When you enter a tracking number, it has options for how often it should check. And it supports Growl. So now I know that my iWork-package is at Heathrow, and once an hour Delivery Status will alert me with Growl. Just brilliant.

Delivery Status supports just about any way to deliver a package there is (except pigeons):

- Adobe.com (US and Canada)
- Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.jp, Amazon.de, Amazon.at, and Amazon.fr
- Apple.com (including all international stores)
- Canada Post (Postes Canada)
- DHL (US and Germany)
- FedEx and FedEx SmartPost
- Google Checkout
- Nintendo (US and Canada)
- Purolator
- TNT
- UPS and UPS Mail Innovations
- USPS (United States Postal Service)

As you can see, the Apple.com tracker just shows that the package is shipped, and no details apart from that. So you need to set up a special tracker for TNT or similar.

Try iWork for free

There’s a 30 day fully working trial version of iWork ’08 for download at Apple. I just would like to mention a few highlights: Pages opens AND saves Word documents. The new Numbers app is something as self-contradicting as a cool spreadsheet app! And Keynote has a new, better masking features, animation and new effects.

Check out the 3 minutes entry video which says it all:

Then go grab a semi-public beta at Colin Devroe, or just wait a few hours until it’s public beta.

In a few hours, I’m off to the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. A whole week of unlimited Mac fun, learning, meetups, sessions, labs, meeting people and seeing San Francisco for the first time. If you’re there and would like to meet, call me. Or use the contact form. Or the comments below. I’m brilliantdays at AIM, oyvindsolstad at Skype and sol24 at Yahoo.

I’m especially interested in Mac apps for productivity and digital creation (video, graphics, sound). I will be posting about everything here at brilliantdays, in English. And at NRKbeta in Norwegian. Also, I’ll be twittering if you’re into that. Finally, here’s my Facebook badge:

WWDC links

Here are some useful links if you’re off to WWDC.

Apple’s official WWDC site
Attendee WWDC login
Moscone Center website
Moscone West floor plans
Moscone West on Google Maps (street view)

The two things I like the most:

Focus
Let’s you focus on a special project or folder of projects. Hides everything else you have entered in the app, so you cab concentrate on the task in front of you. Like a zoom lens on a camera. Very cool feature.

Project folders
You’ll be able to make folders of projects, grouping together projects. Put all your “home” projects in one folder, “work” in another, “you” in a third etc. It lets you organize your projects much better than just a long list of projects. It also helps you see the bigger picture. A silly example: Your “work” folder has 800 projects and your “home” and “you” folders 4…

Combine these two features, and you have a very strong tool to help you do what’s mos important right now. I have two major areas of responsibility at work now, and with the project folders and focus, I can hide the other half while I’m working on one of them.

Get me the beta, and I’ll start using this from day 1.

Heh. But today a friend of mine called and asked:

What do I buy if I want the most crazy wipes out there for Final Cut Pro?

Fair enough. He makes a children’s program, so he DOES need them. It’s part of the deal to make wacky transitions every 6 seconds.

So I made a list of some interesting things:

The Final Cut Pro wipes list

GeniusDV has a tutorial called “Utilizing Gradient Wipes in Final Cut Pro”. It shows how to use a matte image as source for crazy wipes in FCP.

CHV Electronics has a collection of plugins for FCP. One of them is called “The AlphaWipe-collection V1.0″. I have never tried it, but it looks like you get a lot for your $.

CGM also has lots of FCP plugins, and many of them have crazy transitions. Have a look at the demo movies (links are on the top of the page).

Mattias in Sweden makes a great bundle of free FCP plugins. You can download them at mattias.nu. They are not wipes, but they are free and should go into any FCP setup. Donate him some Paypal $ if you use them!

Digital Heaven in UK has some great quality FCP plugins. I use the DH_Subtitle – a subtitle plugin myself. And when it comes to transitions they have the nice DH_WhipPan. The plugins are cheap, and they are great quality.

And finally: Toolfarm has a list of FCP plugins that does transitions.

Do you have any suggestions? Things that actually work?

I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

Yesterday Apple showed their biggest upgrade of Final Cut Pro ever; the Final Cut Studio 2. With new versions of abot everything (except Livetype).

Let me start off with the single most important thing to me as a video editor: Open Format Timeline. With this new feature in FCP, I can drop all my most used video formats in the same timeline… (drum roll) with no rendering!. I’m going to save hours and hours just with this feature. All these formats are supported by this feature:

FinalTouch = Color

Apple bought FinalTouch last autumn, and now they are throwing it into Final Cut Studio 2 – for free! Yes, it’s part of the package. Either you pay $1299 for the a new package, or $499 to upgrade from Final Cut Studio, or $699 from any previous version of FCP – including version 1 from 1999. That’s a very good deal. Applause for Apple, who have sold more then 800,000 copies of Final Cut Pro so far, and will sell tons more with this upgrade.

Have a look at the new features of FinalTouch, now called Color.

I’ll have a full rundown of all important new features of the new Final Cut Studio 2 package soon.

• Graphs that show your progress over time, either with the same route, or how far you manage to run in (example) 60 minutes.
• Map integration. Let me put my runs on a map like on Nike+
• Route playlist planning. Don’t know if that would be useful, but I thought it would be cool if I could put up a map for my run, grab data from previous runs of the same route, mark different sections of the run with a marker (like part 1, part 2 etc), and then drag in songs from iTunes to fit the different parts. Like power songs in the hills, slower stuff when it’s flat etc.
• Some way to integrate the running with iCal. Bitch me if I’m lazy!

If you have any ideas, put them here or in the thread at Flickr. Ditto if you have any good suggestion for other Mac software that uses the data the Nike + iPod collects.

The two things I like the most: Syncing and Quicksilver integration. Syncing worked flawless on my Mac. I had a few tasks in iCal already, synced from another GTD app; Actiontastic, which went open source some days ago. When I synced iGTD, it got these tasks from iCal with no problem.

And this is a good lesson if you are developing a Mac GTD application: Syncing with iCal. One GTD application that doesn’t have this is Midnight Beep Inbox. So there’s no way to get my tasks over to another app. Bah.

I also like that I can use Quicksilver to enter tasks into iGTD. And a nice menubar item with direct access to the app.

The date entry (for entering due dates) is very old fashioned. There’s no pop-up calender to click dates, and you can’t type “today” or “next monday” as some of the other apps can. It doesn’t even recognize 20.3.2007 as 20 March 2007, but as 20 March 2020. Weird.

So the race for the best Mac GTD app is still on. In my heat of possible winners are now five:

Actiontastic
iGTD
OmniFocus (not out yet)
Ghost Action
Midnight Beep Inbox

Which one do you like the best so far? I have big hopes for OmniFocus, based on the quality of the other apps Omni make. Of the other four, I think Inbox looks beautiful, but it’s soooo slow. The other three are great apps, and all have syncing that works. It’s too early to pick a winner for me.

Mentally superimpose the above graph on your desktop (or if you really want, draw it as your background).

Drag the resources (URL locations, documents, graphics, audio files, forms, whatever you’re working with) to the appropriate quadrants on your desktop. URLs are the exact pages on a site with which you need to do whatever task it is. You can chunk a bunch of related items for a discreet task in a folder.

Now rename the filenames to “verb-noun” (ie. “handle tax returns” URL item links to the online filing page on the IRS.gov site)

I find Sean’s tip on using the desktop quite interesting. I drag stuff to the desktop all the time. I will try to organize them according to his tip for some time, and see if that make sense for me. And I think he is spot on when he says that…

Anytime you find yourself uncomfortable contorting your processes to match the latest and greatest productivity religion, I think that’s bad. Ultimately you should learn the fundamentals of various different productivity religions and pick and choose the elements that work for you and make your own.

But – and this is an important but – sometimes it’s better to just use a system someone has spend quite some time thinking about. And not start spending days and hours and months trying to tweak it into your the “perfect-productivity-system-for-you”.

Use Exposé

If you decide to use Sean’s tip, here’s a productivity tip to the productivity tip: Set up Exposé with the upper right corner of your screen to be “Desktop”. When surfing, just grab the link from the browser, move your cursor up in the upper right corner, and wham – all open apps and windows disappear. And you can put the url exactly where you want it on the desktop, on your new urgency/importance grid.

When “Optimize System Performance” appears during the update process do not touch your computer and definitely do not launch any applications. Just back away from your computer box as if it were a swarm of bees.

I always do this, and if you’re setting up a new Mac, and instaling lots of apps: One at a time. And reboot between every install. Saves you lots of troubles up the road.

