BPM for your iTunes songs
I just bought a iPod Nano and an Nike Sports Kit for it. I’m going to use it for running and bicycling, and I’m thrilled by it already. A full report coming soon!
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?!
Make your own iPod nano ad
You need Adobe After Effects
Mac vs PC
The old OS war… But when a Larry writes something as utterly stupid as this, he gets a birthday present like this.
FinalTouch in Final Cut Pro
Silicon Color announces that they have been bought by Apple. This is good news. FinalTouch is a program for color correction of movies. It’s typically used in high end environments where specially trained people do color correction on programs before airing them: Fixing color temperature in pictures, making cuts better by suiting the color of two different cameras/positions to each other, changing the color of special objects, making things in the (almost) dark more visible etc.
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.
Google gadgets in OS X Dashboard
Apple has a list of several thousand widgets for Dashboard on Apple.com. And now you can add thousands more. All by yourself.
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:
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How to make special effects in movies
Buzz Image shows how to make special FX for movies. You get to see the original shots, the shots used for the FX, and the final composites. Including huge movies like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Aviator”.
Kate Winslet about to get her left foot removed.
Notice the cool sound effects…
Seriously different christmas presents
Yes, it’s only 81 days for christmas. If you need something different this year, head over to Fugitivetoys.
Cool stuff. And even if I haven’t shopped at them (yet), I immediately like a shop with a blog – called the Hideout – where customers can comment, a community (or forum if you like) and their IM nick in the footer of every page.
Thanks, Luke!
323 seconds… be patient…
…and this is what you get. Amzingly cool photo by Toby Keller (“Burnblue”). Put your camera on a tripod, and open the shutter for 323 seconds. Yes. 323. It must have been very dark when shot. But look at the great colors. And the fireflies seem to have been flying on command.
See my other favourites at Flickr here.
Update: 92 seconds ain’t bad either…
Connect RSS feeds to people
Now you can assign RSS feeds to people in AIM messenger. Great idea. It only works in Trillian for Windows so far, but I think features like this will come everywhere pretty soon. I have been writing about similar ideas for some time. In June 2005, “How about RSS feeds in the Address books?:
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?
The race for the best Mac GTD app
The Omni group is planning a GTD app, which will be called OmniFocus:
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”.
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.
What happened to thinking for yourself?
This is the most creepy movie trailer I’ve seen for a long time. And it isn’t even in the horror section.
Have you called Luke Johnson?
Ok, then do. His number is (+1) 602-435-3694. He wants his phone to call 24/7 and I’m sure he will make it. Excellent way to prove that as long as you have something new to tell, people will come to you. His video is embedded below, and here’s also the link in case it doesn’t show up in your newsreader.
It’s epidemic – soon your tv will have a zillion channels
52 channels and nothing on? Soon you’ll have millions of channels and the traditional tv-channels will be in BIG trouble. I totally agree with what Eirik writes today:
When the internet really starts to shift the flow of money in the media industry we are up for some groundbreaking change…
I’m not sure that the flow of money needs to change before the groundbreaking change. Two things have happened the last days that gives a hint of the change to come:
Evidence #1: iTV
Apple does something very un-Apple: Talking about a product before you can actually buy it. The name will change, but it is a box that takes videos and music from your computer and plays them on your tv screen (and plays the sound on your tv or stereo). MacWorld explains:
Enter the iTV, which connects to your television and stereo and provides the remote-control-driven interface of Front Row without the keyboard-and-mouse issues of a full-fledged computer. Once it’s hooked up, the iTV connects to the network in your house and displays, right on your TV, a menu of options, all geared toward letting you play back digital content—stored on a computer in your house or somewhere out on the Internet—while sitting in your living room. That content includes movies, TV shows, and music downloaded from the iTunes store; other audio and video content you’ve loaded into iTunes; movie trailers from Apple.com; and perhaps other kinds of stuff that Apple hasn’t talked about yet.
So the videos don’t have to be stored on your computer. They can be streams from websites. And this is where your head is supposed to go “bing!!!”. This means that you’ll have thousands, maybe millions of channels available from day one. In no time there will be channels for every single interest, hobby, subject or event imaginable. The adult industry will of course be running ahead of all the others, but then you’ll have video streams with knitting, kittens, collecting stones, hybrid cars, wool socks and klingon language classes. And as always when the revolution comes: The ones who starts first will get the best seats. So which traditional tv-companies will get this first? And deliver their quality content via the web? Formatted for this kind of “television”? And compete? I’m not sure if they will understand it at all in the beginning. They’ll just notice that their younger audience is disappearing.
(TV by Horrortaxi)
There are reports that Apple and Google already are negotiating about putting Google Video on the iTV from day one. Which means that when you turn on the iTV in your living room, you’ll have everything on Google Video available on your tv-screen with a remote. Think about it.
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The universe doesn’t care what you believe
Brilliant webcomic from xkcd.
New Mac GTD app: Inbox
Midnight Beep has a beta of a forthcoming Mac GTD app; Inbox.
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.
