Tiny Planet

ACTA in Ireland

2012-01-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

Here's the copy of the email I wrote to my TDs last week and our MEPs. Sometimes I wonder….

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I am writing in connection with the proposed legislation being pursued by Minister Sherlock in relation to copyright material and online services.

I could say I am writing as a resident of such and such an area, and voted here there and everywhere along the political spectrum over the years. But I'll spare you all that.

I am writing as a filmmaker who has worked in many creative fields, from music to art, theatre and photography over the intervening years, I've produced several feature films and had some modest success.

I have also followed the rise of technology since the mid-Eighties, lectured on Computer Animation in Ballyfermot in the early Nineties, and continue to teach in Digital Media in the IT, Sligo. I've over twenty five years experience, researching and tracking the steady advance of digital technology as it has swept over the creative sector, from digital creation, through digital distribution and consumption.

What it is important to understand right now is that we are in the middle of a watershed, a period of transition and various creative media are at different points in their transition. But all of these:
- Music
- Television
- Publishing
- News
- Art/Photography
- Film
All of them have entered the watershed right now. Moving through huge changes. It's, as the word of the day says, disruptive. Extremely disruptive. It's been tough on all in the business.

Each of these media, to a lesser or greater extent, find themselves transitioning, through creation, distribution, combination with each other and the interaction of the public, gradually being absorbed into another medium, Software. Software is emergent as these other forms break apart and transform.

That, from a bigger picture, is what is in play. And a bigger picture likely is a century long viewpoint. At some point, there will just be creative software, it's the key art form of this 21st Century.

It's absolutely vital that we don't get in the way here. The challenges facing the creative sector is not to stem, contain, or alter the creation, distribution or consumption patterns. The challenge is actually one of excellence, we just need to get better, a lot better, at what we do. I, personally, have every faith in the creative and content sectors in getting to do that, excellence and innovation are two keywords we have lived or died by for a long time. We need to embrace the technology and just be better than the pirates, we need, in short, not to contain or stem it, but to actually push it, and get involved in deepening it as this century progresses.

Please I would use your connections to urge the Minister to move away from this legislation and to spend his time and portfolio encouraging the content industries to focus on their own path, to encourage partnerships in particular with our software and technology companies and to pursue excellence in these fields.

I would be happy to discuss this further with you should you so wish.

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What you gotta do…. Anyway please visit http://stopsopaireland.com/ and sign up.

On Software

2012-01-05T13:18:00.000-08:00

Today I discovered that this blog was down, all my permalinks were non-functioning, so I loaded it up to have a look and see what was up. It was an easy fix but over the course of checking through the links I had a read… I've been spending a lot of time on Twitter over the past while and not so much time here. I had been wondering about that, about what it said and why. Perhaps looking at what I'd discussed here, bar posting the odd photograph, held some insight.

I've lost my earlier postings in the previous incarnation of this blog, whatever platform I used prior to Blogger. I'm pretty sure that I was talking about the same area of focus, various bits and bobs on technology and the creative sector. One clear benefit to blogging, even casual short notes, is that such thoughts are captured as some form of argument, a postulation in formation, at least how I practice it. So perhaps of interest to some readers, here's a summary with handy (and functioning) permalinks.

First, back in 2006, I had a note about the music industry, which has always led the way, despite how that industry works. Those guys had issues that the film industry was going to face.

Then in January 2007, some speculation about an iTV, perhaps Apple would release some video device for consuming video. But in fact they didn't, it was something else entirely, "something so interactive, you'd never put it down'. And yes, I still haven't managed to do that. Little did we fully realise that the iPhone was the platform for ubiquitous computing which the public would fully embrace.

In April 2007, when financing creative projects online started, I compared it to our experience financing a feature. And in that month I talked about some people who were doing just that, the gang at Four Eyed Monsters. in July 2007, I welcomed the arrival of Charlie Rose and his content online, the early vanguard of mainstream media. I also noted that interactivity was changing, that search had become the norm, that the structuring of data had moved to algorithms rather than experts providing links, the data equivalent of the democratization of links in hindsight.

In January 2008, I stopped listening to mainstream radio entirely, moved my listening needs to podcasts. I've been a lover of good talk radio longer than any other medium bar books, but I've never looked back. That month I also noted that I was a Grumpy Old Punk, but thats neither here nor there. in February I celebrated the podcasts of IT Conversations, an unashamed quality stream which broadcasts content from various sources, including conferences, a model which will be developed further I feel. The IT Conversations crew are actively exploring podcast curation around topics, Colleges take note.

In June, 2008, I wrote a short piece about Computer Art and what had happened. And what was beginning to happen now... The following month I revealed my file naming nerdiness to the world.

In January 2009, I had some inkling about personal tastes and software, but the real thing which was developing in my head only became clearer later, in April 2009, when Apple sold a billion apps. The revolution underway was about a relationship between the consumer and software.

Then in August 2009, I arrived at what has become the equivalent of an organising principle for me, how software has become the key artform of this century.

In September 2009, I had some thoughts about iTunes Extras, Apple making a start on digital delivery, and in October 2009. I speculated along with everyone else about Apple's upcoming predicted iPad, about a computer based on content, that content being primarily software. And in May of last year, I talked about Sony's latest efforts in iTunes Extras. There hasn't been enough development here in the interim, I still think this will be the field of apps.

And more recently I've been thinking about curating again. Looking back, it's a little like feeling like the guy who was pointing at the oncoming tidal wave. It came alright and washed over me like everyone else. Time to digest I think. The wave has happened, the transition is in play, and the future is clearly software. And time, definitely, to resume blogging.

My pre-iCloud life

2011-06-22T13:30:00.001-07:00

I thought it might be handy to write down how I handle files and directory structures before iCloud forces me to rethink everything I do.

Because what I have is a kind of belts-and-braces version of iCloud, at least in some regards.

Let me start with the hardware, as one should. I have a MacBookPro, creaking at the knees a tad, but still offering valiant service. To that I can add an iPhone and an iPad, both shiny at time of writing. I am a MobileMe subscriber and a Dropbox user.

So how are things set up? I sort files by type, all my Text documents are in a single folder, called Text Documents, all my spreadsheets are together in another, all my PDFs in another, and so on. I have a rigorous file naming system which Ive blogged about before, but which enables sorting by project and date simply by sorting by name. So a folder filled with thousands of text files is not the jumbled mess you might initially assume.

Three key folders sit inside my iDisk, Text documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations, each with a symbolic link back to my main Documents folder. Default FolderX knows each applications key folder and guides all my open/save dialogs to the right place. And yes, that's my iDisk, not Dropbox. I was helping a friend with their setup and noted that they synced their disk with no issues. Like many early adopters I followed the standard dictum that this was unreliable and you just didn't do it. But hey, it actually works, at least in my recent experience. Perhaps Apple got their act together while all our backs were turned.

So what does this mean?

Effectively, I have the same files available to iWork on all three devices. Sure, when I add a file to one of the iOS apps, it will drop some features, and I have to be conscious to maintain my file naming patterns and save back out. But it's a glimpse of what's to come.

Aaron Koblin - TED

2011-05-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

Aaron Koblin is one of the more interesting artists working in software today. He sees the creative form of the 21st Century to be that of interface...

On Curating

2011-05-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

Curating has become, in the data flood we are currently floundering in, one of the anchors people are using to find and establish meaning as we attempt to engage with this swirl of endless cultural material. It's become particularly prevalent in the film industry.
I was a curator once. An actual one, one who works in a gallery or museum, who puts on exhibitions and so on. I left the role at a particular juncture within the visual arts industry, when curators were moving front and centre. That time was held a personal journey for me as I moved from Dublin to New York, from a burgeoning visual arts scene to a highly developed one.
My first job title in Dublin was ‘exhibition organiser’, where the role was clearly on logistics. Get the list of work, establish the values with the artist, organise insurance, transport, the installation and hanging, manage the production of the catalogue and poster, liaise with the writer and designer, work with the director on promotion, and liaise with education on talks.
The creative aspect of the role rose and fell with the artist in question, usually in terms of the decisions around the catalogue design and the exhibition layout. Some artists needed more support than others, some less. In short, the engagement with the material was mainly functional in nature and creative only to a point. Co-ordinator is the term in popular use now and it’s used in many industries, today co-ordinators hop between creative sectors quite easily, it’s a set of transferable skills.
At the time, the act of curation, for me, became an extension of that kind of work. Making a decision to show this artist, in your space, at this particular time, and to craft an exhibition of their work. Having learned the technical skills of exhibition-making, it was time to engage with why this person, at this time in that space. Not that there was always an entirely rational reason for the selection, quite frequently it was from a gut instinct, with the various contexts being nonetheless fully borne in mind.
The curator steered their way through the emerging culture, finding things of interest. For me successful curation lay in being interesting in turn, where your take on things, somehow, contributed to the forward momentum. And having a take meant literally what you picked up to look at.
In a way the act of curation was simply selection added to those earlier learned logistics. It was the job of the artists to provide the work, my role lay in ‘look here’ and opening the door.
There were shows where the artists managed everything, self curating in short, the exhibition making broadly came from them. Blue Funk, a media group who dealt with issue based work was one, Derek Spiers, a photojournalist was another. You selected them, you facilitated them, and that was that. There were others where you stepped in more and the shape of the exhibition emerged from the engagement with the artist, the material to use, the amount and the presentation all formed through the interaction.
In each and every case, the artists made the work and the artist’s work was front and centre. The exhibition was a point of encounter with the work, that was its point.
Then I went to New York.
My first gig was an exhibition of Irish artists for NYU. I was called a curator and introduced as such to the industry there. I rolled that term around seeing how it sat. I had always viewed the term as pertinent to a museum where scholarship underpinned exhibition. In one of my first evenings there, we went for dinner, and there on the top of the Anarchy Café’s menu was “menu curated by....”. It was the first indication to me that the term might have had some slippage, that it might mean something different.
The second indication lay in my visit to Exit Art, a gallery on lower Broadway which my contacts in the visual arts had suggested as a possible venue for exhibitions I might curate. I visited over several months and it became clear that their view on exhibition-making was that an exhibition was a piece of work in itself which used artists work as its raw material. The curator was front and centre here.
Which in a broad and diverse world, is all well and good. The problem for me, is that this view has become the dominant view of curation. Curators set themes now and seek work to amplify the theme.
The exhibition title lies as some clue, a divination rod for the public to unearth hidden meaning and perhaps a stick for the curator with which to poke around and uncover work. In addition, this ‘mature’, developed notion of curation has become allied to a stagnation in personnel. Gallery directors have long lives it appears, and younger independent curators are barely fostered. And in the absence of an ongoing venue, independent curators cannot develop or ascribe meaning through a succession of shows, a programme, instead each exhibition becomes the event, a here’s-what-I-have-to-say.
There are some interesting developments, my students rarely indicate ambition to be shown in the major venues. It’s almost as if it was in a different realm, instead they seek to do their own work and self-exhibit. There are many pop-up spaces emerging in Dublin with artist led events. The circle closing again perhaps, it recalls Independent Artists and Living Art from the seventies. And independent curators, who feel equally excluded, have the relationship with artists that inspires some hope, there are projects, however isolated it appears to me, which seem to ring with a sense of authenticity.
Curation has entered the film world’s vocabulary. One of the outcomes of the digital revolution has been the diminution of films prominence in popular culture. As the net engulfs ‘content’ filmmakers have had to adopt multiple roles in order to keep afloat and to establish meaning. We are not just to produce work, we must promote and exhibit work, not only our own but also work we believe in. A return to the original meaning of curation at least in how I saw it, ‘Look here’ and open the door.
I personally hope that we keep that naive simple view, that we leave the art of being interesting to our filmmakers.

Pitching

2011-05-06T06:01:00.000-07:00

I quite like pitching and I've only realised why quite recently. At first I thought it was my natural tendency to sell something, I’m usually happy when I am in the space of selling an idea.

But now I realise that it is closer to me than that. Over the course of making a film, many films are made; the films in all our heads as we push a script through development, the films in the financiers and partners heads, the actual film you shoot, the scenes you don't get to shoot, the unused sequences that lie in Final Cuts bin, the rough cuts, the final cuts and the film you get to release into the world. And then when you show it, you realise that, in the end, there's no actual film. There’s just the films we all carry in our heads, no one even sees the same film when it's on screen. That at least explains the reviews I read, or the responses you hear after a screening, the film is more like a trigger to something, a pitch in itself.

