Recently in Software Category

Philip Bloom mentioned, in his master class yesterday, a file utility I had not heard of before, one that seems brilliant to me:  ShotPut Pro.  This program will copy your media files from their source (camera card) to up to 3 locations simultaneously.  Brilliant!

I think that always having an untouched copy of your original media files and a working copy of them is always a bright idea.  This practice not only gives you the option of having an emergency backup of your files in case of drive failure or theft, but provides you with some measure of future-proofing your media files for later use—perhaps in projects using CODECs we don't even have today.

I also use BackBlaze to automatically and continuously sync all of my data off site.  The three important parts of that last sentence are:  off site, continuously, and above all:  automatically!  BackBlaze is a steal of a deal at only $50 per machine per year for unlimited storage!  I just do my work using my machines, and BackBlaze is always keeping my offsite backup up to date.

If you were doing professional projects, where setting up the shoot required a significant investment or was time sensitive (can't be easily repeated, for example), using locally redundant copies of the original media and off site backups is essential!

I just stumbled onto this new program, TuneUp, from TuneUpMedia.com. It's an iTunes plugin that has a number of really cool features:

• The program will analyze your iTunes library and report back all of the tracks that have incomplete information and create a "dirty" playlist.  Incomplete information might mean the track is missing any of the data listed in the graphic to the right.


• Drag any of the "dirty" tracks into TuneUp.  TuneUp then analyzes the sound footprint of the track to determine what the track actually is and offers to retrieve all of the missing meta data for the track.  In other words, you could have a track in your iTunes library called "Track 09."  TuneUp would figure out what the track name, artist, album, genre, year, cover art, and actual track number on the album are and populate all of that data, replacing the "Track 09" with the real info!  That's rather remarkable!  But there's more...


• TuneUp will follow what you're listening to, offer videos of the track in a sidebar (just click to play the videos right there in the sidebar), a bio of the artists, tell you about the upcoming concerts for that artist in your area, even let you purchase the tickets, share related items about the artist from ebay, let you tweet what you're listening to.


• Other features too...

Today Apple sold its 10,000,000,000th (that's billionth) song at the iTunes Store—all in less than 7 years. The music industry can gripe all it wants, but Apple has made them a lot of money they would otherwise have lost to file sharing!

Today's Business Insider has this headline: Blockbuster Collapses: Shutting Down 500 Stores In Desperate Bid To Save $200 Million. I'm actually shocked they survived as long as they did. They ended last year almost $1,000,000,000 in debt.

By closing 500 of their weakest stores, they hope to reduce operating expenses by $200 million. They are also exploring other ways to increase liquidity and find new emerging distribution channels.

Let me offer them a touch of advice. Liquidate now and save everyone the misery to come.

You may have heard that I don’t do iPhone or iPad development at this time. That said, it’d be silly to not keep track of what Apple is up to with the platform they care for most." ...

• Upgrades to software for laptop and desktop machines hadn't all but died in the last several years.
  • Cases in point:  Where is iLife 2010?  (Apple made a big issue of rewriting iLife 2010 from the ground up, but only for the mobile platform!)
  • Where is iWork 2010?  (Apple made a big issue of rewriting iWork 2010 from the ground up, but only for the mobile platform!)
  • What happened to iMovie on the iPad?  Where did it go?
  • When Apple finally came out with an upgrade to Final Cut Studio, the new feature set was anything but substantive.
  • Now there are rumors all over the net that Apple has laid off over 40 people from the Final Cut Studio software team.  This can not be good as it probably indicates Apple is abandoning one of the most powerful production tools it ever developed!
  • How many years have we suffered with Aperture 2?  Finally, Aperture 3 is released, but many users are reporting huge issues with the program's basic operability and stability.
• What of any significant improvements in laptop and desktop hardware?
  • Cases in point:  The "new" iMacs have been plagued with screen problems and shipping was completely halted for a time while the issue has hopefully been corrected.
  • It blows me away that I bought my 2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon computer about 1.5 years ago, and today Apple doesn't even sell a machine as fast as this "old" computer!  The fastest machine on their site is a 2 x 2.93 Quad-Core Intel Xeon computer!  What's with that?!  Their hardware is getting slower?
  • Where's the innovation in hardware?  Apple has been the leader for years!  With many of the new HD DSLR and video cameras sporting HDMI access, why hasn't Apple added this to the hardware line up?  Instead, my computers today have fewer high speed data access ports than they did 2 years ago!
• One company control of my media access?  Increasingly my heart is saying, "Absolutely no!"

