You see that shiny ladder there? I didn’t realize it when I was shooting, but it’s very shiny.
As you can imagine, it’s been a headache in post production, causing lots of “sizzle”.
After racking my brain for almost an hour, it occurred to me that the thing doesn’t move.
womp. womp.
10 minutes in Motion and I have a lovely matte key effect that I can throw on all of these shots.
Final Cut Pro X Tips
I created a Final Cut Pro X tips Tumblr blog. Mostly to catalog all of the little tricks I pick up and to hopefully move past this anti-Final Cut Pro X sentiments among “old hat” editors.
I know that sounds snarky, but I just want to share tips with fellow editors that have opted to stick with Final Cut Pro X.
Fun with FaceTime(s)
27” put to excellent use, as you can see.
The Mac App Store
I like it. I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more apps that I wanted on day one, but I really dig how this thing works.
I’m really jazzed about the idea of having all of my app updates coming from one place instead of having to discover an update when I launch the app. Not a huge deal, but still pretty cool.
I didn’t get carried away with buying apps. Most of what I wanted (Things, Billings 3, MarsEdit, iLife ‘11, etc) I already owned. I did pick up The Incident and it’s just as fun on the desktop as it is on the iPad/iPhone.
It sucks that I’m hearing that apps I already own that happen to be in the App Store won’t be updatable through said App Store. I’m sure there will be a solution to that in the near future, but for now, it’s kind of a bummer.
I was also hoping for some MobileMe integration. For example, if I get on a different computer, will it be able to just pull down my downloads? If so, that could be a great feature.
I also picked up Twitter for Mac / Tweetie 2… like the rest of the Mac-owning world did, today.
All in all, I’m sure it will be a success for new and old Mac users, alike.
My AppleTV Experiment: Phase One
I’ve started a blog series on alexstone.me to get somewhat official with things, but this is more of a side-post.
I picked up an AppleTV yesterday and I’m currently running a little experiment to see just how realistic TV 2.0 is for a regular family.
This is phase one of that experiment. What I’ve done is emptied out an external hard drive and placed it on my Airport Extreme (Apple WIFI router. It has a USB port on it so you can plug in a printer or a hard drive).
Now that I have this massive amount of storage that I can access wirelessly from anywhere in the house, the next step is moving things over. I am currently migrating my entire iTunes library (music, movies, TV shows, apps, etc.) to the external drive. It’s literally 3 clicks and a lot of waiting. Nothing too major so far.
Hopefully, by the time I get up in the morning, everything will be moved over and I can start with Phase Two, which is converting all of my downloaded shows (currently in divx format) to an iTunes/AppleTV/iPad/iPhone/iPod friendly format.
The idea is that anyone in my family will be able to watch the shows in my iTunes library, via Home Share, on their own machines and that I can free up ~100GBs from my harddrive and just have all of this content stored on the network drive.
Right now, I’d really love to get my girlfriend an AppleTV, as she is planning on killing her cable this week. My only concern is figuring out how she would get my content at her house without me going over and putting it in her iTunes. Even then, what happens when she runs out of space on her laptop?
Steve Jobs addresses this Flash "war"
First off, I think it’s great that Jobs finally put together a document explaining why Flash isn’t on the iPhone (or any mobile device, now that I think about it), rather than letting Adobe and Apple fanboys have at it in the blog comment trenches.
He makes some good points
- Flash is made for mouse & keyboard, not touch-based UIs.
- Flash is terrible at playing modern video.
- Flash is closed. Very closed.
- Flash is has terrible security.
That being said, I did have a problem with this part:
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
To this part, I have to say “so what?”. Let the consumers vote these SDKs out of business. Ultimately, sub-standard apps will go away.
Here’s an example:
Say a Flash/ActionScript developer picks up Flash CS5 and bangs out an app for the iPhone. If the app is bad, it won’t sell well and he’ll either learn to adopt to the official Apple iPhone SDK and built the app natively, taking advantage of all of the Apple open APIs or will make his app better in Flash.
At the end of the day, lame apps will always be lame apps.
Bad apps are bred from bad developers, not bad tools. I cannot stress this enough.
In conclusion, as a longtime web developer and web app enthusiast, I definitely get why Apple wants to assist in phasing Flash out of the web experience. It’s just not a good platform like it used to be in the early 2000s. Most of the things I’ve used Flash for, have all been replaced by jQuery plugins that perform better, without a proprietary plugin.
I also totally understand why Apple wants developers to stick to C++, C, Objective-C and the Apple SDK, but Apple needs to understand that it’s not the tools that make mediocre software, it’s mediocre development that makes mediocre software.
There should be a way to universally filter iPad news and media from the entire Internet for a while.
The Verizon iPhone Rumor: 2010 Edition
Every. single. year. the same Verizon iPhone rumors surface and it’s like no one recalls the same “verified rumors” from the previous year.
The only thing that makes me highly skeptical of any of the Verizon iPhone rumors, is that Verizon still runs on CDMA, meaning that a Verizon iPhone would be useless in a year or so when everyone finally switches to their LTE networks.
Not only that, but the current network would heavily degrade the iPhone’s user experience. Being able to talk and use server-centric apps is kind of a major selling point of the iPhone. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the phone and not been multi-tasking at the same time. Checking Facebook, posting to Twitter, or looking up movie times, restaurants, directions, flight schedules, Wikipedia entries, etc.
That’s not just me, either. I don’t know anyone who has an iPhone that doesn’t do the same thing when on a call, especially when calling a business or customer service line.
Finally, the other reason Apple is waiting for that LTE network is that unless Verizon has been upgrading their network in secret over the last few years, there’s no way they’ll be able to handle the load of Verizon users itching for an iPhone. AT&T has about 20k customers, probably about 70% of those users on iPhones all pulling roughly 1-5GB of mobile data every month per user. You think Verizon’s network is ready to handle that much data being pushed around.
AT&T wasn’t ready for the iPhone and has managed to step it up and roll out more hotspots and 3G towers over the last 3 years. Verizon has not. Granted, they’ve been hard at work getting ready to roll out LTE, but that’s not going to happen until next year and you won’t see it in your area until late-2011 or or 2012.
That being said, when Verizon rolls out their LTE network, then, and only then, would I put any weight behind a rumor of a Verizon iPhone.
UPDATE: I’m not saying a new iPhone isn’t coming out this year. That’s almost definitely happening, as Apple has released a new handset every single year about the same time, in addition to an iPhone OS update. I’m just saying that it’s not likely we’ll see a Verizon-enabled handset.
My name is Alex. I work at Tumblr. I moonlight as a mobile application and web developer, videographer, and occasionally pretend to be a photographer.
