January 25, 2004

iTunes Music Store

I just bought the Lord of the Rings soundtrack for my wife off of the iTunes Music Store… Just had to post about how great it is! All I had to do was search for Lord of the Rings, click Buy Album, and within two minutes it had downloaded all 19 songs — an hour and nineteen minutes worth of music. After that was done I plugged in my iPod and in a few seconds I had the whole album in my pocket ready to take with me. I then made a Lord of the Rings playlist and burned it to a CD as an archive and so my wife could listen to it in the car when I had the iPod. The whole process took less than ten minutes, which is 5 minutes faster than I could have made it to the store. I’m amazed again and again at the integration and ease of use the Mac provides.

Another example of this is when you have a song playing in iTunes and then start an audio chat in the iChat program, the Mac automatically pauses the song on iTunes so that the person you are chatting with doesn’t just hear a loud song playing in the background. It’s funny how Microsoft showed something like that in their Athens prototype computer, and seemed to think it was one of the most revolutionary ideas ever. That was back in May and they were showing it as an example of how computers could work in the future. But of course that technology is obviously already available on every single Macintosh computer today. Hooray for Apple!

Oh yeah, the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is good too. :)

Thanks to MichaelP for reminding me about that iChat pausing feature

January 21, 2004

Stock Photography sites

Found a couple of good stock photography sites recently…

MarineStock focuses on marine related photos, and is coming along nicely. It just recently launched, so it doesn’t have a huge collection yet, but there are quite a few good ones there like this one that my dad took. Here are other photos he has submitted from his recent trip to the Caribbean, and Daytona Beach.

R3 Stock also has a lot of good photos. It especially has some good macro and texture shots.

And of course the best stock photo site, iStockPhoto, though it isn’t new. My dad and I both have some stuff on there…

January 20, 2004

CRASH

My poor wife hasn’t been having much luck with cars for the past 6 months or so. Last year her car was hit twice while she wasn’t even in it. Then she used my car for a few days and someone hit that car too, while she was at work. The damage was minor to her car but my whole door had to be replaced and repainted several times.

Then last week sometime she was at a stop sign just down the road from our house, and was hit by a big van that had stopped in front of her. The van started backing up, not seeing our car, and despite the honking horn and flashing lights, it backed into our car. Luckily there was no damage that I could see, other than maybe a little black mark around one of the headlights where the van’s spare tire rubbed against the white body of our Acura.

She was driving down to Georgia to take our dog Rye to her agility training class, and was hit by a 18 wheeler that decided to merge into her lane without signaling or even checking to see if anyone was in the lane. She was right next to the cab when he started moving over, but was boxed in by another car so she sped up to try to avoid the truck. But he moved over too fast and clipped the backend of the car. She fishtailed a little and swerved off the interstate onto the shoulder, luckily missing all the cars in the other 3 lanes of traffic. She thought the truck pulled over a little ways up the road, but then pulled back onto the road and kept going. She didn’t get a license number or anything.

Thankfully neither she or Rye was hurt seriously. She says her hip has been bothering her, which she will see the chiropractor about, but other than that she is fine. It could have been a lot worse so we are thankful all we got was a dented car.

The car still drives fine, it just has some body damage which you can see above. The estimate is over $3,000 to fix it. Which is freakin’ crazy. I just had the car refinanced 2 weeks ago, and that is exactly what the trade-in value for it was… So I could take that $3k and either fix one little dented body panel/bumper, or completely pay off my car. Hmmm…

So if there is a trucker reading this in a white cab that has the letters “CJ” in his company’s name that hit a white Acura Integra on I-24 last week, screw you buddy!

OneWord: Burn

When I was a kid my grandparent’s house didn’t have central heating, so they always had a kerosene heater in the kitchen to keep the house warm. One day when I was staying with them because my parents were out of town or at work, my uncle and I were playing around on a scale next to the heater. I would stand on the scale and he’d push down on my shoulders to make me weigh 100lbs or something, which was fun for a 5 year old or however old I was. Then he left to make some popcorn or something and I decided to make myself lighter by pulling up on the scale. Obviously that didn’t work, but I lost my grip and then lost my balance, and fell on the heater, stopping myself with my arm on its hot surface. Needless to say I burned the crap out of my arm, and still have the scar to this day a little bit. My palm turned into a giant blister. It was like holding a baseball all the time or something, except it was a huge ball of skin and whatever is inside blisters, instead of a baseball.

