made me think they’d added the feature back… now I’m just confused! That’ll learn me… Can anyone tell me how Time Machine behaves for them, please?

Update: I was wrong

According to the Apple Support Forums, that is.

I’m a huge fan of Spaces in Leopard. As a long-time Linux user I’m no stranger to the idea of virtual desktops, but I really like the way that this is implemented in OS X.

I have the bottom left corner of the screen set to trigger the Spaces overview, so any time I want to switch i can just drop the mouse pointer to the bottom corner (and the top right hot corner blanks the screen). Obviously I can use the Ctrl-[n] shortcuts to jump to a particular Space, too. I’ve settled into a pattern whereby the online stuff is generally over in the left-hand column, with iTunes top centre (those apps are set to only open on those Spaces). I have spare space over on the right for when I’m coding, running Second Life, using VMWare Fusion, or whatever.

It works well for me. I like the way I can move entire apps around by holding Ctrl and dragging applications between Spaces in the overview. Miraz Jordan has a nice series of posts on some of the other things that are possible using Spaces, too.

A new video device

A couple of weeks ago I saw a short news item on Tech Digest, which mentioned a new handheld USB camcorder called the disgo Video Plus (also mentioned on Shiny Shiny and Slashgear). Something similar has been available in the US since last year – the Pure Digital Flip Video – but that product is not available in the UK. The disgo camera has a flip-out screen which the Flip Video does not have, but in other respects they seem very similar.

I’ve been experimenting a little bit recently with video. This device seemed neat – it plugs in directly via USB and is aimed at YouTube-quality, quick video capture. The only thing I was concerned about was that according to the specifications, it didn’t support the Mac… unlike the Flip Video, which has full Mac and Windows support, the disgo product is only listed as compatible with Windows. I contacted disgo’s support team and had an excellent conversation via email where we established that it should just be a USB Mass Storage device, and I might have to do some fiddling to get the AVIs to play on the Mac, but I was willing to give that a try.

Impressions of the Video Plus itself

The camera is extremely neat. It takes 2 x AA batteries (a pair are supplied), comes with a soft carry case, and apart from that… it’s ready to go. The height is less than the size of my hand from the base of the palm to my fingertips, and it is about the same width as a classic iPod. It’s light, too.

There’s a 1.5 inch screen (which, incidentally, is really nice and clear) that flips out sideways to enable you to see yourself if the camera is pointing at you – it doesn’t rotate on the axis, though. On the back there are a few buttons: on/off; play/pause; delete (which enables individual clips to be deleted on the device itself); a four way next/zoom/volume button; and a big red button to start or stop a recording. And that’s about it – this is simple stuff.

On one side there is the battery compartment, an SD/MMC card slot which will take up to a 2Gb SD card, and a slider which when pressed causes the USB connector to slide out of the top of the camera to the right of the lens. On the other side there’s a switch to choose between high quality or long play recording, and an A/V connector for hooking up to a TV. There’s a tripod screw connector on the base, and a mystery port on the top with a rubber cover, that I’ve not identified just yet.

It was dead simple to get going – switch on, hit record, and start making video clips. The onboard memory will store 30 minutes of video at high quality, or 60 minutes at lower quality; beyond that, you can obviously add an SD card to expand the capacity.

Using the disgo Video Plus with OS X

There was no CD in the box, and I’ve not plugged the camera into a Windows PC. When I plugged it into my MacBook, it appeared as a USB drive called ‘disgo’ on the desktop.

Interestingly, although the disgo website does not say that the device is supported on OS X, the ReadMe.txt file included on the disgo’s internal memory does give information about how to access the video files (i.e. you can get them from the DCIM/100VIDEO folder you can see in the screenshot). It is not clear whether files on an SD card plugged into the camera will be able to be read in the same manner – I suspect possibly not, and that I might have to use an external SD card reader, but I’ve yet to try it.

The AVI files played without problems in Quicktime on Leopard. Thinking about it, I did have all kinds of codecs installed already – the camera appears to record an XVID video track at 640×480 resolution, with an mpga audio track – so I may just have been lucky, and it might be necessary to find the right codecs before this will work for anyone else. The files would not, of course, load into iMovie, since that application does not recognise AVI files.

The solution is very simple – transcode to a more Mac-friendly format like a .MOV file or MPEG. The free option for doing this is ffmpegX, but you can also use VisualHub, which I’d previously bought for other purposes and is rather more user-friendly than ffmpegX. Once I’d done that, I was able to use iMovie ‘08 to quickly edit together a movie. iMovie ‘08 is quirky, and possibly less functional than the previous version, but actually it was ideal for this kind of rapid editing.

