One thing that I've noticed is that I'm increasing my presence online. I don't know if the quality is increasing or if it is just more stuff, but I think that one of the reasons that I'm more prolific now is that is easier. I love using Blosxom to blog because I can create the entries with any text editor, but I always use BBEdit to write for bitdepth. But the bitdepth entries aren't as frequent as I wanted them to be, but now with my increased use of Blogger for Screen Arts and now bitdepth digest, I blog more often using Blogger. The other things that I use often are Flickr and, increasingly, 43 Things. One thing that all these sites have in common are their fairly flexible and open APIs, which allows the information and the sites to interact with other applications and sites. What it means practically is that I now am able to blog using Flickr and 43 Things and to have Flickr images automatically show up on my 43things page as well as here on bitdepth.
Very exciting things are also happening with Technorati adding watchlists where you can follow discussions in the blogosphere based on keywords. I keep track of just about all of this stuff using NetNewsWire as if there isn't an RSS feed, I'm not as interested in it as I don't want to spend the time looking around to see if anything has changed. While Flickr and 43things are very fun and aren't technically oriented, Technorati is a geeky data-rich backend that is starting to have some very cool applications built on their API.
So the exciting thing now is that we're moving away from needing to use one application to view and share and just find and create and share. It's exciting when you don't have to code or understand how to code to use things (but if you can, it's even more exciting now as you have a lot more to play with).
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I've been using the browser less and less since I started using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds. It's one the best shareware investments that I've made. It's simple, well-designed and works well. Most of the time I can quickly get a lot of information via the feeds and NNW lets me check out things that I'm really interested in. When I used to click on a link it would open in my browser which is usually Safari, but I'm using Firefox a bit now. Now I'm using the latest beta which makes a good thing even better. Support has been added for Atom feeds and the weblog editor has been broken out into a new application called MarsEdit. The thing that has changed the way I look at things the most is that now (thanks to WebCore) I view pages within a tab that pops up in NNW. It's a great idea and now I'm going outside to the browser less when I want to check something out. Simplifying things is always good.
MarsEdit is something that I wasn't sure I'd use that much. But I've been using it a bit and I think that I'll use it more. I'm not using Movable Type as much now which is what I used the weblog editor for before, but I am using Blogger and I can post to Blogger using MarsEdit with the quirk of not being able to set the title, but that's on the way. I'm also thinking of using it a bit with this blog which is Blosxom-based with me editing the posts in BBEdit. The change in the interface of MarsEdit is that it now works and looks a bit more like email, which makes a lot of sense. The email workflow is closer to how blogging works intellectually. That being said, why am I writing longer posts now?
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I've been working with Final Cut Pro for a long time. It's one of those programs that I loved right from the first time that I've used it. It feels comfortable to me and it's like working with an old friend. With the latest version which adds HD instead of a version number (but it's really version 4.5) it's even better. I haven't done any HD stuff with it, but someday I'm sure that I will. What I like about FCP is that it doesn't get in my way. I can sketch out ideas fairly quickly now and don't have to think much about how I will do it. When I'm editing I want to focus on the story I'm telling and how things will look and sound without needing to remember a lot. One of the challenges with any application that you've been using for a while is to learn new tricks and to break out of old habits. I'm using some of the new features such as the full-screen preview with an external monitor. It makes a big difference in how I work. The other thing is that I'm consciously trying to work in a more visual way and moving away from a list of clips to thumbnails arranged in a bin. My secret dream is to combine some of the very cool XML parts of FCP with CVS to have a way to roll back to different edits and allow multiple editors to work together. All of the pieces seem to be there and I'm hoping that Apple is thinking this way too. I would love to set something like that up, but I don't know if I'll have the time. Wouldn't it be great to have something like a Project Manager that would let you check out the latest cut of the film that you're working on? You'd have the captured footage on a local hard drive and would just need the XML that describes the timeline. Then I could change one part of the timeline and someone else could change the other. You'd just need to make sure that your footage was in sync and it would work. I'm working on a simplified version of this (without CVS) that will use an iPod and maybe iDisk to share and synchronize things, but true version control would be the ultimate goal.