So let that be a lesson to you… don’t play on scales around a kerosene heater when you’re 4 - 6 years old! I just wanted to write about this to warn all the 4 - 6 year olds that read my blog, to keep them from hurting themselves.

OneWord

January 15, 2004

OneWord: Rotate

Rotating and sorting through your pictures is much easier in the new iPhoto 4 thanks to the new slideshow controls during the slideshow. You can flip through all of the pictures one by one, rotate them, rate them, or delete them, all while seeing them in a full screen preview rather than a little thumbnail. Before you had to double click the picture to open it large enough to see, then go back and rotate it or delete it or whatever. Now you can just import your photos, click “last import” as your album, hit slideshow, then look at all of your pictures full screen and decide what to do with them.

OneWord

January 06, 2004

Cool Non-Apple stuff announced today

Like I’ve already mentioned Apple announced some really cool new software updates and additions today, as well as the new iPod Mini. However they weren’t the only cool things announced at MacWorld.

Elgato System announced the EyeTV 200, and the EyeHome, both of which are extraordinarily cool looking.

EyeTV 200
I’ve written about the original EyeTV before, and the EyeTV is basically the same with a few exceptions.

It now uses Firewire instead of USB, which allows for much higher quality video capture from the device to your Mac. It encodes in MPEG2 instead of MPEG1, and is powered through the Firewire cord so you don’t have to have an AC adapter plugged in anymore. It also comes with a wireless remote so you can change channels and recording settings from across the room.

This new model is $309, whereas the old USB version of the EyeTV is only $180, which includes a third-party wireless remote that I have also mentioned before.

It would be nice to see a sample of the quality difference between the two on their web site, so you could tell if it was worth the extra $120 to get the 200 model.

EyeHome
This one is almost cooler than the EyeTV itself! It’s a little box that connects to your TV on one end, and to your Mac through an ethernet cable or wireless internet on the other. With the supplied wireless remote you can watch the TV shows that EyeTV recorded, listen to any song from your iTunes library, view pictures or slideshows from your iPhoto library, listen to internet radio stations, browse news sites, watch MPEG or DivX movies from the Movies folder on your Mac, and more.

And with a Wi-Fi router in the house, you don’t even have to run wires! Just connect the box to your TV and attach a Wi-Fi to ethernet adapter, and you’re good to go! The device then communicates with the Mac to access all of your digital content right on the TV. You could watch your iMovies directly on the TV from the Mac without having to run wires directly from the Mac to the TV, and without having to burn to CD or DVD first. You could download Ahem… Legal… Ahem… movies from the internet in DivX format, put them in your Movies folder, then watch them immediately on your TV!

Pretty incredible that it can do that, especially wirelessly with Wi-Fi! The EyeHome thing is $219.00, so if you got the EyeTV 200 and the EyeHome, you’d be looking at $550 for this system. But that isn’t too much more than a TiVo and most importantly, there are no ongoing subscription fees with the EyeTV method. With TiVo you have to pay around $15 a month for the service, which could make up the small price difference quite quickly. Plus if you went with the lower quality EyeTV, you’d only be out $400, which is only $100 more than the 80hr TiVo.

Hopefully someday I’ll be able to afford this setup. Gotta pay off the Macs it connects to first though!

Many iPod Mini’s & iLife

Apple announced the rumored Mini iPods this morning, along with some nice updates to its iLife software package.

iPods
Before announcing the iPod Mini, Steve released the sales figures for the “bigger” iPods. 730,000 for the fourth quarter of last year alone, and around 2,000,000 total. Wow! The iPod has 31% of the MP3 player market, and 55% of the MP3 player revenue. Not bad for one of the most expensive players on the market. I can confidently say they are worth every penny however.

