Author: Randy Stewart

Mac blogger toolkit – Northern Voice 2007

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 26, 2007
3 Comments on Mac blogger toolkit – Northern Voice 2007

CBC columnist and Mac geek, Tod Maffin ran another great session at Moosecamp around favorite productivity tools. Below are my favorites from the session.

ImageWell – Swiss Army knife for images (free)
Paparazzi – takes screenshots of full web pages.
TextExpander – condenses messages, phrases or code that you might reuse all the time into short keystrokes.
VoodooPad – wiki for your Mac. BEST NOTEPAD EVER!
Synergy – software for using one keyboard and mouse with two computers (and screens). Kind of like a KVM…
Hazel – best maid for cleaning up your Mac.
BrowserShots.org – test web designs on 31 different browser platforms.
QuickSilver – I’m hoping I’ll get this one day, but for now, I’ll point it out to all all of you

More tools

Audio of the session

image by Flickr user katiew

Conferences Digital Cameras

PhotoCamp at Northern Voice

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 26, 2007

Kris Krug, photographer extraordinaire, organized a conference within a unconference within a conference at this year’s Northern Voice. He collected an exceptional panel of other photogs and tech geeks.

High end consumer cameras

Tim Bray did a talk on high end compact cameras. Made me think about using the G3 again. It does shoot in RAW and it has the intervolator. I wonder if the G6 has that? If you are looking for a new camera, Tim posted his talk at the here.

Tim’s talk brought up some points that I’m always thinking about: I love my Canon Rebel, but there are serious costs to bringing it with me all the time. It takes beautiful pictures, but it’s big and bulky. The vast majority of the photos that I take are on my Canon SD450. Maybe I could learn to use it a bit better…

Color Profile Love

A huge THANK YOU to Matt Trent at UBC for teaching me in 10 minutes everything I needed to know about color profiles in Photoshop. I sat through an hour at a Macworld session years ago from someone who worked at Adobe and I didn’t get it. Now, I think I’ve got all I need to know.

The secret – if you work on a Mac and are posting photos online work with Adobe SRGB. Why? Safari reads numerous color profiles, but almost no other browser does. The color profile is smaller than Adobe RGB, but it is the lowest common denominator, thus will look the same on most browsers.

Hopefully, next year I’ll get to see your lab and work in HDR.

Matt Trent’s Moosecamp Presentation

Adobe Lightroom

Roland Tanglao led a session about Adobe Lightroom, which looks a lot like if iPhoto and Adobe Bridge had a kid. Oh, and apparently, in the photo world, black is the new white.

Lots of good features here, but not enough to pull me into another app. One interesting thing, though, it looked like Roland was running an older G4 laptop, but Lightroom really seemed to fly. If you’re looking for something a little more robust than iPhoto, Lightroom might be for you.

Thanks everyone for such an informative session! Look forward to seeing you next year.

Conferences Northern Voice 2007

Pix from Northern Voice

Chris Heuer, Social Media Club founder and all-around nice guy, has a great set of pictures up on Flickr from the conference so far.

Check them out here.

All Northern Voice photos on Flickr are here.

Photo by (or at least in his feed) Chris Heuer

Building Community Conferences Links

10 tips for meeting people at industry events

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 8, 2007
2 Comments on 10 tips for meeting people at industry events

My friend Andrew Chen has posted his thoughts on meeting people at conferences. Great list if you are in the mood to meet folks in your industry. Here are a few of the points:

Use pre-conference time wisely
Arrive early for some 1:1 time
Sit next to interesting people, and introduce yourself
Bring business cards, and ask for business cards

Some of these things might appear dead obvious, but you would be surprised how many people don’t follow them. Fact is, even if you are shy about meeting folks, other people are as well. Keep in mind, the main reason why people attend these events is to meet people.

Andrew, btw, just moved to Silicon Valley from Seattle. He’s an Entrepreneur in Residence at the VC firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures on Sand Hill Road. Sounds like a dream job to me! If you’re looking to get a company off the ground or join a startup, he might just be the guy to talk to.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be in Palo Alto this weekend and spending a little time in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday.

Read

Apple

Steve Jobs thinks DRM is pointless

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 6, 2007

Wow… here’s something I thought I’d never see.

Steve Jobs posted on the official Apple blog, errr, Apple’s press release area a letter entitled “Thoughts on Music.”

Basically, Steve boils it down to 3 possible futures.

1. Stay the course with DRM.
This doesn’t really work for the music companies as they still sell most of their music on unprotected CDs. DRM really only hinders the sale of music on iTunes and other players as folks don’t like being locked in.

