Three months without something on here, the very least I can do is wish you all a happy new year.
The crazyness of the last few months is now coming to an end, so the new year is time to start looking at my own projects again. Usermesh is probably the most likely direction for me to continue in, but there’s the 9th anniversary of Chatbear coming up which also makes me consider doing something in that area.
One thing is for sure is that there is going to be more writing. Not necessarily on here, but somewhere.
I struggle with motivation. Ideas are easy. I can drop them like Hansel and his sister can drop breadcrumbs. That’s why Alertbear went so well. All I had to do was keep coming up with the ideas and make sure somebody else was motivated enough to turn them into reality.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on usermesh, a different kind of social networking site that I conceived of a while ago. This isn’t the time to get into why I think it’s worthwhile producing ANOTHER one of these (in short, usermesh will actually give you something to DO), but what I’m finding is that the ideas are coming even thicker and faster now that I’m doing something productive again. I thought of a use for the allapple.com domain I’ve had kicking around for all these years, I’ve had thoughts of technology blogs, wedding websites and mechanical turks. Even the venerable Chatbear piqued my interest earlier today as I considered removing features from it rather than adding them.
What happens eventually is that somebody else has the same idea and stronger motivation. whatfilm is a site that I constantly wish was better than it was. I still keep up a list of all the films I see in the hope that I’ll sit down and write reviews of them, but it never seems to work out. The original concept of a site which recommended films based on your tastes and a few simple questions (hence the domain name) seems a million miles away. Somebody else will probably do it before long (they may already have and I just don’t know), the way Giant Bomb have finally done the Gamesplayer idea of mine from about 8 years ago.
None of this helps me of course. I may struggle with motivation, but I certainly don’t struggle for ways to heap scorn upon myself for not seeing ideas through.
Yea, it’s been a while since I added something on here, four months in fact. I don’t think I’ve ever gone quite so long without dipping my toe in the waters of the blog world.
I subscribe to Google Alerts for the word Alertbear, and it just found me this. It’s a very thorough review of the original Alertbear release, the RSS reader that I designed. It really is quite a gushing piece, which makes me feel great. It’s only a shame that the project died a death.
This is my response to a blog post by Stephen Poole, slightly edited to make it standalone. It’s also a subject that came up on this week’s Macbreak Weekly, so it’s already been on my mind this week.
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If you’re currently making a living from writing books, composing music, or making movies, then you may be forgiven for thinking the Internet has you under seige. Everywhere you look it seems that people want you to give away your content for free, as if everything you do no longer has any value and it’s a basic human right that everyone be able to do as they please with anything you produce. You are basically being told that if you wish to continue to be creative, you’re mad to think anybody is going to pay you to do it.
This really is not the case.
The argument is not that anyone who is creative should be denied payment for their efforts, but simply that those who are going to be the most successful going forward are those that embrace a new business model, rather than continue to cling on by their fingernails to the old one.
The record companies are a perfect example of what happens when you cling on too tightly. At first they tried to pretend the Internet didn’t exist, and then when Napster came along they sat there and just lashed out at anybody that tried to take away their comfort zone. Then they woke up a bit, and at least admitted they needed to do something. But they lock up their songs up with DRM, sue anybody who ever touches a file sharing network, and in one Sony case, install malicious software on your customers computer. This is simply not the way to conduct yourself. Not only is it hugely damaging to their brand, but it also devalues music even further, as those who truly do like the rebellion distance themselves even further from the money grabbing corporate whores the music executives appear to be. The harder the music companies push, the harder it is for them to win back the mindshare.
But some of them are beginning to get it. iTunes was the first real step in actually providing what people wanted, easy access to the songs people wanted. And unlike Napster, you had a 100% chance of actually getting the song you wanted to download, with proper tags, and not an MP3 rip of a song recorded from the radio with a DJ talking in Spanish over the end. Starting to allow DRM-free versions, even in their previously feared MP3 format at Amazon, shows that they have finally realised you should treat your customers as people first, and thieves later; not the other way around.
The lesson from this is that change should not be feared. Grab the internet generation with both hands and use them to your advantage, rather than locking your doors and cowering in the corner with your old business model pressed tightly to your chest, afraid that the mob is coming to steal it from you. For musicians this means giving away a few tracks from your new album for free and selling the rest, with a premium for the higher quality lossless versions. Or selling complete recordings of all your live shows. And using the momentum from this to sell more tickets to your next show (see TMBG and Barenaked Ladies). For writers, this means giving away your last book for free in order to create publicity for the one you’re about to release in hard copy. Or giving away the first couple of chapters for free as an incentive to buy the rest. Or selling your novel one chapter at a time, as you write it (see Stephen King). And if you’re a movie producer, let people download the first 30 minutes of your movie for free and then let them buy the DVD containing the rest of the film direct from your website.
