In LA

Apple’s publicity strategy for new products often involves keeping information about the products secret until the next major conference or other event at which the press and public gathers. In this way they generate a lot of hype for a relatively low cost.

So the fact that Apple announced the new line of Mac Pro desktop computers a week before the upcoming MacWorld conference tells me two things:

• They want to get this lesser product announcement out of the way so that they have more time to focus on something big.
• They want to get this lesser product announcement out into the press before it is completely overshadowed by the fireball of hype that will be generated by next week’s announcements. Announcing it after the conference’s keynote address will ensure that few will hear of it.

So obviously I’m expecting at least one big, new product announcement next week. If you’re the sort of person who gets excited over such things, I suspect you won’t be disappointed. My hope is for an announcement of the much-rumored new solid-state subnotebook. If other rumors are true, such as that the new machine features a touchscreen (particularly one that can be used with a pressure-sensitive stylus for sketching) or is a tablet rather than a notebook, that’d be even more interesting in an exotic sense, but I think just a really lightweight notebook would be a major-enough announcement to cause Apple to strategically push the Mac Pro news out of the limelight.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple rumor, Macintosh, OS X, rumor

If you use a mac and are curious about the whole RSS thing, or already read news sites and blogs and whatnot with an RSS reader, you could do worse than download a free copy of NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire is awesome, and it’s an app I paid good money for when there were plenty of free alternatives. Now that it’s free, there’s no reason not to give it a spin.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Deals, free, Macintosh, OS X, rss, software

This post is going to be very geeky, and is probably only relevant for those of you who do any film editing or VFX work.

Today I needed to process a few clips with Shake to convert their colorspace from Panalog to linear. Rather than just do a bunch of pointing and clicking in the Shake gui to process each clip, I figured it might be worthwhile to spend a little bit of time scripting now to save a lot of time and finger joint wear and tear later.

I wanted my script to process any clip thrown at it, and to render out the result as a 1920×1080 Apple Prores 422 QuickTime file at 23.98fps. The script would append “_PL” to the filename before the extension to indicate that a panalog conversion had been done, so if the original file was A38.mov, the resulting file after running the command “myscript.sh A38.mov” would be “A38_PL.mov”.

I typed “shake -help |& less” to browse through Shake’s available command line arguments, and to find out how to address the “panalog4lin” macro I would be using to do the conversion.

There were two problems that made this a not-so-straightforward task. The first was that there is no way that I can find to tell Shake what kind of QuickTime file you’d like it to write (most professional users likely have it write out individual Cineon or DPX files for each frame, which would have been a simpler solution but didn’t fit our workflow). I found in the manual how to set Shake’s default QuickTime format, and set it to ProRes 422 1920×1080 in a .h file. The second problem was that Shake only renders out one frame by default unless you tell it the time range you’d like it to render. My script would have to know the duration of a clip to process all of its frames. Luckily I could use Shake’s “-info” flag to determine the duration of a clip.

Here’s the script (looks pretty simple eh?):

#!/bin/tcsh
set duration = `shake "$1" -info |& grep "Duration" | cut -d ":" -f 3`
shake -fi "$1" -t $duration -panalog4lin 1 1 -fps 23.98 -fo "$1:r_PL.mov"

I wanted to apply the conversion to all of the clips whose name contained the string “AT”, so I typed the following at the tcsh prompt:

% foreach foo (*AT*)
foreach? echo "processing $foo"
foreach? myscript.sh "$foo"
foreach? end

I walked away, ates some food, came back, and a set of clips that had been converted to linear space were sitting there waiting for me. Excellent!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macintosh, OS X, Panavision Genesis, software, unix, vfx

I have an extra cell phone battery or two lying around, and have occasionally been on long flights that would have felt less long if my iPod could have played a few extra hours of video. I’ve noticed there are some commercially available devices that can charge an iPhone for sale on the net, but they are either expensive or are a little bulky due to their use of AA batteries. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just use small, high-capacity, and cheaply available lithium ion batteries to act as an emergency battery pack for my iPod and other devices that charge over USB?

