Remember back in September 2007 when the iPhone v1.0 came out? There was considerable competition between various carriers to be allowed to be the Chosen One in each country, and to enjoy the exclusive right to sell the iPhone. I’m pretty sure that from O2’s point of view, it’s been great business here in the UK.

This level of competition allowed Apple to include onerous conditions in the contract, and one of these was a never-before-seen clause to allow a handset manufacturer, that is Apple, to take a share of call revenues. I seem to remember that this was talked of as redefining the power balance between handset manufacturers and carriers, and not to the advantage of the carriers.

Then the iPhone 3G came along, and with it the App Store. Apple now had a new way to make ongoing revenue from the iPhone.

And that has led me to indulge in some speculation. I imagine that the contract clause requiring call revenue sharing was deeply unpopular with O2 and the other carriers. I speculate that, with the introduction of the App Store revenue stream, Apple allowed this clause to be dropped from their iPhone 3G distribution contracts with O2 et al. If true, this might have led O2 to allow immediate upgrades to its customers because it got them off the phones to which the revenue sharing applied, and and moved them back towards a more standard arrangement.

That would have been a special case, though, and there are no such conditions prevailing now.  O2 are following the industry standard practice of making people wait to upgrade until their contracts are finished. This is in some sense understandable and fair enough, although I suppose that it feels pretty random to customers, many of whom had an expectation based on last time.

So,  January then…

I have a problem.  I really hate the manual process that I have to use to keep my two iTunes libraries in sync, and I’m dying for there to be a application that solves this problem for me.  There are quite a few that synchronise iTunes libraries between machines, but I’m not confident that any of them really do what I want.

The libraries are on two Macs; a Power Mac G5 and a Macbook Pro.  The Power Mac sits at home, has lots of disk space, and contains the 60Gb master version of the library.  However, I am often away from home, and so the Macbook Pro is my day to day iTunes machine, but it has a lot less space, and only has room for a 20-30% subset of the library.  Oh, and this is the version that gets synced to my iPhone where I do quite a bit of listening.

When I add tracks on the Macbook Pro, I have to remember to manually copy them to the Power Mac, and sometimes vice versa.  The copying process doesn’t take account of ratings, play counts, or other metadata.  Large chunks of my main music library go neglected, because they never get onto the Macbook Pro. Et cetera. Et cetera.  So, I want an application to synchronise music between these two machines.

Here’s what I want it to do:

1. I want a selection from my master library on the Power Mac to be synced to the Macbook Pro;
2. I want the mechanism for determining what is in and out of this selection to be at least as flexible as the iTunes smart playlist. This is so that I can do things like automatically rotating songs that I like, but haven’t listened to recently, into the Macbook Pro’s version of the library;
3. I want the sync process to remove tracks from the iTunes library and hard drive on the Macbook Pro if they become removed from the selection on the Power Mac;
4. I want the syncing to run automatically in the background over the network.  It would be nice if it worked over the internet, but over wifi is the minimum requirement;
5. I want songs that I buy or otherwise add on the Macbook Pro to be synchronised back to the Power Mac.
6. I want metadata to be synchronised.  Particularly, in addition to the basic static info like song names, albums, genres, artists, etc., I want play counts to be accurate on both machines, rating changes to be synchronised, and the various dates to be right;
7. I want it to work while iTunes is running;
8. I want it to be secure and not provide the general public with access to my library.

It’s not clear to me that any of the existing products that do this kind of thing are able to meet all of these requirements, and I’m not sure why.  Perhaps I’m unusual in what I’m trying to do, or perhaps there are technical issues in here that just can’t be solved with reasonable effort.  Perhaps I’m just not understanding properly what I read on product websites.

So, am I crazy to want this?  Is there anything out there that does it?  Help!

I recently took delivery of a T-Mobile Web’n Walk Stick III.  This useful gadget looks a bit like a USB memory stick, albeit one a little on the large side, and gives me high speed Internet access via T-Mobile’s 3G network in the UK.  A little probing reveals that under the covers it’s actually a Huawei E170 USB Stick. I’d not heard of Huawei before, but on investigation it looks as though they pretty much have the market cornered for 3g modems.