Related articles

• Apple's Desktops to Disappear Eventually? (tastyslate.com)
• Is Aperture 3 sucking up memory? (macworld.com)
• Apple Looking to Bring iPhone OS to More Devices (mashable.com)
• Conspicuous by Its Absence (timtyson.us)

How many times have I cursed the Caps Lock key. I've wished I could pluck if from my keyboard more than once.

Well... turns out, you can with a simple keyboard preference change!

Go to System Preferences and select Keyboard. In this window, click on Modifier Keys...

Now click next to "Caps Lock" and select "No Action". Easy!

Something else just dawned on me about today's announced iPad: all that went unannounced. In fact, I'm concerned.

Where is iLife '10? One of the presenters mentioned that iLife had been rewritten from the ground up. OMG!

The last time Apple's software team re-wrote something from the ground up, they gutted it: iMovie!

What features will we lose? Will desktop machines even get an iLife '10?

Any plans for a new model iPhone this summer as seems customary?

I'm hopeful more news will trickle out from the mothership soon.

And I'm sorry, the word "magical" just doesn't work for me.

Image via CrunchBase

Here's a great shortcut for downloading YouTube videos when using the Safari browser.

1. Go to the YouTube page with the video on it.  
2. [Command] + [Option] + [A] to bring up the Activity window in Safari.  
3. Under the Address Column find the YouTube page.  
4. Under that column, look for the largest file size, which will be the video file itself.  
5. Double click it to download it.  Done.

I love stumbling upon a cool technology trick.

Working out compression settings for video distribution is part art, part science, and a whole lot of witchcraft. Compression is just often difficult and can be very frustrating.

Well, tonight I learned that if you take a movie file that has already been compressed (select one, of course, that looks really good because it was well compressed) and drop it into the "Custom" folder under the "Settings" tab in Compressor 3.5 (part of Final Cut Pro Studio), Compressor will think about that file for a second (depending on the speed of your machine) and then create a custom preset of the compression settings used to create that finished project! And the description tag becomes the name of the movie project you dropped into Compressor.

Sweet!

Compressor reads the metadata from the file and figures out how the file was compressed and then returns those settings as a preset you can use for your own project compression. Now, even with good compression settings, if you have poor quality source video, you will get poor results. But the problem is often the opposite way around: you have a great project and can't get the compression output to serve a good finished product.

And here's another little tidbit: if you take a Compressor Droplet (a little preset "stand alone application"), right click on it, select "show package contents," open the "Settings" folder and drop the .setting file onto the "Custom" folder under the "Settings" tab in Compressor 3.5, Compressor will again create a custom preset of the compression settings used in the droplet.

Why would you ever want to do the later? You can't get to the setting details of a droplet any other way. So if you want to tweak them but don't have the original settings saved as a preset in Compressor, this lets you get to those settings as well as save the settings as a preset in Compressor if you choose. It's just one of those things you will never need until you do--and then you will be pulling your hair out trying to figure out how to do this. :o)

Thanks to Brian Gary and the helpful folks at rippletraining, just a few miles from my home, for these two helpful tips.

I use John Einselen's MediaboxAdvanced, from iaian7, on my site for the media shadowboxes. I love it!

I've had two issues that needed attention. This is a "note to self" on how I fixed them in case I do site upgrades that might break the fixes, and I can't quickly find the resources to these solutions.

Problem 1: Volume Inadequate on NonverBlaster Player (Solution Works)

I was having the same problem today and I tried making some changes in mediaboxAdv-1.1.7.js and it worked for me. I hope this works for you as well.

In the JS file, you can find the settings for NonverBlaster as below (seach for "FLV, MP4")

------------------------------
// FLV, MP4
                        } else if (URL.match(/\.flv|\.mp4/i) || mediaType == 'video') {
                                mediaType = 'obj';
                                mediaWidth = mediaWidth || options.defaultWidth;
                                mediaHeight = mediaHeight || options.defaultHeight;
                                if (options.useNB) {
                                preload = new Swiff(''+options.NBpath+'?mediaURL='+URL
+'&allowSmoothing=true&autoPlay='+options.autoplay
+'&buffer=6&showTimecode='+options.showTimecode+'&loop='+options.NBloop
+'&controlColor='+options.controlColor
+'&controlBackColor='+options.controlBackColor
+'&scaleIfFullScreen=true&showScalingButton=true&crop=false', {
                                        id: 'MediaboxSWF',     ...
------------------------------

You can set the default volume by adding [&defaultVolume=100] right
after [crop=false].
like this.