The 10gb model of the old iPods has been bumped up to 15gb for the same price of $299. The other iPods stayed in the same configuration.

iPod Mini
This is the new “mini iPod” that has been rumored for a couple of weeks all over the internet. It comes with a 4gb hard drive and is roughly the size of a half inch thick stack of business cards. That makes it noticeably smaller than the current model, and definitely the smallest 1,000 song storage device available to my knowledge. The scroll wheel was redesigned to have the buttons actually part of the wheel, due to a lack of space on the front of the smaller iPod. Without actually using one yet, I’m going to guess this is going to make my only complaint with the current iPods even worse. Not only will you have to feel out the buttons for hands free operation, but now you have to try to press the correct quadrant of a super sensitive scroll wheel. But since I’ve never seen or used one, I could easily be wrong.

They also come in colors now; silver, blue, green, gold, and pink. I personally like the plain silver one myself… I think the others are a little tacky, but I know of some people that always asked me if mine came in other colors, so I guess there is a market for it.

The price for this new mini model is $249.00, which in my opinion is a little steep, considering you can get 11gigabytes more storage for only $50 by going with the new 15gb iPod. But I also read on a Mac news site that Apple retail employees think it will be a big seller because a lot of people were intimidated by even the 10gb iPod, worrying that they would never be able to fill it up with songs, and would be wasting their money. So now they can store 1,000 songs in an even smaller device than the original iPod, and they get a choice of 5 colors to go with it. Most of my friends think the new iPod is too expensive as well, but they are all geeks like me who are only thinking about the gigabytes, rather than other features that may appeal more to less computer savvy people. So Apple may be able to move these pretty quickly anyway, despite some people’s first reactions. I still can’t help but think if they had priced it at $150 or even $200, it would be flying off the shelves.

iLife
The iLife apps were all updated today, with the exception of iTunes.

iPhoto
iPhoto gets Rendezvous picture sharing, faster browsing, support for up to 25,000 pictures, smart albums, new slideshow transitions and options, the ability to rate your favorite photos, some new organization options, and a great new preview/slideshow mode.

Rendezvous Picture sharing
This will be a very welcome new feature indeed. I have an eMac and a 12” Powerbook, and have already been running into the problem of keeping my pictures synced between the two. Sometimes I sync the camera with the Powerbook, which means I don’t have them on the eMac, and vice versa. Now I can sync to either one, and easily browse all of the photos regardless of whether they are stored on the eMac or the Powerbook. You can also easily drag and drop photos from one album to another, so syncing the libraries together will be a snap.

Faster Browsing, support for 25,000 photos
This will be nice… I’ve already noticed quite a bit of slowdown when browsing our collection of 1,500 photos on the eMac, so hopefully this will help out that problem a lot. The speed on the eMac is tolerable right now, but I certainly won’t complain about a speed boost.

Smart Albums
Smart albums look cool as well. They work like smart playlists in iTunes, allowing you to make albums by date, or by rating, etc. So for instance you could display all pictures taken from December 15 to January 2 of 2004, with a rating of 4 stars or more. This would give you a smart album of pictures taken during the holidays, and would display your favorite photos of the bunch. And when you added new pictures from that time frame, perhaps from a family member’s camera, they would automatically load themselves into that album so you can have them all grouped together automatically.

New slideshow transitions and options
With the old iPhoto the slideshow automatically did a fade between each picture. But now with the new version you have a selection of transitions like cube, mosaic flip, dissolve, and wipe. You can also load an entire playlist from iTunes to play during the slideshow, rather than having the same song repeat over and over like the old iPhoto did.

New onscreen slideshow controls
This is one of my favorite new features. Now when you view a slideshow you can choose to see onscreen controls, which allow you to rate the picture, rotate it, or delete, all while the picture is being displayed full screen. Before it was hard sometimes to see enough details in the image from the thumbnails to decide whether you wanted to keep it or not. Now you can view them full screen, and still delete them or flip them on the fly. When the slideshow is over, the changes are reflected in the pictures in your iPhoto library.

iMovie
iMovie adds new transitions and titles, bookmarks, audio scrubbing, and easier movie sharing.

New transitions/titles
Going from memory, there are some new title effects like spin, which spins a the word in from the center of the screen, a picture cutout mode, which shows a black background with the words filled with a picture, and a movie cutout mode which does the same thing only with a movie clip. There is also a Star Wars style title effect…

Bookmarks
This along with the new waveform view for audio tracks should allow syncing transitions and video clips to music changes a lot easier. For instance make a bookmark right where a symbol crash is, then put your video transition at that bookmark to sync them perfectly. At least that’s the way I understand the feature, without actually using it. Audio scrubbing also allows you to sync things easier, as you can “fast forward” through the music and still hear it, so you can find quiet spots, etc.