And most importantly, take the feedback from your audience, interact with them, let their word of mouth be your marketing machine and never treat them like criminals. People will be more than happy to pay for your work if the price and terms are fair. At the end of the day these are your customers, and for the first time in human history creative people have the opportunity to truly communicate with those who appreciate their art en mass, and that should be something artists should be excited about, not fearful of.
My PC broke. All of a sudden it started randomly giving me blue screens, either before I managed to login, or shortly afterwards. To determine whether it was a problem with Windows or the hardware itself I decided that installing Linux wouldn’t be a bad idea. That didn’t work either. It doesn’t even get 80% of the way through the installation before it just gives up, freezing completely. I’ve installed Linux just fine before, so it definitely seems like something is amiss.
I’m at the stage now where actually debugging something like this is not what I want to do, I just want the thing to work. So since the machine is a few years old anyway, time to order something new.
I didn’t want to spend a fortune, and I’m no big PC gamer these days, so top of the line specs aren’t really that big a deal for me. I want it to be quiet. I want it to be reasonably good looking. I want a big screen. So here’s what I ended up with…
Total cost is about £800, which I think is pretty awesome considering the spec.
The worst part is that I now have to build the thing, which is something I didn’t want to have to deal with anymore. But from a price point of view, it still seems like the way to go, if you’re up to the challenge of picking the parts. There are so many model numbers, so much choice, and Intel and Nvidia are innovating so fast that it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of their respective product lists. It took lots of Googling and lots of looking at other peoples complete systems to come up with this one.
My original idea was that I would install OS X, and the parts I’ve bought are specifically chosen to allow that. But then I read that 10.5.2 turned machines that weren’t real Macs into bricks. Now there’s a workaround to that, if you follow a specific set of instructions, but is that something I really want to worry about? Do I want to put a whole bunch of data in there and then find it breaks one day because Apple make a change? No. I don’t. That’s why I bought Vista.
So there we go, my new home PC. Not top of the line, but easily a step up from what I’ve got at the moment. And not just because that’s broken.
The job of an ISP is to allow access to the Internet for their customers. For that service, they charge the user on a monthly basis. Why should the BBC, just because they are providing a now popular destination for those customers, provide any sort of financial backing to the ISP? The ISP is charging for a service, if they are unable to provide that service at the cost they are passing onto the consumer, then their business model is flawed and they should be charging more than they are.
And why single out the BBC? Are the ISP’s going to make similar demands to anybody else who creates a site to which customers flock? Is YouTube on the line? Or Flickr? Are they going to come knocking on my door if I create something that really starts pumping out those bits?
The ISPs seem to have misunderstood their position in the Internet hierarchy. They are a gateway to content, not a gatekeeper (and they don’t want to be a gatekeeper, for that makes them liable for everything that passes through). Asking to be paid from both sides is not only greedy, but it starts a slippery slope for both consumers and web content providers.
I’ve had my Apple TV for a few weeks now and I’m using it every night. I’m a podcast whore, which was one of my main reasons for buying it, because it means I now get to watch them on the big screen in my living room. Diggnation, Tekzilla and the other Revision3 shows do look very nice in HD on there. And for the audio stuff I listen to, the various shows from the TWIT network come out a lot clearer than they do via my laptop speakers. One thing that does bother me though is the necessity to still download this on my laptop and then sync it across, as it seems like an unnecessary step. The unit itself has an Internet connection which is perfectly capable of downloading items, it’s even possible to browse the podcast directory on my television screen, just not actually subscribe to anything. I can only hope this somewhat bizarre oversight is fixed in a future revision.
I don’t yet have my music in a place that is easily accessible for synching over to the unit, but that’s something that I hope to resolve in the coming months as I reorganise my computer setup. But it is nice that the limited music I do have available on my laptop can be streamed to the Apple TV and out of my computer by selecting it as a speaker output within iTunes, just like you’ve been able to do with an Airport Express.
Purchasing content straight from the Apple TV is fast and painless, and although I was initially going to complain that the search functionality was almost completely crippled by the slowness of the on-screen keyboard, I’ve since realised that this is because of some weirdness with my universal remote as switching to the one shipped with the unit makes the interface feel much snappier. I do think though that £1.89 per show for TV is a bit much, and is unlikely to sway me from the less reputable sources of the stuff. Even buying whole series is overly expensive. It’s about £20 for a season of Friends, when the same thing on DVD is easily available for less than £10. They’re going to have to do something about that if they really want to compete with torrents.
Overall, I’m pleased with the purchase, and will get even more from it once my music can be synched across. I’d like to finish by making a special mention of the photo screensaver, it’s an excellent touch that has everyone who sees it just fascinated.