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I love NetNewsWire. I registered it and use the pro version and it's always running in my dock. Now it's the main source for news for me. It's also the main way that I keep track of the 'blogs that interest me. I have been able to keep the feeds down to 22 so I don't have to scroll, but I think that I may need to add some more. NNW recently had a nice little update to version 1.0.4 which now uses Apple's Web Kit (the renderer in Safari) for displaying the HTML and it also allows you to use your own CSS if you want to control the display within NNW. My favourite new feature was suggested by Aaron Swartz who script is used to implement HTML differences which shows any revisions to an entry as green text and what was replaced as red strikeout text. It's a neat way to see how someone changes entries on a site. I like seeing the traces of revisions as a more ephemeral history.
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I've discovered a new environment for developing and exploring the possibilities of digital media. One of the problems in working with digital media over time is that if you change tools and as things evolve it becomes difficult to work with older material. The other challenge is that the tools that you use tend to push you in a certain direction. You don't have to follow that direction, but it's harder to swim against the current. I've used a bunch of different tools and I'm fascinated in how the history and evolution of tools can be embodied within them. As time goes by I notice how new tools always seem to have all the answers, but overall it doesn't seem as if things have evolved that much.
Back in the old days when I started using version 4 of Director it was amazing...so much that you could do. Now the hot tool is Flash and it seems as though Macromedia is revising their product line using years to maximize the profit. Even though I've used a lot of versions of Flash, I'm getting tired of constantly updating. I've been thinking for years that there is a need for an open-source or free tool for developing things a bit more advanced than what you can do with other programming languages.
Now I think I may have found it in Processing, which was started by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It's designed to allow the exploration of programming more within the context of electronic art. What's neat is that it is built upon Java, so when you're done you export your work as Java and it can be placed on a Web page...no complicated plug-ins, etc. I've started playing with it and I hope to have some experiments up soon.
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I've updated to the latest version of Blosxom and there may be some strange things over the next few days as I play with the new plugins, etc. The upgrade was surpisingly painless...well, I guess it isn't that surprising since Blosxom works pretty simply and painlessly.
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One of the things that happens quite often is that you don't notice the things that are always in front of you. That's what has happened with Omni Outliner from the Omni Group. I registered it last year and use it just about every day. I started using it because I needed to organize a bunch of information for a report that I was working on. I was able to structure and write the bulk of the report and then move it into another program for laying stuff out. I really like working in the outlining mode as it helps me structure things and flesh them out. At some point I think that I'll be using Keynote to create support material (but I'm waiting for a teacher deal like the one that was available in the U.S. for Keynote and iLife together), and I can export my outlines to Keynote to become presentations. Now I make lesson plans with it and use it for all sorts of planning...I'm just starting to use styles with it to make the outlines look better. It's simple, well-designed and powerful. The only downside is that I also use Omni Graffle which I registered at the same time, but the latest version of Outliner doesn't work with Graffle...before I could drag and drop an outline onto Graffle and get a neat diagram...but I'll have to upgrade to the latest version of Graffle to do that again. But Graffle is still great for creating all sorts of graphics, but the update adds a lot...
The most inspirational part of using Outliner is the user community... the application is filled with features that I keep learning about through what other people are doing. The column adding features have made me think of using Outliner to keep track of student marks. Some people use Outliner for project management or accounting and there is a whole page filled with samples that you can download from the extras page.