Better Sharing
You can now select a single clip or several clips from iMovie and export them to the web, email, a bluetooth phone or PDA, or just as a Quicktime file to the desktop. Very handy.

Direct Trimming
Trim out part of a video just by clicking and dragging to shorten the clip. If you decide you wanted the long version later, just click and drag it back out, and it will still be there, iMovie doesn’t destroy the editing video clip until you empty the iMovie trashcan.

iDVD
I haven’t used this one much, as I want to get a good full DVD ready before I burn one. And now with the new iDVD, they can hold up to 2 hours of video, including the menus and everything.

New Themes
I think there are 20 new themes included in the new version, and the ones Steve demoed looked very nice and professional, just like the old ones.

Menu Transitions
Now you can put transitions between menus, like cube, wipe, and page curl.

New Slideshows
The slideshows now have customizable transitions, just like iPhoto, and you can also add a playlist to them like in iPhoto, so you don’t have the same song looping over and over.

DVD Map
You can now see a tree outline of your menus, so you can see how people will progress through all of the menus in the DVD and how they all interconnect.

GarageBand
This is the new iLife app that was announced today, and it looks absolutely incredible.

• 100 Software instruments
• 100 Audio Effects Presets
• 2,000 pre-recorded audio loops
• 15 Digital guitar amps
• 64 track digital mixing
• More more more…

Software Instruments
Using the onscreen piano keyboard in GarageBand, or a USB/MIDI keyboard sitting on your desk, you can play over 100 different instruments in real time on the Mac. Record them, mix them, etc. Steve had Jon Mayer help demo this feature live onstage and I thought it was quite impressive. Using only one little keyboard he played a bass, piano, organ, guitar, drums, percussion, etc and mixed them all into a quick song. Apple is offering a beginners keyboard for $50 to make this part more fun than clicking on screen to play the notes. Another cool thing is that once you lay down the rhythm and notes, you can change the instruments on the fly. So you could play a piano track, then change it to an organ sound in the middle of the song.

Pre-recorded Loops
Choose a drumbeat, a bassline, a guitar riff, a piano track, some percussion, etc. then drag them all onto the screen and arrange them how you like. They all sync up automatically to the same tempo on the fly, allowing anyone to create simple songs and background music with ease. Jon liked the fact that you can pick out a bassline and drumbeat, then play your guitar live through your Mac, along with the beat you had already started playing. This is basically a more simple version of Apple’s Soundtrack, but is still incredibly cool.

Record
You can plug in a guitar, bass, keyboard, or mic into your Mac and record in real time along with existing tracks already in GarageBand. For instance if you play guitar you could lay down a drumbeat, bass and piano them play over that sound in real time and hear yourself on the Mac or through headphones, etc. You can record it and mix it down after that.

Guitar amps
Plug a guitar into your mac with a $20 adapter, and you can play through 15 different digital amps in real time. They sounded like real guitar amps to me, but some guitar purists may not like them. For most people they will be great though, and it adds the effects in real time and records them directly to the Mac.

Mixing
All of the features above work perfectly together. You can play the piano parts on your keyboard, play the drum beat and bassline with pre-recorded loops, and then lay down the guitar and audio tracks on top of all of that in real time, and record it all.

Export
1 click exports your song to iTunes, where you can listen to it, add it to an iMovie project, sync it to your iPod, burn it to a CD, play it as background music in a slideshow, etc.

I of course haven’t used this app yet, but if it is even half as cool as it looked in the demo Steve gave on stage, this app will be a ton of fun to play with.

All of the above programs are part of iLife, which Apple is releasing on January 16th for $49, but it will be included with every new Mac for free. I’ll be pre-ordering my copy tonight!

It’s really mind blowing at how all of this stuff is integrated on the Mac. I mean out of the box you can record your own songs, burn them to CD’s with a few clicks, put them into an iMovie project along with digital still pictures, burn it all to a DVD, upload it all to your web site, and the list goes on and on. There is just so much fun stuff to create on the Mac…

I think John Gruber said it best in his post about today’s announcements:

“Apple is going after … People who want to be producers, not just consumers.”