------------------------------
...   &showScalingButton=true&crop=false&defaultVolume=100', {
                                        id: 'MediaboxSWF',   ...
------------------------------

[Source: NonverBlaster default volume too low - mediaboxAdvanced | Google Groups.]

What doesn't solve the problem: uncommenting the global media options volume parameter in line 93 or adding a defaultVolume parameter to the NonverBlaster section of code at line 110.

Problem 2: MP4s and FLVs Not Playing

From your server, open up the mediaboxAdvanced javascript file in a text or code editor, and update the options to reflect your desired settings. Make sure you update the file path to the JW media player with the correct path to your server."

[Source: iaian7 » code » webcode » mediaboxadvanced.]

What he inadvertently left out: also be certain to update the file path to the NonverBlaster.swf file too!

This tutorial needs a slightly faster pace, but Helen does a great job answering some questions I've grappled with in frustration concerning changing the crop orientation while using a fixed aspect ratio in Lightroom. I could never figure it out. It's so easy when you know the magic trick!

Go ahead, check out the new footer at the bottom of my blog. I've completely redone it. What do you think?

Special thanks to the Creative Pony for letting novice users like myself use some cool code! She calls it Sliding Tabs. It is similar to cover view in iTunes that many readers here are probably familiar with.

Tim likes!

Each of these keyboard shortcuts works with the [Command] + [Shift] keys:

• K - Network
• C - Computer
  
• A - Applications
• H - Home
  
• D - Desktop
• O - Documents folder
• U - Utilities

And, for the record, I knew Desktop, Applications, and Utilities but have always wanted one for Documents! Having one for the computer hard drive is also nice!

Photo credit: alcomm @ Flickr

I've been consumed by lust ever since I was at university and had the opportunity to practice on the Bӧsendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, you know, the one with 97 keys keys instead of the standard 88. I spent about 6 hours a day with my love. Words can not express the depths of intimacy!

I've wanted one ever since. But they, like the objects of all lust, are unspeakably expensive, and I but a lowly civil servant. It was never meant to be. Or so I thought.

Through a twist of good fortune, my Bӧsendorfer 290 Imperial Grand was delivered here to the house yesterday! The richness of the tone! The deep, full-bodied resonance! The capacity to craft the finest and most delicate nuance!

But don't read, have a listen for yourself!

I must confess to having a difficult time deciding between the Bӧsendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, the Steinway and the Yamaha, so I decided to get all three as a set. Ahhh! Bliss.

Photo credit: Bass by High End Piano Guy @ Flickr

I have the basic news apps on my iPhone: AP, the New York Times, NPR, even the Wall Street Journal. I've had the CNN site bookmarked on my phone until today. I deleted it after purchasing CNN's new mobile app for the iPhone. It's the best news site application I've seen to date--complete awesomeness!

The app only costs $1.99. As a friend of mine pointed out, however, you still have to suffer with advertisements on the paid application. Sad. But at least I don't find it nearly as intrusive as CNN.com's video ads before every video. [By the way, I've found a way around that!] On the iPhone app you only get a still image ad while the video loads. And I'm delighted you can watch live newscasts and video over WiFi, 3G, and Edge! (It's about time, AT&T!)

Turning the phone horizontally gives a very nice coverflow slideshow for news events and videos all based on category. Touch the picture to flip the image and reveal the barebones basics of the story with a link to watch or read if you desire.

My CNN provides immediate access to news, weather, and traffic based on your physical location and on any locations you setup to monitor. The news stories link to local media.

iReport, shown at the bottom of this post, is probably my favorite, not because of the content, but because of the concept. In this section you can view featured iReport articles or video. But what is really impressive: Submit. The user can submit photos or video right from the iPhone. So if you find yourself in the middle of a news-worthy event, you can shoot it and upload it to iReport on the spot. Very slick! CNN even offers some suggested assignments for iReporters.

Other nifty little features remain undiscussed. I like the new CNN app, a lot. The designers did a great and thoughtful job.

Some nifty Photoshop CS4 little known tools!

Other programs in the series can be found at AdobeTV

I've been loyal to Transmit 3, by Panic Software, for many, many year. It has been my only desktop FTP client. It has some really wonderful features I've grown to love and now simply expect in an FTP client, tabbed server connections and elegant bookmarking being among my favorites.

