confessions of a serial hobbyist

So I haven’t been writing a lot of mobile development here, as I have generally tried to keep my personal opinions and work-related interests atleast slightly separated, I want to make a few comments on Android, after working with it as a developer for a few days. There will probably be atleast a few technical bits in here…if you’re bored, well, deal.

To start with, Android is a bit…over-engineered. It’s a problem I’ve seen a lot of in the past, whenever Java developers would try to get into J2ME for example. They take their academic lessons on proper system design and object object oriented programming and then go on to large, memory intensive, and overly complex mobile applications. And this is my first impression of Android. It’s large, and overly complex. The class listings are huge, and the steps to get things done, while nice in design theory, are numerous.
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So I’ve been sitting here, allowing this blog to stagnate for the past couple of months.
The last real posts I’ve done and gotten any readers for were me complaining about iLife and iMovie…and since then I just haven’t had a chance to do much.

Fastforward to last Friday when I decide to pick things up, and start off by going through comments…
7834 comments in moderation…WHAT?!?!?

So I start going through (I have about 2500 left to sift through still)…of those 7800+ comments I’ve found about 5 real comments in there and a WHOLE lot of spam. And it makes me sad to think that people are actually taking time to read something I’ve written, and taking time to comment on it, and I never reply any noone ever sees it because it’s buried amongst ads for sketchy loan officers and street corner pharmacists. So I’m trudging through, I’m trying to set things up better so that comments will actually get through and spam will be thrown aside, and hopefully this will encourage me to get writing more.

There almost might start to be a slightly businessy side to future posts, as I currently run a small business (of which I don’t think I’ve ever named or linked in this blog…and will probably keep it that way) and it’s just one of the things often on my mind. It’s a hobby, as well as my job, so it fits…and if one of the maybe 5 people who occassionally read this blog disagree, so be it.

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…