Category: Apple

Apple NAB 2007 Final Cut Server, Final Cut Studio2, Color

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher media

Mike Curtis did a great job in writing a point by point list of todays announcement

Here my comments to these Announcements from Apple:
It is nice that all that has been shown is actual product. I am sure that Discreet will tease us this afternoon with ‘technology demos’ that actually look exciting. But their track record of making products out these bits is mixed, to say the least.

Apple did go close to the line -if not over it- in a couple of ways themselves: The new multi resolution / multi frame rate timeline in FCP is amazing. Nothing short of that. It needs computing and gfx power. It would have been nice to mention how much of it you actually use.

The Soundtrack pro demo used Zodiac footage. Which is nice. What was not nice was that they converted the footage all wrong. I never saw the pictures of that movie being that ugly. It’s a soundtrack, not a color or fcp demo, but still. Apple can not use their own tools it seems.

Motion 3 looks amazing. It has tracking and a 3D environment. Bullet point featurewise Final Cut Studio2 is up to par with Flame in the year 2000 it seems. Not bad. Motion did always demo extremely sexy, but it’s uptake in the real world has been limited. Maybe Motion 3 can change that. Apple did a typical Apple by claiming that they now have solved 3D tracking and made it easy to use and just work. That remains to be seen. The demo track was actually kind of pointless. Some Text hovering around in space, nicely far way from the object to be tracked. This would have been a good day for Apple with the real product they had to show for, I do not understand why they had to exaggerate certain things so needlessly.

The quality of the content usedof the demos was actually, well, dismal. On Zodiac they did the dpx conversions wrong, and the other material was really really bad.

I think that Apple should detach their applications from the content section. Have one DVD for all applications!
Then if people like to have demo presets, footage etc, they can
go into the ‘content manager’ (I dreamt that up, it does not exist). Ideally this one would be able to load and manage all those sound loops (god! they even were proud of those free 150 tracks that you get with Soundtrack Pro) Motion Presets (those are as hiddeous as you average default gif collection on the web) etc etc. Either from 27 Data DVDs that apple can provide or that people can / will copy. Or content from a website. Were people can share their loops, clips, fx you name it.

The upside would be that the application install would go fast (like it does for shake) and would not put all that bloat on the disk. And the people that like to have these collections they
can get even more by subscribing to those for instance. Everybody would be much happier.

Compressor 3 looks interesting. It can do lots of nice things by now. Final Cut Server is a product where there is huge need.
Now you would think that they interact with each other. Actually
Compressor3 should be just a function of the media management tool. You would think. Well, apple thinks differently right now. The Compressor3 demo did not mention Final Cut Server3 once. Apple might need to do a bit more integration there. I am not holding my breath in term of “Server”. But then again the Red camera might as well exist tomorrow, and a year ago I said that there would be no way that it would.

one gig is not enough

Apple history OSX technology

Thirteen years ago I worked for the first time on a SGI computer. “Super Computer” as it’s owners liked to call it whenever they could. They spent more than you would pay for mid sized house on it’s memory alone. It had 1GB RAM. Telling people casually about this machine back in the day I had to emphasize: No, not the hard drive, the RAM is one Gigabyte. There were a handful of computers of this size in Germany back in the day.

Yesterday I saw somebody beach-ball on a MacBook. She just uses it for the normal communication things you do these days, no ‘heavy’ applications. This computer had the same memory size: one Gigabyte. And it is not enough. The machine was swapping. Horribly slow.

Something is a bit odd here: Using one gigabyte you could store one million pages of text. Or one thousand books with a thousand pages each. Or you could fill the screen of the laptop with 350 layers of images. 349 of them being invisible.

Memory is cheap these days. But wasting a whole GB is something that might
lead to the wasting a whole 16GB in a few years. That memory one could use probably for real useful things as well.

not that easy

Apple technology

March 11, and the spring-forward Daylight Savings Times goes into effect earlier. Right now (0:11am pacific) my properly updated OS X 10.4.8 dashboard is showing the time for central europe 1 hour to early. Which is amusing since Apple did indeed update it’s operating system. The change in DST was initiated in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Four weeks more time shift. It might be that the upcoming confusion next week is more costly for the economy than those hours of sunlight during peoples waking hours save resources and therfor money.

The underlying systems, servers and services will do just fine with the change. We still have 31 years left to fix all the equipment that has a sense of time.

Looking in my crystal ball after it’s DST confusion has cleared up, I see allot of bad software working oddly. Millions of people shrugging their shoulder because their computers time is now off by one hour. Corporate support desks will have a busy monday. It’s really bad software and the interaction with human readable time where the change might cause troubles.

As crazy as it is, some people just buy a new computer next week, one that shows the time correctly. And of course there will be poster child snafus that the media will be all over. Some big corporation loosing millions because of a weird cascade of events, triggered by a pointless law.

