iLife ’09 and why you want it February 6, 2009
Posted by David in Apple, Software.add a comment
Last week Mac owners were treated to updates of the two most essential software collections for their computers.
iWorks ‘09 gathers together the best office-type functional software (Pages, the word processor, is assisting me in the creation of this week’s column) but far more excitingly for the more creative type, iLife ’09 shows off some excellent applications that really should form the backbone of just about everybody’s Apple computer, including iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and the unrivaled fun and power of Garageband.
In its previous incarnations, iPhoto was already doing a sterling job of managing my ever-growing collection of digital photography but a couple of new features are little short of mind blowing.
First up is ‘Faces’ which attempts to sort your pictures by who is in them. By telling it the name of one or more people in a particular shot, it uses face recognition technology to find them in others. Initial results were usually accurate and sometimes way out (it suggested that my daughter might be her grandfather, for example!) but guesses become more reliable as errors are corrected.
The other new feature, called ‘Places’, had a friend and me literally gasping in amazement.
A Google map of the world featured a forest of red pushpin icons around central England. Zooming in increased the number of pins until they were dotted around the southern half of the country with particular emphasis on Oxfordshire. Certain modern cameras and the iPhone 3G plot your location coordinates when a picture is taken and embed the position within the photo’s data. ‘Places’ can then literally pinpoint where a photograph was taken anywhere in the world. Amazing.
I though I’d caught it out when a path of red pins traced a line right down the middle of the Thames until the pictures reminded me of a boat trip last summer.
iMovie makes editing your video footage an absolute breeze and my personal favourite, Garageband, combines a home recording studio and music teacher that is unrivaled by any other software out there.
No Mac should be without iLife. An excellent suite of software that’s just £69.
Anyone home? December 19, 2008
Posted by David in Gaming, Software.add a comment
If you’re lucky enough that Santa brings you a Sony Playstation 3 this year, you’ll probably want to try out the new Playstation Home service that just launched on the console.
The idea behind Home is simple and yet allows for some very sophisticated things from your PS3.
The two other big current consoles, Microsoft’s XBox 360 and the Nintendo Wii both have personal avatars – characters that you design and model either in your own likeness or some fantasy persona. These avatars can then interact with other avatars and communicate or meet up for online games. It’s a way of quite literally putting a face to the services offered by the console.
Ever since the PS3 launched in early 2007, Sony has been promising and releasing sneak previews of its Home network planned for the device and it has finally been made available to the public, albeit in beta form.
Home gives you the obligatory avatar but with considerably more detail than the other two consoles. You also start off in your own personal virtual apartment next to a beautiful harbour. The apartment is yours to decorate and fill with your own personal belongings that you gather along the way including, of course, lots of nice hi-tech Sony kit.
Upon leaving your apartment you join a plaza which is bustling with other avatars, each controlled by real people sitting at their PS3s.
The plaza contains a bowling alley, cinema complex, shopping mall and other areas to meet.
When you approach a fellow avatar you can chat with them by voice or text and challenge them to games within your library. You can also play bowls, pool and various arcade machines.
It doesn’t take long before you start to realise the genius behind Sony’s Home network.
Fed up with the default t-shirt your avatar is wearing? Pop into the shopping mall, find a clothes shop and but some new threads. I bought a hooded top for my character to wear for 59p of real cash. It’s fun money for me but once everyone starts to do it, it will make Sony a fortune.
There are posters up all over the mall advertising real things and you can enter the cinema and watch an actual movie for a small fee.
Home is definitely a fun and immersive experience.
If you fancy a meet-up, look out for me – TintinX.
Singin’ to the songbird yesterday December 8, 2008
Posted by David in Cool, Firefox, Music, Software.add a comment
It’s been some considerable time in the making but last week finally saw the official 1.0 release of Songbird (getsongbird.com), a media playing application clearly designed to snap at the ankles of the likes of iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp.
In a world awash with MP3 playing software, Songbird offers anticipation because of its open source foundation and the fact that it is built using Mozilla XULRunner, the same programming language that brings us Firefox.
In fact, the first thing you notice when you install and launch Songbird is that it does appear to be the offspring of an iTunes and Firefox liaison – something which brings both good and bad points to the table.
Early pre-release versions of Songbird looked so similar to iTunes that I was convinced Apple would be slapping down a lawsuit before too long The developers appear to have gone some way to giving it its own style but the inspiration is still there for all to see.
