confessions of a serial hobbyist

So for some time…atleast January of ‘07, I’ve been feverishly anticipating the new iLife and iWork bundles. Surely they would contain great new features that would change my entire life and how I work, play, and think about EVERYTHING. I mean, it’s going to be that great right?

Well iLife/iWork ‘07 never happened, and some months later the ’08s were released (albeit still in 2007) and the SAME DAY I ran to the store to get the upgrades. I mean I couldn’t put off having my entire life somehow magically changed by a few software upgrades, could I?

And so I got them, installed them, and began to play…
And here I am a few weeks later realizing how rarely I actually use ANY of that software…as in almost never…so why did I care so much? It’s something I go through often - something new, or cool, or sexy is released, and I want to need it so much that I convince myself that SURELY it will fill in some void and make me more productive…and so I get that thing…and nothing happens.

Pages is an improvement, and if I actually ever had to write a document I’m sure it would come in EXTREMELY handy. I like the improved UI and the ease of access to various formatting options via the context-sensitive toolbar. I love Keynote, but as of yet I’ve only had one time when I ever needed to make a presentation. Numbers…now there’s something. I had been looking forward to a new spreadsheet application to ditch NeoOffice and have a nice native application. So of course the first thing I did was convert the ONE spreadsheet I ever use (a list of our bills, debts, due dates, etc.) from the OpenOffice format to XLS, to import into numbers, and convert to a .numbers bundle. And now what? I don’t make spreadsheets all that often. I mean sure I could do all kinds of exciting…math…but that’s nothing I need in day-to-day use. Hell, long before the spreadsheet version of our bill tracking I just kept a tab-delimited plain text file, and it worked GREAT for me. So here I am, with a $99 “office bundle” that will be used maybe once a month (when in a single day I both update the bill spreadsheet for the new months due dates, and in that same sitting pay all the bills and mark them paid…). And yes I paid $99 for the family edition because for some reason ever since switching to a Mac I’ve been on a kick to be legit and pay for everything honestly…weird, I know.

And then there’s iLife. I’ve already posted about iMovie ‘08 and how it’s just not for me (not saying it’s bad…it’s just not for me). iPhoto is what my wife and I use for all of our photo management. Once I got past the annoyance of fixing the failed attempt to auto-separate all of our photos into events upon upgrading (a single day’s shots could somehow end up spread across 3 different events, while I had another single event that had photos from 5 MONTHS in there?) I realized that it changed nothing. I already had everything split up nicely - I used folders (or were they called albums, I don’t remember). And so now all I did was recreate each of the “old” folders, with “new” events, and instead of clicking on a folder on the left, I click on an event on the right. Revolutionary! iDVD is decent enough I guess…I’ve only ever made one DVD with it (a photo slideshow from my wedding for the wife) but it’s there if/when I need it, and I’m sure I will eventually. It does what I need it to - lets me throw some images together to make menus, and lets me throw some video to be played from the menus.

iWeb is another of the apps I’m not too sure about. I WANT to like it. I’ve even tried re-creating this blog in iWeb just to see how I like it. It’s terrible. If you don’t fit their templates perfectly you end up with something that’s just ugly and a pain to use. For example, if I didn’t WANT a photo at the header of each blog post, either I’d have a big empty space, or I’d have to go through and edit the page view of each blog post individually to make sure the next/previous links weren’t ending up somewhere in the middle of the text. Which makes me wonder - why is every post saved out separately? I get when exporting they all become .html because it’s for “simple” sites which can’t assume PHP or whatever, but why do they generate separately as I post (if I edit one’s layout I’ve had to go back and edit the rest of them by hand also)? And why can’t I get any of the positioning right (fixed-positioning etc.)? I’m sure it’s just iWeb layout stuff that I could learn…but something is VERY wrong if I find it easier to write the HTML than I do to drag stuff around when it comes to getting a decent and consistent looking website. All that being said, I continue to play with it here and there…maybe I’m just secretly hoping that it will click one day and all make sense…

