5 August 2010 •Notes • Comments
So I was reading the Time Out New York article that’s been making the rounds on Tumblr being the best job in NYC. As you might imagine, the start-up isn’t big on stock photos, so it’s hardly the first time I’ve seen the inside of their office. But what I hadn’t seen was this fossil (photo #14) with the mirrored drive doors hanging out in the back. WTF do they use a G4 tower for? PowerPC testing? Internal server? There’ve got to be faster and more power efficient ways to do that. Maybe they fire it up and Tumbl on OS 9 once in a while just for kicks. 

So I was reading the Time Out New York article that’s been making the rounds on Tumblr being the best job in NYC. As you might imagine, the start-up isn’t big on stock photos, so it’s hardly the first time I’ve seen the inside of their office.

But what I hadn’t seen was this fossil (photo #14) with the mirrored drive doors hanging out in the back. WTF do they use a G4 tower for? PowerPC testing? Internal server? There’ve got to be faster and more power efficient ways to do that.

Maybe they fire it up and Tumbl on OS 9 once in a while just for kicks. 

Filed under \ powerpc \ g4 tower \ apple \ tumblr \ os 9 \

22 July 2010 •0 notes • Comments
“They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”
An Apple employee, to Wired.

Filed under \ apple \ iphone \ att \ steve jobs \

15 June 2010 •Notes • Comments
AT&T is the Jesse Pinkman to Apple’s Walter White.

AT&T is the Jesse Pinkman to Apple’s Walter White.

Filed under \ apple \ iphone \ att \ breaking bad \

23 May 2010 •Notes • Comments

Using UStream Broadcaster as an iPhone Video Camera

Cycorder is by far the best video camera application available for iPhone 3g. It’s simple, free, its frame rate slays, its got sound, and it doesn’t leave crappy watermarks all over your videos. 

Yes, you need a jailbroken phone to install it. But if your phone isn’t jailbroken, you get what you have coming to you. Unfortunately, Cycorder seems to have a bug that prevents it from working on firmware 3.1.3, at least for the moment. 

As far as I can tell, your next best bet is the UStream Broadcaster, available in the iTunes App Store. By using the local record mode, you can save videos with OK frame rates, no crappy watermarks or time limits, and a so-so resolution of 320x240—the best free combination on the App Store.

After recording, these videos will be saved on the iPhone filesystem (access it through SFTP—your phone is Jailbroken, right?) at private/var/media/Applications/. Unfortunately, Apple hates its customers, so each application folder has nonsense string of characters for a name. Rather than dig through each one, your best bet is to look at date modified—the last UStream Broadcaster update was around 5/20/2010 as of this writing. 

The real curious part is that the videos are saved in Flash (.flv format)—something you’d think The Steve wouldn’t be OK with—and yet there it is, right there in an official App Store app! They even play back on your phone, though I think they’re converted on the fly to .mp4, which is why it takes a few minutes to preview them.

Once you’ve copied the files to your machine, you’ll probably get the best results from opening them in QuickTime 7—still miles better than QT X—and exporting them as .mp4 (Miro, VLC, and MPlayer will do desktop Flash playback, but it’s not great.)

I actually had an aspect ratio error with one of my videos after this export, which can be corrected at Window Menu > Show Movie Properties > Video Track > Visual Settings:

Save it all as a self-contained .mov once the aspect ratio is corrected, and you get a barely-passible-but-at-least-watchable video that should run trouble-free on any Mac, iPhone, iPad or PC with QuickTime installed—no web sharing required.

Filed under \ iphone \ ustream \ video \ cycorder \ apple \ flash \

18 May 2010 •14 notes • Comments
adobegripes: How hard is it to put in an effing “if” statement, Adobe? You don’t even have to clog up the Preferences window if you don’t want to. Take a leaf out of Apple’s book where they have hidden preferences for the 10% of users who want to tweak things like this. You have some XML preference files—just stick a key in there and have a tech note about it. The Great War of Twenty-Ten opens another front: peripherals. User: this scrolling is a problem. Can I turn it off?Adobe Support: sure—by buying a non-Apple mouse.

adobegripes:

How hard is it to put in an effing “if” statement, Adobe? You don’t even have to clog up the Preferences window if you don’t want to. Take a leaf out of Apple’s book where they have hidden preferences for the 10% of users who want to tweak things like this. You have some XML preference files—just stick a key in there and have a tech note about it.

The Great War of Twenty-Ten opens another front: peripherals. 

User: this scrolling is a problem. Can I turn it off?
Adobe Support: sure—by buying a non-Apple mouse.

Filed under \ adobe \ apple \ desktop \

16 April 2010 •2 notes • Comments

Inside Adobe's CS5 Rebranding

Adobe’s Misaligned Priorities

Not going to lie—I’m a little torn about this. I think the insight into Adobe’s branding process is really cool. Plenty of people think the CS5 splash screens are stupid, but I’m going to have to throw my hat in with the opposite camp. I especially like the Otl Aicher inspiration.

That said, branding is simply not Adobe’s problem. Since CS3’s “elements” redesign, their apps have been immediately and universally recognizable as part of a wider suite. Yeah, the splash screens are a little bland, but at least they follow a reliable, uniform aesthetic—unlike, let’s say, Photoshop’s sliders.

The people who live inside Adobe’s applications day in and day out are indeed artistic, design-y types who appreciate the little touches, but they also need tools that work—to borrow a phrase, “real artists ship”. The Internet is awash with complaints for people who rely on Creative Suite to make their living, and other length-of-time-stared-at, no one is whining about splash screens. 

Maybe it’s not abundantly clear to Adobe’s higher-ups, but the vast majority of designers in the world prefer to work on an operating system made by Apple, which—let’s not mince words here—is currently at war with Adobe. iAd is a serious threat to the near hegemony Flash has in interactive online advertising.

If Apple were to custom-tailor some Creative Suite-esq applications for its already extensive line of high-end production software on OS X, while Adobe twiddles on splash screens instead of fixing the problems that actually matter, the firm could see its competitors in Cupertino snatch away the lion’s share of both the rich-content and design markets it currently relies on.

No splash screen is pretty enough to spin a positive outcome from that sort of failure.

Filed under \ adobe \ apple \ branding \ design \ software \ creative suite \ cs5 \