Indeed, with a couple of rejigs of the layout and the application of a new skin (as per Firefox, Songbird lets you apply different designs called ‘feathers’), it’s possible to reintroduce the striking similarity. Personally, I would like to see a little more innovation in a new product.
The Firefox family line comes into play with tabbed browsing within the player, the aforementioned ‘feathers’ and extensions – small add-ons to Songbird which perform specific tasks like adding iPod integration or video playback.
It’s these add-ons which excite me most because they offer limitless potential.
As the software stands at the moment, it’s hard to imagine embracing it over iTunes or, indeed, Winamp (just about anything is better than Windows Media Player so there’s no real challenge there).
Yes, it’s open source; yes, it includes concert and ticket information (did you know The Damned are playing in Oxford on the 19th?) and yes, it’s available on all platforms, but it can’t rip or burn CDs, there’s no support for Podcast subscriptions and the deal-breaker for me – it doesn’t recognise the iPhone.
Songbird’s similarity to iTunes causes inevitable comparisons at every step of the way and this is the product’s biggest hurdle.
Do I want it to succeed? Yes, I’d love it to.
Does it have a long way to go? Oh yes, miles. But it’s off to a good start and I’ll be waiting.
Vista by default March 2, 2007
Posted by David in Microsoft, Software.add a comment
Despite daily promises to myself that I wouldn’t be taking the plunge with Windows Vista any time soon, last week I bought a new laptop computer which, as you would expect, came with it preinstalled.
I’ve already had plenty of experience with the various pre-release beta versions of Vista so on the whole I knew what to expect and the performance has definitely improved with the full release. The bells, whistles and eye candy aplenty certainly do no harm and if you can stop yourself from systematically reverting its functionality to something more akin to a familiar XP style, you’ll eventually find some cool tools and productivity enhancing features, though little that’s truly innovative and doesn’t already exist as third party downloads in XP or in Mac OS X.
That’s the Vista review out the way, probably the least in-depth evaluation you’re ever likely to read, but the web is, of course, full of them so seek greater guidance there, if you must.
I’ll end by saying that I was going to ‘write’ this week’s column using one or both of Vista’s alternative input methods – handwriting and speech recognition. In fairness, the experience wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting – indeed, once trained, I was occasionally impressed with Vista’s ability to translate my scribbles and mutterings – but I don’t think secretaries and PAs have anything to worry about just yet. Unless your typing sounds like the ticking of a grandfather clock, pecking away at the keyboard is still going to yield faster results for some time still to come, although from a disabled usability perspective, Vista does deliver potentially useful help.
There is always some new online innovation causing a buzz and filling up blog inches and Joost is no exception.
The software aims to merge computer and television experiences by delivering video content over the web using established peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies. It’s no fly-by-night start-up, either. Joost is the collaborative brainchild of the founders of Skype and Kazaa and it has already signed deals with Warner and Viacom for providing content.
Still at the ‘invitation only’ beta testing stage, Joost shows considerable potential and looks likely to push forward considerably the whole IPTV trend of delivering television and film over the internet at very little cost to the provider.
Desktop blogging tools October 2, 2007
Posted by David in Comment, Software.add a comment
I’ve been trying out some alternative desktop based blogging tools over the past few days. Primarily I will be blogging from my Mac and there I’m running some software called MarsEdit which I’m so far finding more than satisfactory.
There’s something so straightforward about well-written Mac applications and, although there’s a price attached once my 30 day trial expires, I’ll probably end up shelling out the modest $30 for a MarsEdit licence.
But this morning I am in the office and tied to a Windows laptop. Fortunately I’ve downgraded it back down to Windows XP so it no longer feels that every waking computer moment is a trawl through extra thick treacle in wellington boots with breeze blocks strapped to them. It does, however, mean that I need a Windows blog client.
But my work licence doesn’t stretch to Office 2007 and quite obviously Word 2003 heralds from a time before the explosion in blogging so it was time to find a Windows client I could use with ease.
I settled on Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. Actually, that sounds a little misleading. Saying I ‘settled’ on it gives the impression I tried out a lot of options before determining it was the best rather than download it first, use it and decide to stick with it. I’m writing in it now and, given that it’s something I’m only ever going to fall back on when I feel the need to blog from a Windows environment, it’s perfectly adequate if not quite as intuitive and shortcut-laden as MarsEdit.
Oh – and it’s free, of course.