And lastly in iLife is GarageBand. A decent enough editor that I’ve long since replaced with Logic Express and not looked back. The inability to export composed tracks to midi is all it took…

So there we have it, the utter realization that after nearly a year of waiting, and $200 spent, I’m not really much better off than I was before…because I just bought the hype, and bought a bunch of software I’ll rarely ever use…

and I’ll do it again next year

Apple recently announced it’s new iLife ‘08 Digital Lifestyle application suite. Most of the apps got some nice new features, but iMovie was selected to be completely replaced with an entirely different application (albeit still named iMovie).

And in doing so, it was made easy for people who don’t enjoy video editing, and made useless to those that do…

First off, we’ll look at a before and after:

Before (iLife ‘06 / iMovie HD):

After (iLife ‘08 / iMovie ‘08):

The first thing to notice about iMovie ‘06 is that it includes a LARGE viewer of my 1080i footage (filmed as 1080p24…I love my Canon HV20) to show more detail. In iMovie ‘08 I have a much smaller view, and have to view fullscreen to get much detail.

In iMovie ‘06, on the right is your bins of footage. These are clips imported for THIS PROJECT, because frankly if I’m editing a small movie I only want clips for that movie, not footage I shot three years ago for something else. iMovie ‘08 takes up the majority of the screen filling the bottom half with a selection of every clip you’ve ever shot (though to be fair, it does let you narrow it down, and lists by clip). You can argue yourself as to whether or not it’s more powerful, or just more information you likely don’t want/need. iMovie ‘06 shows one picture per clip, while iMovie ‘08 can either show one per clip, or one per every .5, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 30 seconds of a clip. In iMovie ‘06 if you want to add a clip to your project, you drag it down to the timeline, and then trim. In iMovie ‘08 you select within the clips clicking and dragging (each clip is like its own mini-timeline) and then add that selection to your movie.

iMovie ‘06 gives you the option of per-clip views of your movie flow, or a more standard timeline (seen in my screenshot). In timeline view you can see your clips lengths, edit them based on time, and also align footage and audio down to the frame in order to line things up nicely. You have timecode based support for fading in / out audio, switching effects, etc. In iMovie ‘08 you have some videos you added on the top (this and the clips list can be swapped), and you can throw in a song or sound effect by just dragging the file the clip you want it to play during. iMovie ‘06 shows your audio via a nice waveform, allowing you to look for spikes in the audio and other features of the audio for betting syncing of audio and video. iMovie ‘08 gives you a green line to say there’s audio there. I haven’t found a way to do much more with footage or audio in iMovie ‘08.

I really liked iMovie HD, because I saw it as a near complete (albeit low-weight and low-priced) video editing solution. I could see using it to edit small videos and even short movies without much worry, because it was basically Final Cut Express-Express, a more light weight version of their more professional products. iMovie ‘08 on the other hand is designed for people who want to take some movies, throw them together, and spit out the results. Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly a market for that, but it’s not me.

One place where iMovie ‘08 does a nice job over iMovie ‘06 is the sharing options, as it allows you to easily export to multiple files (with simple options such as mobile phone, iPhone, small, large, DVD, etc). In iMovie ‘06 I’d have to do each export separately, one at a time. Being able to select multiple export targets at once means I can tell it to export, and get some sleep for the night while it churns out a bunch of highly encoded h.264 files.

I honestly think iMovie ‘08 does a better job of fitting the iLife target audience better than iMovie ‘06 did, it just bothers me because I’m not strictly in that target audience. I’m more apt to enjoy Aperture over iPhoto, and Final Cut over the new iMovie (neither of which I own yet). I already use Logic, not Garage Band, when recording audio. It’s a bonus to the consumer, and a strike against the prosumer on this one…

I’ll say one good thing - it doesn’t overwrite iMovie HD when you install iLife ‘08, and if you’ve registered your copy of iLife ‘08, Apple allows you to download iMovie HD for free. Obviously other people are seeing the same frustrations I am.