I’ve had to sign a 24 month contract, but for £15/month I get 3Gb of data, and the device for free.  They promise that they won’t charge me if I go over my 3Gb, but apparently, if I do it too often or excessively, then they’ll talk to me about adjusting my tariff.  This is by far the most reasonable approach I’ve heard of to this problem.  Oh, and they’ve included unlimited access to their WiFi hotspots, which is a great bonus!

There was a bit of faffing to get the E170 to work on OS X, but I found a very useful blog posting at phototropic.co.uk which helped a lot.

In many ways, the service is very good – it’s nothing like as fast as they say, of course, but it’s at least as good as I expected.  A speed test was saying something around 450kb/s download speed, and about 300kb/s upload with a good 3G signal present.  It certainly does feel like broadband, and it’s wonderfully liberating to be able to be online almost anywhere.

All seemed to be going well until I started to notice some odd behaviour on my Macbook Pro while using the modem.  The fans were coming on and the computer was running very hot.  Some investigation revealed that the system log server, syslogd, was consuming vast amounts of CPU.  To cut a long story short, it turns out that the device drivers are outputting a very large amount of debug information. I conducted a 3 minute test, during which I ran a broadband speed tester application, and found that the main system log file grew by about 0.5Mb in that time.

A quick look in the log file revealed that 30-40 messages per second are being logged while data is being transferred.  Interestingly, it also revealed what I believe to be the name of the culprit programmer at Huawei.

Unfortunately, this is enough to stop the device from being long-term usable on my Macbook Pro.  It drains the battery, and rapidly consumes the limited amount of free disk space.

I talked to a really nice man at T-Mobile, who said he would enquire about the possibility of an update for the device.  I have another few days during which I can choose to cancel the contract and send the device back.  I guess I’ll be regretfully doing that unless it emerges that Huawei and T-Mobile are going to fix the problem.

It’s a shame, because I really like the freedom that this service seemed to be about to give me.

Update: 22nd October. The mad syslogd CPU consumption seems to have been a fluke.  There are still way too many syslog messages, but the fans are quieter seem to be ok now.  I’m going to keep it.

I’ve been in the process of cataloguing my large collection of books into Delicious Library for a while now.  Version 2 introduced a web publishing feature, and so you can now visit my library online.  It’s just a bit of fun really – I’m doing it because it’s cool, rather than because people need to know what books I have.

The Currently Loving shelf has stuff in it that I am particularly excited about at the moment.

I recently upgraded my UK O2 provided iPhone to a 3G model, and we bought an O2 pay-monthly SIM to put in my “old” iPhone that was freed up as a result of the upgrade.

However, while it would work sometimes, at other times it would display “No SIM” at the top left, and pop up a message saying “No SIM card is inserted”.  We would restart it, and it would be fine for a short while, and then “No SIM” again.

This was very annoying, and I spent a long time trying to figure out what the problem was.  Two restores, a lot of removal and re-insertion of the SIM card, and a certain amount of Googling did not provide a solution.

The answer turned out to be as follows.  On the phone, I went into the Settings applet, then:

General -> Reset -> Reset Network Settings

This has completely cured the “No SIM” problem, and it’s run very smoothly ever since.

I’ve been working on another machinima project.

For over a year now, I’ve been doing these things on and off. I’ve learned a lot, mostly by being incredibly frustrated for extended periods of time.

Throughout all of this time, I have used Snapz Pro X to capture the movie clips from Second Life, or whatever other virtual world platform I was using. This product is indispensable, and yet it has provided me with some of my most miserable moments. You see, Snapz has a dangerous propensity to lose all the data that you just captured with it.

The main reason is that it is simultaneously inflexible and intolerant when it comes to disk space. Inflexible because it contains no options allowing the user to save output to any drive except the boot drive. Snapz creates a temporary capture file as it is going along, and then it encodes this into the final output format. This process requires up to twice as much disk space as either of these files require on their own. Intolerant, because if you run out of space on your primary disk, Snapz bins all your work. That’s it. Bye bye. See you later.

So I decided to try an alternative piece of capture software called iShowU.

In many ways, this software seemed to be the answer to my prayers. It offers useful and easily configurable profiles for capture. The save file is produced immediately after capture finishes – no hanging around. Finally, it only uses one lot of disk space. If there’s 1Gb left on the disk you can stop capture, and know that saving your work will require no further space. Oh, and joy of joys – you can configure where the final output is sent, and where the temporary files are kept.