Hacking the iPhone is incredibly easy. I did it with ZiPhone and the process was thus…
1. Close iTunes, disconnect the phone from your Mac.
2. Open up Activity Viewer and find the “iTunes Helper” process and kill it.
3. Plug the phone into your Mac with the supplied cable.
4. Start ZiPhone.
5. Click the option of your choice on the left. I’m sticking with O2, so just wanted to Jailbreak it.
6. Click Go.
7. Wait 45 seconds.
8. Marvel at the new Installer option that’s been added to your home screen.
I don’t guarantee all these steps are required, but these are what worked for me.
The iPhone is a great device, but once it’s jailbroken and you can start installing stuff on there, it becomes an amazing device. I’ve spent a lot of time playing Solitaire and Lights Out, two nice little games. MobileScrobler lets you listen to last.fm radio stations and playlists and automatically updates your profile with what you’ve been listening to on the device as you listen to it, and that’s very cool. ScummVM lets you play Monkey Island and the other Lucasarts games, although I found it quite difficult to point at things just by tapping. And although it has no Google Talk support (really, where is a working Google Talk client? Isn’t it just Jabber?), MobileChat does a good job at connecting to other IM networks like MSN. And don’t underestimate the power of installing SSH and a Terminal client on there, to allow remote access to the servers of your choice.
The app store is coming from Apple in June, at which point a lot of this stuff is going to become a lot more official, but I’m very impressed by what has been made possible without official help. I’m looking forward to seeing where people take it next.
Thanks to work, I got myself an iPhone. I’ve been using it now for almost a couple of weeks, and I thought it worth throwing some thoughts up here on my impressions thus far.
I’ve been a Sony Ericsson user ever since I got my first mobile 7 or 8 years ago, as I’ve always just preferred their interface to what Nokia were doing. That means I’m upgrading from a k800i, but it’s not really fair to put both within the same category of mobile phone, the iPhone really is an entirely different beast. Firstly, there’s the feel of the thing, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it just feels good in your hand. There’s a solid, weighty feel to the device, and the decision to not make the back shiny like the iPod range means it feels warmer and looks cleaner. Then there’s the screen, so vivid, so clear, even in bright sunshine (tested that today), that any kind of content just looks gorgeous.
Interface wise it’s not too much of a surprise to me, since I’ve been using an iPod Touch for the past few months. It’s all laid out sensibly, and you can find your way around fairly intuitively. The camera is not anywhere near as bad as I’d read, giving nice clear images. The problem seems to be that it updates at a pretty slow rate, and holding the device steady is incredibly difficult. This tends to give you very bright, but slightly blurry, photos. The interface is always responsive, and it’s simply a surprise that it all works as well as the demos on the Apple website have always shown. And it doesn’t matter how many times you turn the device into landscape mode to look at a photo, it’s still cool to see the photo automatically rotate with you.
Text input, the bane of any portable device, actually works quite nicely. The trick is simply to ignore any mistakes you might be making and keep on typing, allowing the auto-correct to pick up any mistakes you’ve made. It really is freakishly accurate, even on words where you’ve barely hit a single key correctly, it still somehow manages to come up with the right word. It would be nice if a similar thing was available on OS X too, it would save me a lot of time. Web access is slow on the EDGE network, but not so slow that it makes it unusable, and it’s certainly just fine for email access. It’s also come in quite handy so far for looking up cinema times when we’ve been out and about, and I’m sure there will be plenty more opportunities in the future for it to shine. Would it be nice if the access was faster? Sure. Is it a deal breaker? Not by a long shot.
There are some annoying things, like notes not synching up with anything, like the Stickies I have on my Mac, or the notes I have in Mail. Or that some applications seem to understand me rotating the screen (like the browser) and others don’t (like Mail). It would be nice to use the entire interface in landscape mode because typing that way is so much easier (bigger keys). But overall, the experience is pleasurable, and simply being able to carry one device in my pocket rather than two (a phone and iPod) is a step forward for me at least.
Coolest moment so far - buying the new Supergrass album directly from the device and having it download all the tracks over the air. It’s like living in the future.
The truth is, stuff like this probably happens quite a lot, it’s just the Internet makes it so much easier for us to find out about it. The magnitude of these people’s stupidity really is quite staggering. Why does believing in a magical being also make some people lose any sense of judgement or intelligence?
That’s a picture of an avalanche ON ANOTHER PLANET. There is something infinitely more exciting about seeing rocks moving than just sitting still, it makes the place so much more real and alive. How long before these probes can return video?
The Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD fight that has been going on over the past couple of years has had all the hallmarks of any good format war, mainly that they’re bad for business, and bad for consumers. Getting anybody to go out and invest in your new HD disc format is hard enough, especially when normal DVD’s are already so entrenched. But when there are two competing formats trying to do the same thing, most consumers decide it’s too risky to choose either, and nobody wins.
