Category: computers

Computer related stuff (and computer-related gadgets).

“God’s Own” AppleScript?

AutomatorAbout a year ago, when Tiger was in Public Beta, Thies told me to check out Automator. I didn’t get around to it because Thies is in the habit of saying things like, “Skype is God’s Own phone.” When everything is “God’s Own” X, then saying something like, “Automator is cool” isn’t going to get me jumping onto BitTorrent, especially since I never grokked AppleScript.

Earlier this year, I gave a talk in Vancouver. After Cal, the lead developer of Flickr, complimented me on it, I decided to see his talk. Okay, so his doesn’t have cool Keynote transitions like mine, but in terms of content, it totally rocks. What he and Ludicorp were able to do building Flickr is textbook case of why LAMP rules in the right hands. Go see his talk! I was impressed.

I registered for Flickr.

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Posted on by tychay 7

Google Video “Up Yours”

Google Video BETA

Hello,

We’d like to remind you that in our continued effort to respect the
rights of copyright holders and content providers, Google is only
accepting video uploads from persons who hold all necessary
rights to the uploaded material.

Both U.S. copyright law and the Google Video Terms of Service
prohibit distributing copyrighted works, unless you have the legal
right to do so. If you’re not sure whether you have the right to use
any of the content you submitted to Google Video, including any
music in the video, you can remove your uploaded video to the
product by following these instructions:

(blah blah blah)

Yeah, that’s nice but you still haven’t verified the two test videos that I uploaded two weeks ago. What’s the point of a “video upload” program if the user can’t download/link it?
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Posted on by tychay 4

Why computer magazines shouldn't review cameras [reprise]

Nikon D70sNikon EOS 350D Rebel

To further emphasize last week’s tirade, PC Magazine usurps C|Net’s position as poster child for digital photography review incompetence. This time it is a review of the Nikon D70s, a small upgrade of my Nikon D70.

Check out this gem:

We love the D70s’ feel and design as much as we did the D70’s, and for those with larger hands, these two models may be preferable to the lighter Canon Rebel XT. The Rebel XT, however, ups the capacity ante to 8MP, which gives you the ability to print very large images, still besting the 6.1MP Nikons. The Canon kit (lens and body) is also cheaper than the D70s kit, although the Nikon lens is longer.

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Posted on by tychay 10

What camera should I buy?

Since I take a lot of photographs with a dSLR, I’m often asked by others for advice on camera purchases.

I think if they saw my photo album, they’d not be asking such questions. In fact, a digital SLR photographer is the last person you should be asking for advice as their needs are different from yours.

But since it was my brother’s wedding and the cell phone just wasn’t cutting it for snapshots, I was enlisted again to advise on a digital camera for the wedding registry.

ken, mia, cellphone camera
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Posted on by tychay 19

Reloading Dashboard Widgets

One of the new features of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is Dashboard. Instead of talking about what Dashboard is, I want to show you a poorly documented feature (and nice eye-candy) that Apple placed in the Dashboard.

While I’m told to think of them as desk accessories/Konfabulator for Mac OS X, I prefer to think of them as Sherlock 2/Watson done right. That is because Dashboard widgets are basically HTML web pages + Javascript + optional Cocoa binding. As such, most dashboard widgets are simply web views. This means that sometimes your dashboard widget may be displaying something that needs updating from the web and it isn’t. Instead of complaining to that the widget developer was too moronic to include a control for widget reloading, you can reload your widget manually by hitting Apple-R.

When you do so you’ll be given a nice little Core Video eye-candy (click the picture below to “get” it).

Posted on by tychay 0

Being Steve Jobs…

One thing I’ll never understand is why people follow what Steve Jobs does so closely. Are these the same people that have a secret stash of People magazine?

They’re in good company though. My co-worker (an ex-HP employee) once said that Carly Fiorina has a bad case of Steve Jobs-envy which pretty much hits the nail on the head. Too bad whenever I see a picture of Carly with rock stars, actors, or entertainment executives, I keep hearing the Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the other… One of these things doesn’t belong…”

Now Gawker has a contest guessing the expletives uttered by Jobs as if it is impossible to utter an 8 letter cuss word.
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Posted on by tychay 4

Does the Pokémon effect apply to Tiger developers?

In his quid pro quo effort to convert me to the Dark side of the Force, Mark sent me this reference to a Gizmodo article.

WWDC trading card handGo to the site, and read some. The special powers are a nice touch. I wonder which cards are rare? I want the Jobs and Avi Tevanian card. Do you think the Phil Shiller card has an animated GIF of his hands gesticulating while he talks about how “cool” Tiger is? Where is the video of Jonathan Ives talking about the design of these cards?

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Posted on by tychay 4

A little bit about iTunes for the iPod generation.

“I felt like a dope, I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”
—Steve Jobs, CEO Apple, Inc. on digital music Fortune

Mark mentioned that he’s planning on buying an iPod Shuffle and later blogged that iTunes is missing features like skins. That hit me as a blast from the past.

Skins was one of the features that got axed when Apple bought SoundJam from Cassady & Greene to create iTunes. A program called Audion supports that and a wealth of other features for those people who need their daily dose of feature creep in their music player. You can read the excellent history of the player that almost was.

I remember buying MacAMP and later SoundJam MP. I remember being really pissed when I found out that iTunes would be introduced and SoundJam would be shelved. I remember skins. Ahh, let me tell you about those days…

They sucked.
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Posted on by tychay 2