Dear WordPress Blog

Dear WordPress Blog,

Yeah, it’s been a while! I kinda went off the idea of whoring myself out in public view on a regular basis because it just attracted nutters and got my stalkers all in a tizz about what I meant by that. Nothing, usually, because they’re hardly at the forefront of my mind. I still exist on the internets, but let’s face it, a personal blog is sooooo 2003. It’d be like having your own podcast. A what?!!

These days you can post 200 updates a day on Twitter and nobody cares. There’s no need to form complete sentences or, heaven forbid, have something meaningful to say. It’s kinda like blog comments whose purpose is inverted. I’ve been on Twitter for three years, but it’s only the last year or so that everyone else worked out what to do with it: talk about themselves! Right!

Photos? Videos? Well, just as you got to grips with your dSLR and HD cam, expectations of quality have plummeted. Yes, fuck uploading your full-res 12MP images to Flickr and waiting an hour to encode the 720p video for Vimeo, Facebook can’t handle that shit. Who cares how your drunken night out photos look anyway? Nobody looks at anything else. Think cameraphone.

I must confess, dear WordPress Blog, that I have been unfaithful. Bucking the trend for shameless self-promotion, I now have an anonymous blog, known only to those whom I trust, where I post about everything in my life. Everyone has codenames. No comments, so nobody needs to accommodate a perceived request for validation. No stats! Who cares?! You’ll never guess the URL and no, I don’t link anywhere. There is no trail.

Funnily enough, it’s been the most comfortable I’ve felt writing and all I ever wanted to do in the first place. My friends tell me it’s the digital equivalent of a page-turner. But, oh, you can imagine how other people would react, couldn’t you? Even if I get found out, I can switch things about without anyone but my mates being able to find me again.

So, yeah, things have been good. One hell of a year. Went to Japan, Ibiza, San Francisco, got a new apartment, ran a 10K, made new friends, lost others, did a shitload of work and moved the fuck on from all the things that have been dragging me down for so long. You wouldn’t even recognise me these days. I hardly recognise myself.

Wishing you a merry Christmas and a very happy new year!

Love,
Steve

Yes U Can Has

Obama Kitteh, originally uploaded by steveharris.

 

And Back Up Again…

Cunts.

Audi the new BMW

Ringing the changes – Top Gear

Sad, but unfortunately seems true, and one of the reasons why my next car wouldn’t be an Audi – not that I have any intention of changing it soon. At least my Audrey predates the arsehole era. The other reason is that the people at the Audi centre have changed too and seem miserable these days.

MacBook Bore

A big part of me wishes I could be cool and minimal enough to be able to own a MacBook Air. It would impress all my friend and I’d feel better about myself. However, when I really think about it, I can’t, so I ordered a MacBook Pro instead, which I should get sometime next week.

Here’s what I use my PowerBook for when at home:

- Support Email
- Testing on different versions of Mac OS X
- NetNewsWire
- Watch DVDs and videos, listening to podcasts

And while travelling I use it for all the above, plus:

- Photo editing
- Video import and editing
- Software development – (i.e. bug fixing, etc)

On the Air, the following things would be difficult or impossible:

- Testing on different versions of Mac OS X
- Watch DVDs and videos, listening to podcasts
- Video import and editing

Yes, I could get a USB disk for the OS X testing (and I am keeping the PowerBook for PowerPC testing) or do it on the iMac and I could get the optional superdrive for the DVDs (wouldn’t you need this work OS updates too?), but I would be totally fucked on the video importing and editing, firstly without Firewire and even if I did have a USB-capable camera not with such a tiny HD (and only one USB port).

Sigh.

So, the irony is that the ultralight portable is decent enough when I’m at home, but kinda limiting when on the road. Oddly enough, my desktop Mac suffers the same problem. Of course, I don’t travel much but when I do, those are the things I really want to do with it.

And besides, I actually want the laptop to do all the fun stuff – photos, videos, etc, with the iMac just as a workhorse but the tiny hard disk affects all of that. I know because the PowerBook’s HD is the same size and bursting at the seams with a very limited selection of stuff on it.

Of course, if I was some computer bimbo like Miss Chick, I’d be happy to plug my USB camera into my MacBook Air to download photos of dogs-on-the-beach and forgo the DVDs for a damn good book.

But I’m not. I’m a demanding user, and that is exactly what the MBP is for. Or is it? Well, ahem, you can do all the above on a MacBook too, at half the price. That was an even tougher decision, made easier by a multi-touch trackpad (one day I’ll end up developing something for that), 20% ADC discount (vs. only 10% for the MacBook – look how much you save!) and the fact that I’ll drive it into the ground every day for the next 4 years, like I did the PowerBook, so it’ll be worth the money.

If the MacBook is the cheap option and the MacBook Air is for cool people, the MacBook Pro must be for dull geeks with money to burn.