Thanks to the inclusion in the Playstation 3, along with strong studio support from the start (it helps when you own one yourself), Sony’s Blu-Ray has been seen as the market leader for a while now, although sales of each format weren’t too far apart thanks to HD-DVD players being significantly cheaper. But in the end, price just proved to not be enough, and with a number of announcements this year from people like Netflix, Best Buy and Walmart saying they would only be supporting Blu-Ray, the writing really did seem to be on the wall for HD-DVD.
And then, in a surprising twist, after hundreds of millions of dollars spent, Toshiba took HD-DVD round the back of the barn, and shot it dead. In a press release this week they announced that they would no longer be producing players, discs, or continuing to promote the format.
Wow.
Never before have I seen a company just admit defeat so readily. Formats normally die slowly as less and less people buy them, and stores fill up more and more with their competitors. Sony never pulled the gun on Betamax or Minidisc with quite the same ferocity, they just kept on going as VHS and the Compact Disc rolled over the top of them. But not Toshiba, they knew they were down and there wasn’t really any comeback, so they did the sensible thing both for their shareholders and potential HD format consumers everywhere and simply held up their hands, congratulated the victor, and moved on. And I think you have to applaud them for that.
Now does anybody want to buy a barely used Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on?
At last. There is now one good Perl editor for OS X. Komodo Edit.
Komodo was promising a couple of years ago when it first came out for OS X, and I actually bought it at the time. But when the switch to Intel came, it was a while before Komodo followed, making it a bit slow and clunky to use. Quite recently I got an email from them saying a new version was out and that I should upgrade, but when I looked, the previously cheap personal edition was gone and it was now quite an expensive application. I didn’t follow up on it.
But then I found out today that the personal edition became Komodo Edit, which in turn became free. So I did what any OS X using Perl programmer would do and headed over there as quickly as I could and you know what, finally somebody gets it.
It has tabs. You can open them whenever you want, no project required (but yes, it has projects too). It has FTP opening and saving in a sensible FTP dialog, complete with bookmarks and the ability to type in your path. When you select a block and press tab, it indents, rather than replacing it with a tab. When you end a line with a brace and press enter, the next line is indented. When you put a brace on a line on it’s own which is already indented, it decreases the indent for you. These (and many more) are the absolute basics of what a code editor should have but which no other Mac text editor gets right. It’s been driving me crazy for years that not one developer has used Editplus or UltraEdit on the PC to see how this should be done and instead keep producing crap like Textmate and Textwrangler.
What’s extra special is the features it has which are the cream on top, like code-sensing for when you type a function name and it tells you the arguments it supports, even in your own custom modules, and there’s even function auto-completion too. And in the FTP functionality (SFTP and SCP too) when you save a file and the remote copy has changed since your version, it doesn’t just warn you, it lets you see a diff of the two of them also. Genius!
Up until now I’ve actually been running a copy of Windows 2000 in vmware, just so I could run Editplus. That’s the difference this is going to make, this is the kind of thing that allows me to throw away my Windows shackles for good and solely use the Mac. I’m just sad that it’s taken almost 10 years of being a Mac owner for somebody to get this right.
Remember when the Star Wars: Episode 1 teaser-trailer hit? Go and check it out now if you don’t remember it. Or the follow up full trailer. Quite simply, it’s fabulous. It is, on some levels, better than the movie that followed. The special effects work, the performances don’t look too bad, it sounds like Star Wars, the music fits, and the last 25 seconds blasts through shot after shot, synched up with the visuals and leaving you (remember, this is back before you actually saw the final product) crying out for more.
I pick Star Wars as a point of comparison, since they’re both Lucasfilm properties, and it would nice if the influence rubbed off. But instead what we’ve been given is like some sort of hack job, knocked together by an intern let loose on the editing software for the first time. The first 36 seconds is spent showing us parts of previous films. If you’ve seen the previous films you know exactly who Indy is and are already excited, and if you haven’t, then this isn’t going to change your mind. Then follows another minute and a half or so of badly paced cuts, questionable CG, bad wigs, bad acting, bad jokes, and musical sync up so bad that about 10 seconds before the end of the trailer the music actually has to start again because it’s run out, before hurriedly having to cut back out again. And do we really need a CG Indiana Jones logo to finish it all?
I had hoped that Spielberg and Lucas would realise that it was in their best interests to keep the effects and sets as practical as possible, and not resort to digitally creating quite so much, but alas this doesn’t seem to be the case. Nobody would say the previous films lacked scale, but at least when cars/tanks/trunks faced off against each other in those, it didn’t look like the drop off the cliff beside them was painted in by an ILM artist.
If you want to check it yourself, here are some hi-res direct links to the international version (which doesn’t have the guns painted out by the MPAA) - Small, Medium, Bigger than your screen.
I am Richard Smith, part time genius, full time procrastinator. I make my bed in Hamilton, Scotland, from where I cast my eye over the Internet like a king surveying his land.