After joyously using this for a brief period, I noticed that Second Life was running unusually slowly while I was capturing it. An investigation revealed, perhaps obviously, that some of the benefit of iShowU was coming at a cost. So I did a quick and dirty test.

A quick look at Activity Monitor while capturing reveals that Snapz uses about 2.5% of a CPU on my MacBook Pro to capture at 1280×720 (it’s a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo).

The same test for iShowU reveals that it is using more than an entire CPU for its capture at the same resolution and target frame rate.

When it is capturing, Snapz Pro is obviously writing its output into a file with very little compression. All the CPU requirement comes afterwards for the encoding. iShowU achieves its greater convenience by doing the processing at capture time, but of course that has a major impact on the application being captured. This is probably tolerable for capturing Safari or Mail or other less demanding applications, but not for Second Life, or games.

So I guess I’m going to end up putting up with Snapz and its idiosyncrasies for a while yet. I’m just going to cross my fingers for the provision of additional preferences so that I can tell it where to put its files.

Apple released iLife ‘08 recently. It’s been broadly well received, with the very notable and vociferous exception of iMovie ‘08 which has suffered from the severe disapprobation of the commentariat (thanks to Alastair Campbell for that term, by the way). iMovie power users everywhere are up in arms about all the stuff that is missing or different, compared with iMovie ‘06, the previous version.

You see, the thing is this. Apple ditched the whole way of thinking and working that underpinned the previous version. Someone at Apple decided, correctly in my opinion, that iMovie ‘06 was too hard to use for your average non-technical user. They decided to change the direction of iMovie to cater for this kind of user – which arguably is who the iLife apps should be targeted at.

Apple’s aim, therefore, was to make it very quick and easy to import a movie from your camera and edit it. Having done this, it they wanted it to be very easy to publish the movie so that people can watch it. With the exception of publishing to iDVD, they succeeded very well at satisfying those requirements. It’s to their credit that they simplified, rather than just adding bloat. There’s more than enough bloat already in the world of software.

I expect things like iDVD publishing to be added incrementally over time, as non chargeable updates to iMovie ‘08. I don’t expect to see timelines, timecode, audio track editing and other complicated stuff coming back. The problem with iMovie ‘06 was that it was neither a consumer app, nor a prosumer one. It was too hard for consumers to use, and too limited for the prosumers.

For the machinima that I’ve been involved with, I used (read: battled) iMovie ‘06 for a while, but subsequently upgraded to Final Cut Express, and have never looked back. Now, with this upgrade, I can finally use iMovie – in fact I have. I have published two videos of my family to the .Mac web gallery, in order to share them with family members.

Here’s a list of things that took me longer than editing either of these movies:

1. Picking the musical accompaniment to the videos;
2. Uploading the videos to .Mac;
3. Cooking tea for two tonight;
4. Writing this blog entry;
5. Watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on More 4 tonight.

Viva iMovie ‘08!

Technorati Tags: apple, avchd, finalcutexpress, imovie, video

Well, I have finished and delivered my virtual worlds presentation, and by all accounts the feedback was very positive. So now I am contemplating how I might take the presentation, with all its video, pictures, meaningful use of transitions, and the accompanying talk, and make it available for people to download, or even view online.

Given Andy Piper’s troubles in negotiating this exact same problem, I am giving this rather more thought than I had done previously – it clearly isn’t as obvious as it seemed. Exporting a presentation and adding audio should be simple on a Mac with all its media capabilities. That wasn’t Andy’s experience, though.

Unfortunately there’s no audio recording from the event itself, and so in order to produce a downloadable version, I will be required to reprise the talk that accompanies the presentation.

Here are my options for making a downloadable self running presentation, with audio:

1. Run through the presentation, using Snapz Pro X to simultaneously record the audio and screen capture the slideshow video;
2. Record the audio track separately. Listen to the recorded audio track, while clicking through the slideshow, and capturing it with Snapz Pro X. Use Quicktime Pro to join the audio and video together;
3. Record the audio track separately. Export the presentation to a Quicktime movie allowing five seconds per slide. Either export it in a video format that will be editable in iMovie or Final Cut Express, or convert it to one post facto. Finally, edit it to extend the stills so that the slides fit in with the audio track.