2. Apple licenses Fairplay
This doesn’t work for the music companies because ultimately when more companies have access to the DRM, DRM becomes less effective.

3. DRM goes away.
I’m still shocked about this one. You can buy music from anyone and play it on any device. Ultimately, Apple still has the advantage here as they sell the number one player.

So, the big question is why did Steve post this?

Here are some possibilities:

European bans on DRM will affect Apple’s business.
A free market for music would help, not hinder Apple’s music business. Apple doesn’t have 100% player market share, so in theory, they could sell more music. Apple could, in theory, sell more iPods.
iPod battery life would increase. DRM sucks batteries dead because of the additional horsepower required.
DRM is a bad user experience and Steve knows it.

Ultimately, I hope this has some affect on the state of DRM and isn’t just a power play to garner consumer sympathy for Apple’s dilemma.

[via TUAW]

General

Community Next – this weekend

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date February 5, 2007

Sorry, faithful readers for my long departure. I’ve been buried under a few projects. Hopefully, I will be posting more regularly very soon.

In the mean time, I’ll be attending the Community Next conference this weekend at Stanford. If you are at the conference or in the Bay Area and would like to meet up, drop me a line at randy@boxbe.com.

Apple Conferences Home Entertainment HTPCs Macintosh Macworld

Macworld 2007

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 10, 2007

Just a few quick general impressions from the show today.

iPhone and AppleTV

First, iPhone and AppleTV are two huge new platforms for Apple to develop and deserved the spotlight today. That said, not really being able to touch or to truly get a “live” demo of the iPhone was a bit of a bummer. I guess this is why Apple usually doesn’t release products that aren’t done.

[Jan 10, 2007 – David Pogue gets a hands on with the iPhone – “Typing is difficult”

The AppleTV seems to be on the surface of things a great platform for Apple to develop. That said, I think they may need to do some convincing to those of use with HDTVs. While photos look great on this device, video was …lacking. Maybe it’s the fact that I was looking at a 42″ HD set from less than 3 feet away, but video looked kind of horrible. I’m not sure if it is the device or the video, but man, it didn’t look good.

Fanboy Whining

No Macworld would be complete without a little complaining. I know we’ll see it soon, but I really, really wanna see what Leopard looks like. I get that two big products were introduced today, but what’s shipping from today? Typically, we get a little software to play with before the hardware ships, so I’m bummed that we didn’t get iLife ’07 today. I suspect that it is tied to the features in Leopard we haven’t seen yet.

Finally

From a visit to Macworld perspective, Macworld is pretty boring. Folks at home are getting as much of a hands on experience as we are at the show. However, the AppleTV and iPhone launch are the most significant new directions we have seen from Apple in years. Exciting times, indeed.

More pictures from the show

Apple Consumer Electronics Features iTunes Microsoft Portable Entertainment Rumors

Twas the Night Before Macworld

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 8, 2007
4 Comments on Twas the Night Before Macworld

Twas the night before Macworld when all through the town
No MacBook was mooing nor turning brown

At Moscone, nerds were queuing with care
in hopes that Saint Steve would soon be there.

Consumer Electronics Games

A Merry Christmas, Indeed

Ok, they weren’t both for me, but add a TMX Elmo, and I may have had all the hot gifts for Christmas in my trunk.

Loving the Wii

The PS3 was for my brother-in-law, but the Wii (or Wheeeeeeee! as we said over the holidays) was all for me. I don’t want to join the choir in the universal praise the Wii has been getting, but wow! It’s pretty spectacular when you can hand any high tech device to someone who isn’t a gadget nerd and they can immediately use it.

This isn’t to say that the Wii isn’t without faults, but as a first generation device (I guess this counts as a first gen device), the level at which this game system just works is nothing short of amazing.

That said, game developers, you have your work cut out for you. While Wii Sports was spectacular, other games were spectacularly difficult for non-gamers, or even hard core gamers. I’ve found that by turning down the sensitivity on the Wii-mote, it tends to work a bit better for me.

It’s just fun

While the graphics fail to compare to the PS3 or the Xbox 360, we had a lot of fun going bowling, playing tennis and hitting the ball out of the park in baseball. I even had fun playing golf! I can’t emphasize the fun part enough. Often, games feel like another task to complete or a skill to acquire, and frequently feel more like work and less like a game.

Clearly, I can’t recommend this system highly enough to non-gamers, but the Wii also fits as a “supplemental” game system (Wii60 anyone?) for so-called “hard-core” gamers.

Downloads Features

Cool Tools – PicLens

This a very simple plugin for Safari that makes full screen slideshows from folders on Flickr and most of the other major photo sites. Nicely implemented and a great use of screen space.