Be sure to read the rest of his post as well. He always says exactly what I’m thinking in a much more eloquent way than I ever could.

There were a few more announcements today like new Xserves, Final Cut Express 2, MS Office 2004, etc. but they weren’t that interesting so I’ll just ignore them.

Overall I’m really really excited about getting the new iLife suite, and the new iPods are pretty cool too, I just won’t be trading in my 10gb model to get one anytime soon. Apple announcement days are the best! Much more exciting than Christmas.

January 05, 2004

Fontifier

From the creators of the always helpful IdentiFont comes Fontifier, a web site that allows you to upload a sample of your handwriting, which is then turned into a Win/Mac compatible system font for use in your favorite graphics app!

You just download the template, print it out, write in the letters in your own handwriting, upload it to the site, and then you’re sent back a free font file made out of your own handwriting. If you don’t have a printer/scanner you can just draw in the letters with a mouse or wacom. I’ll be trying it later today most likely, and will post my results.

Here is my first quick attempt… I’ll probably do another one later and spend more time on it so all the baselines align and stuff. Strangely this doesn’t really look like my handwriting… Mostly because when you do the template you have to write each letter individually, whereas my natural writing all flows together into a big mess. My wife didn’t even believe it was my hand writing, except for the numbers, which do look like my numbers. Still, I wrote it with my own hand and now I can type with it, which is pretty cool! I did this one with my Wacom, Photoshop, and one of the default caligraphy brushes. I’ll probably experiment with different brushes and sizes later.

OneWord: Volcano

My wife and I watched Showgirls the other night… One of the repeating scenes was during their show when the “Goddess” would pop out of a volcano to make her grand entrance. Man that was a terrible movie… One of the worst I remember seeing… Ever. I think I saw parts of it when I was younger on HBO or something, and I remember it being a whole lot more interesting then. Probably because I didn’t have easy access to porn and no girlfriend/wife at the time!Plus I was probably only 14 or 15 when I saw it so that would have been a lot more exciting at the time. But anyway… I think they should have just made it a full on porno. It would have been quite good for porno standards, but it made a really terrible Hollywood drama.

iSync

I’ve used iSync only a little bit since I got my Macs, mostly just to sync the Address Book and Bookmarks between the two machines. But tonight I really saw some of its power…

I have trouble remembering when my wife is going to be working, since she has several part-time jobs and a very confusing schedule. So today she told me her schedule for the week over the phone and I entered them into iCal. Just double click when the event starts, enter the details, then drag down the pretty little block until the event ended. Couldn’t have been easier. I actually learned how to use the program while I was talking to her on the phone. The basics of the program of course, I’m sure there is a lot more to it. But anyway… I plugged in my iPod to the eMac to charge it up for the trip to work tomorrow, and thought it would be cool to have all that info I entered in iCal, on the iPod so I’d have it with me everywhere. So I first ran iSync on the Powerbook where I entered the dates, which synced my calendar to my .Mac account on Apple’s servers. It also uploaded my bookmarks, address book, and files while it was at it.

Next I ran iSync on the eMac, where the iPod was plugged in. It downloaded all of the new info from the .Mac account, added it to iCal, or Address Book, or Safari, depending on the info. Then it added all the relevant info to the iPod, which was my Contacts, and my new calendar info. Then I picked up the iPod a second later and was able to browse my wife’s schedule for the coming week right in the palm of my hand. Pretty amazing stuff! The info went from the Powerbook, through the internet to the eMac, then through a wire to the iPod. All completely seamlessly. “It just worked” you might say. Making the hardware and software for a computer really does have its advantages… Way to go Apple!

January 02, 2004

Email links on web sites

I’ve recently been noticing quite a few sites that are no longer using mailto: links to allow people to email them with a single click, like it has always been. The obvious reason for this is the insane amount of spam that can be generated by a single Mailto: link on a site that has been spidered by one of the email harvesting bots that spammers send out.