So, why do I like pitching? Why is it close to me? Well... for a brief moment, between you and the financier or partner, your film lives, right there in the space between your heads. And when it goes well, the financier has had a good time or at least the desire to see more. And so, why not, let's make a film, floating somewhere above the coffee, as I lean in and say "Well... it's really-"

Sony's latest iTunes Extras is another step after Apple's start

2011-01-05T02:48:00.000-08:00

PaidContent profile Sony's latest release, a Will Ferrell movie, The Other Guys, which will have some interesting new features available in their iTunes version.

iTunes Extras are as I've noted before at least a start from Apple in acknowledging the issues facing film in the digital era. They re-introduce the idea of DVD extras, available only when you purchase the movie via iTunes. To date, they've been a predictable set of additional video clips and slideshows along with text. So far, not really a new deal, all very familiar. It's limited, in fact, by the unavailability of directors commentary in the current format.

In the Sony offering you can search for any word in the script and the movie will jump to that spot in the dialogue. Which is pretty neat. Other options including sharing a clip on your social networks and having direct links to the songs on iTunes.

A step forward after Apple's start perhaps. Good to see studios stretch a bit and interesting that Sony was the one to do so first. Perhaps it stems from their experience in the music industry, a few years ahead of the film industry in dealing with the digital revolution.

The PaidContent article talks about one-upping DVD, but the reality is this is about one-upping piracy. The key differentiator in the future for legitimate paid for content is to offer more than the pirates, to make purchasing the digital film compelling. The article makes some good points about how the Extras format pushes consumers to buy rather than rent. I think there needs to be some preview of additional material and functionality in the movies iTunes page for that to be a compelling factor.

The overall issue, of course, is the limitation that the film be viewed in iTunes at all, and the relative clunkiness of the Extras .ite format, a bundle of HTML, CSS and Javascript. There's only so far it can go here. The main creative act in the Sony offering, the 'wouldn't it be neat if..' is the script integration. We need a lot more of that, deeper too, looking to interaction with story itself.

All our future viewing devices, large or small, will be precisely that, devices, computers in various forms. The future here surely lies in some format, as yet undetermined, whereby content is not simply presented, much as a player might do, but also available through creative programming to be interacted with. The future of film lies as an application running on a device.

There's a lot of experience in the gaming industry, there's a lot of talent in the film sector. Apple have fundamentally changed people's relationship with applications with iOS, essentially shifting the public's perception of them as a new content form.

All in place. But not here yet. My gumption is that it'll start in two ends of the spectrum.

First, a major film will plan a digital release as an application, iOS, but also Windows and Mac and perhaps Android, offering only rentals via Netflix, iTunes etc. It'll be big, it'll be expensive. It'll be along the lines of a game, or at least employ a lot of gaming style interaction, and it'll probably be a lads, sci-fi, film. At some point the money on that will make sense, including the marketing requirements they'll face. They'll target the gaming market as a core and build upon it. They'll make this approach the story and get a lot of media attention.

Second front could even be first off the bat, small teams will form where filmmakers will fold programmers into their team at story stage and will fashion the shoot around the requirements of the planned application. They will release on iOS and perhaps Android alongside their Festival release, they'll embrace mobile as part of their strategy. The film will be made by respected indie filmmakers and will get a lot of attention as a result.

This all builds upon the revolution in production and distribution and marketing the film industry has been dragged through over the past years. The filmmaker's role has expanded from maker through to distributor and marketer and curator as Ted Hope has expounded upon at length. Transmedia, storycubes all of these exploratory approaches will end up forming ways of exploring the question of "how to make a compelling interactive rich narrative which isn't a game?" I'm hoping, that here, on this end of the spectrum, we'll see some diversity in approach and theme.

This year, perhaps, we will see the first one. If not, by the end of 2012, for certain. There, that's my new year's prediction, time for a resolution or two, methinks...

Facebook Contacts linger longer than you might think

2010-10-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

Okay… Like most people at some point, I asked Facebook to check to see if any of my contacts were on Facebook. It did its thing, I selected some and moved on, never really thinking much more about it. What I didn’t realise is that Facebook keeps all that data.

All of it. Not just the friends you add. They keep the contacts you didn’t add too, that includes work, business, confidential numbers and emails etc. If you go and look at your Facebook Phonebook (no, I didn’t realise I had one either) you’ll see the full list. And you’ll quickly see not just your Facebook contacts but everyone who you had in your contact database when you checked for contacts. Be it your Apple Addressbook or your Outlook contacts or Yahoo or whatever.

Your Facebook Phonebook is available by Clicking on Account then choosing Edit Friends and selecting Phonebook from the sidebar. Up it pops.

Now here you see the first listing of my contacts. None of them are Facebook friends, actually only one of them is on Facebook. That doesn’t stop Facebook keeping their telephone numbers and email address however.

Friends who are in your address book but not on Facebook (or use a different email address for Facebook) will appear with ‘Invite to join Facebook’ down the bottom. Their telephone numbers are listed and presumably their email addresses are stored too. Friends who are on Facebook have an ‘Add to Friends’ link.

Spot the small ‘Learn more’ in the top line above? Clicking on it brings up the following dialog box.

There’s no actual instruction how to disable the feature on your mobile device but my bet is most people uploaded a contact file at some point. Clicking on the ‘this page’ link again at the end brings up this dialog box.

This is a by now standard Facebook wording designed to discourage you from protecting your privacy. Their standard approach is to discourage through planting some uncertainty every time you protect your data.

Clicking ‘Remove’ brings up this.

The troubling thing is most of you who know me probably have my numbers and addresses in yours….even if you’re not my friend on Facebook. I have over 3,000 contacts in my Mac Addressbook, and only a few hundred contacts on Facebook. But Facebook has held on to those telephone numbers and email addresses years after I checked when I first joined.
There’s very little hope of them all being deleted, most people won’t be bothered to do it.

The answer lies in Facebook’s hands, but the simple courtesy of not storing data after a contact list check seems to be beyond them.

Position

2010-03-14T15:03:00.001-07:00

We had a Mother's Day picnic here on top of Knocknarea. This was actually taken on top of Queen Maeve's cairn on top of the mountain. And it's not one of us, a tourist. It's a tradition to bring up rocks from the bottom and carry them to the top.

Pinnacle

2010-03-12T14:25:00.001-08:00

A quick snatched shot while I was in traffic in central Sligo end of day. I liked the bird at the end of the buIlding… and then the plane obligingly flew into view.

Markree chandelier

2010-03-06T09:11:00.001-08:00

I like using the camera apps on the iPhone which come preset for particular styles. My two favourites are Polarize which does this sort of Polaroid look and Format 126 which recreates the Instamatic look from the mid-Seventies.

If I'm going to take a snap, it may as well have the fetishistic sheen of the crap cameras of my youth.

Make Way for Tomorrow

2010-02-24T07:39:00.001-08:00

The bleak and moving "Make Way for Tomorrow", 1937, by Leo McCarey. When he ended up getting the Oscar for "The Awful Truth" he told them they gave it for 'the wrong movie'. New, and by all accounts beautifully restored, release on DVD by Criterion is now available on Amazon. Can't wait.

Lough Gill Rainbow

2010-02-22T03:23:00.001-08:00

Overhead

2010-01-04T17:52:00.001-08:00

Slipway

2009-11-08T14:09:00.001-08:00

I think I'll get back to posting photographs here. Been ages since I have.

I like the square format here, the slipway made that possible. Marian's response was that it stopped it looking like an image from a religious calendar.

So I'll take that as a compliment.

Apple Tablet - it's all about content

2009-10-20T07:26:00.001-07:00

The speculation about the tablet from Apple has swirled up again.

I’ve always felt that the next generation device for viewing content has been with us for quite a while, it’s called a laptop. All over the world people spend their evenings with them, "duelling laptops on the sofa" as one of my students described her evenings with her partner.

And it's not just the sofa, it's extended into the workspace too. Over the past few years, the desktop computer has looked increasingly like it has a quite specific, need driven future. You only install one if you want something either sturdy, dumb and cheap or very powerful indeed. The laptop, increasingly more powerful and connected, pretty well matching the desktop in raw power and capabilities, has ended up being the general computer of choice.

Apple’s proportion of laptop sales reflect this, steadily increasing year on year. They’ll be in no rush to replace or compete with that. Why a tablet at all? If Apple do one, it'll have to clearly differentiate them.

Many years ago Apple released a tablet, namely the Newton which it then dropped. The difference now is Apple’s focus on content. Content is everything now, we've finally reached a stage where all our content is digital and online, that future has actually come to pass at this point.

Kevin Kelly has talked about how all content is merging onto one platform, from news to music, from film to blogs, from books to financial services. There's but one platform, the internet, and all our devices simply offer different windows onto it.

Apple notably have always pointed out that the internet content flows into every aspect of their machines, that it's not just for the browser, as Google would have it. That firehose of content can and should be pushed into many different apps. I'll return to this in a bit, but here is where future exploration lies.

Any tablet, if Apple are to release one, will likely have one guiding principle, how best to present and manage content. Apple have understood how important this is from the early days of OSX, iLife has been a key factor in the successful rebirth of the Mac platform. The emergence of iTunes as the single most important application for Apple has consolidated ownership for Apple of the content creation and distribution arena. Apple also want to establish and control how that content is monetised in much the same way that iTunes does in digital music. They know all too well how content can drive hardware sales.

To speculate, primarily because it's fun, but also because it presents factors which will are in play.

Resolution and size - It’ll be like a large iPhone, but not that large and probably smaller than most people expect. Apple lead the way in pixel per inch displays in consumer products. The iPhone runs 160 dpi. Given that Apple have settled on 1280 x 720 for iTunes Extras and the LP formats recently introduced, you could be looking at a device 8 x 4.5 inches if the device is 160dpi. This is a perfect 16 x 9 form factor for HD video exactly matching iTunes native HD format. Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half, it’ll be a little smaller than that. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple increase the dpi and reduce the size further. They'll want to reduce the weight.

Weight - You’ll have to be able to hold it comfortably in one hand. It’ll have to be light, and that’s probably the biggest engineering challenge they face, finding some version of their beloved unibodies which can deliver strength with the right weight. It'll need some body to it for the audio.

Audio - It’ll certainly have good speakers, Apple have focussed a lot on speaker technology lately. They've excellent small speakers in the new iMacs and they've progressively made the internal speakers on iPhones and iPods louder.

OS and App Store - It’s going to run a version of OS Touch like the iPhone, with full screen apps running at 1280 x 720. Yes, this will take time to develop. Yes, developers will grumble and scramble, as they quickly rush to embrace it. Given FCC clearance times, there’ll be some advance time prior to market release. The App store will be king, no other way in bar jailbreaking it. The App store has been a huge success and moneyspinner for Apple. They’d love to extend that model. Apple's approval process will annoy and present new challenges for developers, but won't ultimately matter a damn to the market. Apple understand one thing very well, the key shift here is the relationship between the users and applications. Users have a simple uncomplicated relationship with Touch apps, Apple will do anything to protect that.

Bundled apps - The principal focus will be on viewing media of various forms from movies to albums to photography, the internet and email, lightweight document production. There may even be cut down but ever improving Touch versions of iLife and iWork bundled. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kindle app is in there too at launch.

Price - my guess, it’ll be 800 bucks. It’ll ship with all the iPhone aerials, GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G and a SIM slot. Hopefully Apple have learned not to tie themselves into a carrier, It’ll be unlocked and be available from carriers at a discount.

Connections - a version of the dock connector for sure but that's probably it. Much as I would like USB and an SD card slot, I can't see it. They'll expect you to use wifi and bluetooth for connection with other devices, be they printers or storage systems. MobileMe users will have access to their iDisk everywhere.

The geeks will complain about the closed system, Apple's control over applications, the limited feature set, yada yada. Everyone else will swoon. Emotionally and functionally, it'll be perfect for 90% of people. It will do pretty well everything most people want from a computer, email, browse, word processing, photo and video management and of course, listen to music, watch films, read books and magazines and check the net. You know, look at stuff. A platform for content of every description.

The one thing it won’t be is a general purpose computer.

We'll still be using them in our offices and workspaces. I couldn't work without VoodooPad and DevonThink Pro Office, Nisus Writer Pro and Bento, Photoshop and RapidWeaver, or without access to my years of data and I suspect that most people will discover their own version of that pretty quickly.

But a lot of people will not be lugging their laptops home at night.

It’s almost old-fashioned in it’s limited feature set as I have outlined it, almost like the computers in the early eighties with physical buttons for word processing and databases. I think most people will find a comfort in that, eating it up, a computer which ‘just works’ the way their iPod does with all the stuff they like. But for me, that's not really the full potential here. Despite the controls Apple have in place, despite the limits on features and focus on experience, or maybe because of all of them...other newer possibilities emerge.

I've blogged here before about the shift with the App Store. A fundamental change between how ordinary people and applications interact. People feel about apps the way they do about songs or movies. They're personal, a reflection of you, what you do and what you're into.

I see applications as a new content form. Both a form in and of itself but also one with the power to work with all existing content too. We're going to see the creatives who develop the best apps celebrated as widely as other artists as this century progresses, where apps become expressions of ideas and emotions.