Keynote is very good at exporting. You can export presentations to PDF; to Flash movies; Quicktime slideshows and movies; Powerpoint; and other things.

Hence, superficially, the most attractive of these is option 3. However, there are difficulties in exporting slideshows to Quicktime that have movies in them. For example, where there is a delay in a slide to allow time for a movie to play, the delay in the exported version doesn’t begin until after the movie has finished which doesn’t work at all well. Also, in my slideshow, there are a couple of instances of running movies having other things fade in on top of them. Without having proved it, I suspect that, in the exported version, this is going to happen after the movie has stopped, which also won’t be as intended.

Option 1 is probably not going to work that well, because the idea that I might get the talk right in one large take, at least without an audience keeping me on my toes, seems a little improbable.

So, even though I’m not mad about option 2, it’s starting to look like the least painful way to do it.

Apple! If you’re listening, here are my suggestions on what you could do to make all this much easier:

• Fix Keynote Quicktime exports so that slides with movies in them work properly;
• Enhance Final Cut Express and iMovie so that they can edit at 640×480, 800×600, and 1024×768 – standard computer resolutions as well as standard video resolutions;
• Enhance Keynote to give it a presentation recording mode. The user would give the presentation, and Keynote would generate a Quicktime movie of the presentation, complete with the recorded audio track.

I’ll post again, if and when I’ve managed to do this!

Technorati Tags: apple, finalcutexpress, keynote, presentations, snapzprox, quicktime

The other day, I could be found proclaiming my undying love for the Apple iPhone.  I knew in my bones that I would give it as much space as it needed, and when it finally came to me I would tenderly love it forever and always.

However, I must now confess that since my proclamations of love,  I have become wracked by doubts.  The affair is beginning to pall for me.  iPhone is just too far away – beyond touch and possession.  Its prior perfection is becoming marred, with flaws beginning to show, and while I have been admiring its beauty from afar, there are other beauties closer to home that I have been ignoring.

Now others have started to catch my eye.  I have felt the shameful allure of forbidden 3G delights and I am tempted by the wicked thrill of mobile photography with 5 megapixels and Carl Zeiss Tessar lenses.  Worst of all, the aloof iPhone is far far away. These delights are temptingly available here and now. They sit behind their glass windows, beckoning me.  I cannot resist…

So, I ordered a Nokia N95.  It’s coming on Monday.  Thanks to Mark Cathcart for reminding me that there are other phones in the world.

Technorati Tags: consumption, iphone, n95, nokia

I’ve been watching, only slightly enviously, as lots of my friends on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean get their Apple iPhones.

About two years ago I realised with something of a shock that my main requirement for a cellular telephone beyond the basic phonebook and call-making ability was that it fit comfortably in the breast pocket of my shirt.  Up to that time I had incorrectly believed that it had something to do with advanced functionality and being a “smartphone”.  Smartphones are large and unwieldy, over complicated, and full of compromises.  They offer bad web browsing, poor tcp/ip performance, and have lousy user interfaces.  In fact, they aren’t what I need.

I suppose that, over the years, I have experienced a fundamental shift in the way I perceive the importance of form vs function.  In 1990 I would have claimed not to care about how something looked and felt – function was all.  When it came to computers, the Unix command line was (and still is, a lot of the time) my natural home, and I went around with a sexy Psion Organiser II LZ 64 that was generally referred to as my “brain” (hello Jane, if you’re out there!).  To complete the picture, you can imagine a bricklike cellphone attached to my belt somewhere in a bad imitation of Batman.

As time went by, and phones and PDAs allegedly converged, I tried to merge them but always ended up carrying two things around with me.  In 2005, I gave up, abandoning smartphones for the smallest and cheapest phone model that matched my minimal functional requirements.  I haven’t yet replaced the phone that I got on that occasion – it’s the longest I’ve ever had one.

So why do I suddenly want an iPhone?

As a geek, there’s a lot I like about Apple stuff.  I like that OS X has Unix in it, I have loved both of the iPods I’ve ever had, and I like to feel that I am kicking back a little against the Microsoft hegemony.  However, on consideration, I’d have to say that the main reason that I covet an iPhone is that I think they are just beautiful – both in terms of hardware and software. When I watched the video of Steve Jobs launching it at Macworld, I instantly wanted one.

I wonder what I’ll do if it fails the shirt pocket test.