I’m not sure. I think the other Omni icons are way better. Here they are, presented with the three “main” competitors OmniFocus have:

If I were in charge at Omni, I would have followed the style of the two other apps, a slanted document with something in the lower right corner. A checklist with a magnifying glass was my first thought. The color is ok, so keep that, but change just about everything else. Maybe keep the clip, which looks good.

The other three apps all look great when they are this big. At smaller sizes, Ghost Action look the best. Clear and simple. Actiontastic is a little to complicated for smaller sizes, but the concept is fun: Hit those tasks with a hammer.

OmniFocus out soon

I think OmniFocus is pretty close a release. This is the status message GTD guru Merlin Mann of 43 Folders sported yesterday:

“That thing you want? It’s almost done, I swear.”

Could be he’s knitting some amazing productivity wool socks for his friends… But I think it’s OmniFocus he’s referring to.

“Saw your posts about multitouch. How do you think this interface technology will impact software engineering and what kinds of applications can be developed?”

Good question! I’m not sure it will impact software engineering much at first. It’s the end user that will experience the biggest revolution. I guess Apple would have to make a set of tools for software developers, and these wouldn’t have to be much different than the ones used today for trackpads and other input devices.

Applications? I have mentioned a few examples at the end of the “Multitouch will revolutionize your computer” post. With examples how multitouch could change (a lot) existing apps in Mac OS X.

New applications? I’ll have tgo think about that. Give me a day or two. And if you have any suggestions, feel free to use the comments.

The first one is Xsan tuner, that comes with Xsan:

Speed is calculated to 186 MB/second.

We use DeckLink Extreme HD cards in the Macs (10 bits uncompressed SDI). Blackmagic also has their own test tool for disk speeds, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test:

Now, the same disks show 136 MB/second.

Which one to trust? BlackMagic make dead solid products, but on this one I hope their tools show the wrong results…

If you need to test your drives for speed, whether you use BlackMagic cards or not, download the DeckLink drivers for Mac OS X or Windows XP, and you’ll get the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test application when you install it. If you don’t need the actual drivers, just “hide away” the app, and uninstall the drivers again.

Xsan tuner can be downloaded from Apple.com.

Why a difference?

Do you have any idea why the two apps show different speeds? 136 MB/second up to 186 MB/second is almost two more streams of uncompressed video in realtime. Less rendering, more done.

O’Reilly also has this video that shows how much cooler multitouch has become in just a year. Go back to my original multitouch post and have a look at the video there. Now, Multitouch is a whole wall.

(Click through too se the video)

But – and this is an important but – there’s still no real OS behind it. When will we see a real operating system using this? The iPhone already has multitouch on it, but that’s only a small screen. And on a closed system: You can’t develop your own apps using multitouch on the iPhone (yet). My guess: Within a year.

Revolutionary

As I was sorting lots of old photos on a table today, this image of me doing the same thing digitally on a wall came to mind. Fast-forward a year or three. Huge LCD-screens are now at a price level where people not driving Ferrari can afford them. So you got your 100″ LCD-screen. Multitouch is now integrated in the OS, and you bring up the photos from the last month in Aperture 2008. All the pictures are in a pile in the middle. You start dragging them into piles according to themes you see. Change them around. See new combinations. Move again. Zoom in on a picture to see details. Zoom out again. All while standing in front of this gorgeous screen and using the best tool ever existed on earth: The hands of a human.

I think Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he compared multitouch to the mouse and the click-wheel at his keynote in January, 2007:

We have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market – the mouse, the click wheel, and now Multi-Touch.

And just as with the iPod, we don’t see the huge changes this will make. I think multitouch will change the way we use computers, a revolution.

Try this: If you know kids that use a computer, watch them find their way around on it, play games etc. They are fast. It’s second nature for them.

Now watch the same kids playing; Lego, toys, dolls, puzzles, drawings – whatever their favourite is. If they like to draw, and do it a lot, watch how fast they move their hands, change the angle, move the paper, grab a new pen or crayon, put it back and pick a new one. It’s like they don’t watch their hands at all: It just moves around. Precise and fast. Watch kids who build with Lego – look how fast they find tiny pieces, pick them up, turn them in the right position, position them and make something.

Your hands are 100x superior to your computer mouse. Or tablet, trackpad etc.

Of course, you still will be able to write your name lots nicer with a pen than with your finger. And you still will need special input devices for special tasks: Like a shuttlewheel for video editing, a tablet for illustration.

But for lots of the things we now use a mouse on the computer, using your finger is much better. I move around the screen much faster on the Powerbook, than on the MacPro, because of the trackpad. And the trackpad is only one finger! Or actually two, as two fingers scrolls the screen. The thing I miss the most when I’m working on the MacPro, is the two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Very intuitive and time-saving.

Which apps?

I want Final Cut Pro with multitouch: Zoom in and out on the timeline. Move clips around on the timeline. Trim or expand with two fingers. Mix the sound with 10 fingers, right on the screen. Manipulate videos in 3D space. Colorcorrect.

Aperture with multitouch: Make stacks of pictures on a virtual table. Sort. Mix. Change. Zoom in and out. Retouch or colorcorrect. Drag pictures into albums. Move them around. A lot. And really fast.

Soundtrack Pro with multitouch: Expand loops. Timestretch and pitch change. Mixing again. Tapping the rhythm to change tempo. Same thing with Logic. Tap different drums. Play a piano right on the screen for easy note entry without your keyboard with you. With real chords.

And Finder with multitouch! Move files around. Stack them and sort them. Zooming and panning on a huge desktop.

Suddenly the worlds most advanced OS, Mac OS X, seem so old-fashioned and restrained…

Update: Multitouch Logic

Infinite Loop at Ars Technica is on to similar thoughts:

Basically the rumor is this: There will be no Logic 8. The successor to Logic 7 will have a new name. The unnamed application will be 10.5 only and will work with a new line of touch sensitive Apple displays. Also, it will be an OMG PROTOOLS KILLER!@!!

I’d love to throw out ProTools. Talk about overrated!

Well if Gates believes that Apple’s claims about Vista and Macintosh are a pack of lies he obviously thinks that they’re powerful lies because he appears worried. And why wouldn’t he be?

The part about a Vista upgrade being major surgery and the PC guy offeing to donate his peripherals if he doesn’t come through it has some real elements of truth.

Refering to the new I’m a PC, I’m a Mac ads (also in HD).

(Ghost Action screenshot. The app looks slightly different than this screenshot, as I use Uno).

I still have big hopes for OmniFocus, but Ghost Action looks clean and simple, and very similar to Actiontastic. It looks like it’s made using technology by Omni, the same way Actiontastic does.

Ghost Action syncs with iCal (both ways), something Inbox doesn’t do yet.

I had some problems when entering text into new actions. The text just disappeared after hitting Return. This happened twice on about 20 actions. I’ll try it out for some days. One “fun” thing is to see what happens with tasks already in iCal, synced from Actiontastic. Do the two apps live nicely together?

But I seriously think Bill should leave Microsoft now. Why wait until July 2008? Now he’s just making a fool of himself. This is what he told Steven Levy of Newsweek the other day:

NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, “Bill, why upgrade to Vista?” what would be your elevator pitch?

Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”

That’s it? You have a sidebar with widgets, sorry – gadgets. You can search things, photos too? You have parental control? You can edit in HD? You can make DVDs? Come on. That’s it?

Lying in front of people

Bill also thinks Apple got all their ideas from Longhorn:

NEWSWEEK: In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

Bill Gates: You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

What an utterly STUPID thing to say! I’m speechless. This must be the most stupid lie Gates ever has told. “Security guys break the Mac every day?” Plain lie.

I’m sure Vista is much safer that XP. And if it’s safer than Mac OS X, then a big applause! Good for computers, good for people. But the CEO of one the world’s biggest companies can’t lie to Newsweek.

I’m a PC, I’m a Mac

Then Gates talks about the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ads.

NEWSWEEK: Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?

Bill Gates: I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

I can understand that lots of people don’t like the ads (and some of them ARE lame). But they’re not about PC users! They’re about the machines!! There’s a clue here. The ads always say “I’m a PC”, not “I’m a PC user”. Bill Gates doesn’t get it.

PC users are not klutzes. And not dullards. But PCs are more complicated to use than Macs, even though I understand that Bill Gates can’t admit that.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball and Peter Cohen at MacWorld came to the same conclusion: Bill Gates is lying.

Or simply FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. My dictionary on FUD: “fear, uncertainty and doubt, usually evoked intentionally in order to put a competitor at a disadvantage”. Exactly. Joy of Tech is spot on.