This device, like the iPhone before it, could be very significant in the development of that, as software developers begin to fully explore the fact that, given that all content is digital now, they are ultimately the shapers of how that content is communicated to all those people on all those sofas.

It could even end up being the device where that old dream of computer art actually takes place.

32A DVD is here and out in the wild...

2009-10-20T07:24:00.001-07:00

Yes, see the link to the right for purchasing options...

or here at the main Janey Pictures site

32A DVD is coming...

2009-09-23T15:58:00.001-07:00

Delighted to say that the DVD of 32A is coming soon. It’ll be released on October 16th, Friday in Ireland available nationwide in Xtravision and for sale via the Janey Pictures site and via Amazon.

It’s actually available now for preorder on Amazon.co.uk. This will take a little longer to come, November 9th.

For those of you not based in the UK or Ireland, it’s a PAL disc with Region 2 encoding. So you’ll need a multiregion DVD player and television to match. That or a good laptop...

iTunes Extras - a start at least

2009-09-10T00:36:00.001-07:00

Well it’s a start.

It’s always interesting to see when Apple put a new element into the media mix. With iTunes extras, they’ve placed a marker in the sand, acknowledging the need to address additional content. but they have not provided a full solution. That’s a while away. I think that’s probably Apple’s take on this too, given the short amount of time it got at the presentation in San Francisco for iTunes 9. The independent sector is in full flight at the moment examining new ways of engaging audiences using additional content amongst other things, but there’s only studio offerings here.

Apple have taken one thing on board, that digital downloads provide a thin experience compared to DVD. The additional material is popular and acts as a piracy deterrent. Up till this point it has also been a deterrent to buying on iTunes. The public would sooner own a DVD with extras for the same money as a download. This decision is a step towards addressing that. Kudos to Apple for being the first major player in the market to step in and start providing a solution. But my hunch is that Apple have taken an interim measure to see how this shakes out. This has the vague air of the AppleTV about it in terms of Apple’s commitment.

iTunes extras are essentially websites bundled into a package for download. iTunes has Webkit built in for quite a while, it’s what the iTunes Store is built upon. As such the extras are designed for a specific screen size, resizing windows won’t scale anything, it’s a set frame. This means it won’t migrate to the iPhone or iPod Touch. it certainly could work well on an AppleTV, but there’s no news on that possibility. AppleTVs would need a system update, which is probably in the works, it would make sense. The extras would also have a lot of appeal on a future tablet which Apple may release.

When you download one, you get two files, the main movie file and the extras version, which also includes the main movie file. The main movie file is presumably for popping on your iPhone or AppleTV, the extras version is for watching on your computer. So flexible on one hand but, given the repetition, a bit clunky on the other. it would have been smarter to see a version that knew what it was playing on, but that’s not how they’ve been built, and it’s not how iTunes works. The Wall-E movie file is about 1.4 Gb and the Extras version was 1.8Gb, pretty big chunks of data given space and download caps. This clunkiness extends unfortunately and has implications.

The first howl of protest you’ll hear from the buyer is ‘No commentaries?’ and on first look through the offerings, there’s none. A closer look shows why.

The way iTunes extra versions are set up means that the original movie file, which comes with two soundtracks, stereo and surround, is bundled into the package. For Apple to provide a director’s commentary, it would have to be included in the main movie file as an alternate soundtrack. Or they would have to bundle into the extras version a different movie file with a commentary included. However...

- that movie file would have become more attractive to pirates. Metadata like commentaries are key now in providing a richer experience away from piracy. Studios may be slow to release this increasingly valuable additional material, this may be a negotiation issue.

- there could also be a technical issue, stemming out of the overall structure of an iTunes extra file. For example, there would have to be some way of having a movie file play with one soundtrack and not another from a javascript instruction. I’m unaware of that being a possibility, perhaps at some point.

So you’ll see a lot of ‘introduced by the director’ pre-scenes as well as deleted scenes with extensive introductions and afterwords, certainly in the Wall-E iTunes Extras version. Apple are seeking to re-invent a little here, skirting around the missing commentary. I wonder what process the films which are included went through with the iTunes team, would be interesting to hear. Clearly a fuller, deeper look at how metadata and films are to be presented digitally is still a ways off.

And on the front line? Indie filmmakers know that, like musicians before them, it’s increasingly all about a direct relationship with the audience and building up a conversation with them. Compared to real time interaction, continuously developing material and new forms of cross platform material, the iTunes extras look a little dated, taking on some of the aspects of the DVD which they seek to replace.

San Francisco

2009-08-15T00:35:00.001-07:00

As any of our friends will tell you, we loved San Francisco which we explored during our screening of 32A at Mill Valley last year. Wel, two of my photos from my SF Flickr set have been included in the Schmapp guide to San Francisco. Which is pretty cool.

California Academy of Sciences

Transamerica Pyramid

Software as the key artform of the 21st Century

2009-08-14T03:18:00.001-07:00

Isn’t it time we stopped talking about media and returned to the term artform?

A medium is ultimately physical in our understanding of it, no matter how enhanced or extended it may be.

For me, one of the main achievements of the digital revolution is to have separated creative content from media. Now, no longer bound by the existing hardware models with all their limitations, we are free to explore our various artforms via software, a far more natural environment for creative material.

Technology has always impacted upon cultural development, in particular the arts. All you have to do is look at the Russian avant garde and the impact of the machine on art, or in the explosion of media in particular, from radio on up throughout the 20th century.

The rising tide of digital technology as the end of the 20th century which has matured at the start of this century, given the wide dispersal of computers and the emergence of broadband globally, gave birth to a new internet culture which has impacted hugely on existing media.

We’ve been distracted by how digital technology mimics a medium really well, how it extends them and combines them with other technologies. Those three steps are present in each of the creative fields, most clearly in music. There it took on the genre of music completely, extended the creative options for musicians and spearheaded the new distribution channels for music. These cultural forces, experienced as rapid changes to humanity, are almost alive in how unstoppable and progressive they are.

Not all existing media fare well out of this, television as a medium was in trouble long before digital culture emerged. The structure of television, top down, one to many, rigid control of content, only a few outlets per nation, had been incredibly limiting over the years, and it had ended up myopically examining itself as the last century closed with top ten shows focussed on television’s own inventory. If music had faced similar limitations it would have withered and died.

The net disbands completely these kinds of structure, they have no place there. The recent economic downturn and the shift away from advertising saw those old models crumble alarmingly quickly, it became clear that the boom and advertising were all that was holding up the existing ways of doing business.

This dispersal of content creation opens up the very basics of each artform for questioning. As a creator of course, It matters not whether it’s individuals or groups of individuals, active independent content producers or production companies, all bets are off. And ultimately one major question we all face is that of production finance. Who’ll finance these?

Our focus now, both on creative work and it’s dissemination should be on exploring developing software with a view to creating work and it’s expression and communication. The creators of software whether it’s new services online or applications, are the structuring limitation or future liberators, the new artists in our mix. If Film was the artform of the 20th century. Software is the key artform of the 21st.

--
Earlier thoughts on software here and here.

Design decisions for iPhone

2009-04-26T12:45:00.001-07:00

I attended DevDays, a useful one-day conference for iPhone developers, enjoyed it thoroughly, had a good positive chat with the folks from Apple and enjoyed most of the presentations. The slideshare presentation below was from Des Traynor of Contrast. It was a good positive talk where the route to making your app was clearly outlined as a concrete series of steps, decisions that need to be made.

Design Decisions for iPhone applications

View more presentations from Contrast Contrast.

One Billion Apps

2009-04-23T17:35:00.001-07:00

A billion apps downloaded. In just nine months.

What does that tell us?

It tells me a lot. It tells me that people have a very different relationship with applications on the iPhone than they do anywhere else.

That really made me stop when I thought that.

Because that’s a big deal, that’s the game changer right there.

For decades now, installation, even choice of apps, has been the domain of the lone specialist. Groups, whether they be families or companies, trusted nerds to specify, source, install, train, maintain, upgrade, replace them when needed.

That’s all gone. Everyone does it now, all that's gone on the iPhone.

I’ve been long fond of saying that Everyone’s A Nerd Now. That we all use computers and software to do whatever it is we do, but the reality is that most people used a trusted guide to structure that experience still. But here it’s clear that is over.

Why is this big for me? It’s big because it opens up the possibility of exploring that relationship. That people, individuals, will start to engage with software on the same level as they do with books, or songs, or film, other creative material. That it’s personal in a real way which it’s never actually been before, not shared, not mediated, not agreed or consulted about. But direct, immediate, intimate in a way.

Is this what Apple’s finally done after all these years? Ignited the personal in personal computing?

Choosing unpopular software

2009-01-26T15:10:00.001-08:00

You know I don’t know what it says about me... but... I always pick the underdog.

I don’t use MarsEdit. I use MacJournal.
I don’t use Yojimbo. I use Together.
I don’t use Tweetie. I use TwittelatorPro.
I don’t use Twitterific. I use Twhirl.
I don’t use Preview or Adobe Reader. I use Skim.
I don’t use OmniFocus. I use Things, and occassionally TaskPaper.

I used Mailsmith for years until it became clear that development was just not going to happen and all sorts of cool plugins became available for Mail.

I’ve stopped using MS Office a long time ago. I use Numbers and Keynote, keeping Pages for simple page layout. I do my wordprocessing in the really rather lovely Nisus Writer Pro.

I don’t know. It says something. I just can’t figure what.

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Obama - Man on Wire

2009-01-22T03:05:00.001-08:00

There’s been a lot said about this remarkable man, I’ve no intention of rehashing it.

I just have an observation... in Obama’s coolness, his calm handling of what is surely the largest burden going, I kept thinking of Man on Wire, and Petit’s incredible ease with his extraordinary act....

[youtube EIawNRm9NWM]

The key thing about Petit was his faith that it would be done, the sheer scale of his ambition and his willingness to risk.

He took a lot of strength from his support network. He brought people along a brave and risky path, and while they all made mistakes, they managed to achieve a truly remarkable act.

But also his strength came from his own devotion to just doing the work. And here he evokes our new President even more clearly.

I can see a difficult balancing act in Obama’s future, but like many people, I think he’s going to pull it off.

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32A in Cinemas

2008-07-27T01:20:00.001-07:00

[youtube dysIJlVXE0g]

We’re finally in the cinemas in Ireiand with our feature, 32A. It’s been a long haul and the final step is one we have to take ourselves.

Independent cinema faces a lot of new challenges. On the one side, there’s competition for audience eyeballs from the internet and computer gaming. And on the other, filmmakers encounter increasing distributor nervousness. The studios are pumping out bigger and bigger tentpole movies, pretty soon you won’t be able to pick out the big movies in the cinema, they’ll all be big. And those smaller films find it harder and harder to get a release. We’ve forged some relationships with exhibitors and are putting the film out in Ireland ourselves. So a risk, but hopefully with a good outcome. We’re going with our gut, hey, it’s got us this far.

As a filmmaker, exhibition is very necessary phase. The film only becomes real when you sit with the audience and you feel and hear them respond. It’s almost physical, the sense of an audience going with a film. I’d say the other side is true also, losing them can be as painful as it gets. We’ve been very fortunate however, and had really great audience response and feedback in screenings at festivals so far. I can’t wait until I pick a random screening and pop in to see how it plays.

Dublin: IFI Cinemas
Booking office: 01.679.5744 Book Online

Carrick on Shannon: Cineplex
Booking office: 071.967.2000 Book Online

Sligo: Gaiety Cinema
Booking office: 071.917.4001

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Spam King Makes Prison Escape!

2008-07-24T16:28:00.001-07:00

Scrabble sues Scrabulous. Why not buy them? Facebook opening the architecture for others to take advantage of its system. Google activates KNOL, its Wikipedia clone. The Northern Lights are actually explosions. Intel gets serious about SOC – systems on a chip – AGAIN. Sony modernizes its e-book reader. Alien formats now work. Yahoo announced a rollout of Zimbra e-mail consolidation software. Spammer walks out of jail and is now an escaped convict.

Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/119779/tech5-119779-07-24-2008.mp3]

File Naming & the dumbest thing ever

2008-07-24T04:27:00.001-07:00

John Foster in a recent episode of MacBreak Tech while in the middle of a perfectly enjoyable discussion on file naming... said the one thing you should never do is use the date in a name, that it was ‘the dumbest thing ever’.

Now, I would have a lot of crossover interests with him, having an opinion on file-naming conventions, no matter how freakin’ sad, being one. And you know, I have being doing the dumbest thing ever for... like the longest time.

Well, maybe fifteen years or so.

I have a filenaming convention which I’ve applied rigorously since deciding I needed to do it. It works for me. And I think the key to adding any element into a filename convention is to be utterly consistent. The benefits only become clear years on.