I’m in the process of thinking this through, and my knowledge of electronics is rudimentary. Here’s my current line of thought:

1. Whereas, iPods charge from a USB port, and
2. Whereas, USB provides 5V at 100mA (up to a max of 500mA, thus saith maxim in APPLICATION NOTE 3241 Charging Batteries Using USB Power), and
3. Whereas, my extra treo battery provides 3.6V (at ?mA), and
4. Whereas, many auto USB chargers for iPod currently on the market do not work with iPhones,
5. Now, Therefore, I would likely need to step-up the voltage from my Treo battery, and hopefully get sufficient amperage out of it. I do not know the reason that many chargers on the market do not work for the iPhone/Ipod Touch, but it does look as though other folk have figured it out. I’m going to pore over those ladyada forum postings and try to understand their fix for the problem before I try to build my own adapter.

Anyways, a fun project to think about. I’m at the thinking stage now, will write more if I actually take any action on this.

It would seem that progress has already been made on porting my favorite Chinese input method for OS X to the iPhone (Chinese URL, English URL¹ ).

If 3rd party application development is to proceed at this rapid pace in countries in which the iPhone is not even yet sold (China), and without the distribution of an official SDK, and with not just a lack of support but an antagonistic attitude on the part of Apple towards the use of 3rd-party applications and the users who love them –just imagine how quickly the stable of quality iPhone apps will grow with the existence of an SDK, as iPhones begin to be sold around the globe.

A very good call on Apple’s part to open up the phone to outside developers. As a wise man once said, “developers developers developers developers!” Apple does well to not give a cold shoulder to the people who actually want to develop apps (and thus add value to) the iPhone.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Chinese, Chinese IME, Chinese Language, IME, iPhone, Macintosh, OS X, Pinyin, SMS, software

1. half-assed translation courtesy of babelfish [↩]

To use iChatAV, you’ll either need a free .mac or free AIM ID. Here’s how to get an AIM ID and how to set it up for use with iChatAV:

1. Go to www.aim.com in your favorite web browser.
2. 
   Find and click the “Get a Screen Name” link on the AIM web page. Right now it’s at the upper right of the page. Don’t bother with the much more prominent links on the page to install AOL’s lame AIM software.
3. Follow the prompts to make an AIM screen name. Your screen name has to be unique, and you won’t be able to register as your first name alone because there are probably thousands of people who got there first. If you don’t want to end up with the kind of unique but random-number-encumbered and difficult-to-remember screen name that the form will suggest to you, such as “James4258″, you might try include your last name. You can of course skip using your name entirely and do whatever you like. Be sure to choose a password you can remember. You’re not likely to conduct financial transactions over iChatAV, so the password really doesn’t have to be very secure in my opinion.
4. 
   iChat icon
   Find the iChatAV icon in your dock and click it to launch iChatAV. If you have removed iChatAV from your dock, you’ll need to open up your /Applications folder and find it.
5. 
   
   iChatAV will pop up a window boasting of its greatness and regaling you with tales of its many heroic deeds. Hit the ‘Continue’ button.
6. 
   click the image to see a larger version
   Now iChatAV will present you with a form. Click the popup menu and select ‘AIM Account’ so that iChatAV knows you’re entering an AIM screen name and not a .mac ID. Enter all your info, then hit the ‘Continue’ button.
   
7. Time to skip through a few more forms without doing any more setup. iChatAV will provide you with a form to “Set up Jabber Instant Messaging”. You can skip this and hit the ‘Continue’ button. Just hit the ‘Continue’ button to skip through the next form as well, the one that asks “Do you want to turn on Bonjour Messaging?”. The next screen will show you an image of yourself if your computer has a camera, hit ‘Continue’ to skip ahead.
8. Hit the ‘Done’ button and iChatAV will launch. You’ll see a ‘Buddy List’ window. Once you add some buddies to your list, this is where you’ll see that their online and available for a chat. There’s a nice document at Apple which explains how to add buddies to your buddy list, among other tips for using iChatAV.