Why Vista

I have a Windows Media Center with XP. Is there any reason why I should upgrade to Vista? The PC is wicked, so that’s not an issue. Are there any really good reasons to spend lots of money upgrading the Media Center?

Aperture solves that, and so far I’m very happy about the 1.5 version.

And just the other day I was putting “figure out how to export lots of pictures from Aperture to FCP quick and easy” in my todo-list. Then comes “Aperture to Final Cut Pro” from Connected Flow. Check. Great work, Fraser! There’s a dead-easy manual online and the price is nice (read: Free).

Also check out the excellent Flickrexport for iPhoto and Aperture.

I didn’t even know that I could import NovaMind mindmaps into DevonThink Pro, so this was a real eyeopener!

2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed on the majority of computers sold the last couple of years…

Add these together, and you have the perfect portable book reader. Here’s what Booksquare thinks:

We’ve noted in posts past that that an unheralded feature of the iTunes store is the ability to serve up PDF files. Go back and read that sentence again because one key element of the iPhone is its tight integration with iTunes (in retrospect, woefully misnamed). See, if you can browse the web and use iTunes, you can, theoretically, download PDF files. Not a heralded feature, but we have faith in Steve Jobs and his design team.

In other words, you can read lengthy texts. Articles. Short stories. Novellas. Books. Compendiums. On your cell phone/miniature computer/portable media player/killer device.

Setting aside the comfort issues, the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.

E-reader to new levels

I have bought quite a few books for my (now retired) Palm Pilot. eReader.com has over 17 000 titles, but reading books on the sharp, but way too small screen on my Sony-Ericsson K800i doesn’t cut it. The Palm had a bigger screen. A lousy screen, but a bigger.

The books are DRM’ed, which of course is a nuisance. But I can live with it. If i WANT to, I get the texts out of the books, but I seldom do.

Tie text and audio together = killer app

Booksquare’s idea is brilliant. If I could buy books for the iPhone in the iTunes store, I would. What if Apple made an app for the iPhone that let you have the same book in both text and audio together? They already sell thousands of audiobooks in iTunes, and if I – for a slightly higher price – could get both audio and text at the same time, that would be a killer. The text could follow the audio when I listen to it, and if I read the text, and later were in my car, the audio version would know where I left reading the text. Let me have a way to set bookmarks with my voice when I listen to the audio version, and let people copy smaller passages and send them by e-mail or by bluetooth. That will help spread the word, and good books will sell more.

The next thing Apple should do with Google: Get all those Google-scanned books into the iTunes store. Let me use Spotlight to search all my books, and give me the most amazing e-reader ever made.

—

Apple let the iPhone out of the box today… and wow! It’s a revolution, especially on the UI side.

So now we know where the multi-touch technology that Jeff Han demoed at TEDtalk in february 2006 went. In the iPhone.

Just to remind you, here’s the video at Google again:

And for rss readers: Here’s the direct link.

Now, watch how it is used in the iPhone.

Where do you think all the other cool things Jeff demoes will go? Obviously 10.5. All MacBooks and MacBook Pros could use the same technology with the touch pad. Or maybe the rumoured new Apple display will have a similar multi-touch feature as the iPhone? Just think about it. Apple has already done this now, on a small scale in the iPhone. Mind-boggling.

Used in Pro apps

Imagine having this way of working in the pro apps; Final Cut Pro, Motion, Logic. Zoom in and out of timelines. Zooming on video effects. Controlling faders and graphs directly on the screen. And you could use your fingers to draw vectors for movements, and easier graphics work. It would be so much more organic. Like playing on the computer, using it more like a musical instrument. I would love it.

4 minutes into the video, Jeff moves around lots of pictures with his hands. Imagine using that to organize your content before putting it on the timeline.

The new OS?

What if the new OS X worked like this in the Finder? Zooming into folders, organizing content. Sorting and analyzing. That would certainly be something different than Vista!

So Eirik, it’s Apple-shares you should buy.

The guys behind it are setting up a company and hope to put it into production. Where can I buy shares?

Or rather – bought. Apple shares went up 8.3% today.

Eirik also has a nice video of the screen in action at Siggraph 2006

Update: TED blog

Several blogs write about this, including the TED Blog. Chris Anderson asked Jeff Han about multitouch, and he answered:

The iPhone is absolutely gorgeous, and I’ve always said, if there ever were a company to bring this kind of technology to the consumer market, it’s Apple. I just wish it were a bit bigger so I could really use both of my hands.

Hm. Does it make you any wiser? A bit secretive?

Just to make this a little more fun, seven different computeres at Apple read this post some minutes after it was digged… Read into it what you want. I still think 2007 will be an amazing year for Apple.

Update 2: Exciting updates coming?

Now Jeff Han comments on the project page for multitouch:

Update: Yes, we saw the keynote too! We have some very, very exciting updates coming soon- stay tuned!

(via daringfireball). Still in doubt something big is in the works?

Update 3: Fast company

Fast Company has an article about Jeff Han, which was done before the iPhone launch:

Not everyone is sold on Han’s idea. Ben Shneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland and a founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, calls Han a “great showman” who has “opened the door to exciting possibilities.” But he doesn’t think Han’s technology would be suitable for a large-scale consumer product, nor as useful as a mouse on a large display. If you are standing in front of the screen, Shneiderman wonders, how would people behind you be able to see what you’re doing?

One way, Han counters, is for the demonstrator to simply move his ass out of the way. Another: Use a drafting-table display, as Han did at TED, and project the image on a wall-size screen.

But criticisms like these are a million light years from Han’s mind. We’re in his cluttered and cramped office at NYU. Books line a shelf, and a skein of wires unfurls across the floor. A computer circuit board is half taken apart (he stopped losing screws long ago), and a nearby whiteboard contains blueprints and sketches of the touch screen, plus a clever trick for hacking programming code.

Han is explaining why he formed Perceptive Pixel. “I want to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating,” he says. “I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It’s every researcher’s fantasy.”

Update 4: Fingerworks

According to both Engadget and Charles Arthur, it is FingerWorks technology that is inside the iPhone. Apple bought their technology some time ago.

If you head over to FingerWorks.com, you’ll see…

Important note!

FingerWorks has ceased operations as a business.

FingerWorks products are no longer available for resale, and no further updates to software drivers will be developed.

The fun thing is that both Jeff Han and FingerWorks call their technology Multitouch.

Update 5: Revolution!

You may want to know how multitouch will revolutionize your computer/…

Update Nope. He didn’t.A bit strange that Merlin just qoutes TUAW, when he is actually working with Omni on the project.

In response to very popular demand (to the tune of 150+ requests on the Labs CS3 forum), I’m happy to say that Adobe is now making it possible for Windows customers of Photoshop CS2 to get a Mac CS3 beta serial number, and vice versa. To request a number, you can send mail to photoshopcs3beta@adobe.com & include your CS2 serial number.

We made this decision a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t want to publicize it widely until the staff was back at full strength after the holiday break. Please note that this is a manual process on our side right now, and we appreciate your patience as we handle requests.

Related: If you find that you want to switch an Adobe product license from Mac to Windows or vice versa, please contact Adobe Customer Service. They’ll walk you through the process.

Record companies – listening?

I wish more companies were thinking like this. The principle here is simple: We have a customer who bought something from us, and now he/she wants to change the carrier of the product. It’s almost no cost for Adobe. They will get good PR. And probably sell more software because people know they can change platform if they want.

Now imagine if records companies could start acting this clever? Stop acting like idiots and announce the following:

Do you have a huge stack of LPs you never play anymore? Sure you do. And you paid for those. The artists have already got their money for the making of the music. Now guess what: We are going to start being nice! As of monday 29. January 2007 you can upgrade your music. You have already paid for the art, so you only pay for the actual CD (or downloadable DRM-free file if your prefer), shipping and a small handling fee.

Go to www.musicupgrades.com, check if your LPs are covered with the new MusicUpgrades Plan, order stickers to the nearest central. We have one in most European countries and USA/Canada.

Yes, sure… Anyday now…

Screenshot: Front page of Apple.com as of 2. January 2007

Automatic syncing of household digital content. Any device on the network that buys a song, TV show, or movie from the iTS will inform the server of its purchase; a specialized iTunes iServ app will make a copy of all content purchased on authorized household systems. This copy will serve as both an archive, as well as a source for streaming or copying the file to other authorized devices.