In closing I’d like to thank my son for volunteering the footage of his first steps used in those screenshots - yes he really is that adorable in real life.

Obviously now, being the Apple whore I am I had to get iLife ‘08 and enjoy the now 10gigs in my .Mac account. Even better is the personal domain support that’s going to be easy in iWeb ‘08 (even thinking of moving this blog to iWeb…just because I could)…or maybe not.

So I went to look at what it takes to setup iWeb ‘08 to publish to a personal domain, and am either frustrated, or just annoyed at how the support was implemented. You can’t have it upload to your current website. You can’t setup an FTP to upload to. What can you do?

Well, you click on the handy “Set Up Personal Domain” option in the File menu of iWeb, and it takes you to .Mac. You enter your domain, and all is well so far (though why do I need .Mac to publish to my personal domain?). Well the answer’s obvious - because they don’t want you uploading to your server - they want you to pay to use theirs! Even worse, once you punch in your domain, this is what you see:



Now that makes perfect sense to me…I get the concept of A records, and CNAME records and what not…but is that really Apple’s target market for iWeb users? People who have setup BIND or other DNS servers in the past? Aren’t the same people who know what a CNAME is, the same people who would likely have their own hosting already?

And this doesn’t even bring up the fact that if you have a DNS server that you can edit to set up a CNAME record, don’t you probably already have a web server you can use?

I’m sorry…but Apple, you failed on this one…

So apparently I was tagged in this a couple of weeks ago by Jonathan Greene at atmaspheric | endeavors. But things having been crazy with work and all I missed it, but to follow on I’ll see about what I have…

I’m currently switching between two devices, the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95. I have a few others phones (N80, N75, about 30 others…) but I don’t use them much so they don’t count.

Let’s start with the iPhone because it’s the least interesting in terms of what’s on there. I use the iPhone primarily as my iPod, a web tablet (it is in my opinion superior to say the Nokia 770/N800, despite lacking flash support), for email, and sometimes I even use it as a phone. I do have a little bit of extra software installed:

1. Mobile Terminal - The quite nice (though a pain to install) terminal emulator for the iPhone. I actually end up using it more than one might expect… Unfortunately it doesn’t fully support ANSI escape sequences and what-not so it’s not 100% usable as a unix terminal yet.
2. SSH - what I use the Mobile Terminal for. I frequently SSH into my machines at home etc. to check on things (and once popped on IRC just because I could, though it didn’t work so well…see above comment about ANSI escape sequences).

That’s it - afterall what else is there for the iPhone? Even these required me to spend most of a morning running shady applications to break into my own device. However, having a usable terminal on my phone is such a godsend that it has me thinking of picking up a Nokia E61i - the qwerty on the iPhone is probably the biggest reason I like using it for email etc. over my N95.

Then there’s my N95… I use it often as my phone, and for a slightly larger number of apps - some officially released and some not.