I would be very surprised if this years DST change would go as smooth and seamless as the last ten did.

command line airport application

Apple technology


/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport --help

beat’s counting bars.

broken things

Apple technology

The screen goes dark on an iBook G3 that my wife used to use. Turns out that this is a very common problem with iBooks G3 machines. Google does do a good job in showing related results. But imagine it could do a better job! How if computer makers would give their models google-able individual ‘names’. Those could be anything, as long their use is easy and encouraged by their nature. Bugs could be tracked. There could be a whole new industry around this: I rather write some new code then to battle 50 tiny screws on that iBook. But somebody else might have fixed a few of those iBooks already. Putting a bigger harddrive in while the machine is open. It’s old, but still a very neat machine. Who cares about the Mhz? The white iBook is a great little computer. One worth fixing. One capable ‘enough’.

would you like to save this password?

Apple

When going to a website with a password both firefox and safari ask if they should save the password.
Which is an ok thing to do. But who thought that it would be a good idea to ask this BEFORE you know that it was the right password. Ideally the browser would ask you after the page has been loaded. Then you know if it worked or not. Sure, that is a little bit more work for the coder. But that extra day of coding would be well spent. After all, that’s what we are doing all day: Getting those odditiies out of your computer uses. Allot of work, but it seperates crap from things that you would like to use tomorrow as well.

os x server is junk!

Apple linux marketing

People see the shiny rack mountable Apple Servers. And then they make the mistake to buy them. Don’t! They are way to expensive. But the worst is, that they are impossible to administrate: It’s pretty much all different. And then when you spent hours and hours to go through the documentation you just have to realize that what you need is simply not there.

I wanted to change the default umask for a user that creates files on the afp server. Too bad. Not possible.

Using mac laptops since years I get to appreciate that the computer is not getting into the way when I want to do things.
Linux is a bit different, you have to google a bit for what you want to do. But 80% of it is pretty damn easy. OS X is just plain obscure. It really is a waste of time. Nobody should be believe that you actually got a unix box when you buy OS X server. What you get is some perverted BSD box that no sane sysadmin would like to deal with it. Phew.

Just try to use a device under OS X (server or not) if you have any doubts.

thanks giving

Apple misc technology

Sony and Ericsson embark on getting us the TV watch again. That’s right, now that the PS3 obviously exists I have to find something else to hit over Sonys wide head. I think that the recent Nielsen Study makes allot os sense. There is just not much content that you want to watch on a tiny little device like an iPod or Zune for that matter. Microsoft hopes that the later one, being much better equiped for video, will benefit from a new usage pattern. I doubt it will be huge. I could see sports fans wanting to watch certain highlights when they actually happen. Or just around that time. But it needs to be easy and cheap.

Yet, I am hardly the average target group: this watch is not geeky to me. My geek watch would read 1164342294 right now. That’s the number of seconds since January first 1970. And yes being a real geek watch it would roll over when 32 bits are exhausted to express this in January 19, 2038.

The Washington post had a look at the Wii and the PS3. Makes allot of sense what they are writing. PS3 is pretty, but Wii has the better ‘fun factor’ for non hard core gamers it seems. I really wonder if people will get fitter, now that they will play standing. Will we see xbox and ps3 with Wii like controllers? technically that should be feasible. Guitar hero on PS2 was hugely sucessful and came with a guitar. Maybe there will be games for Xbox 360 that include it’s own set of Wii like controllers? Maybe Nokia comes out with a cellphone that does use the motion sensor not to write stupid message. Or, wait, can’t I use the motion sensor in my laptop? That’s actually a game I did not get around to write: The virtual Brio Labyrinth. try to get that ball around the parcour by juggling your laptop.
2 people could compete. It’s not that we not having ideas …

The 250 Million Dollar iPod add on

Apple daily life technology

that would be a Boeing 747

When I saw the headline in BlogsNow I had hoped for Apple picking up the much beloved Connexion system. Just because I want somebody to. Not that it would make any sense for Apple or the airlines. Wishful thinking. Purely egoistical. Free WiFi everywhere. It’s just a matter of time. What I love-love-love is the fact that my ssh sessions which is more or less 35 year old technology applied with safety work on my mac laptop together with it. Apple+ssh+free wife -> Dream come true. I really can work from everywhere. Not just answer email. The blackberry proud can do that. I mean real work, like making things. It is pretty awesome.

I sat in the Yahoo! office complex in LA this morning, free WiFi from Tully Coffee. Some Starbuck’s clone that ‘gets it’: they have free Wifi, as it should be. It was great to have both laptops going, sitting outside, have a Bagel and a coffee. Biggest treat was to see the Yahoo! and HBO worker bees congregating at the water hole during their morning routine and not being one of them.

Apparently Tully coffee makes you ramble incoherently. Sorry.

data management

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher media photo technology

Stu Maschwitz writes about data management for digital still photography

It is so very true. We can generate lots of data, some of it might be of potential value for us in the future. The filesystem keeps the it for us. But that’s about it. There is almost no help from the computer to really manage data. Yet that’s one of these things that computers could be really really good at: organising data. Spotlight was a nice attempt. But Apple of all companies messed up the interface. The underlying search technology seems to be working, but the interface is pretty much useless.
In order to find the ‘spacehogs’ on my drives I had to write a perl script that shows me which data is stored in which folders (including it’s sub folders). Should be simple for the OS to just show me where those GBs have been going. Yet I had to gapher tape my own solution, which is never a good sign.