Exactly. I said:

It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

Just this evening I have been IMing Eirik for a long time about solutions for sharing thousands of pictures between several computers. This is a quite common scenario in modern families. You have parents and kids who all have photos that belong to several groups:

• The ones all in the family would like to have on their Macs all the time, both on portable and not portable machines.
• The ones that you just want to keep for yourself.
• The ones that you want to share with just one other.

And so on.

As far as I know, there are no solutions that does this. Add backup that works flawlessly and syncing between machines, and you have a huge project that I really hope half of Cupertino is working on (the other half, please keep working on FCP 6 please). Add music, video and recorded tv, and you need a very clever system to keep this clean and simple.

What features would you like to see in the Xserve Home? Or iServ?

With Xsan cataloging using Proximity artbox and project level integration between artbox and Final Cut Pro, users are able to acheive streamlined collaborative workflow.

Artbox has partnered with all the big names in the video production industry: Apple, ENPS, Avid, Chyron, Discreet, Grass Valley, Omneon, Quantel and Sony.

This is a perfect match for Apple, and I’m sure they’ll develop Artbox into an ever better product. Apple don’t even need to change the name – “Apple Artbox” sounds just as good as the other names in their pro video portfolio.

(Screenshot: Artbox asset management)

Have a look at the screen shots or the tutorial video.

I’ve been testing Aperture for some time, and it’s an amazing program. But I like iPhoto a lot too. There are many features in iPhoto that Aperture doesn’t have, and the other way. So I find it difficult to decide which one to use. If I could have one wish for Aperture and iPhoto: Use the same database and folder structure. I don’t care which one, where or how. Just use the same database.

So that everything I do in iPhoto (tagging, easy picture manipulation like removing red eyes, putting together some calenders and books), also shows up in Aperture.

And when I do advanced editing/correction/tagging in Aperture, it should immediately show up in iPhoto. And be available in all apps that tap into the media from the iApps, like Pages, iWeb, Keynote, Comic Life, Disc Cover etc.

There’s a screencast showing how it will work. And it does exactly what I need it do.

Edit Google Calenders in iCal

So now I can make a shared calender in Google Calender, subscribe to it in iCal, edit it in iCal, and sync the changes right back to Google. Wonderful!

My next question is obviously if several people can edit the same calenders? I would guess this is possible.

But does Spanning Sync keep track of things, so if I edit a calender in iCal, and then try to sync it back to Google Calender, Spanning Sync will warn me if the calender has been changed between this and the last sync.

The screencast is also available at Google Video. And there’s a Google Group for discussion and feedback to and from the developers.

Simple interface, but maybe too simple for my taste? Not sure yet. I think the tasks should have had more importance (in style), and the buttons under them be less visible. But I must admit they have great taste in colors.

It worked flawlessly in Safari on Mac and Firefox on Win XP. Dragging things around works and editing is fast and responsive.

Todos kan be tagged with tags, which can be used like David Allen the way David Allen suggests you set things up with contexts.

You can also set dates for tasks that need to be done before a certain date.

You can sign up for a free test account but I couldn’t figure out if it was always free, or if there was a fee after some time. Data can be exported out of the system. They haven’t got around to write an export feature, but they will send you your data if you cancel the account.

Try it out! I wish there were an offline system to go with it, but if you’re always online and trust Tedium to also be, this could be your next way to get things done.

Watch the screencast to have an idea of what it does. I just imported the whole iTunes library. Wicked fast and no problems.

So when I heard about Tangerine, an application that scans my iTunes library and figures out the BPM – Beats Per Minute – on all my tracks, I downloaded it immediately.

Perfect for running

I would use it like this:

• Scan all my tunes, and get BPM for all of them
• Make a test run, and figure out which pace that fits the running I’m doing
• Make playlists that starts at a certain pace, and speed things up at the end
• Or make playlists that mix paces, slow at the start, then faster, slower again etc.

Tangerine does all this. Tags my tunes with the right BPM. Make playlists. Very cool!

Except that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t find my iTunes music library. It may be because I have an Norwegian version of OS X, so the music folder is called “Musikk”. But other apps using the iTunes music library finds it, so it’s just a guess.

Tangerine is still in Beta, and others reports having the same problems as I do. Others tell that it works flawlessly. I’m really looking forward to the next version and hope that it will find my music library and start tagging it.

Do it manually (or maybe not…)

In the meantime, I’m using the bpmWidget. It works like this: Download and install (as a widget). Start a song in iTunes, and tap the widget with the beat for some seconds. Then hit the small note icon to copy that BPM value to the current song playing in iTunes. Repeat 8 000 times for all your songs. Sigh… Tangerine! Where’s that next version?!

Now, let’s add things up here:

• Apple has said that Shake is not to be updated.
• Apple has bought Silicon Color and the Final Touch color correction app
• Motion never became the killer app Apple wanted it to be

Motion is way cool, but I’m not sure that most Final Cut Users have discovered it yet. As I written before; I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

So getting better color correction in Final Cut Pro and Motion is reason number one for buying Silicon Color. Number two isn’t that obvious but I’m sure it’s a just as big reason for Apple: Aperture. Put the color tools of FinalTouch inside Aperture, add the realtime engines of Motion and finally the Core Image and (the new) Core Animation.html of OS X 10.5. What do you get? A app for processing photos that can compete with Photoshop. And lots more.

Steve Jobs loves photos. I don’t know whether he’s a photographer himself, but search for “Steve Jobs keynotes” on Google Video or YouTube, and watch when he demonstrates iPhoto. Always great photos, always quality. I’m sure Aperture – already an amazing application – will take giant steps forward with the color tools from FinalTouch added in the 2.0 version.

First, download the new Amnesty Generator from Mesa Dynamics. It’s a small app for OS X. Next, head over to Google and check out all the so-called Google Gadgets. These are small pieces of code that you can install on your page, blog, site, MySpace whatever.

Click “Add to your webpage” when you find something interesting, and paste the code in Amnesty Generator. And voilá! A new widget with that Gadget running inside.

Brillliant. And think about all the useful widgets you can make. Here are a few suggestions:

• Technorati tracker
• Uptime monitor
• Digg News
• Wine Spectator Daily Wine Picks
• Bejeweled
• Google Videos

Babelfish

Some of these may have OS X Widgets already. But especially in the Tools section on Google Gadgets, you’ll find lots of useful things worth putting in an OS X widget. Be aware that some may not work, and Amnesty Generator is a 0.5 version. Very beta. But most of the ones I tried making, also worked in Dashboard.

Note the little RSS icon after the URLs (I should probably make a better mockup with the new feed icon).

Now, in Mac OS X 10.5, coming early 2007, there’s an dedicated API for RSS inside the OS X. Which means that every app in OS X can get and display RSS feeds, if programmed right.

Having a display in my IM program that shows new posts for my contacts is a great idea (I use Adium X – you’ll find my nick on the about page). But I want to manage these feeds in my Address book. That way, all programs using the people in my Address book can use the feeds associated to each person.

Waiting for spring 2007 takes to long. I would like David Watanabe that makes NewsFire to make a new function for NewsFire. Scan all contacts in the Address book, find all URLs, load up these URLs and find the feeds for these pages, make a special folder in NewsFire called “Contacts”, then make a sub-folder for each contact, and put the RSS feeds for each contact in the right folder. That sounded a lot more complicated than I think it would be, but I’m not a programmer. So how about it, David?

It has a name. It has a team of engineers working on it, a user interface guru mocking up modes and widgets for it, and a product manager whose Herculean job it is to herd this whole mess towards an elusive ship date.

Great! If it’s only half as good as OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, it will be better than all other GTD apps out there.

At the same time, Midnight Beep has a new beta of Inbox out (previously on Brilliantdays). Inbox looks amazing, and Omni is known for their clean and good-looking UIs. So if you want to get things done on the Mac, there’s no excuse anymore.

Also see previous posts in the GTD category, and especially “Getting things done with automator and spotlight”.

Update
And now it turns out that Ethan J. A. Schoonover – who makes Kinkless – is developing OmniFocus with Omni. In “Hold breath. Exhale. Focus.”, Ethan explains that …at some point it became clear that the next logical step would be to consider Cocoafying the whole shebang. And continues:

Having the chance to take everything I’d been thinking and working on with kGTD and see it turned into something bigger and better and brighter is like making a doodle on a piece of paper, handing it to da Vinci and seeing it turned into a full color oil painting. Even better: it’s like Da Vinci letting you sit around and gab at them while they do this and ask for “a bit more cobalt-blue in the sky” and “a few more peasants in that bit on the left”.