Availability

The disgo Video Plus is available via Currys in the UK or direct from disgo.

More photos on Flickr.

Final thoughts

There’s only one way to do this, really…

(I’ve also put this on YouTube)

Update: rebranding, and Windows software

My friend Heidi notes in the comments below that the camera is available in the US as the RCA Small Wonder EZ201. According to this ZDNet review, the original Small Wonder was based on the same technology as the Flip Video, but now RCA have tried to differentiate more (which they seem to have done, in adding the flip screen etc.). However, as we established above, although the ZDNet article claims that this is not Mac-compatible, and the manufacturer doesn’t supply software for the Mac, it seems to work.

The Windows software is on the device itself (remember, I said there was no CD in the box). Inserting the camera into the USB slot on an XP machine, it appeared in My Computer as a USB device called disgo, and when I right-clicked there was an option “Manage your videos” which started the software. It has a few simple features – a grid or list view to access the AVIs and play them; the ability to grab a single frame as a .bmp or .jpg; a section for “editing” i.e. using just part of a clip, or splicing clips together; and a section to email your video to a friend. I’ve added a screenshot on Flickr.

Update: SD card support and UK retailers

I’ve now tried plugging an SD card in. This is treated as an additional device. When you first plug the SD card in the camera copies its software to the card and creates a directory structure. When you then plug the camera into the computer, it continues to see the internal USB flash memory as the storage device, but if you then press the red button while it is connected to the computer the device vanishes (nasty unsafe device removal message), and then the SD card gets mounted instead. So it does work with OS X, but not entirely seamlessly.

Oh, and it looks like Amazon UK have the same device, but branded a Busbi BUSVP0010R Video Plus (and looking at the Busbi site, it looks like they and disgo are the same company since they are both handled by cleverstuff.ie).

Update: other reviews

Paul Knight has done a very detailed video review including a comparison with other cameras including DV tape, and an excellent screencast of how to get the disgo working with a Mac. Shiny Shiny have a short review on YouTube, too.

My friend Ian Smith pinged me today to alert me to the fact that MacHeist are running a limited promotion which provides a bundle of very nice OS X applications for a reduced price ($49 instead of a combined price of nearly $350), and with a donation to charity for each bundle sold.

At the current dollar-to-sterling conversion rate this was an absolute steal. The idea is that CSSEdit will be thrown in once 5000 bundles are sold; and Snapz Pro X and Pixelmator will be added at as-yet-unannounced additional thresholds.

(update 14th Jan: CSSEdit and Snapz Pro X are now unlocked, and Pixelmator is not far off; plus,  Speed Download has now been thrown in as well)

I don’t actually have any of the apps in question and think I’ll be using almost all of them, so I was happy to jump into this promotion. Worth a look.

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

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

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.

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

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

We just presented our team’s hack for HackDay in London…

An awesome team effort inspired and led by Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley. A mixed reality naval game from the Supernova team.

Here’s the science part.

 The real world part(s) of the hack involved a DV cam feeding Nigel’s G4 iBook with a live feed of some pieces which represented two teams, “crabs” and “sharks” (cut from O’Reilly postcards). The camera rig – managed by Jon Hadley – was a highly technical setup involving gaffer tape and a borrowed tripod – thanks to Twitter! The iBook then used the TUIO protocol to update the coordinates of the game pieces to a web server.

The second RL part of the hack was my MacBook Pro rigged with Quicktime Broadcaster and Darwin Streaming Server, pointing at the game board. This provided a video feed that could be used within Second Life. This was technically challenging to set up due to issues connecting between the laptops on the BTOpenZone network… so someone donated us an Airport hub (again following a Twittered plea for help), and I shared my connection with Jim Purbrick who was then able to tunnel through to Second Life, as well as seeing my Quicktime stream. We experimented with a cheap USB webcam too, but the iSight just worked a lot better (positioning was “interesting” though!)

Meanwhile… in Second Life, the team of Jim Purbrick, Ben Hardill, Chris Mahoney and James Taylor built an amazing setup. We had a floating blimp (on Arcanum, the sim that Linden Lab had donated for the Hack Day event). The blimp contained a table which showed the live video feed of the game being played in real life. Below that, the sim was submerged. During the demo, Babbage Linden showed off the live feed, and then flew under the blimp. When he hit the floating buoy, a group of submarines were rezzed in that corresponded with the movement of the pieces in real life. Oh, and the subs were named after names found via the Yahoo! Answers API.