My needs in file naming are two-fold. You should be able to instantly see what a file is about just from the name and you should be able to find it years later with no real hassle. So I take the following approach:

1. I give every project a three letter acronym, whatever is intuitive is usually what I use, I don’t over-debate it.
32A (our feature film 32A)
EDI ( a script called Easy Does It we’re developing)
JPC (Janey Pictures Company, business stuff)
etc..
2. I then include the date, in reverse order and always YY.MM.DD
3. Then who it’s for, IFB, RTE, Media, Bank, Marian etc.
4. Then a narrative on what it is.

So I get files called:

32A 08.07.20 IFI my notes on press release

I can instantly see what project it relates to, when I wrote it, who it was for and what it’s about.

The joy of doing the date in the name only becomes clear when you sort by name. You instantly sort by name and date simultaneously. Projects are sorted into lists which are further sorted by date.

The story of a project becomes very clear as you peruse directory listings.

32A 07.05.02 GFF application for festival
32A 07.05.28 GFF additional notes on format and dolby
32A 07.06.04 GFF acceptance letter
32A 07.06.06 Media press release on premiere
32A 07.07.12 GFF Hotel booking form
32A 07.07.19 GFF thanks again for all

It’s pretty clear what was going on and what the sequence of communication was. The story is clear, that’s one thing I value. And no other project files are in there, if I didn’t have a date in the name, and I sorted by date, you’d see a jumble of different project files mixed together.

This particularly applies if you have an ongoing flat file approach, I have a folder on my desktop called ‘Inbox’, essentially my current working folder.

You have the benefit of the filename doing some of the work folders do, essentially I’ve built in a project folder sorted by date right into the name. I only Archive files into a hierarchy of folders every couple of months or so, and this keeps things organised even with that.

But it also helps in using Spotlight. You can also search quickly in spotlight for ‘32A 07.06“ and get just the files for that project and that exact month. I realise you can construct a spotlight query adding in a date but this is far quicker and much more intuitive.

Other benefits.

- Even after I do sort into a directory hierarchy, a file can leave it’s folder and still have the meaning in the file name.

- For sharing the file, the date of creation is embedded in the file name and if you email to other people, it doesn’t matter about when it’s saved on their system or how correctly set up their system is.

- I don’t do versioning that often, but if I do I build into the narrative, commencing with the word ‘Rev’ and a number: Rev01, Rev02 etc.

Related Tags:

Apple Sells One Million Phones Instantly

2008-07-14T18:30:00.001-07:00

Blackberry and Palm release new phones. Apple says it bought 1 million iPhones already. EU to regulate SMS roaming charges. Netflix looks like it is going on the Xbox360. It may never work out if the Net clogs up as predicted by at least one study. Load expected to be 100X worse. Icahn and Ballmer on Yahoo deal. But it's not their company. Yahoo will reject any offer. Xbox360 to go to 60GB. IBM reveals 8-core Power 7 chip.

Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/118740/tech5-118740-07-14-2008.mp3]

Ira Glass on storytelling

2008-06-29T03:53:00.001-07:00

[youtube n7KQ4vkiNUk ]

This American Life is one of my favourite podcasts. A recent episode, The Giant Pool of Money, outlining the background story to the sub-prime mortgage crisis was a standout. It was almost Wire-like in how it interwove high end financial shenanigans, the systems people have to work within, and the trials of ordinary citizens.

The episodes are free on the feed in iTunes for a period but after a while, you have to pay about a dollar for a show. And just to say it, your broker made a lot more telling you a lot less.

Frankly there isn’t a dud episode in the whole series.

Here Ira gives some pointers on his approach to storytelling, basic but very good. Part One is above, There’s four in the series and well worth checking them all out.

Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

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Pestle

2008-06-29T03:48:00.001-07:00

Pestle, originally uploaded by Dromahaire.

I love this mortar and pestle, it's made from granite, Danish and a present. I've made my salad dressing in it for years now. I like it because it's wide and flat, not tall and narrow, you can swirl and stir in it and have a good look at what's going down.

I usually make the same dressing every day. It's pretty straight forward but we wouldn't want it any other way in our house. Starting with a clove of spring garlic lately, ripe and wet, popping straight from the skin with just a press, Then flakes of sea salt and black pepper. And it barely takes a few grinds to have it mush up nicely. Then some Dijon mustard, just half a teaspoon, the juice of half a Sicilian lemon and add enough good olive oil to taste.

You get squodges of mustard and sharp attacks of lemon juice sometimes in your mouth depending on how they were. but I tend to enjoy the odd surprise. The oil is the main thing I vary, I like to check different ones out.

Will Bill Gates Please Leave the Building!

2008-06-26T18:58:00.001-07:00

New top level domains still in play. Look for dot.porn among other names. A land rush projected. 700 redundant news stories today about Bill Gates and how he's retiring. Cripes. When will it end? Dell adding colorful laptops. What took them so long? Microsoft indeed going on a buying spree. Intuit does layoffs. This is all the news they can manage. Yahoo reorg news also clogging up the news channels. Susan Decker is now the boss it seems to me. Should the US nationalize the Internet? Symbian versus Android? What can Sarbanes-Oxley do for you? Nothing.

Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/116828/tech5-116828-06-26-2008.mp3]

Whatever happened to Computer Art?

2008-06-18T02:10:00.001-07:00

I was asked a while back to give a talk on creative applications on the Mac and it set me off thinking about the early days when I first got into this.

I have to say, it was much to the bafflement of loved ones and friends at the time, about 20 years ago. It’s an interest which has continued to this day, my wife says she has no equivalent to it. I counter, rather lamely, pointing out her yoga and interest in alternative healthcare, but it doesn’t really wash.

Back in the day, 1988 to be a bit more precise, I spent a lot of time debating just exactly what Computer Art might be. I was working in the visual arts, primarly with young and emerging contemporary artists. I was intrigued by the new technology which was arriving. I bought a Commodore Amiga which was definitely the artists platform, launched by Andy Warhol painting Debbie Harry.

[youtube 3oqUd8utr14]

Computer Art is a topic that has by and large disappeared from the landscape. The Wikipedia article on it reads like a genre from the fifties, no sense of any current activity at all.

Artists, like everyone else, use a lot of technology these days, but no one particularly calls it Computer Art any more. They’re either film makers or graphic designers or just plain old artists. How it’s made is neither here nor there.

Of course, most clearly with Photoshop and 3D modellers, it’s easy to see how necessary a computer and set of software was to create the work, but that’s now realised as not all that important really. Photoshop is just a set of digital tools after all, generally used to create images which don’t look processed in any way. And while these digitally created images may form a subset of image making, it’s not in any form, a separate medium.

And that was what people were discussing back in the day, the emergence of a new medium.

For me, coding was always key to that. There were people, like William Latham, who worked within IBM in the UK, used coding in particular to generate work but they didn’t mesh with the art world all that well, the work didn’t speak to people, either the artistic community or the general public, in a way they could relate to, it’s protean and exploratory by it’s very nature.

What was central to them was that the work did completely come from the code. And I think coding is the key to the future of this, but just perhaps we shouldn’t put the limits of the word ‘art’ on it.

Recently I had a small sense of something emerging from quite an unexpected source.

[youtube PCg1SpEan5k]

I, like everyone else, use Google Earth more and more. And yes it’s very useful, any trip or hotel choice is checked out there first and location based services will be more and more prevalent. But that’s not why I look there sometimes.

There’s something in the experience of Google Earth, I have a true sense of wonder there. This experience, unimaginable a century ago, unimaginable in fact to my own Dad who died too young. There’s a flicker in the back of my head more akin to encountering a work which speaks to me, a sense of wonder. Is this is landscape re-invented, is this is a new sublime?

What if software finally emerged as a new creative genre? What if it became, much as film defined the 20th century, the key defining medium of the 21st?

Related Tags:

WiMAX in Amsterdam Now!

2008-06-17T18:09:00.001-07:00

Philly municipal Wi-fi on again after being off again. Toshiba steps up and promotes its R500 laptop. Bumper stickers on your car could indicate you are unbalanced. Microsoft having various issues in Europe. Jon Shirley leaves MSFT board. Google Apps suffer outages. Good news for people pushing cloud computing. Firefox wants 5 million downloads. It's a publicity stunt all the way. Samsung suing TV makers. Amsterdam to run mobile WiMAX. How did they get into the act?

Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/115956/tech5-115956-06-17-2008.mp3]

Killala Bay, Horse racing

2008-05-26T07:39:00.001-07:00

Killala Bay, Horse racing, originally uploaded by Dromahaire.

Got to Killala for a party at a friends house and wandered down to the beach. They were doing their annual race on the beach and they got an incredible day for it.

The pounding of the hooves on the sand was truly amazing.

Hillside

2008-05-22T01:58:00.001-07:00

Hillside, originally uploaded by Dromahaire.

On the road out of Glencar Valley towards Sligo town. I love these stone walls, long crumbled, covered with earth and sod, criss-crossing the mountains. The labour involved must have been considerable and for what really....

By the way, this photo is filled with sheep... not that you'd know it. The G9 original file shows them, when I zoom in, and you can see a few when you view all sizes here in Flickr. The noise was nearly deafening when I was there, sheep bleating nearly constantly.

The Revenge of Mighty Mouse

2008-05-21T17:31:00.001-07:00

Microsoft is now in the news too much. Gates still chattering about one thing or another. The company decides to bribe users to use their search engine. Microsoft Office not adding support for its own Open XML until Office 14. Apple and CBS sued over stealing Mighty Mouse name. Is Comcast irked over the set top boxes? GTA IV actor irked over only making $200,000 for doing voice work.University of TN prof. sending secret docs to enemies? Xbox360 copying the Wii style controller.

Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/113109/tech5-113109-05-21-2008.mp3]

Straddling at Rosses

2008-05-17T03:45:00.001-07:00

Straddling at Rosses, originally uploaded by Dromahaire.

Summer, 12 years old. Somethings are classic, others new. He may have an iPod, a digital camera, access to the net and a Wii, but his favourite thing in the whole world? His new Swiss Army penknife.

Mind you, it is pretty cool...

Something new...

2008-05-16T16:29:00.001-07:00

I’ve been reading John C. Dvorak’s tech writing for as long as I’ve been interested in this stuff. He was the first general columnist I became aware of after Jerry Pournelle’s writing in Byte Magazine. My first computer was an Amstrad PC1512 and I was an early subscriber to PC Magazine where I came across John’s work. I stopped subscribing to PC Magazine once the Amiga, and later the Mac, became my main machines. I always remembered John’s style and one of the pleasures of the developing podcast world is now listening to him.

One of the strings to his bow is a short podcast called Tech 5 and he’s testing out delivering it directly to blogs, about ten or so initially, including mine.

I like his take on tech generally, though I’ve disagreed with him on occasion naturally enough. What I really like is his understanding that matters technological and business have a certain lifespan, they come and they go. Hype is just not something he’s going to participate in.

So readers will come across John’s show in my feed, hope you enjoy.

Related Tags:

Comcastic Speed

2008-05-16T16:03:00.001-07:00

Comcast upgrade works. Now I get as high as 22 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. The numbers fall off when you go overseas. Apple rolling out 4 more non-exclusive iPhone deals. Yahoo being sued. It decided to conceal details for some unknown reason. Missouri woman now indicted for cyberbullying. Comcast still being accused of throttling bit-torrent. Sprint says 2008 WiMax. Yeah, right. I like the Aliph Jawbone. ASUS making all its motherboards "instant on!" Wow.

Click to listen: [audio:http://m.podshow.com/media/12115/episodes/112616/tech5-112616-05-16-2008.mp3]

Headlong

2008-05-16T07:30:00.001-07:00

Headlong, originally uploaded by Dromahaire.

Just came across this shot in my trawl through my photos after I imported my iPhoto library into Aperture. I've always liked it, there's something about his energy that's conveyed here. Headlong and curious. the world open before him.

I remember this trip up the Leitrim mountains well, he plunged his arms deep into rabbit warrens, climbed higher than I felt comfortable, belted rocks with his geology hammer hoping to find a cluster of quartz.... He brought a hammer, I brought chocolate...

And yes, that is a Toy Story backpack.

Alles

2008-04-05T17:52:00.001-07:00

There’s many nice things you can receive in the post from a festival, an acceptance letter, a prize and hey, a cheque is always good.

Last week, we got an envelope at the office we didn’t expect. The Berlinale sent us out an envelope with t-shirts for each of our lead actresses, all wrapped up in festival posters for them, together with a photo for each of them and a lovely one of Marian at the Q&A in Berlin. There was a nice letter from the festival director and a press pack and DVD of still images from the premiere.