But, we may be breaking up. At least, we're separating for a while until I can sort through our relationship.

You see, Transmit now has huge reliability and performance issues. It frequently drops the ftp connection. Which, with the way I almost always use the software with other file editors, causes me to lose my current edits in those editors (that provide their own ftp clients--hmmm... ).

Panic identified that if one of the drawers is open, which I love and use all of the time, file transfers will now get "hung up." Just keeping the drawers closed is painful as I use them so frequently.

Yesterday I went to do several drag and drop file transfers, another thing I do frequently, and the transfer of those large files was instant. The files transferred were then 0 kb. What's with that?! Each time the transfers worked on the second try. What's with that?!

Also, unless I select a file and drag it exactly sideways to the right, I keep highlighting other files when I go to drag instead of actually dragging the file or files. This has become crazy annoying.

And I've discovered other ftp clients have some nice features not included in Transmit, like QuickLook technology, even for video.

All in all, using Transmit has become such an aggravation, and Panic doesn't seem to be much interest in addressing the issues as I've dealt with them for a good while now.

So, for now anyway, I'm going to explore other options. Maybe one day soon, before I get a divorce, Panic will address these concerns and fix the issues I've been having with my favorite ftp client.

Apple has some really great ideas in their Aperture software. I really like several of the implementations of the tools--very intuitive and natural. But when Apple's own software can not run on Apple's own state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line hardware without constant, serious, and totally annoying issues, it's no good.

I've posted before that I've abandoned Apple's Aperture myself. For years now, Apple has failed to make any significant feature enhancements or fix the bugs that plague the software. No wonder people are dropping it. Pity, too. Adobe's Lightroom, while having significantly fewer performance issues, lacks the finesses of Aperture and will lack the competition from Apple to address this sooner rather than later.

I still use Aperture to print books and such, but that's about all.

Among photographic pros using the Mac,

• In 2007 Lightroom was nearly twice as popular as Aperture
• In 2008 it was nearly three times as popular
• In 2009 it's approaching four times as popular

By the numbers:

	2007	2008	2009
Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in	66.5%	62.2%	57.9%
Lightroom	23.6%	35.9%	37.0%
Aperture	5.5%	7.5%	6.3%
On the Mac platform only:
Lightroom	26.6%	40.4%	44.4%
Aperture	14.3%	14.6%	12.5%

link: John Nack on Adobe: Lightroom pulls further ahead of Aperture

I set this up and love it. Just in case I forget how I did it, I'm posting this 10.6 hint here. My shortcut is [Shift] + [Option] + [Command] + L.

When I step away from my Mac at work, I want a quick way to lock the screen, and hitting a hot-corner with the mouse is problematic for me. This hint details how to lock the screen from the keyboard by using Automator to build a Service in Snow Leopard.

First, check the General tab on the Security System Preferences panel to ensure that the Require password [some period] after sleep or screen saver begins box is checked.

Then, open Automator in the Applications folder, and select Service from the screen that appears. At the top of the new Service's actions, in the Service receives drop-down, select no input from the options. Make sure that any application is selected in the second drop-down.

Add the Start Screensaver action (in the Utilities group of actions) to the Service by dragging it to the right. Save the Service (Automator does not ask you where to save it, just to name it). Next, open System Preferences and select the Keyboard preference pane. Select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab at the top, then the Services group on the left. The service you created should be near the bottom of the list of Services under the General disclosure triangle.

Double-click on the right side of the entry for the Service you created and assign a keyboard shortcut. This was a bit unintuitive, because the shortcut column is not distinctly visible, so it is not obvious that you can double-click in the assigned shortcut column to add a shortcut.

I had difficulty picking a keyboard shortcut that would work in 10.6.0. Command-L did not work for me, because it is assigned the Show All Preferences menu item in System Preferences. Control-L also did not work for me. Command-Shift-L did work once I reassigned the Search with Google Service a different shortcut.

Exit the keyboard preference pane to give it a try.

If you find yourself holding down the keyboard shortcut until the screen saver appears, and it disappears when you release the keys, you may want to decrease the time Snow Leopard waits before requiring a password in the Security system preference to immediately (or release the keys before the screen saver appears).

link: macosxhints.com - 10.6: Lock the screen via a keyboard shortcut

Pressing Option-Space pulls up the full-screen Quick Look view in Finder under Snow Leopard

link: macosxhints.com - 10.6: View full screen Quick Look via the keyboard

While feverishly working on work-related paperwork, today I upgraded to Final Cut Pro Studio 3. I chose to do a clean install of the software, and the install took hours! At this point anyway, everything seems to have gone off without a hitch: FCP3 running on 10.6.

