I got a MacBook Pro this week, and am absolutely loving the thing. The little remote that controls Front Row (and other apps) is so elegant, and I miss it sometimes on my G5. At home, I set up the MBP on top of the fireplace so it’s visible everywhere, and fire up iTunes or Movies. Very handy and cool.
But, the Photo display is tied to iPhoto. I just moved up to Aperture. So, for now, I’ve got my end-of-life iPhoto library sitting next to my shiny new Aperture library. Wasting 18GB of disk space just so I can look at photos from Front Row.
Apple – here’s my wish: make Front Row work with Aperture. Bonus points for extending this to the AppleTV so I can display my photos on my TV…
There’s simply no way I’m going to go back to iPhoto. Aperture freaking rocks. Every time I use it, I learn more about the app and its photo workflow ninja mojo.
I was just chatting with Josh, and was mentioning that the Pachyderm server would be getting additional bandwidth allocated through to the commercial internet, thanks to campus IT.
I was searching for the spelling of a word to describe the price we were quoted. Couldn’t remember if it had an “a” or an “o” in it, and Dictionary came through for me! The dictionary entry even included images that look like actual old-school dictionary woodcuts, likely directly from the Oxford dictionary (perhaps a live image linked from their website?). Regardless, it sure makes for a nice and polished dictionary/thesaurus app. It’s the little things.
Here’s what Dictionary provided me with:
I’m working on my presentation for Museums and the Web, which runs this week in Vancouver (I’ll be in YVR for just over 24 hours, but am so overbooked I will count myself lucky if I get outside except for the cab ride to/from the airport).
I’m using Keynote 2 to author my part of the Pachyderm presentation – I get to present on the technical architecture of Pachyderm, to a non-technical audience. So, instead of bullet-point-filled screens full of acronym soup, I’m trying to use the build transitions to help construct a framework for me to speak to. Nice layers-of-software diagrams, with arrows and boxes and stuff, rather than just acronyms all over the place.
It’s not many screens so far (just a few architecture screens for any propeller-heads in the audience, and a few screenshots that will be used to illustrate the code in action – as opposed to Tom’s UI section).
Keynote 2 makes it so darned easy to make nicely polished presentations. I mean, this thing looks like a freaking Stevenote! And with the new WebKit object, which can be set to not update automatically, it makes it sooo easy to embed a web page onto a presentation slide. Without the scaling artifacts you’ll get with a screenshot of that web page.
I’m sure I’ll be posting a full version of the presentation when it’s done – it’s part of a multi-person Pachyderm-o-rama session covering all aspects of the beast. Should be fun 
I was hoping to use GarageBand instead of Audacity as part of my recording suite, but the stars aren’t aligned…
The only mic I have on my desktop G4 is my iSight camera, which sounds pretty good, but runs at 48KHz. GarageBand only likes 44.1KHz sources, so it doesn’t work.
Doh. Looks like I’ll be sticking with Audacity. There wasn’t a real reason to switch, just that I like GarageBand a lot 
October 26, 2004 · 1 comment
in Uncategorized
King has been at it again…. Keynote Web Viewer Plugin
It’s a plugin for Keynote that provides a WebKit-powered web browser component (the same one used in Safari and OmniWeb) for use in Keynote slides. Very slick. It has some limitations at the moment, but it’s pretty amazing.
Playing quickly with the first release, and watching the demo movie he made, I had an irrational flashback to Cyberdog…
Actually, it finally arrived on Monday, after slightly over 4 months on the waiting list. After it was taken out of the box and plugged in, it took maybe 5 minutes to fully configure the machine. Now, we just have to copy some APOLLO apps and resources on it, and it’s good to go!
This beauty sports dual 2GHz G5 processors, and a moderate-sized 80GB drive – we’ll tie it into our XRAID as soon as the card arrives, so it will have something silly like 3.5TB of storage space. It’s a little RAM starved at the moment, coming with the stock 512MB – that won’t do for long…
I was a little stumped as to how I would configure the server. Previously, I’d had to connect a monitor and do the config locally, logged into the machine “in person”. I actually had to search the docs, and it mentioned Server Assistant. Sure, I’ve used it locally before (you know, standing in front of the server, with a monitor plugged in and all), but I was completely surprised by the remote config function (which I had previously never noticed) – I launched it on my Tibook (on the other side of the building from the new XServe), and it scanned the LAN looking for servers that needed configuring. I selected the shiny new XServe, provided the serial number, and was done the whole process in under 5 minutes, with a fully configured, fully functional, secure application server.
Eric Meyer (and a few others in his comments area) has suggested that the table top in the Tiger iChatAV app might be useful for more than just pretty reflections. What if it also served as a place to share documents? Either as icons (which, when clicked, would open said document), or as thumbnail icons that enlarge when selected.
I would absolutely LOVE this feature. Ideally, it would support sharing of static documents (PDF, images), “live” collaborative documents (SubEthaEdit workspaces), and, perhaps even group web browsing (select a web page document, and follow along with whoever is leading that document browse session…).
This stuff, combined with audio/video/text conferencing, could become insanely useful and powerful!
Here’s my crude attempt at a mockup, taking Eric Meyer’s addition of a textured tabletop to the Apple Tiger iChatAV press image:
Perhaps (hopefully?) someone will come up with something a bit more elegant, but the idea should work… My Shared Documents will show up as icons/thumbnails beneath my video image. Selecting the icon will open the document (either downloading a copy, or connecting to a shared live document, or joining a shared browsing session).
Perhaps something like a drawer of shared documents would be more effective, without filling the video area with icons that might not be so useful? Hmm… Actually I think I might prefer that idea…
I was just iChatting with someone, and the topic of Macromedia Breeze came up. I suggested it would be cool if Keynote could do that kind of thing, and he dryly mentioned that, since it’s just XML, why couldn’t it?
So, I’m poking around, trying to see what it would take to turn a Keynote .key file into a happy standards-compliant MPEG4 .mp4 file that could be played/streamed anywhere.
Looks pretty straightforward (not trivial, though). Start with the Keynote .key APXL file, run an XSLT transformation to an MPEG4 XMT file, compile that into an MPEG4 BIFS file, and then stream it to any compliant player.
How hard could it be? I know… Probably a little harder than it seems. Anyway, I’m going to give it a shot. I’ll report back to the rest of the class when/if I have anything to share.
I’ve had 6 video conferences today, using iChatAV and iSight. Coolest thing ever.
When I got the iSight, I honestly didn’t think I’d actually use it – I figured “Hey, cool toy. Sure is shiny!” and assumed it would sit on a shelf somewhere.
Now, I find myself plugging in the camera right after the keyboard, mouse, and power when I get into my office in the morning. The thing Just Works. It works amazingly well. And being able to see the people you’re working with is pretty cool (as long as they remember to shower and get dressed first… ahem).