Some of them have just been putting the email address in the HTML without actually making it a link, like this:

john@somesite.com

Others take it a step further, and don’t even use the “@” sign, which means you have to not only copy/paste their address into your email app, but then you have to add the @ sign yourself. They’ll usually put something like this on the page instead of the @ sign:

john{AT}somesite.com or john(at)somesite.com

This prevents the spambots from harvesting the address, but it also seems like a big pain for the person that wants to email the owner of the site. Normally this doesn’t bother me at all if it is on a messageboard or some other site like that, but I’ve been seeing it on some commercial sites recently, and even on some sites by people that are normally all about usability and accessibility on their sites.

Is it just my imagination that this technique is really less usable, or are these people sacrificing usability just to save themselves the trouble of deleting a few (hundred) emails? It almost seems hypocritical to me… These people can preach usability from the rooftops, until it inconveniences them by opening up their email address to the possibility of spammers. Now I’m not naming names and don’t mean to say that it is wrong to do this, I’m just really wondering if this is becoming the new norm or if it is just happening on a few sites. I did a quick search on Google and found that even “Mr. Usability Guru Himself”, Jakob Nielsen does not use a mailto: link on his web site. He even admits that it is a “sub-optimal design” but then says that he omits the mailto: link anyway basically because he doesn’t want to get any spam. And he also basically implies that unless you will go to the trouble of copy/pasting his email address, he doesn’t want to hear from you in the first place because he already “gets several hundred email messages per day”. Again, this really just makes it look to me like once usability inconveniences the “usability guru”, he suddenly doesn’t care about it anymore or makes up some half-assed excuse as to why he goes with the less-usable method.

This could especially be a problem with new web users. I still talk to a lot of people that ask if my email address starts with “www.” when I give my email address to them over the phone. Or they will start their own email address with “www.” (and normally when this happens, their address also ends with aol.com). Obviously these people are having a hard enough time learning what the “@” sign is in the first place, let alone knowing that {AT} means to delete the two letters between the curly braces, and then replace it with the @ sign. Hell a lot of people don’t even know how to copy/paste. So you can bet that a lot of people will be trying to send an email directly to john{at}somesite.com which will of course bounce back or not go out at all, totally frustrating the user and keeping them from emailing you. Even people that do know how to copy/paste and know to put in the @ sign may find this irritating. Most of the time I just won’t write the person/company if they do this. If they want my money/attention the least they could do is make it easy for me to contact them, not have to jump through hoops by copy/pasting and decyphering some email code just to make sure they don’t receive any offers to enlarge their penises.

There are several other options to allow people to still easily email you without opening up your inbox to spammers.

Use an HTML form
You could write an email contact form that sends you an email from your web site. This is good because spambots can’t harvest your address, and it allows people to contact you directly from your web site without having to launch their email app.

However, you can’t easily attach a file to the email (unless you set that up in the form), and the sender may want to add HTML or other email options like CC or BCC to the email as well, which wouldn’t be easy (again, unless you added all that to the form, which would likely make it too complicated to be useful).

Encode the Mailto: link
Use something like the Hivelogic Email Enkoder to encode your mailto: link in a piece of Javascript code. It works exactly like a Mailto: link in most browsers, but is just gibberish to harvest bots. However, if the visitor has Javascript disabled they won’t see the link and won’t be able to email you without copy/pasting and all of that business. But at least this method would make it easy for 95% of your audience to email you with a click. And if someone has a reason to turn Javascript off, they most likely also know how to copy/paste, which would mean they would probably realize that they had to use that method since they had chosen to disable Javascript.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it bad? Is it just something that web users are going to have to deal with as Spam becomes an increasingly uncontrollable problem? Are there any other methods than the ones I’ve mentioned above to still provide an easy way for visitors to contact a site owner, without opening that site owner up to every spammer on the ‘net?

OneWord: Precision

I think the word precision is quite underrated these days. It’s a good, unique word to use to make something sound “elite”. Most adjectives these days like “cool” and “awesome” and “bling bling” are so overused…

Here are a few examples of how to use the word precision to make your job title sound really cool…

Precisioneer

Vice President in Charge of Precision

Advanced Precision Analyst

Internal Precision Representative

Precision Examiner

Precisionist

Post your own Precision title in the comments! It’s hours of fun!