And what’s more: Productivity guru Merlin Mann is in on the team: Mostly I just stand around like a fat man at a construction site, drinking coffee and shouting pointless suggestions. Ethan and OmniGroup listen patiently, sometimes complying with my random requests, and that’s all the pay I could ever hope for

Two modest guys, eh? I think OmniFocus will be my third most used app in no time… And it will be really interesting to see how Inbox works when it’s finished.

This looks very promising! Khoi Vinh of Subtraction asked for it some days ago:

It surprises me, actually, that no one is working on a proper, Cocoa-authored desktop application that is a fully-fledged, elegant version of kGTD.

“Elegant”. Exactly. I want the apps on my Mac to look fantastic. Nothing less. And Inbox looks fantastic. It looks like something Delicious Monster would have made, and that’s a big compliment in my book. If you have a look at the personal site of Hans Hansen of Midnight Beep, you’ll find an genuine interest for both technology and art. He has several sites, even one for gaming and one for “all the art and all the crack in the heart of San Francisco”.

Which is in a bit what Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen talks about in his latest post:

However, it’s increasingly clear that logic alone is not a sufficient condition for success for individuals and for organizations. “Right-brain reasoning,” then, is every bit as important now — in some cases more important — than so-called “left-brain thinking.

Spot on. So I’m always excited when I find people that are able to geek and enjoy art, and not just stay on one side of the “fence”. Garr’s post is worth a post of it’s own. But then again, so are all his posts.

For now, I’m going to take Inbox for a test run, put lots of stuff in there, and start reporting back to Midnight Beep and to you what I think.

Previously

You may also want to have a look at “Getting things done with Automator and Spotlight” and the Getting Things Done category in general.

I would like to have a meny item under the Airport icon in OS X. It should read: “Broadcast vCard”.

What it does is to listen for other’s sending me their vCards, and also sending out mine. When it finds them, the OS show me a list of who else did this around me, and let me check off which ones I allow to get my card. The others in the room do the same. This is to prevent anyone else around to get all our vCards without our permission. Like this:

Now, R. Tyler Ballance has made Bonsoir, an app that halfway does what I would like it to do, and also adds in some new features.

What it does, is to broadcast your vCard to other people on the same local network. Now, I’m not sure how that works if you’re on the same 802.11 network? Will all the other’s on that same wireless network find your vCard when you broadcast it with Bonsoir?

I didn’t have anyone else to test with here, so I’m not sure.

Bonsoir takes advantage of Cocoa Distributed Objects, Bonjour, and the Address Book API for allowing the quick and easy sharing of vCards on a local network.

Bonsoir also adds some extra preferences: Adding your del.icio.us username and skype name. I guess these are distributed with the vCard? (Apple: When are you going to add a “skype” usename in Addressbook?).

This kind of functionality should be integrated in the OS, both Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista, in a simple and clean way. For now, running Bonsoir when on conferences is a great alternative. Unless you’re on Windows, that is…

Lots of my friends and contacts use sites sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us or LiveJournal. They have blogs, Amazon wishlists, and Upcoming pages. All this is possible to enter in the Addressbook app in Mac OS X 10.4. As of this version (or was it 10.3?), you can assign as many webpages to a user as you like.

…

Now, checking all my friends and contacts blogs, new pictures, fresh bookmarks etc. takes time. And what better are computers for, than doing the boring stuff that you don’t want to do yourself? What I would like is to add a RSS button to all of these links.

Today HardMac has posted lots of screenshots from the coming 10.5 Leopard. On page 4 you can read this:

Leopard integrates a RSS engine which can be utilised by every application (dedicated API). Thus mail has also become an RSS reader.

This is interesting. What is stopping Apple from adding RSS inside the Address Book too? Have a look at it and tell me what you think. I would love to have this functionality. Since I wrote the original article it seems like everyone has got a blog, a Flickr account, a photocast, podcast or videocast. Having all this info tied to persons makes sense to me. If Apple doesn’t make this, maybe someone else could make it? As a plugin for the Address Book?

Speaking of Apple, they are readying a dizzying amount of new products. I wish I could camp out at an Apple store during the World Wide Developer Conference on August 7th. I wish I could say more, but that’d get me sued by Steve Jobs and I don’t need that kind of heck right now.

…says Robert Scoble on his site today. Interesting. He usually knows more than most others…

I especially liked Nathan Ziarek’s ideas on how to share music between members of a family. Infact, Apple should take this even further, and make an Xserve for families.

It could work like this: A special Xserve with special Apple software is installed somewhere safe in your house, a place cold and where no one can hear it. It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

The family Xserve should also have a tv-tuner and an EPG, making it possible for all users in the house to plan recordings even if they where “off-site” with their Macbooks.

…trash, backup and refresh your Final Cut Pro preferences with the click of a button. Can be used with all Mac OS X compatible versions of Final Cut Pro (version 3.x thru 5.1).

(via The TV Weasel)

…if people look at it and their initial reaction is “Oh, it’s an iPod rip-off,” that’s a pretty crummy first impression. Does anyone at Microsoft realize that rip-offs aren’t considered cool?

A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Then again, Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” By that standard the people on the Zune team must be a bunch of Michelangelos, eh?

A: CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN.

Excellent analysis as always from John Gruber.

So here’s a small mindmap on how to rule the world, a project quite a lot of people seem to be having on their list.

Make the mindmap, and save it. When you make a document in OS X, you get a small icon right in front of the name of the document, in the title bar at the top. Before saving it’s greyed out, and everytime you make changes it also greys out.

But hit Apple-S and the icon gets colors. And – you can drag it.

Exposé is an amazing productivity tool

For dragging to be useful, I have set up Exposé like this:

In English: If you drag the cursor to the lower left corner of your screen, Exposé will show all your open windows, in all apps. That’s the one we’re going to use.

Now, in OmniOutliner Pro, make a new project (“Rule the world”) in your Kinkless file, and hit Apple and Esc to make a comment on it. This opens up a field just below the projects name, where you can put notes and stuff that are not sub-tasks. Like this:

In my example I’ve just typed a reference to my mindmap: “My mindmap for ruling the world”. Just leave the cursor where it is after typing that, and switch to OmniOutliner Pro. Click the little icon in the title bar and start dragging. The icon now becomes a little bigger.

Drag the icon down to the lower left corner of your screen, the one we set up in Exposé. Now all your open windows pop up on the screen. Look for the window with your Kinkless projects in OmniOutliner Pro. Move the cursor up again and “park” on top of that window. Wait half a second or so. Finder will now zoom in on that window. Drop the icon right after the text you wrote previously.

Now you have a link to the mindmap directly from your Kinkless projects. Double-click the icon, and NovaMind opens with your mindmap.

Other ways to do this

As always in OS X, there are many ways to do things. You can drag from a window to another, if both are visible. Here I’m dragging a file saved in TextEdit directly into OmniOutliner Pro.

You can also start dragging the icon from the mindmap, use Alt-Tab to switch between apps and then drop the icon.

Forget import or open commands

With this method, you almost never have to import or link to files with a dialog window. You make the document you need, save it to the right place, and drag it into the app you want to use it. I use it for Livetype files in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop files in Final Cut Pro and InDesign, and in general all kinds of graphics, sound, video and text files into apps that use them. No more Apple-I. A huge timesaver. At it looks cool.

If you came here from MacSurfer, you might want to check out my other Mac posts.

Some recommendations:

Use your body to control the computer
Broadcast vCard
Getting things done with Automator and Spotlight

What I like the best is the fact that you need to move more to use it: You use a pen and make circles, lines across the desktop. Not the static mouse we all have gotten so used to. In other words: More Africa in your computer.

…It has been an absolute pleasure to serve the visual effects community for the past 9 years. We are looking forward to continuing to support you and are especially looking forward to working with you again. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this new version of Shake.

Frank thinks – and so do I – that there will be a new version of Motion with all the goodies from Shake inside. Why?

Motion never became the product Apple hoped it to be. After Effects users kept using After Effects, as Motion didn’t have all the features After Effects have. As Frank says: “Motion was no match for After Effects.”

But with all the power of Shake inside, and the new power of Intel-based Macs, Motion would be a amazing tool for high-end graphics and compositing. It would also mean that the stuff that is inside of Shake today, in the future will be inside the Final Cut Pro Studio package. So you get software previously priced at $2500 included with the Final Cut Pro Studio, at the moment priced at $1100 at Amazon.com.

All this is of course speculation from my side, and Apple is known to surprise us.