In the wee hours of this morning, around 4:30AM, I had my first experience with augmented reality. No, I wasn't dreaming or doing drugs. This was the real thing, just augmented!

"What is augmented reality?", you ask.

Let me explain.

I love Yelp, an application for my iPhone. Yelp is a social network in which those who participate share information about businesses. I first learned about The Veggie Grill through Yelp. Hundreds of people had eaten there, had liked it, had rated it highly, and wrote glowing comments about it. So I tried the restaurant, and now it is one of my favorites in LA.

The new version (3.0) of the application has a hidden feature. Apparently fearing the trolls at the Apple iTunes App Store wouldn't approve this new concept because of the jackasses at AT&T, no one knew the application had "The Monocle!"

Yes, it's sort of like a one-eyed Oracle. You launch the new version of Yelp on your iPhone and then shake the phone violently. After two attempts, the screen welcomed me to "The Monocle!"

Now, I hold my iPhone, running Yelp's Monocle, up in front of me and peer through the screen, which has activated the camera and shows me, on the screen, what is actually out in front of me--reality. As I move the iPhone around in 3D space, overlays appear in the direction of restaurants ahead of me in that direction--augmenting reality in real time with overlaid information. I just follow.

I can touch any of the overlays, which contain a name and up to a 5 star rating to get detailed information about the restaurant. The Monocle guides me to the location I choose!

This is nothing short of radical!

Imagine the day you walk in front of a restaurant and the Monocle shows you the menu. Or, you walk by a store and the Monocle shows you the sale items inside!

I ordered Snow Leopard from Apple so it would be waiting for me when I arrived home from the east coast on Friday. I was most annoyed that Apple required a signature for the $50 shipment (I ordered the family pack)! Since I wasn't yet in LA when the FedEx truck stopped by, I had to go wait in line at the FedEx shipment center (5 miles away) to pick it up.

The intent in ordering it was to have it at the door; otherwise, I could have just driven to the Apple store which was only 1 mile away and stood in their awful lines. I'm completely over waiting in line to get Apple's products! Annoying!

I installed the OS on a laptop I use as a spare. I haven't always had good experiences upgrading Apples operating systems: slower processors they claim fall within their specs have run so significantly slower with previous upgrades as to be rendered useless. So I wanted to try it on the machine I use least, first.

It appeared to work fine. In fact, much to my shock, the machine seems to run faster! Maybe the speed difference is the result of the new 64 bit OS? So I then installed it on the newest machine in the house, the iMac that serves as a media server. It too had no install issues. Today, I'll try another machine.

The one new feature I've noticed that I really like is in System Preferences under Date & Time: Time Zone: Set time zone automatically using current location. The system checks the known location of wireless devices to locate the physical location of the machine and sets the clock accordingly. Immediately locating me, the system identified my city/state, and then set the time accordingly. I love this feature. As much as I travel, this should come in very handy!

While appreciating their search functionality, I've been rather ambivalent about Google. But in recent days, I've decided it's time for me to explore other options aside from using Google exclusively for so many things.

Yesterday I went to demonstrate setting up a free Blogger account. Now Google requires the user give Google a cell phone number to set up a free account! This isn't an option. Claiming the need to reduce spurious blog accounts, if you want a Blogger blog, you must give Google a cell phone number. Google will send that number a code which then must be input to continue the setup process.

This makes me angry.

How dare they!

But it gets even worse!!

Quoted directly from Apple's response to the FCC, Apple claims that one of the reasons the Google Voice App (which would allow iPhone and I think iPod Touch users the ability to place phone calls from their device without using AT&T, a corporation I loathe) was rejected from the iTunes App Store:

In addition, the iPhone user’s entire Contacts database is transferred to Google’s servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways. These factors present several new issues and questions to us that we are still pondering at this time.

What?! I wonder if the end user would have even been aware of such a devious action?! Oh it would probably have been buried deep within the bowels of some user agreement 99% of us just click "I Accept" without reading.

In my mind, this is despicable conduct.

Yes, Google has become too big, too powerful, and is collecting too much information. I no longer trust them.