We didn’t quite have time to sort out the audio, but there were supposed to be some sonar noises as the subs were rezzed. Pretty easy to add, but we got moved around a couple of times prior to the demo, and had to disassemble our rig each time.

Someone managed to capture the blueprint for the hack on camera.

Oh, and as a complete aside – it is interesting to see the distribution of hardware and operating systems at the event. I’d say Macs dominate, Windows are probably second (I’ve only seen one running Vista but there may be more), and there are quite a few people running Linux too. Almost all of the demos and presentations seem to be run from Macs. W00t!

I had a spot on stage earlier in the afternoon as the “glamorous” helper for the MyBlogBunny hack, holding the Nabaztag – thanks Lance

[ edit 19/06 - links and photos added, minor edits ]

[ edit 21/06 - added some more links to interesting Flickr photos ]

Technorati Tags: HackDay, hackdaylondon, IBM, mixed reality, Linden Lab, scripting, Second Life, streaming, video, virtual worlds, Yahoo

I had an email this morning announcing that the new Plazes is online, so it looks like all of the features should now be public.

There are just a few things that still bother me – I think if the team could sort these out, they might get a bit more uptake:

1. Some of us have been kept up-to-date via email. The Plazes blog has been very quiet on the subject of the whole upgrade. I’m grateful for the alpha/beta exposure, but it seems like more awareness could have been built up around the new version by more coordinated use of blogs, email and other media.
2. The Plazer for Windows and Mac has been re-released, but the Mac one in particular has had some problems. It would be nice if these were open sourced, or a better way of reporting issues existed than the comments in the new Mac group.
3. The API has changed. I’ve seen inconsistent messages on the blogs or via email that certain parts of the API have been / will be removed before certain dates. The WhereAmI XML-RPC PHP endpoint has certainly been removed, and as a result my little Applescript for ecto is not currently working. The success of Web 2.0 sites is usually a lot to do with their APIs and the ease of use… right now, Plazes could be opening this up a lot more and letting the community play with the new features programmatically. The upcoming Hack Day is a case in point – participants could be making use of APIs offered by Plazes if they were made available.
4. [added in a later edit] They seem to have stripped out some of the privacy features. Before, I could choose which of my IM accounts or email addresses to reveal publically or to contacts… this option seems to have gone. An unwelcome regression in function.

I still think Plazes is a cool site, but there’s so much more they could be doing to build their own momentum.

Technorati tags: Plazes, Hack Day, mashups, API, communication, Web 2.0

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

I’m sat in Edinburgh airport and thought I’d have a play with Skitch.

Skitch is a new screenshot / drawing tool for OS X. It is currently in closed beta. The application is by plasq.com, the makers of Comic Life. It is ridiculously easy to use – and very cool.

The interface takes a little getting used to, as it departs from some of the UI conventions that we’ve come to expect. No menu bar. Preferences on the “back” of the window, more like a Dashboard widget. The tools and features are kept to a minimum. But, no problem – when you first start it, a small screencast leads you through the features and the way the tool works. It really is very easy.

You can quickly grab the screen, part of the screen, or take an iSight photo… and then resize it by dragging the window corners, which physically resizes the image inside it. To crop or expand, you grab the edges of the image inside the window, and drag. Once you’ve got something to play with, there are a series of simple drawing and shape tools, and a limited palette of colours. There is also a very cool text tool – simply start typing and your text will appear. To resize the text or change the thickness of the lines, there is a size slider on the left of the window.

Even cooler is the fact that all of the stuff that you do to the image is automatically done on layers, so text and lines can be moved around later – Skitch also keeps an image history so that you can quickly find stuff you’ve edited before.

To save, you simply “rip” off a tab at the bottom of the window, having typed a filename and chosen from one of the formats (JPG, PNG, SVF, PDF or the Skitch format which preserves layers, so that you can exchange the editable file with friends). There is also the ability to email, or you can upload to a web service like Flickr, an FTP server, or Skitch’s own mySkitch site at the click of a button.

I love it. It’s so simple. It took a little bit of getting in to, but now I’m using it more, I find it so quick and easy. Definitely one to watch, for Mac users.

As for Firefox, he’s not my friend anymore. Why use 70% of my CPU when there’s no network connection and the application is minimised and idle?

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OS X, plasq, preview, screenshot, skitch