I Has a Personal Blog

Who knew?!!!

What Goes Up…

It’s a bitter irony that, when the UK economy starts tanking, it’s good for me. From the BBC’s Market Data:

I wrote about this last spring, saying that the exchange rate is as much dependent on the strength of the overinflated pound as the weakness of the dying dollar.

On that post, the point I made about raising the price of Together to match its competitors (along with the features) is working too. Sales are the strongest they’ve ever been for me, including the podcasting explosion back in 2005.

Video: 2007

Mostly pointless self-indulgent schlep through unreleased footage from 2007 with the start of 2008 at the end.

Just about everyone and their dog (literally) is in this.

Video: Cat Drinks Water!

High-speed rehydration.

Why iMovie ‘08 isn’t Final Cut Express

Stuff like this has me rolling my eyes. Why? Because what it’s saying that iMovie ‘08 fails to be a Final Cut wannabe when that’s not the point. A quote:

[In iMovie '08] each clip is represented as a number of stills, and there’s a thin break between each clip. As you move the mouse over the clip bin, the clips play both audio and video—I found this very distracting and not at all useful. In addition, if you’re using the mouse like this to preview clips, you have to drag it from the rightmost edge of the frame back to the left in order to continue playing the clip when it spans more than one row. Overall, I just couldn’t adjust to this new paradigm, finding it imprecise, visually busy, and not at all intuitive.

It’s true that iMovie ‘08 is a massive departure from just about every video editor out there, which take an approach similar to editing film or tape, splicing sections into place. But iMovie ‘08 borrows the familiar concept, as Jobs said when introducing the product, of selecting text and dragging it around. I think this really works.

Normal People shriek in horror when first introduced to that traditional way of working. I have a great example of when my friend asked how he should edit his video. He showed me some clips, as imported from his DV camera. In one clip, he stood in a square in NYC and moved the camera around the various streets, zooming in and out, with various wobbly transitions in between. It’s what all raw footage from a handheld camera looks like.

What I would do with such a clip was cut it up, so you look down one street, then cut to another, or the guy in the shop doorway, and so on. Basically, remove the crappy bits and keep the good stuff. As this footage was from NYC, quicker cuts would be ideal.

In the old iMovie, the process would go something like this:

• Locate the clip by its thumbnail, drag it into the timeline.
• Scrub through the video to select the start and end points of the first bit you don’t want.
• Delete the unwanted section, probably splitting the track into up to three pieces. The before and after sections will stay in the timeline while the other goes in iMovie’s Trash.
• Repeat with each segment to discard.

Another approach I’ve used is to play and split tracks at the start and end points. This saves losing things in the Trash, but creates as much mess.

In iMovie ‘08, the process makes much more sense:

• Move the mouse over the clips to find the start point.
• Click the start point and drag to the end.
• Drag the selection into the timeline.
• Repeat with each segment to keep.

So, for starters you don’t end up with severed clips everywhere. This is not only cleaner, but useful. Say you want to adjust the time of the clips. In the old version, you’re screwed, and either have to Undo or go to iMovie’s Trash and drag the deleted clips back into the timeline and edit again. In the new version, just drag the start or end points to make the clip longer or shorter.

As another example: reusing a portion of those clips (e.g. for a quick preview) would require duplicating the clips and editing them down. Horrific! In iMovie ‘08, you can select and drag clips to the timeline as many times as you like. The other advantage is you can find the starting point much more quickly moving the mouse over the video than playing through it. I have lost countless clips through not having the patience or time to play it all way through, or by skipping bits as I scanned through it.

What really made me realise the approach was so much better for people who don’t edit video regularly was just explaining it: “select the bits you want and drag them into the timeline” is so much easier than telling someone how to split or delete clips. It’s the difference between working with the bits you want, rather than the bits you don’t want.

I even know a professional video editor who really likes iMovie ‘08 because it allows him to create a rough cut very quickly. He then uses its export features to take the clips into Final Cut Pro and saves himself a ton of time in the process.

iMovie HD was really powerful, but that was becoming its downfall. It was like a not-quite version of Final Cut, brilliant in many ways but infuriating for its shortcomings. I can use iMovie ‘08 put a movie together in 20 or 30 minutes that would have taken hours before.

iMovie ‘08 can be annoying too, in that it doesn’t have as much control over things such as mixing different audio tracks, and is less precise. Admittedly, I couldn’t have achieved some of my more complicated videos with it, but that’s not what it’s for. That said, I reckon with a little creative thinking I could have got pretty close.

I think Apple is right to draw a line and say that if you don’t need all the power of Final Cut Pro, but need that sort of control, Final Cut Express is for you and the latest version is nicely priced for such semi-professionals. For everyone else, iMovie ‘08 is something that anyone can master.