OSX again and again

I came across this fabulous music video created by Dennis Liu using only Mac OSX - even if I hadn't switched I'd think this was brilliant:



I've been using the Mac now for almost two months and the shine hasn't rubbed off yet. Some of my earlier quibbles have disappeared as I've got used to the Mac way of doing things (most notably the additional Command key, and the missing right mouse button), and I've got to appreciate some other really nice features (like Preview, Spotlight searching and universal spell checking).

I've also come to regard Windows with a bit more tolerance as a low cost, hardware agnostic, public spirited OS. I've been trying to come up with analogies that do the difference between the two systems justice, and the one that best captures my thinking now is that Windows is a bit like social housing - its definitely something that I think should exist and be made available to those people who need it, but if I was completely honest I'd rather have my own place ;-)

Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded...

Over the last few weeks the BBC have been running what at first seems a trailer for Panorama. In the trailer a camera pans over dimly lit streets of circuitry, diodes flicker like broken lamps, and sink estates wallow in the shadows of tall capacitors. "Your town; your street; your home..." the narrator threatens, "its all in our database."



The viewer raises an eyebrow, expecting some shocking revelation about Orwellian government schemes to combat terrorism, or ineptitude over social service data - in short, expecting the pitch for a documentary about sinister forces working to subvert our liberties - but then the punchline comes: "new technology means that its easy to pay your TV license, and impossible to hide it you don't. Its all in the database."

WHAT? Did I just catch that right? This isn't a documentary trailer warning us about sinister government forces, these ARE sinister government forces. The UK government, in the form of the TV licensing people, have just threatened me, told me that 'they are watching', and implied terrible consequences if I don't pay my license. Perhaps a swift trip on American Air with internment at the end of it?

Online an international audience has expressed horror and disgust, not only at the veiled threats, but also at the whole notion of paying a TV license.

Now I'm a middle-class lefty liberal, so its a foregone conclusion that I'd love the BBC, but it also means that I have a natural dislike for the government fiddling around with my rights, and it seems to me that we have reached an awkward impasse with the TV license fee in the UK.

On the one hand I completely support publicly funded broadcasting, especially when the system produces such fine quality stuff, for so many different interest groups, and on such a varied medium. There is no doubt that the BBC delivers.

On the other hand the shear breadth of that delivery makes a bit of a mockery of the TV license. You need a license (one per household) if you own equipment capable of receiving a TV signal. Even twenty years ago this made a lot of sense, but now you can listen to BBC radio, BBC DAB stations, read BBC content online, and even download programmes - all without owning equipment capable of receiving a TV signal. You can also spend all your time watching commercial channels, delivered through a cable, or by commercial satellites, without ever seeing any BBC content, but still be liable for the fee. Or you can watch that content (with adverts) on one of the many channels that buy programmes from the BBC (examples include UK Gold, Dave, and even BBC America which is independently funded).


And then there's the elephant in the room - the fact that TV advertising is slowly failing, because of digital piracy, digital recorders (press "skip" to jump the advert break) and the shear proliferation of alternative media streams. In this rapidly changing area, a license fee looks like the one iron-clad method of TV funding that can weather the storm, its basically paying for content up-front, which removes all those worries about making money with it afterwards!

All of which makes me think that fiddling with the license fee may be a good way of cutting off our own nose to spite our face.

Less of the threatening 1984 adverts though please Auntie - somebody at ITV might spot the elephant and panic :-/

The Art of Visual Complexity

Tom Franklin pointed me towards this really neat website called VisualComplexity run by an interaction designer called Manuel Lima, which is a catalog/index of interesting data visualisation techniques, examples and tools.

At the moment there are over 500 items in there, and you can filter by what is being visualised (so for example, Internet or Knowledge Networks) to see a subset.

Some are pretty but functional, such as this one by Olivier Zitvogel that shows del.icio.us tags:


... while others, like this one by R. Justin Stewart showing a bus network, are really things of beauty.


Check the site out, its great for for a lazy browse :-)

Podcasting

Earlier this month I went to Portugal for the IADIS m-learning conference, a smallish conference on e-learning and mobile devices. The conference was really quite interesting, although it had a curiously ex-pat feel to it because of the number of UK delegates.

One presentation really got me thinking, it was an account from Malcolm Andrew, a lecturer in microbiology at De Montfort Univeristy, of how he has been using podcasts to support his teaching. I've been toying with the idea of podcasts for a while but couldn't quite decide how best to use them. If you do a whole-lecture will that mean that no-one turns up on the day? If you do supplementary material will anyone watch it? And if you make it part of a required reading exercise ("watch the podcast before the lecture folks") will they bother?