They already have by annoucing “the death” of Shake, a magnificent piece of software, used for compositing on blockbusters as King Kong and the Lord of the rings series. And when Apple ditches great stuff, it’s almost always because there’s something even cooler coming.

For now, there’s Shake to be bought for $499, and I would think that all the trained Shake users, will have a huge head start when and if the new “Shaked Motion” comes out.

Here’s something fun made in Shake, by my good friend Norby.

(If you’re reading this in a newsreader, you may have to click through to the site to see it)

It’s often said that you shouldn’t compare apples and oranges — generally used figuratively, but even looking at it literally you can see that it’s not true. You need to compare apples and oranges when you’re deciding what to pack in your lunch. What you can’t do is compare apples and oranges and somehow conclusively prove that one is better than the other.

John Gruber at Daringfireball is brilliant again:

I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else.

This works in TextEdit, Pages, Safari text fields, all text fields in iLife apps etc. Very useful!

Update
According to Jason Kottke, Uschi Lang said “yes”:

At 4:30 am, he snuck out of bed without Uschi noticing it and headed back to the Apple Store. Based on the timing of the time-lapse video already posted on Apple’s site, James stood with the signs for about 15 minutes (5 minutes per sign) to ensure that they were visible in the video.

A few days later, James set up a “romantic trail of candles” leading up to his G5, showed Uschi the video — which she had not seen despite some coverage on the web — and she of course said “yes”.

He even showed her the video on his G5! What a wonderful story…!

Then my Powerbook chrashed. And I couldn’t find the file containing all my books and games in the backups. Doh. The thought of having to enter everything over (even if it was fast with the barcode scanning with iSight), made me forget about the whole thing.

Until yesterday. I have bought and read lots of books lately and figured I should make a list of books in Delicious Library, rate them, and also make a “Books to read”-list for the books that I didn’t read immediately.

No smart lists

The first thing I noticed was that I can’t make smart lists in Delicious Library. “Every” app out there can make smart lists now – lists based on criteria you enter. Like a list of all books rated 5 stars. Or all books in pocket. Or all books in Norwegian. Or all books NOT marked “read”. This is my number one feature wish. I would like to make lists for all kinds of things: The books on subjects like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Cooking or Creativity, the Novels or the non-fiction, Kids books, Norwegian or English books, travel guides, books I have lent away and books I have borrowed from others.

A shelf is the Delicious Library term for lists. You can add as many shelves as you like, but you can’t change the order of them: They go in the order you make them. How stupid is that? Also, you can not make folders, and put several shelves inside a folder. Yes, I know you wouldn’t put your normal bookshelves in a folder, but let’s not take the shelves system too far. I think it would be really nice if I could make folders. I could make a folder for “New media” books, and put the shelves for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Motion, Illustrator, blogging etc. in there. And a folder for novels with Norwegian, English in there.

More about shelves: I would like an easy way to change their looks. I would like to be able to have custom sizes for the books in different shelves. Now – if you set books to big size in one shelf, they go big in all shelves.

I also would like to have different backgrounds and shelves graphics for different shelves.

It really should be drag and drop: Drag a graphic to the background, and it becomes the background. Maybe with dialog asking if you want to change the background just for this shelf or all shelves. And ditto with the shelves backgrounds.

Tags

My feature wish number 2: Tags. I would like to tag my books, with names for projects I do, with subjects, with anything. Like I tag all my bookmarks at Del.icio.us and my photos and Flickr. With smart lists and tags, it would be very easy to make advanced lists, and find books that belong together for projects.

The tags field should be auto-complete, so that when I start typing, it fills out the first tag that matches. Just like tags do on Del.icio.us on the web. Auto-complete should be a feature on most fields. Or an option. Like in the language field: 99% of my books are Norwegian or English. So when I type N it should autocomplete “Norwegian”. Ditto with format, genres, publisher and author (like in iTunes).

Entering data

Now you might ask: Why? Isn’t all data downloaded from Amazon? Yes, with most English books. But many of my books are not in English. Or strange ones not found on Amazon. So I have to enter the data myself. Auto-complete is needed!

Also: If Delicious Library doesn’t find anything on Amazon, it should give me the option to use Google. Just do a Google search for the title in qoutes and the author name. With most my Norwegian books, I find the publishers page with a picture and all the data I need on the top spot on Google.

What if Delicious Library could “scrape” the data of the page? Just use a “get data from Safari” button. Delicious Library would then use everything it finds on the frontmost page in Safari, and try to fit that into the proper fields. How? If the web page says “Pages: 221″ then 221 would go to the number of pages field and so on. And if there were a preference pane where I could tell Delicious Library the words for author, published, pages etc. in my language, it could even understand Norwegian (or Spanish, German, French…) webpages.

When entering barcodes with iSight, if Delicious Library can’t find the book on Amazon, why not search Google? It would find most books just as easily as on Amazon. Then I could pick the right link, and use the “scrape” function above to enter the data.

Quotes

I would like to be able to enter qoutes inside Delicious Library, have a quotes pane. Where I can add a quotes with their corresponding a page number. After some time Delicious Library could be used as a research tool. With smart lists, I could make a smart lists that searched qoutes for keywords.

Lame rating

The ratings need to be fixed. Now you can rate any item from 0 to 5 stars. Let users decide how many stars. Where I live, most reviews are rated from 1 to 6, so I would like 6 stars being the topscore. Others might like 10.

More wishes

Highlighting When you click on a new shelf, Delicios Library always highlights the first book in that shelf:

Maybe that’s smart? But I don’t like it. It would be nice if there was a preference to turn that off.

Currency I would to set currencies when entering prices. And set my default currency in the prefs. So when I type 229 in purchase price, Delicious Library adds NOK behind. Or $ before if you’re paying in US Dollars.

Date purchased Delicious Library always enters today’s date when entering a new book. I never enter books the day I buy them, I take a whole bunch when I have time. I entered 50 books tonight with my iSight (I love that feature – amazingly cool!), and had to go back and delete the “purchase date” on all 50.

Date published Most publishers don’t put the exact date they publish a book online. Just the year. If I type 2006 into the release date field, Delicious Libray adds today’s date to that, making it “monday 1st of May, 2006″. Which is wrong. Ditto if I type 2003, it becomes 1st of May 2003. Also wrong. Software like Reunion and OmniOutliner Pro has date fields that are more intelligent. If you type a year, it stays like that. If you type “5.1.2006″ it becomes “1st of May 2006″ (or 5th of January if your date format is European in the Mac OS X control panel). “Today” becomes “1st of May 2006″ and “yesterday” 30th of April 2006″ and so on.

iTunes I would like a way to import everything I have in iTunes into Delicios Library. All my albums or just a playlist. I could make a playlist that had only the music I have imported myself from CDs. I tell Delicious Library about this playlist, and it makes albums, downloads cover art etc.

Publishing

There are software that can put your Delicious Library online. But it doesn’t add any affiliate codes. This should be a feature in Delicious Library. I’m sure Delicious Monster make quite a lot of money when people use the similar pane in Delicious Library, and buy books and movies from Amazon with Delicious Monster affiliate codes attached. Which is ok. But when and if I publish my own library, I want it to have my own Amazon affiliate code. Can we please have a great export feature in version 2.0?

Colin D. Devroe has a theory…

I’d love to publish my library as an HTML file on my Web site. This way my Internet friends can look at my library, and I could send them a DVD to view if they’d want. I think the main reason why Delicious Monster has not put this functionality in, is because they earn a kick back if you buy anything through Library on Amazon. If they were to try to do the same thing through the publish HTML file, people like me would go in and edit all the links to earn the dough. Perhaps this isn’t a reason, but that’s my guess.

Love it

I like Delicous Library a lot. It’s one of the coolest programs I have bought. And a good way to spot a great program is that it gives you lots of new ideas. Delicious Monster is working on a new version. With online social elements, and a faster database.

There are some other good suggestions for 2.0 features in this thread at Delicious Monster’s blog…

I’m not sure if there’s an online database that you guys to take advantage us for comic books, but I would love to see that feature in the next release.

Link to other more obscure databases (other than Amazon)…

What are your experiences with Delicious Library? Anything you miss?

Dunechaser does it again. This time he has made a set of co-called minifigs with “Geek Luminaries”. The above is of course Steve Jobs with a first generation iPod (BTW, this demonstrates the beauty of the iPod design: What other gadget could be immediately recognized as itself with just one simple piece of Lego…?)

See also the corresponding post on his blog.

Others include Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds (with a penguin), Larry Wall, Steve Wozniak, Charles Babbage, Tim Berners-Lee and Jeff Bezos – on a Segway!