But best of all was a whole stack of filled in response sheets to the film. The first to catch my eye was one with only one word on it, they ticked the ‘sehr gut’ box and simply wrote ‘Alles“ for what they liked, really just great to hear. Theirs was the briefest, others had plenty to say. About half of them were in German and the other half in English and I’m definitely going to have someone translate them for me. It was a total kick reading through the english ones and what people’s response to the film was.

It says so much of the festival that they do this, the Festival was two months ago, they are one of the world’s leading film festivals, they really didn’t have to do any of this. And the thought came to me, that perhaps they are one of the best festivals in the world, simply because they do things like this, the little things that make such a difference.

I definitely have my own personal ‘sehr gut’ and ‘Alles’ to the good people working in the Berlinale Office, who were a pleasure to deal with from start to finish.

Related Tags:

Charlie Rose - Redux

2008-03-21T02:54:00.001-07:00

I blogged about the Charlie Rose site before but I thought it might be worthwhile revisiting it now that I’ve been checking in for a few months now.

Charlie Rose as a site is a very impressive venture indeed. It hit the ground running and hasn’t let up. Any improvements that have been implemented have been subtle and well judged, the structure has remained constant, each tweak focussed on improving the access to the material available to them.

And what material they have... I’ve been extremely impressed with not only the sheer volume and quantity of high end interviews over the years but with how it delivers it to the visitor. It certainly achieves that primary aim of maiking all that archival material available. As a chronicle it’s superb.

But what has quietly impressed is a sense of currency, each night’s episode is available the next day. The query ‘what’s on Charlie Rose tonight?’ which a regular television viewer might have has been seamlessly transferred to the website.

There’s a keen editorial mind at work too, unearthing interesting interviews relevant to todays episode and provide a lot of context setting. All of which means that the site is ‘live’ in a way that a show chronicling current affairs and topics of interest should be.

The site has one major problem which differentiates it from other sites with large archives of video of similar quality, TED comes to mind. The site launched when Google Video seemed like a viable proposal and the site remains tied to that format and approach despite it’s failure. It would be so much better if it was in Quicktime and RSS was offered. I would love to see it offered as a video podcast. So the only options are to embed it on sites or to view it on the actual Charlie Rose site. To it’s credit, the level of production on the site certainly makes a good case for visiting there. I do think, however, that Charlie Rose as a podcast would penetrate the global consciousness, much as TED has done, if it took the same approach as TED. TED provides a compelling site, lots to explore and see, but it also offers RSS streams to subscribe to. With the coming election, a more accessible Charlie Rose delivered to iPods around the world could reach a huge audience interested in it’s outcome.

Any other criticisms are minor. They’ve done an excellent job tagging, but there’s no way for the visitor to tag. They do provide indexes by interviewee and topic, but I do find the browse method a bit intimidating and lacking an intuitive appeal, something material of this quality deserves. And there is a slight niggling sense that the ability to edit out Charlie’s vulnerabilities is given some leeway, his recent accident highlights this, on the broadcast show, we got a full “Hell yes” as he tells the audience what happened. But online this is cut out. I feel this is a mistake, the relationship with him is at least part of what’s at work here.

But all that said, If you ever wanted an argument of why this stuff is better online than over the air, Charlie Rose is the best example you could ever ask for, the ability to cross-reference with the archive alone is worth your attention. Roll on November, this is the place to see the Election played out.

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IT Conversations - pick #1: Ajax Security

2008-02-21T04:45:00.001-08:00

If I had to pick one tech podcast and discard the rest it would be the originator of the species, IT Conversations. This blend of different shows has a wide-ranging remit from biotechnology to web development. They have a number of presenters who interview innovators and leading technologists, and they also put out recorded presentations from top conferences, which can be especially valuable. They’re all free and available via iTunes.

I listen to them regularly, good meaty discussions which can be satisfying in the midst of the other more newsy, gossipy fluff that fills the tech podcast world. Sure, a lot of it is not for me, I usually have my thumb poised, ready to click through to the next one, there’s a lot in the feed so you have to be selective.

But quite frequently you hear something that’s well informed, interesting and current, covering an aspect of technology that you don’t really see discussed anywhere. So I thought I’d point out ones that have ticked those boxes as I come across one. So, that’s why I have a #1 up there in the title, it’s going to be the first in a series.

Today, I heard Billy Hoffman discussing Ajax Security with Phil Windley in the Technometria channel on IT Conversations.

As Ajax spreads and more and more sites become web applications, the hype online is that desktop software is moving out to the web. The reality is that a lot of these sites push code, especially javascript, out to the users machines, frequently with scant regard to security, exposing them and the site to malicious code. Billy Hoffman covers a lot of different examples of poor implementation which will give anyone pause. More entertaining and enlightening than you might have expected from the title.

Technometria on Ajax Security with Billy Hoffman.

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Goodbye To All That No.2

2008-02-17T02:27:00.001-08:00

Robin Morgan wrote a seminal essay on women and politics in 1970 called Goodbye to All That. As voters in the US debate Hillary versus Barack, she’s been moved to write again. The opening is below but the whole thing is well worth a read, no matter where you stand.

Goodbye to All That No.2

Goodbye to the double standard . . .
—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.
—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)
Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .
Carl Bernstein's disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.” Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?" with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.
Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged—and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.
Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!” Shame.
Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?

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Once up for Best Song

2008-01-22T09:30:00.001-08:00

Oh, it deserved more than one category, though the song deserves the nomination... would it have stuck in the Academy’s craw to put it where it belongs, the Best Picture category? The film’s basic conceit is a musical one, that two strings in tune will resonate and amplify, and the joy in John Carney’s filmmaking is his deft delivery of this.

I’m with David Carr, one of Entertainment Weekly’s bloggers on that one.

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The Problem with Punk

2008-01-09T03:06:00.001-08:00

Peter Carlton of Film Four in the UK has said that they make films your mother wouldn't like. If you're a filmmaker it's a constant mantra from financiers... "hip and edgy".

A few years back, I went to the local supermarket and was loading up the aisles when I noticed the music over the tannoys. 'White Riot' by The Clash. I laughed to myself as I loaded up the pizzas. "White Riot, I wanna riot. White Riot, I wanna riot on my own..." Someone must have been asleep at the scheduling wheel or having a laugh. But no... the dulcet tones of Larry Gogan followed; "That was today's Golden Oldie..."

Hold on, that was White Riot... on Radio 1... in the mid-afternoon... on Larry Gogan... as a Golden-Freakin'-Oldie.

I recalled the NME during the punk era and what they called men of a certain age. 'Boring Old Farts' was the term they coined. Is this what's happened, have all the punks become the boring old farts who run the show?

My generation sneered at those hippies who were becoming middle-aged guys, still with the long hair and beads. But hey now, it's my generations turn. Angry Punk Dads, pushing shopping carts, loading up with stuff for the kids, somewhere inside still giving the world the finger.

When I ask my students who watches TV every day, a handful put up their hands. When I ask who goes online everyday, they all do. They are the Add Me generation. The current crop of Gen Ys and Millenials are a far nicer, more connected and more concerned bunch than the set of Angry Punk Dads that have preceeded them.

They're not that hip or edgy really, in fact they're rather nice. My mother probably would like them... perhaps she should have a word with Peter. Television might be losing it's audience in more ways than one.

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Podcasts worth listening to

2008-01-03T12:41:00.001-08:00

I've moved away from live radio almost completely now.

A surprising thing for me, given that the spoken word has long been my favourite medium for news and politics by far. My earliest personal relationship with media was listening to Radio Caroline and later John Peel chronicling the arrival of punk in the mid seventies. From those early days radio was a constant companion as my interest in current affairs deepened. This was a medium that has always felt personal to me. Over the years I've listened to RTE Radio 1, the BBC World Service, Radio 4, Today FM and latterly NPR/PRI , in particular WNYC.

What's different now? Changes at RTE lost me. RTE's Radio 1 was the mainstay of talk radio here. When you're a talk radio listener, turning on the radio was one of the first things you did upon getting up, letting it witter away in the corner of the kitchen or office. You tuned in and out as needed. As life and work progressed, you'd keep current, ignoring the odd show which irritated. The dumbing-down of RTE Radio 1 over the last year or two left me with little reason to turn it on, so much of it was sheer rubbish.

So I turned to iTunes and a set of smart playlists that brings me a good mix of news and current affairs, interesting stories from around the world including Ireland. RTE have finally gotten their act together on podcasts, though for a while they were on the wrong track there. I pleaded with them via email not to embrace Real back when they started to go online to no avail. Sadly RealPlayer and Windows Audio still form their principal offerings for live listening, so it doesn't matter if you're online or using an old fashioned transistor radio, RTE Live sucks either way...

The shows I list below form my listening now. I have a playlist which automatically keeps things current. I just set it off in the morning, picking either News and Stories or Technology, and let it run. I list my News and Stories podcasts here, I may do the Tech ones later. Looking at this list, I'm aware of how much I tend to like people with strong personalities, shows with clear voices. The News and Stories are from existing media outlets and the Technology podcasts from newer providers, it will be interesting to see how things progress, to see if new voices on current affairs emerge from the independent sector.

News and Stories

WNYC - Radio Lab - Add to iTunes
Inventive and experimental, a show which researches and explores a single theme, from Time to the Wright Brothers, by weaving interviews with key figures, sounds and conversations between the two hosts.

PRI - This American Life - Add to iTunes
Ira Glass, Philip's son, has developed an iconic (or whatever the audio equivalent of iconic is..) show. Wonderfully produced, it brings together several stories around a single idea, humorous and intelligent, and with a great set of writers.

WNYC - The Brian Lehrer Show - Add to iTunes
I keep up to date with New York and US politics via Brian's show. Perhaps a tad parochial for a global audience, you'd have to know and love NYC to care about some of the stories. That said, it also covers national and presidential politics in a lively and accessible fashion.

RTE - Tonight with Vincent Browne - Add to iTunes
Ireland's best politics show bar none. At times rather odd and like something from another era, it's at the centre of political reporting in Ireland. It's also an excellent guide to major figures from history. Essential listening, who is going to be this man's successor?

RTE - Conversations with Eamonn Dunphy - Add to iTunes
I liked The Last Word when Eamonn was at the helm over on Today FM. With his departure it's now just another drive-time show. At times erratic and irritating, but at his best...he's unique. He certainly engages with his subjects in a very real and personal way, providing compelling listening.

BBC - In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg - Add to iTunes
Wonderful radio, a lecture in a podcast, covering topics as diverse as the Fibonacci Sequence to Avicenna. (Okay... a set of numbers which turn up everywhere in nature and an ancient Iranian philosopher.) Bragg is brilliant here, you get a real sense of how television limited him.

BBC - File on Four - Add to iTunes
Investigative journalism as it should be done. I wish there was more shows like this.

BBC - From Our Own Correspondent - Add to iTunes
The Beeb at it's best, covering news and current affairs from all over the world. It might still have the whiff of colonialism... but it's excellent stuff.

PRI - Selected Shorts - Add to iTunes
Leading actors read leading authors short stores to a live audience. I believe the word is 'delightful'. I particularly like this driving home late at night.

The New Yorker - Fiction - Add to iTunes
Sadly only out once a month. The New Yorker's enviable list of writers and stories read by other writers. Theroux reads Borges, Jhumpa Lahiri reads William Trevor.

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Deep Blue

2007-12-27T15:17:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I'm putting Mae, our three year old, to bed after Marian gives up trying to get her to sleep.

Her drink and sandwich taken, the stories done, we're lying in the dark...

'What's this called, Daddy', rubbing her hand on my forehead.
'That's called a forehead'
'Cos that's where the words are. The words are in there.'
'Oh you're thinking about your mind.'
'Inside there's a bone... a bone', her hands on either side of my skull.
'Yes, that's called your skull. Inside your skull is your brain and that's where your mind lives. And you do all your thinking inside your mind'.
'I'm thinking right now, Daddy'. Her forehead wrinkling, her finger pointing to where the action is.
'Yes, of course you are'.
'I'm thinking...'
'Uh uh...'
'...I'm thinking that Mommy should be putting me to bed...'

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Is that Google on the Mac?

2007-11-27T15:28:00.001-08:00

I was actually asked this question when I launched Safari in a traiining session. It was a little insight into what the Net is for most people.

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Once

2007-11-21T16:55:00.001-08:00

Saw 'Once' again.... I love this movie...

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Four Trillion Emails...

2007-11-08T05:44:00.001-08:00

Well... so much for Inbox Zero. Once I finish clearing these 4 trillion out of my Inbox... give or take a few hundred billion... I'll get right back to you.

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Getting Things Done using TaskPaper

2007-10-27T14:40:00.001-07:00

I’ve been been a keen convert to GTD since reading the book by David Allen about two years ago. Since then I’ve been a daily visitor to 43Folders and found a lot there to help guide me, there’s a very well informed community of productivity heads all of whom seemed to be working their way though similar issues.