Malcolm has settled on an easy compromise, one of those things that's obvious once its been pointed out to you; he produces a 5-10 minute summary of each key idea in a course (normally one summary per lecture) using slides, simple animations and voiceovers. He doesn't ask the students to use the podcast in any particular way, and has observed that some watch it before a lecture, some afterward - some watch it on an iPod, some on the PC - some use it for revision, and a few don't watch it at all. Because a summary format is so flexible, students are able to bring the podcast into their own way of working, and because he keeps them short they are easy to watch, easier to make (they still take a bit of effort), and can be sampled as the students like, depending on their time and interest.

Do you ever get that feeling that you haven't seen the forest for the trees :-/

So, emboldened by Malcolm's example, when I returned to the UK I set about investigating how I could produce a few podcasts of my own. This involves two steps: producing the video and getting it hosted out there somehow.

After a few false starts the method I used to produce the video was:

1. Prepare slides in Powerpoint. Create a short PowerPoint presentation with an obvious structure, and simple individual slides. There are many ways to get PowerPoint into a video (not least of which is to select 'save as video' on the Mac version) however I found that the best way was actually to save the presentation as a set of images, and then import those images into a video editor. This means that you cant use animations (but most free video export methods don't support those anyway), but gives you a lot of control over timings and slide transitions.
   
2. Prepare a script. I tried a few times without one and it was a disaster. Ums and erms don't sound too bad (in moderation) when you're lecturing, but they sound dreadful on a video. A script makes you sound a bit mechanical, but at least it means that you end up saying what you meant to say, and when you're saving the whole thing for posterity that starts to matter!
3. Import the images into a video editor. I used iMovie, becuase it comes with the Mac and its easy to use. I guess that commercial stuff would be more powerful, but for my needs iMovie was just fine.
4. Record a section of the script for each slide and cut to size. iMovie has a voice over mode which allowed me to add a voice recording to each clip (every imported image appears as a clip). When importing I make each clip last 30 seconds, which is enough to make the recording, and then I reduce the length of the clip to match my voice over. Doing the voice over is actually quite tough; like most people I hate the sound of my own voice when played back to me (just who is that weird bloke talking - it sure as hell aint me?) and I tend to sound affected when I'm speaking very consciously, as a result I had to try hard to relax when I was recording (its still not perfect, but I got a lot better as I went on).
   
5. Add appropriate transitions. I used a fancy in-your-face cube rotation transition for each section (I want it to stand out), and more subtle fade-to-white transitions between slides. I also used cross-fades to allow multiple slides to gradually build up a diagram, which made up slightly for the lack of animation.
6. Save as a mp4 file (or other format, but mp4 is pretty flexible and allows you to store a master version at a decent resolution).
   

Once you have the video the next step is to get it online. The easy solution is to use YouTube or another video hosting site, but I'm a stubborn old GenXer with my own website, and so I need to convert and host it myself.

I used three pieces of software for this:

• ffmpegX - this is a MacOS front end on the ffmpeg unix tools. It converts the mp4 file into a flv file (flash movie), which is the most popular way of putting video on the web at the moment (thanks in no small part to YouTube).
• flv-duration - this is a small tool which adds duration meta-data to the FLV file, which allows FLV players to add a progress bar control that lets viewers move to whatever section of the video they like.
• JW FLV Media Player - this is a flash video player that can load FLV files and play them within a webpage.
  

At the end of the whole shebang you end up with a hard-earned podcast you can embed like so:

To be honest I'm still astonished at how hard this is (even on the Mac) - perhaps its because I'm swimming against the flow, if I'd used YouTube to host it would have been a lot simpler, but a part of me doesn't want to hand over all my little video darlings to be skewered and critiqued by the slobbering hordes on YouTube :-/

We have a couple of projects within LSL that are looking at how you might host teaching resources in a friendly environment (the Faroes project), and how you might allow managed commenting and annotation of your hosted content (the Synote project). Eating some of our own dogfood has underlined for me how useful these two projects could be to teachers and lecturers.

Both of them hope to have beta versions available by the end of the year and now I have some podcasts of my own, I will be eager to try them out.

In the Beginning there was the Word, and the Word was: Crash!

Arghhh!!! What is wrong with Microsoft? How has one of the biggest software companies in the world got it so wrong?

As you may know I recently escaped to a Mac to avoid the problematic and unappealing MS Vista, unfortunately I still do a lot of document editing and so one of the first installs on my shiny new MacBook was Office 2008 for Mac. On XP I had already noticed that Outlook 2007 had some nasty interface bugs, but these pale into insignificance compared the the hideous crashfest that is Word 2008 on the Mac.