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I was playing a bit with an application called Zoë which I first read about in an article last year by Jon Udell called "Googling Your Email". It seemed like a neat idea, but I didn't bother to download it and try it out. The Web site is enigmatic with a manifesto and a bare minimum of documentation. It was created originally by Raphaël Szwarc who now has other developers helping him with it. While "Google for email" is a good starting point, it's a lot more than that. Under OS X the installation is incredibly simple and involves double-clicking on a Java application which starts it running and then clicking on more links to configure things. It sucked all of my mailboxes in... it took a while as over the past few years I've moved from Claris Emailer to Eudora to Mail.app and imported my mail from all of the accounts... so I've got several years of email stored in the mailboxes.
The greatest thing about Zoë is how everything shows up through a Web interface. You search and can click on links that sort and subdivide even more. In just a few minutes I was able to find all sorts of different connections that I hadn't made before and surfed around through my old email. I often search through my email to find out what I've said or to find links that I've sent as well... with Zoë all of the links (and people) show up and can be used to find other connections. It runs as a Web server, smtp server, ftp server, etc, etc, etc. It lets you get attachments, messages and information from it. You can send and retrieve email through it and you can also keep using your regular email program. I think that I could end up using this a lot... I knew I was keeping my mail for a reason for all these years!
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I was recently reading an article on the O'Reilly Network about "Freeware Gems for Mac OS X" and found it interesting. One of the neat things about OS X is that it has spawned a whole new wave of development and applications. The great thing about OS X is that it combines the Mac with Unix in a pretty package. You can admire and use the system mainly on the surface or dive into development and manage stuff with the command line. The most interesting free app in the article is an address book called SBook. SBook was created by Simson Garfinkle in 1991 for NeXT (which OS X owes a lot to).
I'm actually quite happy with the built-in address book in OS X and I love how I can use iSync to keep my address book on the machines that I use and my Handspring Visor in sync. But I thought that I'd try out the program as I like Simson's writing and if he went to the trouble of reviving a program I should try it out. What intrigued me is how he mentions in the description that the search algorithms are quite paoerful and that they are very fast and parts of them made their way into Mail.app and the OS X built-in address book. So I tried it and really like it. I love how it's a free-form address book, so you don't need to fill in certain fields. It figures out what is what... a name, a business, an email address, a phone number, etc. So you can type lots of notes explaining things and mix it all together however you like. Then you can go to a Web site, send an email, dial the phone, or print an envelope or label. It's fast and searches almost instantly. You can even drag pictures into it! I think that this is going to be my address book of choice soon. I still miss a feature of Apple's Address book such as being able to look up a map by clicking on an address, but I'm sure that it will show up soon.
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One of the applications that I have fallen in love with is Graphic Converter. I used it years ago and then I started using Photoshop and didn't think that I'd use anything else. Then OS X came along and the Photoshop version took a long time to come out. Then I wasn't able to upgrade to version 7, but I needed to do a lot of image processing as I was working on "When Voices Rise..." and I didn't want to do a lot of work in Photoshop 6 in Classic as I was using Final Cut Pro 3 under OS X. I scanned hundreds of photos and documents and needed to resize and crop them to make them more manageable. I found Graphic Converter, tried it out, loved it, and bought it. Small, efficient and fast. I used the Browse feature to select images and resized and adjusted them for use. Then when I was authoring the DVD I had almost 100 images that I wanted to use in a slide show for the DVD, but I needed to rescale and resize the images in a non-proportional way and also to place them on a black background. GC's Batch was able to save me a ton of time doing that. It's what I use to resize and prepare images for the Web and iStockPhoto when I upload stuff there. It even takes a lot of Photoshop plugins!
There have been a few updates over the last year to GC and I dutifully download them, but I hadn't been using it a lot. But for some reason I hadn't poked around in it a lot. Then I had an image open I noticed that there was a new Stamp tool! That was the only thing that I really, really missed from previously using Photoshop as the colour-correction, levels, and other image adjustments work great in GC. The browser has also been updated (in an iPhoto-like way) and there is a neat catalogue HTML export that I may play with as well. I have to check out updates a bit more carefully!