In GTD, there were things I got very quickly - the overall process, ubiquitous capture and adopting a structure to an file system that really matched what I had to do. And of course, Allen’s emphasis on the right tools. This alone is why all the geeks out there love GTD.

Central to my practice was a set of digital tools, KinklessGTD, a bunch of add-ons to Mail, and iCal. When OmniFocus entered beta, I signed up in a hearbeat. And let me tell you, I love it, it’s satisfying and rich, a really flexible piece of software which readily adapted to the complexities of producing a feature film. Now, the film is complete, bar tidying up details, and as the workload grew simpler, I found that my productivity lessened. Sure I was tired, just burned out... but hey, I still was at my desk, still running the system, but I found myself exploring dependencies and time allowances, finessing the structure of my work... rather than actually doing anything...

I’ve had an eye on other GTD apps and downloaded a bunch over the years, usually dismissing them as requiring a bit too much adaptation to their system. I already knew a system, a really good one in OmniFocus, and I’d no interest in exploring another. But still, recently, I’ve come to accept that something has to change.

I returned to an old paper system I’ve used prior to having software for this purpose, post-its with single tasks obscuring my work window, do a task, clear some window space. Gets me up from my desk and there was some simple pleasure in taking up a piece of paper and trashing it. There was something about having your work up on a large public window that put a bit of pressure on me. But still it was hardly portable and obviously very limited.

Enter TaskPaper from Hog Bay Software.

Hog Bay have always produced quality software, their Mori was one of the better outliner/note taking software offerings prior to them selling it on. Back in the day, if you visited the Hog Bay site, it was refreshing to read on the Mori page, frank recommendations of DevonThink and OmniOutliner, two competing products. And today if you visit the TaskPaper section, you’ll read an endorsement of OmniFocus. All very evolved indeed, it speaks well of them, I wish other software producers were as generous. They also produce WriteRoom, which I own and love too. The original of the full-screen wordprocessors, also worth checking out.

To launch TaskPaper is to get it.

Its model is of a blank piece of paper, using it is like grabbing a pen and quickly drafting a list of stuff to be done. As a result it feels really fresh. Punch in your Projects and Tasks, assign Contexts/Tags on the fly, sort your lists by project or by context/tag. That’s it. No Futzing. My productivity soared.

For all its simplicity it has a lot of admirable qualities, not least of which is that the file is plain text, you can load it up into other software should you need to. TaskPaper’s internal workings enables it to sort it and format it.

It’s got tabs which I use for handy clicking to commonly used views. Like everything in TaskPaper, it’s simple to do and simple to remove, so you feel flexible and responsive, you don’t think too much about it, you just do it.

Again a sign of flexibility, It permits on the fly addition of multiple contexts. For me contexts, as defined in GTD, always were tags, as usually understood. Beyond the usual applications for context, I use them to add complexity, when needed, to the straightforward TaskPaper approach.

In OmniFocus I used to have a complex structure of projects and sub-projects, nested several layers deep in some instances. TaskPaper could be used to create subprojects in the use of names only like ‘Film-distribution’, ‘Film-marketing’ and so on. But I’ve not done that. It felt wrong, like the path I’d taken in OmniFocus that ended up with a huge matrix of projects which frankly triggered my procrastinating sorry-ass self to emerge. So now, if I have to designate a series of tasks to relate to a sub-project, I simply tag it with ‘design’ or ‘marketing’ and all the tasks with that tag appear in their own list. If I need that.

I really appreciate the simplicity of this software, it’s almost unspoken encouragement to just put your words down and move on. I’m keenly aware that I may find myself in the throes of a large complex project and TaskPaper may struggle to match it, but hey, I know I can pick up OmniFocus again for that period in my life. For when I’m not, TaskPaper is more than capable and like a good draught of cool water, just might refresh my understanding of my own productivity.

Taskpaper from Hog Bay Software. Highly recommended.

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Don't try to be original, just try to be good...

2007-10-23T13:31:00.001-07:00

Nothing quite an old geezer who knows his stuff.... Paul Rand discussing his approach to work.

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The Digital difference...

2007-10-22T12:59:00.001-07:00

Whooo.... my first lecture on the internet compressed by Michael Wesch into about 3 minutes and way more entertaining. I love the sense of joy and wonder, empowerment and personal responsibility he clearly feels now, in this moment.

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Honouring The Dalai Lama...

2007-10-21T16:25:00.001-07:00

A great interview from Charlie Rose with this eminently reasonable and intelligent man, his Holiness The Dalai Lama.

China today still takes no real heat from the rest of the world over it’s treatment of Tibet and Tibetan life and culture. As the Dalai Lama was honoured in Washington, China redirected any online searches towards state sanctioned search results. They surrounded the largest monastery in Tibet with 3,000 troops.

Meanwhile the world’s economy marches along with China, and nations around the world prepare for the upcoming Olympics. Have a look at Amnesty International’s latest information campaign, the level of shock required to shake our complacency speaks volumes...

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32A trailer

2007-07-10T17:10:00.001-07:00

The trailer for our upcoming feature film, 32A, being premiered in Galway at the Film Fleadh this Friday. There’s more information at the Janey Pictures website.

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Charlie Rose

2007-07-07T14:40:00.001-07:00

Given the role of American television globally, we often overlook the differences between the experience of television in the US and Europe.

Particularly when it comes to public television and the values and styles employed.

To an American, UK and Irish public broadcasters put out a lot of shows which look like they belong on a private network, shows with little or no merit, playing to the lowest common denominator. Even the shows with an obvious public remit, there’s a lot of gloss and packaging involved, they compete against private networks using public money, making the networks look impoverished and low-end.

It’s quite different in America. Often the best output of PBS is very plain and simple.

One of the mainstays in New York living is checking into Charlie Rose and who he’s interviewing each evening. He employs a simple relaxed style, a minimal studio, no audience, sofas or graphic overlays, this is a format which permits serious conversation with some of the most interesting people in the arts, politics, science and current issues.

The good news is a lot of the content is now available to a wider audience, they’ve put 3,600 hours of interviews online at his website Charlie Rose. It’s well worth a peruse, you only pay for a downloaded version and you can watch them for free on the site. It's going to be one of my favourite places to check in for informed commentary as the upcoming Presidential campaign unfolds.

I include a sample interview here with Fred Rogers, another mainstay of public television in the US. His show is the opposite of what you might expect from the likes of Barney, say. A show where he talks straight to camera, treating kids, very young kids, with a lot of honest respect. Europe would be too cynical for this, but it works a charm in the USA.

The man is a wonder and he’s done some pretty impressive work over the years not least of which was an influential address to the Senate commission on public broadcasting for children.

I’ve remembered this interview for one moment when Fred tells Charlie that he too is special and... well... it’s a moment.

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Four Eyed Monsters on YouTube

2007-06-10T04:53:00.001-07:00

I blogged about these two before. They have now put their feature, all of it, on YouTube for free and legal viewing for one week only.... They have a promotion whereby for each viewers who sign up with Spout, a film review site, Spout will give them 1 dollar. Sign up and help these guys get out of debt and hopefully working on their next feature.

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Tell the World....

2007-05-13T01:32:00.001-07:00

It appears I am blocked in China. I thought initially perhaps it’s the name, even though I never thought it would sound like trouble... but then I checked out the discussion board on the site. There's a long list of perfectly innocuous sites which are blocked. So I tried my other two sites, Janey Pictures and my undeveloped www.filmfinance.eu site. They’re both blocked. Go figure.

Well, let’s give it some credence then.

This June 4th is the 18th anniversary of this terrible day. It is still moving to hear Kate Adie’s broadcast from Tiananmen. ‘Tell the world...’ a student said to her. Perhaps the world has stopped listening....

China hosts the Olympics next. They are the worlds fastest growing economy and every major corporation in the world have set up there. Half the world’s concrete was poured in China last year and they are heading to take over the US in terms of environmental impact. China may be hot right now, but it doesn’t take any heat over how it denies it’s citizens rights, it's policies in Tibet, or, indeed, for the brutality shown that day in Beijing.

This coming June.... Embed this.

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Word Processors

2007-05-03T02:22:00.001-07:00

Back in the day... that would be 1986 to be precise, the year i bought my first computer. It was an Amstrad PC1512, all of 512k ram and twin 360k floppy drives. It came with a choice of operating systems. MS-DOS or CP/M and two windowing systems, Windows 1.2 and GEM.

The principal reason for the purchase was word-processing. My girlfriend had an earner typing up a science journal for a publisher and the Amstrad could run a dedicated mathematical wordprocessor which would turn out pretty respectable typeset pages, well respectable given that it was 1986.

People used to drop by and ask us to show them ‘cutting and pasting’. These were heady times....

The main application I used for wordprocessing was Wordstar. It was a tough piece of software to love, it got in your way and had no redeeming factor other than it worked. We got a hold of Wordperfect which was like driving a BMW in comparison. WP was kinda cool, especially when they did a version for my new Amiga which rapidly became my main machine. I stuck with WP for quite some time, until the computer in work had Word on it, and then that became set in stone, of course, for me and for everyone.

Now, nearly fifteen years later, I find I’ve been avoiding Word. i have so many writing tools available to me, even the most basic of text editors is more pleasurable to use, it seems ridiculously cumbersome to me. And the fact that I’ve been using it for so long and I am still at sea on how to use whole chunks of it, annoys me. So I’ve set about finding an alternative.

I checked out Mellel, (very impressive, if I was more of an academic I’d be thrilled) and Pages, (real potential, but too much of a design tool for what I was looking for). Finally, I came across Nisus Writer Pro, which is in beta, and it’s been a joy. There’s a sixty day trial period, long enough to persuade you that you can’t ever go back...

It’s fast and responsive, nothing sluggish about it at all. No hangs or waits, no spinning balls.... the beta is very polished, it’s never stalled on me once. I’m using it every day and, yes, in work.
Overall they have struck a very good ratio in how they handle the balance between interface and functionality, you can do a lot, and the interface is designed to make that potential very manageable and not at all intrusive.
- Number one in my book, I want to write, a nice clean toolbar with just what you need on it. There’s no massive list of buttons you can put on the toolbar, so it stays nice and simple. They use palettes for pretty well most options instead.
- The palettes live in a pop out drawer. It’s a simple thing with a big result, you can make them disappear. If you want them available at all times, you can have them float like other applications do or simply keep the drawer open, but I love being able to put them away.
- On top of that, you can configure different sets of palettes into groups in that drawer, so it’s very customisable. And you can set up as many different groups of palettes as you want. There’s huge functionality here, the range of palettes is very thorough.
- It handles styles better than any other writing tool I’ve used, ever. It’s very easy to set them up and implement them, again handled visually in an unobtrusive and straightforward way, a small set of icons at the bottom of each window.
- And every software should borrow how they handle setting up keyboard shortcuts, it’s that easy.

Generally, the UI is great. There seems to be a real focus within Nisus on getting the heck out of the way and keeping it simple. All the while delivering real high end functionality, certainly covers all of the uses I’ll be needing.

It can import and export Word docs, especially RTFs, but the quality is no better than okay. The same applies to most alternative word-processors, but this isn’t a deal breaker for me, I can certainly deal with the table that’s imported slightly longer than it should be very easily in NW Pro. Far easier than I can in Word if something went wrong there....

Best of all, It’s got a simple full-screen mode which is configurable. I’ve been struck by the Full-screen mode we are seeing everywhere, from MacJournal to Montage. The screen blacks out and you just see... crazy after all these years... your words on screen, nothing else, not a menu or palette in sight. Naturally, it recalls all those early experiences, I have actually gone to an amber on black background. Nothing else on screen, just these glowing amber words. Back home... punching in text, but knowing, when I need to do something fancy, it’s going to be easy and quick to do.

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Susan and Arin

2007-04-24T14:28:00.001-07:00

I’ve followed these two for the past couple of years... it’s been amazing to watch them fulfill what the ongoing development of digital media has promised.

Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, and their project Four Eyed Monsters.

They are two filmmakers who, like many others, set out to make their first feature.

They were perhaps unwitting pioneers in a way, building an online presence around their project which ultimately absorbed their film and became bigger than it. it’s been great to follow it, each step of the way, not just uploading video, but building a community around their project, exploring everything from a premiere on Second Life to Google mashups for screenings.

They give me heart in that it’s not the future, it’s now. It’s the first time I’ve seen filmmakers act like musicians, making their stuff and marketing and distributing it themselves and operating at a certain level. The entire project is open and brave and full of humour and life, genuinely engaging...

The podcasts track the development of the film, its trials and tribulations through production and festival runs and now distribution. They’re funny and touching and really one of the best things on iTunes. I’d recommend watching the podcasts in sequence, including all the little bits promotional stuff... and then catching the film. They have the DVD on sale on their site.