Custom made Lego

And here’s an idea for Lego: Start making a total list of all bricks you make. Every single one. Put it on a web page.

And when people like Dunechaser make models like these, make an easy system for people to tag their pictures with the names of all the bricks they have used. Example: The Steve Jobs model is 5 pieces, or bricks. The hair, the head, the upper body, the legs and the iPod. And I guess you could say that the hands are changable to other colors to, so then it’s 7 pieces.

If all these had a number, one could add these numbers in the description of the drawing, and put it in some kind of format that was clickable. And which set me right to the “Custom Lego” webpage. A form was automatically filled in, and all the little pieces were picked up by a robot in a Lego storage somewhere, and sent to me.

Imagine the coolness of this: There are thousands or millions of Lego figures that people have created and put on the web. But unless you – like Dunechaser – have collected a huge number of Lego bricks and pieces, you’re not able to make Steve or Bill or Linus yourself, even if you can figure out which pieces that are used in the models.

(if you read this in a feed reader, you won’t see the embedded Google video. Click through to my page to see it)

Or head over to the projects home page, where you can read about it and download the video.

Jeff Han

One of the persons behind this is Jeff Han, here at Etech06.

(Credit: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media)

Jeff has an amazing list of cool projects behind him.

Use your body

What I like the most about the video, is that you use your body to control it. Watch when he/she zooms on the map by using both hands – stretching it out. And pulling it back in again. So much better for you than using one finger scrolling a little wheel on a mouse. See my Use your body to control the computer and More “Africa” in your computer posts for more about this.

All icons are marked with notes – hover over them to see what they are (on Flickr, I don’t have that functionality on my site).

Flickr group

I also made a new Flickr group for your menubar screenshots. I couldn’t find one, so I made one. There are Mac groups, desktop groups, but none that is about all the stuff you can put in the menubar.

So come and join. Post your menubar, add notes telling which ones you use, and also add links to their sites if you have.

I’ve been noticing lately that I could really use an easier way to trigger certain things on my computer. I’m thinking perhaps some sort of foot pedal is the way to go. “Right-arrowing into” items in Quicksilver comes to mind. I’d love to be able to use a foot switch to navigate folders, etc. in QS. I’m sure more ues would become quickly apparent.

Three products are so far suggested:

• Savant Elite Programmable USB Foot Switches
• X-keys® Foot Pedal (3 switches)
• Footmouse

NuLOOQ

I also came over the new NuLOOQ input device from Logitech. It’s a wheel-y-kind of thing with software that makes it easier to access tools and menus faster. You can download a 30-day free trial version of the software and try it without the actual USB device. If you have used the NuLOOQ (what a name!), I’m interested in hearing from you.

Jump to hit return

The Xkeys site mentioned above, also sell an amazing collection of USB devices, including the X-keys® USB Switch Interface (12 Ports), which let you put up to 12 buttons and pedals to it. It would be cool if some of these buttons were bigger and that you had to hit them really hard to make them work. Example: You had to punch a big red button to check your e-mail. Or to update your RSS feeds. How’s that for productivity?

To get some action, I guess I could put one button on the ceiling, so that I had to jump up to hit it. Maybe put the return key on that one? LOL. I would get in shape in no time. And would have to keep towels and extra t-shirts next to my editing desk.

Chew Chew…

The weirdest controller is the RailDriver Desktop Train Cab Controller, originally made for controlling the Microsoft Train Simulator, but I guess you could use it for anything that use USB controllers.

,
Apple family, originally uploaded by niallkennedy.

From the comments on this picture:

If some of the 70s godawfulness I see coming back again is anything to judge by, it might be a good idea to invest in a cave and survival gear so you can retreat for a bit.

So true.

There are over 100 pictures tagged “macstickers” at Flickr at the moment.

Do you put stickers on your laptop, Mac or PC? I don’t. And if you do, which stickers do you have?

“What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”

Africa is still far away…

And now it’s 2006. Still no Africa in your computer. Maybe even worse than before. People sit still for hours and hours, using four fingers and their eyes locked at 45 cms. Bad bad.

So StepUI from Microsoft is a step (pun intended) in the right direction.

There are lots of dance pads and alternative input devices out there. But the OS need to be able to use them in an effective way, or nobody will use them. I hope Microsoft and Apple will implement these things, and not just make fun projects of them.

EMIL!!!!!!

Also have a look at what I call EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language, a new standard for storing data from exercise machines (treadmills etc.) and moving them between different machines and online storage.

PS. Click the “FCP” tag under this post to see other posts about Final Cut Pro and the other apps in the Final Cut Pro Suite.

But how do you enable comments on them?

Well, you cant. There is no such function.

So Chad Brantly made a way to hack this in. Just download his iComment software. It uses Haloscan to keep track of the comments.

I wish someone could make a tool that did the same with the names in my OS X Adress book!

Update: Here are lots more…

vCard

So I got an idea. And if it already exists, feel free to tell me in the comments below! Here’s the idea: My Mac has an Adress book with my contacts, and my own adress data. I can export any person as a vCard and e-mail that to someone. When the person who receives my vCard clicks on it, it will open the default contact manager and put my data in there.

This works on any modern OS, Macs and PCs. Most modern laptops also have 802.11. Or WiFi. Or Airport. Many names.

Broadcast it!

I would like to have a meny item under the Airport icon in OS X. It should read: “Broadcast vCard”.

What it does is to listen for other’s sending me their vCards, and also sending out mine. When it finds them, the OS show me a list of who else did this around me, and let me check off which ones I allow to get my card. The others in the room do the same. This is to prevent anyone else around to get all our vCards without our permission. Like this:

It’s crude, but you get the picture. What do you think? Would this be useful? Would it be hard to put this on OS X or XP/Vista?

Update
Now this is “almost” possible. See Bonsoir, here’s my vCard.

Question: What is the difference between Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Avid’s Media Composer?

Answer: None.

Not at least when it comes to creating first-class, professional results in a timely manner. They both get the job done on-budget and on-time.

But when it comes to how we approach our projects or how we interact with the software itself, there are some meaningful differences. I generally classify these differences into two types: Big picture and Smaller stuff.

Tags are – in my opinion – the most clever concept that has been introduced on the net the last years. It gives you and me a fast and easy way to organize bit amounts of data.

And:

Now it’s time for software developers to start adding tags inside their apps. And my first candidate is NetNewsWire. I would like to be able to add tags for each feed I subscribe to. Some examples:

43Folders: gtd, gettingthingsdone, productivity, mac, osx

Adam Curry: podcasting, technology, personal

Apple Hot News: mac, software, apps, osx

Boingboing: weird, security, blogging, future, gadgets, geek, hacks

Now the MacNews Pro newsreader let you do that: Add tags to each feed:

Brilliant! Think about how cool this is. Not if you subscribe to 7 feeds. But if you subscribe to lots of them, this will help you set up smart folders, folders that show you all feeds that are tagged with a certain word (or several if you like).

Apart from this cool feature, MacNews Pro is a good looking application, with everything you expect from a modern newsreader. There were quite a few things that didn’t work on the demo I’m trying, but I think it’s something related to my own Mac. I couldn’t add new feeds. That is – I could add some adresses, others not.

I’ll work with it for a while, and see if it is any competition for NetNewsWire.

With the access Apple will no doubt get to Disney (Research)’s vast library of movies and TV shows, iTunes is about to get a huge boost toward becoming the front end for our digital TV and movie experience too.

“What happens when you can beam shows from your computer or iPod wirelessly to your TV?” he asks. “You have a Tivo (and a music player) that you can take anywhere.” IPods and TVs don’t have that ability yet but they will soon, he believes. “iTunes will be the software that runs your living room.”

Fred Vogelstein of Fortune thinks Steve Jobs already owns your living room:

Skeptical? Talk to Jeff Zucker, the new CEO of NBC/Universal. In an interview with Newsweek he said that iTunes had generated $2.5 million in download revenues just in the last three months. He also said it was helping him decide what to air. Because of the unexpected popularity of one show, “The Office,” on iTunes, TV viewership shot up and it won a coveted Thursday night prime time slot.

I wonder how long it takes before Scoble comments on this…

“If there’s one thing that really stands out about Apple lately, it’s that its products keep getting smaller and smaller. Just as Apple shrank the iPod with the nano (and subsequently its packaging), the company’s latest consumer software offerings are also arriving in ultra-thin, super-small retail packaging. The retail boxes are now just big enough to house a single dual-layer DVD and documentation.”

Excellent. Like the author of the article, I have wondered why software boxes have been so big? Maybe it was to prevent theft? And of course to stand out in the shelves.

