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:

Dear Safari RSS team,

Updated 2005/08/01 with thoughts on Flagged vs. Star Ratings

I’ve been using your cool RSS aggregator for a while now, and while it’s really quite good, there are a couple of things you could do to make it really kick ass.

1. Have a “new items only” view – rather than just sorting by New, or sorting by Date, or filtering by “last 7 days” – just show me the new stuff. I’ve got like 15,000 items that appear to get loaded every time I check my feeds. That would drop down to just a hundred or two if I could limit to “New only”. The “Today” filter doesn’t cut it – what if I miss a day? What about Monday mornings? Vacation days? “Last 7 Days” isn’t granular enough. A “New Items” filter should be possible, with the SQL Lite engine storing the feeds and items…
2. Let me collapse/expand entries – sure, the slider dealie to set displayed article length is nice, but what if I could set items to show title only by default, and just twiddle a little knob on the items that I want to read more about to view the full content – without having to affect the displayed article length of every other item on the page
3. Make Safari’s scheduled RSS updates actually, you know, run on a schedule. Often I find that Safari’s forgotten to update for a couple of hours (or it refuses to update after launching, even if it’s the first run of the day). Seems like clicking on my “feeds” folder in the Bookmarks Bar and causing it to start loading the feeds seems to trigger an update. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to babysit an automated update though.
4. It’d be really nice if I could override the default “Remove Articles” setting – so I could set it to automagically purge items after a couple of months, but I could set a feed (or folder of feeds, or whatever) to keep items for a different period (shorter, longer, infinite, whatever). I know it’d be a bit more confusing for the UI, but if I could “Get Info” on a feed, and have access to the settings there, it wouldn’t be in any newbies’ faces…
5. While I’m at it, why can’t I “Get Info” on any bookmark and add additional information? Have it capture the text of the page for searching by Spotlight? Add additional keywords/tags to a bookmark (you know, like the Finder’s “Spotlight Keywords” field) – personal folksonomies in my Bookmarks…
6. How about a “Flagged” bit on a blog entry? With a corresponding “Flagged Items” filter view? Makes it much easier to find stuff that I’ve found interesting before, and kinda makes the persistent store of feeds and items, you know, useful…

OK. That’s it for now. Keep up the great work. If there’s anything I can do to help out, just give me a shout.

Update: Just had a “duh” moment – instead of just having a “flagged” bit (which is by definition a binary toggle), what about following iTunes and iPhoto by having star ratings for feeds and items? Then I could filter on previous items that were ranked 3 stars or higher… Actually, following the iTunes/iPhoto model for “get info” would work as well – being able to set multiple DublinCore-ish fields to help find stuff later…

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

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).