See you on iChat!

If you have a MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, Intel iMac, or Intel-based Mac Mini, and would like to be able to run the occasional Windows application, there are a couple of options for you:

• Boot Camp - the only option for gaming due to the fact that none of the other solutions really support DirectX 9, but to use Boot Camp requires a reboot, a repartitioning of your hard drive, and devoting a decent slice of disk space to the boot camp partition (absolute minimum of 5Gb).
• Parallels Desktop - Runs a virtualized PC inside your Mac. Pretty quick and convenient. Can run Windows from a disk image or a boot camp partition. For a long time the only game in town. I use this.
• VMware Fusion - Newcomer to the mac from a company with a long history of virtualization products for Windows and Linux. From the sound of things, may be equivalent or superior to Parallels Desktop in features and function.

Boot Camp is free. Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion both normally cost $79, but today I see that Buy.com is selling VMware Fusion for $36.75 after rebates.

I occasionally run Windows 2000 on my Mac in Parallels to use Internet Explorer (IE) to use Chinese websites that only work right in IE, and to test websites in IE. I chose Windows 2000 because runs much faster than the bloated XP, the disk image is smaller (under 1Gb to start), and it runs the latest version of IE just fine.

If you want to be able to run Windows apps alongside your Mac apps, this does seem like a pretty good deal.

Technorati Tags: Apple, buy.com, Deals, hot deal, Linux, Macintosh, OS X, parallels desktop, rebate, software, virtualization, vmware fusion, Win2K, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows XP

Today I captured the last of the footage from the film’s 402 HDCam SR tapes, all shot on the Panavision Genesis camera. The total number of clips I’ve logged and captured¹ for this film: 10,062. That’s got to be some kind of record.

1. If you don’t know what this post means, what a Genesis is, etc, don’t worry. This post is just a brief bit of gloating. I’ll cover some of the details later. [↩]

• This keyboard waffle iron, by designer Chris Dimino, makes QWERTY keyboard shaped waffles. They look tasty.
• The Hide-a-Pod iPod and iPhone anti-theft device:

  Just tell us what iPod model you want to protect and we provide a gutted and hinged Zune with our custom molded iPod casing adapter. We also include a custom cable from the Zune’s controls (see FAQ) and audio output jack that you simply plug into your iPod. No iPod modifications are necessary.

  It’s a bit of a cheap shot –the Zune didn’t look¹ all that bad²– but that page is pretty damned funny. Do click through and attempt to buy one (don’t worry, it’s not really for sale, but the ordering page is amusing).

1. especially in brown [↩]
2. at least, the hardware didn’t look bad. Users seem to report plenty of software problems [↩]

Apple released their web browser, Safari, for Windows a couple of days ago, and since then it has been downloaded over a million times. I’d love to know why all those people downloaded it. Was the reason:

• curiosity
• they’re running OS X on their other computer and like Safari
• features
• performance
• security
• to test web pages for browser compatibility
• because they’re playing the game “Steve Jobs says”

Speaking for myself, I downloaded it out of curiosity, and ran it for a few minutes on Chinese Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop (running an Apple app inside of Windows on a Mac - kind of like making turducken out of fruit and building materials). It seemed fine for browsing, I remember feeling that it looked better typography-wise than IE or Firefox on Windows, but I didn’t quantify that feeling with any testing. A million downloads in two days is a big number, I’d love to know the reason why Jane Doe Windows user would download Safari rather than or in addition to Firefox or IE7. I’d also love to know why Apple released Safari for Windows –does Apple feel that releasing a browser for Windows with a bit of a Mac look and feel will attract more people to switch over to OS X?