But the software industry should just agree to make smaller boxes. It saves them shipping, storage space, production costs – and trees.

Last summer I installed lots of new software, both OS, applications and plug-ins, on five computers. You wouldn’t believe the pile of boxes by my desk when finished. Most of the plug-ins were big A4-size boxes with a single CD inside. Fun for the kids (who played with all the boxes), crap for nature.

The worst ones are memory cards and accessories to gaming consoles. The last Xbox controller I got, was wrapped in a plastic that was amazing: No knife or scissor in our house could open it. I tried everything. And in the end I had to search in the woods for hours, until I found an old jedi knight living alone in a cave. After some nagging, he agreed to open the controller with his lightsabre. Which aaaaalmost broke during the operation. I’m sure they could make a space shuttle with the same material, with no problems with heating during landing.

So do nature a favor: Mail the URL of the Gizmodo story to your software developer.

“Apple has finally done software packing right and hopefully sent a telegram to the rest of the huge-friggin’ software box industry.”

“I like Flickr. I like blogs. I like search. I like the fact that my daughter is going to knit her own ipod sock. Maybe next year she can exhibit at MacWorld and give me a free pass. .

In that light, I hear that MacWorld might have been better called MacWorld Accessories. Is there a fashion show next year?

Maybe we could call it MacFash. .”

This is something for Anina: Arrange the first gadget, computers and fashion show: With all the cool iPod accessories, mobile phones by fashion designers, software for creation of digital art and fashion, and clothing for the digital lifestyle.

Some examples:

The Burton Audex
The Levis RedWire DLX jeans
The Giro Tuneups II system (lame Flash interface, click snow, then helmets, then accessories)
Elite Model Look mobile phones

And of course a million different designers doing iPod cases with everything from polyester, via knitted socks to $30,000 with diamonds.

How about it, Anina? In Paris? The first MacFash? Or maybe TechFash?

So MemoryMiner uses your OS X adress book, and you simply drag the persons on a picture from a sidebar (or search box) to the picture. Clicking on that person later will show you all pictures with that person.

MemoryMiner also calculates the age of persons if you have added their birthday in adress book. And then displays pictures with people as babys, kids, teens etc. It may sound a bit too much now, but if you started using a digital camera 5 years ago, you will already have several stages of your kids. And people scanning their old family photos will absolutely love this.

Places

MemoryMiner also let you add a place to each photo. If you add a real adress to the place, MemoryMiner will find it via web services, and show the maps with the pictures.

You can then make all kinds of cool searches. Find “uncle Lars”, switch to maps and see all the places in the world he has been taken photos of on a webmap (MapQuest). Cool!

The third part is that you can connect pictures with other documents, both text, video, sound and URLs. Drag any file to any picture, and they are linked together. Way cool.

Head over to MemoryMiner and have a look. Actually that’s the only think you can do right now, as the program is still in beta. But do have a look at the nice video showing how to use the app.

A wow app

There are so many things I could see myself using this for. And so many questions I have: How do MemoryMiner store the data? What kind of web services does it use? How do you define people’s relationship to you? What if MemoryMiner could use a genealogy file (like GEDCOM) to figure out who is related to who? And where they lived? Or even use software like Reunion to keep track of people. I want to test it!

PS. If you’re working at MemoryMiner and happen to read this: Let me join the beta program. I would like to put a full review here asap.

It also has a list with the colors on the iPods. That is, the colors they used to have. Now, with the iPod mini gone, they are only black and white.

Have a look here.

It scans through all your Safari bookmarks, and uploads them to Del.icio.us. To help you started with the tags for all your bookmarks, it will use the folder the bookmarks are located in, as tags. So if a bookmark is stored in a folder called webdesign, and a folder inside that one called CSS, the bookmark will get the both folder names as bookmarks; webdesign and CSS. Neat.

You still would have to add quite a few tags to your bookmarks, and a nice way to do that is to load them back to your Mac again with the software Cocoalicious. It helps you manage your Del.icio.us bookmarks and makes it a whole lot easier to add tags to bookmarks.

Benedikt Terhechte is the one who also make Tagbag, the way cool OS X widget that scans all your files, looking for Spotlight keywords. With Tagbag and a the instructions I wrote about how to use your Mac to get things done, you would have a very flexible and fast GTD system working in 5 minutes.

OS X for Intel would change the PC landscape like no other operating system has or could. Apple should open-source their operating system, port Openoffice.org to Aqua and bundle it for Intel PC’s. Offer it for $199 for a home edition and $299 for a professional edition and the world will say goodbye to Windows for good.

Why? OS X is a stable and secure platform and offers the proprietary multi-media applications lacking in Linux. Reports of OS X for Intel indicate it performs well, has a great interface and provides a better overall experience than Windows. Some say the experience is vastly improved.

With Microsoft Vista borrowing heavily from the OS X look and feel, why wouldn’t someone want the original?

Link

Picture from Stepmania.

Seems like quite a few has started dancing already. Also, here’s a list of dance pads that works.

Party tip: Put up your Mac with a camera and Photo Booth running, next to the stereo or bar. Choose one of the more wacky effects. People will fall over laughing. It’s hilarious.

Update:: An alternative for Photo Booth is the shareware WebcamTweaker.

And, as you can see, a nice description, movie poster icon, director and cast.

The next – and final step – would be to add the actual Quicktime movies as enclosures.

“Only” $1,015…

If you’re new to Last.fm, it works like this: You download a plugin for your music player software. There are a number of plugins found here. Install the proper plugin for your OS and player. Some of the plugins also works with mp3-players like the iPod. So when you sync your iPod, it sends the tracks played to the plugin.

Register with Last.fm and create a free account.

Next time you play a song, the plugin will send the artist and track name to Last.fm. Now the whole world can see what you’re playing. Scary for some, cool for some! My Last.fm status page is here.

When you have registered (or if you already are a Last.fm user), head over to the brilliantdays.com group, and join. When 15 people have joined, you can see the collective music taste of the members at the group page.

7) On clients, they want to choose the highest-reach platforms. That doesn’t mean a Windows app. Or even an app that runs only in IE. It must run on every variant of Linux and Macintosh too.

In my opinion, this alone is good enough reason.

I’m so tired of Microsoft making non-standard stuff that doesn’t work in other browser, and on other OSes. One of the worst examples is Microsoft’s own IE 5 browser for Macintosh, that has msn.com as the default homepage. But what happens when you try to msn.com with a Mac? Doesn’t work.

From Tuaw.com:

They’ve made a change to http://www.msn.com that crashes Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh. Yup, that’s right…Microsoft has changed the coding on the default homepage for their IE5 browser on the Mac that crashes the very browser in question. And it gets worse. Since the only easy way to change the default homepage in IE5 is to do it in the browser itself (in the Preferences) and the browser is crashing with a spinning beachball of death (SBOD) when you launch it, there’s now a classic Catch-22. How can users change the homepage to something else if you have to do it in the browser, but the browser crashes loading the page?

Why can’t Microsoft code msn.com so that every browser that follows standards can use it without problems?

Now Microsoft is planning a new service called Windows Live. Will this work on other platforms? I don’t think so. Many people use Windows at work and Mac at home. Or the opposite. Or Linux at work and Windows at home. As the biggest player in the field, Microsoft should make it possible for people to use other OSes on their pages and services.

By making services uncomaptible with other OSes, Microsoft forces people over to their platform. Because people who are not as nerd-like as many bloggers, don’t want trouble. They just want to things that works. Whichever computer they’re sitting at.

Update: I might be wrong (and it would be so nice if I were!): They are trying.

Update2: Also see the Live.com blog at Spaces.

Update3:: Russell Beattie thinks Windows Live is Monoploy 4.0. And man, is that powerpoint behind Bill Gates ugly. Do they even have designers at Microsoft?!? Looks like some car sales person’s first slide after using Powerpoint for… 30 minutes. And what’s with that old iMac down in the right corner? Oh, I see. It’s there to fit the excellent blue color scheme…

A very short summary:
- Public broadcasters should use open standards
- People in general agree on this
- Microsoft Windows Media is not an open standard
- The public broadcasters should choose something else
- People question the knowledge of the broadcasters

Is there an open streaming platform that can meet the demands of broadcasters that wants an alternative to Windows Media. Eirik at Eirikso.com wants to know.

Still, I fail to find one single blog, comment or article that actually suggest a complete, working alternative.

Post suggestions to the article, or use Del.icio.us with tag “opencast”.

This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

Chris Pirillo thinks.