1. Snakes - Yeah I know, it comes on the phone, but for some reason I still have a blast playing it (and replaying it, as I start from scratch every time there’s a firmware update).
2. Podcasting - The s60 podcasting app. Sure I have my iPhone to listen to my podcasts, watch my vidcasts, and generally handle all my media, but I feel it’s my right, nay my DUTY to download as many of those podcasts onto my n95 as I can (especially over EDGE…I’m paying for unlimited data, I should use it). The n95 has the one big win over the iPhone for podcasting - I can actually check for and download new episodes as I’m on the road, and can frequently start downloading an episode as I walk to lunch, and have it downloaded for listening as I eat.
3. Nokia Sports Tracker - I’m an engineer, which almost automatically means I’m out of shape. And so I’ve been using this (along with the GPS built in to the N95) to keep an idea of how much I’m walking…trying to keep up around 2 miles a day atleast.
4. Widsets - I primarily use this for the Jaiku widset. Unfortunately I’m not special enough to get in on the Jaiku mobile beta, and as such have been stuck with the older Jaiku mobile client. It works ok for making a post, and the automatic location updating (based on cell tower information apparently) is great - but being unable to read comments or read more than the last post of other people makes it useless…
5. Mobile Search - as I often do most of my emailing on the device it’s important to be able to search through things. Sure I use my iPhone more than the n95 for emailing (even soft-qwerty beats out t9 when it comes to typing) but since I use IMAP for email, I keep it synced both places. Hint to Nokia by the way - support saving sent emails to a IMAP Sent folder! Currently I have to CC myself, and then have my computer run a rule on incoming email that if it’s from me, move it to the IMAP Sent folder (so it’s saved on the iPhone and my laptop as well).
6. Nokia Maps - I haven’t used it too much, but when I have, it’s come in EXTREMELY handy. This is especially true with the latest firmware where it gets GPS locks a lot faster. And as I’ll be doing a bit more traveling in the coming months, I’m sure I’ll be using it even more.
7. K-Rally - A fun little racing game that took me a while to get into, but then quickly had me hooked. One of the highest quality mobile games I’ve played…and having worked in mobile games for years that MAYBE says something?
8. loopt - Loopt is a mobile-phone based social networking community app. I’ll note RIGHT NOW that this isn’t actually available for S60, or for most phones really - it’s a new service that’s being rolled out a carrier at a time, and the only reason I have it is that loopt happens to be one of my company’s clients. I figured if I’m working on their product, I should be using it - and if I’m going to use it I had to make it work on the phone I use.

So there we have it, most of the apps I use on my Nokia with any kind of regularness (I’m fully aware, thanks to the spell checking built into Safari, that that’s not a word). One thing I noticed as I typed this out - most of those are Nokia apps! I’m not sure if this is a good sign or not… I had previously used QuickOffice for writing up notes, but typing anything serious with t9 was just too painful so I stopped - this may be something I start using again if/when I break down and get an e61i (or e90). I should also note that there are some other things installed on my n95 (generally my company’s own products) but as they’re unannounced, they’ll remain so here - plus I’ll probably have to push them in a new blog post at some point in the future.

I was recently given an invite to try out joost - an internet streamed TV service that actually manages to get real TV content on there. Personally as soon as I heard they had episodes of I Hate My 30’s from VH1 I knew I had to try it out. Watch the show - it’s fantastic (any TV show that name-drops Mr. Belvedere is alright with me).

So, I grabbed the client, logged in, and fired it up. At any point clicking on the screen will bring up the overhead menu, from which you can pick the Channel Catalog to pick what you want to watch. The channels are a combination of old TV shows, made-for-joost content, and TV shows offered up from current TV networks.

On top of the TV at any point you can turn on a number of Widgets (solely for the sake of being buzzword compliant I’m sure) that basically just block portions of the video you’re supposedly trying to watch - I don’t see the point and turned all of them off pretty much immediately.

All of this isn’t bad, and the interface is something anyone with about 10 minutes of playing with could get to the point where they can pick what they want to watch and watch it. This is good. What’s bad is the streaming. I’m on a 3 mbit DSL line at home, and wasn’t able to make it through a single episode of I Hate My 30’s without a number of pauses and delays for buffering. And there’s the killer. That right there keeps it from being usable as a main entertainment source. Buffering before a show starts is acceptible - buffering while the ads play (hint for joost, if you pre-download the ads the client, you can then use commercial breaks to get a jump-start on buffering the remaining portion of a show) is even better, but having my watching experience constantly pausing for buffering made for a frustration time. I couldn’t sit down on the couch with the wife and watch a show on joost because of this. I tried at three different times of day - early morning (7am), midday (1pm), and later in the night (11pm) and all three times had the same problems with pauses.

I like the idea, I like some of the content, I just wish I could sit down and watch a show and forget that I’m using a computer program (this will be KEY in the future of moving video through a computer to the TV).