It might tell you something of the impact of this project when you watch the purchasers of the DVD upload videos to YouTube of them opening the packages and popping them in their players. I love the fact that an audience felt that kind of connection, especially for an indie low budget feature.

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Soulver

2007-04-23T10:50:00.001-07:00

I love apps that break through your model of what you can do in a particular area. Calculation on the Mac seems to generally revolve around calculators like TopCalculette or spreadsheets, like Excel or Tables.

Soulver is one such app. It’s neither a straightforward calculator, though you can certainly use it as one, nor is it a full spreadsheet program.

There’s a phrase in mathematics or more likely, book-keeping or carpentry, called a ready reckoner. This implies a handy tool, a sense of some practical application which will enable your work to proceed. I keep being reminded of this every time I load Soulver.

The developer touts it’s abilities to evaluate English language statements and to calculate results from them, to wit:
Ten euro a day for ten days = 100 euro.
Two apples and three apples = 5 apples

Which is all fine and good and possibly useful for some but has no real place in my life. I use it as a calculator and math scratchpad. For stuff that’s not that involved but would require you to jot down intermediate results if you used the average calculator.

For example, It can understand defined constants.
Book = 10 euro
Fifteen books = 150 euro.

Or you can make reference to particular lines in your calculation
1. 130/2 = 65
2. Line1*10 = 650

These two simple things open up a lot. You can set up scratchpads which you can use for ready reckoning... For the kind of thing that Excel would just be overkill. And, best of all, you can save them.

I set up one, which calculates cost implications of different film ratios for me. You could just as easily do a simple pad up for a mortgage calculation, or to calculate costs of different floor coverings for various rooms, simple things that we juggle every day, that don’t require major setup.

Here, it’s a simple matter to adjust all the key variables
- the duration of the movie
- the shooting ratios evaluated
- the set costs per metre

Loading up Excel for a simple ten line spreadsheet always seems silly, but in Soulver, it feels smart. It’s cheap, only 18$, and we’ve seen steady development over the past year. There’s tons of flexibility and real stuff that mathematicians care about but for me...this is enough.

It’s from France, hence the name, Soulver, highly recommended.

Related Tags:

TED 2

2007-04-17T15:56:00.001-07:00

Ted Robinson on Creativity in Schools.

Al Gore on Averting a Climate Crisis

Great examples of the good things in TED.

I think this might just be the best thing to happen this week... and I've a feeling more to come...

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TED

2007-04-17T14:08:00.001-07:00

First came across TED a few years ago and thought how great it would be to attend that... a conference by leading thinkers in technology, entertainment and design. My cup of tea altogether.

The great news is they have put over 100 of the presentations from previous years online. Terrific. All posted under Creative Commons licenses so freely repostable and linkable to. I wish only that there was one RSS stream so I could download whole chunks of the conference for viewing in iTunes. But even one by one, it’s worth the trouble.

Free Good Stuff, what’s not to love?

Go to it....

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Leopard to ship in October

2007-04-12T15:38:00.001-07:00

Ah feck. I was looking forward to Leopard this coming June... Apparently the current builds are pretty unstable... which means the team must have been seriously depleted. Apple usually get one thing wrong... for years it was hardware... I’d hate to see software being an area of stagnation.

Half the issue is Tiger is so good...they must have dropped OS development down the priority chain and chosen to rest on those laurels. Jobs has been seriously over-committed for years, but the last few are pretty spectacular, the store rollout, Disney, the transition to Intel, the iPhone and a cancer scare. Given all that, I wonder how much face time they got with Jobs, especially with his evident excitement over the iPhone.

Apple Statement:
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/

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Standing Desks

2007-04-10T06:07:00.001-07:00

Every now and then you stumble upon something and then it pops up everywhere. A particular car model, Laksa, scripts involving yoga, all recent culprits...

I do the occasional Standing Desk Day. I have an L-shaped desk. One half low and the other half high. The high side is the perfect height for working while I am standing up.

And then you discover all sorts of people do this, there’s Walter Murch, the film editor who cuts standing up. Back in the day, editors had to get up and shift bins around, lift down cans and spool film, and more often than not, cut on their feet. Now he’s the most prominent editor using Final Cut and he’s still upright. I can see how it returns a free-flowing physicality to the experience of editing digitally.

Our Sound Designer, Lars Ginzel, also works standing up. Somehow it came as no surprise that Donald Rumsfeld, too, has a standing desk...

For me, standing up aids focussed work. It’s an attitude thing.

First and foremost, the Internet isn’t half as appealing when you’re upright. You might check something or download a file, but there’s no way in heck you’ll surf. Man, I’m standing up, I’ve got work to do.

Being already upright, moving around and getting files out of drawers and so on is not so difficult. It’s a great approach when you’re in a crunch and you have to get a package out the door, compiling a document from here and there.

It also works with how I think best, pounding the floor back and forth, scribbling notes on walls and talking to myself.

And I never sit down while on the phone, I walk endlessly.

I have to say, I like what it does to me and how I work, my attitude shifts, I’m much more productive.

The other half of any desk is the chair. Somewhere there must be the ideal high stool, so if I needed to sit occasionally because say, my feet hurt, I could.

My current chair is the antithesis of what I need. It excels in getting me horizontal. If I tilt it back, it’s a perfect for Pzizz, with a set of good headphones and my feet up...

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1Passwd encore...

2007-04-09T12:24:00.001-07:00

I posted about this earlier in the heat of passion and I have to say it’s blossomed in to a full commitment.

1Password from Agile Web Solutions is something that has become a seamless part of my workflow. It’s an excellent piece of software that generates strong passwords and fills in forms for you as you visit the many sites online. Things I really like about it:

1. Cmd+\ immediately fills in your default ID and password for each different site you visit.
2. Multiple identities, I use this for home and office and school, three different credit cards for each....
3. Cross browser support. Works on Firefox, Omniweb, Safari... Fill in a form in one and it’s available in all the others.
4. I had developed a habit of using just one password for all these different web2.0 sites I frequent. 1Passwd generates strong passwords for me for each one. Far more secure and it works like a dream.
5. Regular development. I like this in a developer... indicates commitment and these guys keep improving it.

I recommend it highly. Worth every penny. I got it as part of the Macheist adventure, the next upgrade will be a paid one but I’ll be happily doing it.

FWIW They’ve come up with a neat approach to license keys with pictures, they look cool....

http://agilewebsolutions.com/images/SampleUserLicense.jpg

They’ve a lot of screencasts on their site covering the installation and usage, a quick look at one should convince anybody...

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The Morphing of Interactivity...

2007-04-05T05:22:00.001-07:00

While shooting the breeze with Brian Mulligan, who heads up e-learning at our College, we went through our histories, it’s always nice to talk to someone who knows what an Amiga is and who had worked with them.

What I also like is chatting to someone else who knows the sweep of things, who remembers the issues which emerged of the Seventies and Eighties as personal computing spread when interactive multimedia was the vanguard of creative applications.

We were discussing what approaches would be achievable as the College moves forward. Brian is very active in Moodle and other enterprise level solutions and is leading the IT’s rollout of e-learning generally. I was keen on discussing blogging, podcasting and using RSS to disseminate media from the lecturers to their students and beyond.

Discussion wandered onto CBT, computer based training, and the problems inherent in developing interactive education. We shot the breeze and then slowly came to the consensus that... the whole idea of a non-linear document, a multithreaded experience was probably not worth developing.

It felt very odd to actually say it...

Kind of like something had been lost.

The rise of search

There’s many ways of interacting with material on screen.
        - Choosing, I know I want this
        - Browsing, I’ll check this out
        - Searching, Find this for me

It’s as if we move through levels of certainty as you progess through this list. A steady abdication of authority from the user to the net, whatever that is.

Has interactive multimedia in the main come down to this; gather a big enough pile and make it searchable? Search is probably all the interaction most people want now. I want to find something out... just give it to me, as Google says, I’m feeling lucky.

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Skim

2007-04-04T05:25:00.001-07:00

There’s some apps you just don’t bother replacing.

Preview for one.

Acrobat has tons more features but it’s slow and over-complex and takes an age to load. It’s not really for just looking at stuff, it’s about doing some work. I always feel that the real app is the Pro version and the cut down version has to carry the baggage of an app with a lot to do. I only really use it for particular documents which have tons of layers in them, the IKEA catalogue comes to mind. Preview sometimes drops the ball on documents which are difficult to render and leaves a layer or two out...

But other than that, Preview is nimble and accurate and does the job for 99% of PDFs and also images of all formats. Why change it? I never thought I would until Skim came out the other day.

I used Skim for two minutes, then quit, selected a PDF in Path Finder, chose Get Info and set the default app for all PDFs to Skim.

It can match Preview in terms of speed and it’s attractive and uncluttered. When you use it, it becomes clear that whoever designed it had a focus on what people need when they want to look at stuff and you know, read...

So, in no particular order...

it’s got a quick magnify tool, a cool floating window which can zoom in on different parts of a page.

You can use the snapshot feature to open up multiple windows on a document.

It’s got lots of annotation options, more than Preview, and you can add anchored notes while you’re at it. It has bookmarking so you can set placeholders for the key points that interested you.

It’s got nifty Fullscreen and Presentation modes which I can see being used as a basic Powerpoint or Keynote replacement. So once they fix the slightly goofy document icon, it’s near perfect.

And being open source... it’s Free.

Skim Recommended.

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The future of film financing?

2007-04-01T14:23:00.001-07:00

Cinematech recently did some interesting coverage of current projects out there seeking finance online, Howard Dean style.

http://cinematech.blogspot.com/

It’s too easy to view these projects a little harshly, and no doubt some of them may be finding finance difficult for a reason. But generally I think that would be too simple. Film financing is such a complex problem, this approach has many benefits.

Documentaries
This could suit some documentaries really well. A lot of documentary makers have unique problems, their projects typically develop over years and they progress through actually shooting stuff, as opposed to pitching and refining scripts and creative packages. They go and gather material, often tons of it, offering them good opportunities for disseminating it in new ways.

I can see documentary makers building rich and illuminating web presences which track their projects, offering their individual backers an ongoing relationship and insight into it’s progress.

That would certainly work well with political or advocacy style projects which highlight issues and can attract an audience who care about the issue.

Drama Features
Even excellent drama projects face many hurdles. I remember during financing our first feature the Coen brother’s finance disintegrated. It happens all the time in film no matter where you are on the Hollywood food chain.

It’s because the chunks involved are just so big. The pressure is always on, you are exposed to the vagaries of that particular source of finance. If something goes awry, a whole side of your film’s finance falls away and the entire structure can collapse.

And as a result people enter it cautiously. The financiers are exposed to a high level and are cautious as a result, the film makers are exposed to their nervousness.

Even getting the initial finance is unpredictable. In the US, it’s usually the ‘guy’, whoever it is at the top of the food chain, and whether he ‘gets it’. ‘yeah, I get it’ can be a green light in the US of A. Over in the EU, it’s about panels and committees, equally unpredictable, their version of ‘I get it’ is usually an avalanche of required documentation, combined with panel members who aren’t exposed but nonetheless whose opinion is taken on board. Go figure that one out. Gimme the ‘I get it’ guy any day.

We had eight sources of finance in our film, the legal documentation totalled over 2000 pages. A part of me is wondering if I’d prefer 2000 sources of finance each with the same 1 page contract.

And if one or two go wobbly, would it all fall apart?

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Spam

2007-03-11T05:47:00.001-07:00

I run a pretty tight email ship... it’s one area I’m on top of.

I practice Inbox Zero, I completely got that once David Allen pointed out the simple fact that an Inbox is where things arrive and not where they should live.

When an email lands, I use Mail Act-on to deal with it;
        - if I need to do anything that requires some time and effort, I have an Act-On short cut (Ctrl-K) via Mail2kgtd to add the relevant email to my kGTD file in OmniOutliner Pro.
        - I also have a short cut (Ctrl-A) to send the email to my Actionable Emails folder in Mail.
        - The rest I either dash off a quick response and file in the appropriate project folder, each of which have an Act-On shortcut key.
        - In any case emails only go to the relevant project folder in Mail when they’re done.

The above means I have:
        - An empty inbox,
        - A folder called Actionable that has any emails I have to deal with.
        - My general list of stuff I’m working on has those actionable emails referenced as well.
        - Any emails relevant to projects that I need to be able to refer to at a later point are all sitting in their project folders.

I do like having my email To-dos itemised in my full GTD list, they are no longer a island on their own. Mail2kgtd sends the full copy of the email to the Kinkless GTD file, it stores it in the notes section. This also means that the full email is listed in the notes section in iCal if I refer to the item there. It was spooky the first time, the key data being available in my email program, my GTD program and my calendar...

Each year I run an archive on the email of the year previous to the last one, so I only carry about one years emails around on my laptop. I own MailSteward Lite for archiving, it’s simple and fully searchable, and plays nice with Spotlight. But I’m considering using DevonThink Pro Office, an program whose application grows each time I use it, it may have more interesting options for analysing archived mail.