I'm working on a significant document at the moment (its a bid for EU funding so its relatively big - 70 pages or so - and complex - tables, figures, references, etc.) and I needed to do some editing in Compatability Mode (thats what Word 2008 does when you load up a .doc rather than a .docx). I quickly noticed that Word was a bit unstable, crashing in flames and losing all changes about once every 20 minutes. I adjusted my workflow (repeat after me: save your work frequently) and soldiered on; however the crashes increased in frequency and by the time I got to one crash per minute I gave up, and used my precious minute of teetering instability to save out sections of the document in smaller chunks.

This seemed to do the trick and I managed to complete the sections, however on returning to the big document to incorporate my changes Word upped its game to an effective lifetime of ten seconds, rendering it useless. Honestly, Team Fortress 2 would have been a more effective way to write a collaborative document.

I sought Solace in some MS Office forums (Hello everyone, my name's Dave and I'm a Word user) and noticed that there was an update to Office for Mac that was supposed to address some of these problems - however the MS Autoupdater wasnt picking up on it for some reason.

I diligently downloaded the 114MB update by hand - 114MB! Christ on a Bike, what's in that thing! - however when I tried to install it the updater said:




It turns out that this is a known problem with the update, and that the problem is that the MS Autoinstaller is buggy. So I downloaded and installed the new version of that - but still no joy. I had a buggy version of Word, and a patch that refused to install. In the end I had to follow the advice on the forums and uninstall Office, reinstall Office, reboot, and install the update.

Only problem was that this didn't actually make any difference to Word's seizures every time it sees some text. Nowhere in those 114MB had an MS developer managed to fix the problem I was having.

In the end I had to take the extraordinary measure of using NeoOffice (a Mac open source office package based on OpenOffice) to read and edit the proprietary document format that the official software could not read without falling on its face.

Now that is an extraordinary state of affairs :-( And what's worse, losing several crucial hours with a deadline looming has made me so angry at the stinking thing that I've wasted another 30 minutes writing this blog post.

Bill - your company needs you back at the helm, and if you cant fix it, then at least you could have the decency to go down with the ship!

The Switch is Flipped

In my last post I described why I have decided to switch to a Mac. Well a shiny new MacBook Pro rolled up earlier this week, I've had a few days to acclimatise, and its probably a good time to report on what life is like this side of the switch.

Before the machine arrived I noticed an interesting change in my attitude to Windows, I don't know if it was the feeling of freedom, or some sort of psychological post-decision justification, but I finally lost all patience with the old girl. Eccentricities that I had put up with for years...

("your update is complete, your machine will restart in 5 minutes without your permission and lose your current working space and very likely the work that you had spent two hours creating before you foolishly turned your back to get a coffee")

...suddenly became unbearable insults, and bugs that I had learned to live with...

 ("your IMAP folder is at 90%, so I have decided to create a modal dialogue box that snatches focus away from you - oh, and because this is Outlook 2008 the OK button will no longer make this dialog disappear, however please click it in futile horror to create even more indestructible dialog boxes - if the despair doesn't finish you off, please laugh at the irony of it all")

...became hot pins under my fingernails. I think it's fair to say that when the time came I was all too happy to leave Windows before I jumped through it.

Nice Surprises:

The MacBook itself was a really nice surprise. I bought a 17" machine, and was a bit worried that it might be to large, but actually its only slightly heavier (an extra 0.2kg), slightly wider (about 1"), slightly deeper (about 0.5") and actually a bit thinner (0.5" thinner). It's also a beautiful machine, with an overall simplicity which is really appealing, and little touches (like the magnetic power cord and pulsing sleep light) that make it feel cared for and considered.


The software learning curve has been far easier than I expected, things are different - but natural and consistent. The things that are most different are also the things that are much better. I have a WiFi printer, and I've set it up on a number of windows machines. This involves Googling through HPs cryptic website, downloading and installing a HP suite of unwanted applications (several hundred MBs) to get the one driver you do want, and finally struggling to get the setup wizard to see the printer on the network. I started this process on the Mac and then caught myself, instead I opened the Printer config bit of System Preferences and there was my Printer already listed (the Mac had already found it on the network - I didn't even have to initiate the search), I selected it and clicked "Add Printer" and I was done. The whole process took maybe 20 seconds.

I've also really taken to some of the Mac's visual tricks - such as Expose, and the virtual desktop system (called Spaces). I've tried virtual desktops on Linux and Windows boxes before, but it's integrated so well, and the animated transitions are so good, that it just feels a natural part of the system.