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Wow! It was a busy day at work...end of the term and lots of marking and adding and wrapping up. In my brief glance at Apple's Web site this afternoon I saw that they launched the music store and updated iTunes to version 4. Even though I'm in Canada and we (along with the rest of the non-US world) can't buy songs yet, it's a pretty amazing leap. One of those Apple things that you look at and say, "Hey, that makes sense." I can see me impulse-buying stuff as soon as it's possible. There are still some gaps in the music that is available, but they've got a lot and the presentation is great. The staff picks are idiosyncratic and I suspect that they reflect the folks at Apple. It looks as if the whole thing was a massive task. Over 200,000 songs, tons of album art and a whack of encoding. The other neat features of iTunes 4 are sharing via Rendezvous and AAC encoding (higher quality at lower bitrates...just the same as encoding audio for DVDs).
A very cool feature for iTunes 5 or maybe 4.5 would be "Upload My Songs" to allow independent musicians to make their work available via the Music Store. Now that would be the next step, but would the record companies allow it? The video that Apple has (in the new "Music" button on Apple's site that replaces the "Switch" button) introducing the store and new iPods has a rather smarmy tone about the music industry, so maybe it's not too far-fetched. I love the new ads for the music store... they feature people singing as they listen to music on an iPod. A neat exercise in contrasts.
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Via Rael I saw this nifty little bit of Bluetooth wizardry... the Sony Ericsson Clicker which uses the Bluetooth capability of the cellular phones from Sony Ericsson to turn the phone into a remote control for a Bluetooth equipped Mac with 10.2. You can control your presentation, the dvd player, or use the proximity sensor to pause iTunes when you leave the room. It's very cool and illustrates the potential that Bluetooth has....hmmm... Bluetooth TVs, radios, lamps... they'd shut off when you leave the room. But I've still got too much stuff that I lug around... my PowerBook, my cell phone and my Visor... and I'm still waiting for my cell phone provider to provide the ability to send email from my phone directly... I can receive it, but no sending yet...then I can 'blog via mobile phone... that will be cool and brief.
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It's neat when something comes into focus all of a sudden. I read "The Death of the 'Comments' Section. RIP" by Steve Mallett and I finally figured out why (instead of how) to use Trackback. Until I read the article I didn't really realize what need more specifically that Trackback filled... now I do. Now since many people have weblogs they aren't posting comments as much...they'll just make an entry in their 'blog that links back to what they're commenting about. Trackback can assemble those together. Mallett also links it up with community, which is less than or equal to 150 people. Movable Type has Trackback built-in and I can use that where I teach (with a Movable Type 'blog for my students) and I can also add Trackback support to Blosxom (which runs this 'blog). Rael also did a comment hack to Trackback to add comments to Blosxom. It's neat to see how this stuff is all evolving and even better when a bunch of things click into place and suddenly make sense.
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It's great when you get to see something develop and grow and come to fruition. My favourite new app has gone pro and you can register it to help the development continue. NetNewsWire Pro is the only thing other than Mail that runs constantly on my PowerBook. It has been developed by Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software and it's the best way to quickly catch up with all of the RSS feeds that make collecting information and opinion so much easier than aimlessly surfing around for hours. I also use it to edit the Movable Type 'blog that I use with the Screen Arts students at NSCC where I teach. Yay!
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Congratulations are in order for Rael Dornfest who has officially released version 1 (and then 1.1) of Blosxom, which efficiently has been powering this 'blog since I started it. One of the neat features is static rendering which makes for a more logical and efficient archive for me. So now categories and dates will let you go to entries with a logical hierarchy. i.e. http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/2002/ for all entries from 2002 (with http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/2002/12/ for just December of 2002) http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/film/ for all of the entries in the "film" category. Keep up the great work Rael! I've updated the site with it and it took only a few minutes. Then I set up the static archive along with a little cron job to generate it automatically...a bit geeky, but it's nice to have a simple system that works well that is easy to understand and use.
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