So far so fine. So what about Spam?

I have an excellent piece of software called SpamSieve which does a good job of filtering spam. But it’s not perfect, it’s okay 99% of the time. But that 1% bugs me. Today’s 1% included an email from my EU domain registrar indicating that three domains I registered were due to expire, and a response to an email I’d sent to Red Sweater software about MarsEdit. But more worryingly, there was also an expression of interest in our current feature from a US distributor.

It looks like I’ll have to add “Review my Spam folder“ to my ever-increasing list of buckets to sort through when it comes to my weekly review. Given that eight spam messages arrived in the time it took to write this entry.... That looks set to take over all of Friday afternoons...

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Medieval helpdesk

2007-03-08T13:22:00.001-08:00

Oh so good....

Medieval Helpdesk

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Look Shiny

2007-03-03T10:59:00.001-08:00

Look Shiny’s very funny take on Getting Things Done. As a follower of The David, it all rings horribly true... For all you list generators out there struggling to focus on your next action...

Not Getting Things Done

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Picnik

2007-03-02T12:52:00.001-08:00

Picnik is a really wonderful new web service which offers users basic image manipulation tools. You can zoom in and out, edit brightness, contrast, exposure and a host of other tools, even a basic implementation of Levels. Quite impressive to deliver online via flash in itself, but there’s more to Picnik than that.

It joins an emerging field of creative web services which add value because they are online, not despite it.

For a start, it plays really nicely with Flickr, allowing you to take in and edit your uploaded photographs just as easily as the ones on your computer. And not just your own... You can do a full Flickr search on tags and titles. Very cool...

Second, it loads images directly from Yahoo Images, with a full search field and a nice clutter-free (and ad-free) result. I’d look forward to Google Images as an option.

Third, it allows you to put in a web address and it will distill all the images from that address and load them up for you to edit.

Fourth... it has a very nice full-screen mode, click on the Picnik logo in the top right and it expands to full screen.

Fifth... it will work with your webcam. I can see Photo Booth type Firefox plugins ahead...

This might well give Flash a good name. Quite awesome... check it out before Yahoo buys it.

Picnik

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Blogging and thoughts on software...

2007-02-26T14:42:00.001-08:00

I’ve been considering buying software for writing this blog. I’m in two minds now... specifically Mars Edit versus MacJournal.

MarsEdit has a beautiful and simple clean interface and it’s cheaper... does the job, in fact does it well and pleasurably.

MacJournal is serious. It’s really well made and has lots of heavy functionality built in. Including a Full Screen mode which I’m using now. It’s a fine thing, a mature and well developed piece of software. And it costs more...

MacJournal is a piece of software that’s hung around me for quite some time. Back when the now quiet (but then raucous...) As the Apple Turns was in my everyday browsing, I came across it. The site author, Jack, loved it. I downloaded it but given that I wasn’t blogging, found only a small use for it. But I’ve tried it quite regularly over the years, liking the capabilities but not really having a use. So now that I’m blogging I should have a use... right?

Or is there a reason we never dated... Perhaps the simple approach of MarsEdit will ultimately be the better choice. I’ve been enjoying less heavily laden software lately, preferring a melange of programs each of which focus on doing one thing well.

I encountered this most recently when I was asked to give an introduction to the Mac experience by a local body who had acquired a number of Macs. I enquired a little deeper and it transpired that they had set up a network, including a server which had common files on it, and were just running Office. I visited one of them and all of her questions were about Entourage.

Once the initial wave of depression that washed over me, I sat back and thought a little. This was a familiar setup for all of them, they had essentially re-created their old Wintel network, just this time they were using a bunch of Macs. She seemed pleased that everything seemed ‘easy to work out’ and she was probably glad of the virus issue being put aside, they had been plagued by them.

She said they had decided to use Entourage because “ Apple’s Mail wasn’t very good.” As she did this she pointed at the dizzying array of buttons in Entourage and her mouse ran over long and nested menus.... It looked deep, it looked like you could do lots of things you’d rarely choose to do and would struggle to find the things you wanted to do.

And really that’s all she was looking for from me: How Do I Find The Things In Entourage I Want To Do.

She thought that was reasonable, I guess she was used to the struggle.

I have to say, I was a reluctant Apple Mail user, even though I love it now, I love the ubiquitous nature of it and the other core apps, Address Book and iCal. That trio of products won me gradually over and away from initially Palm Desktop and then Entourage.

One of their principal benefits is their level of integration in the system and the ease with which other developers can call upon them. Not only that, there’s a lot of plugins I use every day which have expanded it’s functionality and kept it current.

I can’t imagine using Entourage and hiding there safe inside the Microsoft box.

I think the idea of having a pot pourri of smaller simpler programs which work together might require a more innocent mindset, a sense of openness, a willingness to take that risk. That it’ll be okay, a sense that it will all work as opposed to a fear that it’ll probably all go wrong...

Update: I eventually did chose MacJournal. Two main reasons other than it works really well.... There’s a very cool Full-Screen mode which means I can do what I need to do, focus on writing better. And the small matter of a decent Education discount which as a lecturer I can avail of...

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K.I.T. released...

2007-02-16T14:44:00.001-08:00

K.I.T. (Keep It Together) 1.3.1 was released yesterday.

K.I.T. is one of those information-gathering tools which have sprung up on the Mac. We're particularly lucky given all the options here. There's KIT, Yojimbo, DevonThink and lately EagleFiler. All of which come from good developers and are fine products. I use KIT and DevonThink Pro Office. Both do quite different jobs for me.

KIT is my favourite set of smart buckets. Plowing through emails and the web usually means I come across pages I want to keep, documents I need to read, and bits of information that come my way from snippets of texts to images, mp3s to listen to and videos to watch.

KIT eats them all up with one keystroke in the Services menu, Shift-Cmd-K. I love it...

It comes with a set of built in smart folders which sort on the type of data it is, a document, pdf, media or a web archive or link etc. and you can quickly and easily roll your own using tags and ratings.

So I tag, which autocomplete, as each item arrives in it's Library and I have smart folders set up for each project I have currently. I have one smart folder which captures all untagged items, so I can easily spot items that haven't been assigned to a project.

So no more saving on the desktop, no dumb unsorted pile of stuff sitting in a folder usually called...Stuff On Desktop..., instead a set of sorted folders with all of the stuff already sorted intelligently for me. It replicates whatever folder structure you've set up in it's Library so you can drill down into that using the Finder and see the same structure. Excellent.

It's a well-executed program, which just works. A lot of people know Yojimbo, a similar product, which KIT predates. KIT is much cheaper. And the developer, Steve Harris, keeps the updates coming.

Highly recommended. K.I.T. at Reinvented

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Apple's iPhone

2007-01-09T12:44:00.001-08:00

First I think it's pretty fabulous. They did a typical Apple job on it. Take on a project the rest of the world has sort of done well, and make it incredible. It's just like the iPod over again.

I wonder what price an unlocked one is... What's the usual discount providers give, a couple of hundred?

I wonder about the EDGE and the lack of support for 3G. Not cool. EDGE is good but is solely US, right? I hope and presume that an EU model would have 3G.

Don't think much of 8Gb, especially if it becomes the only widescreen large video they do. A TV show is about half a gig on iTunes, you'd get about three or four episodes on and then you'd be debating whether you wanted more or your music or photos or contacts...

I'd worry about the battery life. That high res screen will chew up batteries. It's one thing for your iPod to run out of power, it's another if it's your phone. And something so interactive...you'd never put it down.

Jesus, it's made for hyperactive, geeky types with a bit of money.

And I wonder just how many of us will jump on them the first opportunity we get...

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Macworld 07

2007-01-06T13:43:00.001-08:00

And the speculation is in full tilt...

They must feel good about whatever it is... a new computer? Hard to see it, they have a matrix that is now complete and completely Intel. And looking at them it's hard to see where it would be done. An 8-core MacPro is doable but not necessarily something the world is ready for software wise. An iMac or equivalent would be Apple's traditional site of change but no one is hollering for that. The tablet market is small.... Steve will never do a PDA...

This for a phone? I dunno... Frankly there's a bunch of great phones out there now. But the level of chatter is so high, it must be on the cards.

Apple since Jobs return has been pushing its own version of what kind of digital media universe we all live in. With the iTV preannouncement last year, Jobs indicated that the circle was now complete. A vision that media would be created digitally, distributed digitally, purchased digitally and consumed digitally. Oh and they're all Quicktime files you own. The iTV will likely get a full unveiling.

The iTV will have a cut down version of the OS... What if the phone had the same cut down version of the OS...

I wonder if the phone could stream files the same way the iTV will? So once within the range of it's iTunes Library it could browse and listen or view videos and photos?

What if a new video iPod could do the same thing?

You could use a phone, your iPod or the iTV to view the media you own on that there computer you own. And the computer could be a PC don't forget so the whole market is available to you.

I think given the teaser on the Apple site... and the overall direction Apple have taken the big theme will be about how it all joins up.

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The Angelus

2006-12-11T13:13:00.003-08:00

The Angelus
A short film parodying the Angelus as portrayed on RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster. Backed by The Irish Film Board's Short Shorts Scheme. A Janey Pictures production.
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)
Tags:drama, parody, short, film, irish

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Come To

2006-12-11T13:13:00.002-08:00

A short film by Marian Quinn

A story about Kathy Farrell, an Irishwoman living in New York. A series of stills trace out this woman’s life. A series of scenes trace out her stay in hospital. A stationary camera takes her point of view throughout. In a coma, she lies mute, fading in and out of consciousness as her inept and fussing family or drunken and concerned friends come in and visit, culminating with the visit of her abusive boyfriend.

Format: 16mm colour Sound: Optical Mono Duration: 15 minutes. Festivals include: New Irish Shorts - New York / Film Fleadh - Galway / Raindance - London / Kino Irish Festival - Manchester. A Janey Pictures Production
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)
Tags:short, film, drama, woman, drama

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The World's First Web Server

2006-12-06T12:52:00.001-08:00

The World's First Web Server, originally uploaded by sbisson.
 I didn't know this but I bet Steve Jobs did. Tim Berners Lee's original Next workstation.

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Trees by Lake

2006-11-28T04:32:00.001-08:00

TreesbyLake, originally uploaded by Dromahaire.
 My most popular pic on Flickr....I think the appeal is the colour in the trees, the red and golds with a large white birch.

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1password

2006-11-23T05:02:00.001-08:00

I really like 1Passwd.

A simple utility that integrates with any browser, including my favourite, Omniweb, to provide strong and secure passwords online. The .Mac integration is also important for me.

Passwords are a constant problem for my students who use very obvious or easily guessable ones, (you'd be amazed at the amount of ones who use the word 'google') or come up with tortuous names that they forget a month later.

I usually recommend to them that they think of two passwords and use one or the other when online. I get them to think of something only they will remember, their first schoolteacher, or their grandfather's home, and to combine that with a date they will not forget.

1Password has made hopping around the web much simpler to do, logging in and out of different sites is simply a matter of choosing the relevant id and password from the pop up menu which is site appropriate. It can generate secure unguessable passwords, the ones that look like gobbledygook, which you don’t have to remember, they’re available in your browser bar.

The one drawback is using a different computer to access those sites, when 1Password won’t be available to you. It’s solid and secure and so easy to use, this is a minor drawback for me.

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Look to the music industry for pointers

2006-11-11T09:20:00.001-08:00

People often talk about business and it’s quick adoption of the IBM PC. Depends on the business really, just as the Mac started to invent a whole industry around desktop publishing, one of the more interesting early computer platforms, the Atari ST, was quickly adopted by the burgeoning digital music industry. CuBase and Logic originated on the platform and small studios were built around them.

People often talk about digital music, but the fact is All Music Is Digital now, from folk through classical and every which way in between.    Music is recorded digitally, created digitally, mixed and produced digitally, distributed and consumed digitally.

Other media have tracked music and it’s steady submergence in the digital realm by a couple of years.   The widespread adoption of the iPod, not the first digital music player, completed the circle. Video is about to do the same.

We have had a steady progression away from film to ever better video formats, analog to DV and now HD.   Acquisition has made the transition, editing and mixing is already there. Broadcasting is moving to digital, cinema transmission is too.

When we see video on the web, it is for me, digital production finding its home.

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Hey, what's the blog idea?

2006-11-11T08:50:00.001-08:00

Never one to miss an occasion for a smart ass title, but I guess it's a real concern. If I am going to maintain a blog, a couple of pretty basic questions occur to me:

Why...what about... they'll do for starters.
Well. Let's see.. I am going to treat it as an ongoing journal of concerns. So it'll be current, which I think is a key thing in blogs. It'll be personal, which is the point, I guess, of blogs in the first place.

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