I have had a couple of crashes; an open source FTP client called Cyberduck has died on me a few times (otherwise its really good), and the Microsoft Office installer keeled over the first time i ran it. The problem is very different then on Windows. On Windows when a process falls over it goes in an explosion of chaos, freezing great tracts of screen estate and pulling down related processes and often the GUI shell itself, all of which is topped off by a loud boing and another of those damn dialog boxes. On the Mac the application kinda twitches, and then it disappears. In fact the clean up is so elegant that I didn't notice the few times that Cyberduck crashed. One moment it was there, the next it was gone.

Oddities:

There are some negatives, but they don't seem so bad. The built in Web Browser, Safari, isn't so great. It renders pages OK, but it looks cramped, and feels quite basic in some intangible way. I've installed Flock (a version of Firefox) instead - and that's great to use.

The keyboard is US, which means that the " and @ keys are in the wrong place (for my jaded fingers anyway) and I seem to have lost the hash key (see - I cant even type it!). Also the Enter and Cursor keys are weirdly small, the functionality of ALT and CTRL are different (and mixed up with the Mac COMMAND key), and given that the Mac uses context (right) clicks all over the place - why oh why oh why doesn't the trackpad have a second mouse button! I know I can two-finger click instead but its just annoying that its left out - presumably to make a pointless point about simplicity :-/

Story so far?

Overall I'm very happy with the Mac. This is the first computer since my first computer (and thats a lot of beige boxes) that I've actually got excited about. Its fun to learn to use it - it rewards you at every turn - its achingly beautiful - and the community actually likes itself and the products that its based around.

And the killer feature - the thing that its worth switching for all on its own - is that the Mac wakes from Sleep (well, pseudo sleep) in seconds. I got into my office yesterday, and decided to read my email on my Mac laptop rather than my PC desktop, because the Mac powers up more quickly from sleep than it takes Windows to log in.

Three seconds from off to on, and then when it arrives, by god its all so pretty :-)

Switching to Mac

Right - that's it. I've had enough. It's time to say goodbye.

I'm fed up of hourglasses, crappy modal dialog boxes, ugly UI and an OS that reboots itself without bothering to ask first. After 15 years of suffering its time to move on. I've decided to buy a Mac.




Don't get me wrong, while there's a lot wrong with Windows, there's also quite a lot of things that are right. Its much more stable and secure than it's generally given credit for, and it's popularity gives it a steam roller advantage when it comes to choice of applications and the level of third party support. However, its time for me to upgrade my laptop, and I have a simple choice to make - do I change to Vista, or do I change to Mac OS.

By a slim margin the Mac wins. There are a number of reasons:

• The Macbook Pro is the best designed heavyweight notebook. The 17" model is as light as my current 15" Samsung X60, and is even a bit thinner.
• I'm no longer worried about leaving applications behind. I can get Office for the Mac, and virtually everything else I use is an internet application (Google Maps, Wikipedia, Digg, Blogger, etc.). Microsoft beware - internet apps may not compete with your applications directly (well, not much), but they remove a huge incentive to stay with windows. You can now move and still stick with what you know.
• I'm ready for a different set of quibbles. I'm not expecting the Mac to be perfect, but at least it will be irritating in a different kind of way. I'm red raw with Windows, and want to scratch somewhere else :-/
• The unknown Vista. Windows Vista looks pretty, but probably sucks. I know that's not a scientific appraisal, but if I'm going to spend the effort learning the ins and out of a new OS, I might as well change to Mac OS now.
• The Boot camp safety net. As a fallback I think that the Macbook Pro running Vista might actually be the best Windows notebook, so in the worse case scenario I can just switch to that.
  
• A wave of techie defections. This is really obvious to me because I work in a Computer Science research lab and do a circuit of computer-oriented conferences, but may be a bit invisible to those working in less geek-centic circles. The fact is that the Mac is gaining a big geek market share. The popular share is thought to be around 7%, but I would say that it is at least triple that with technical folk, maybe higher. There is a mass defection - which seems a weird trend, as technical folk typically shun out-of-the-box solutions, and software that is perceived as being noddy, but it seems like Mac OS has avoided this by being solid and flexible. One of my worries over the years was that the Mac was a simple computer for simple users - but the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary. If it's good enough for them, its good enough for me.

The Macbooks have just received a bump, and although the high end Sony Vaios are better on paper, I suspect that it might be another case of monkeys driving Ferraris.

The time is right and my first Mac is on order. I promise not to buy any black polo necks, or to get obsessive about white peripherals.

Let's see how I get on...