Austin Heller

Thanks, Amazon Video

2008-09-04T12:39:48Z

Amazon launches their new music store which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t really support Macs all that great. Cameron Hunt:

Offline viewing is available for TiVo DVRs, Windows PCs, something called “Sony BRAVIA Internet Video Link” and a handful of Archos and SanDisk devices. […]

Another service which treats Mac users like second class citizens.

A shame, considering the fact that the Amazon MP3 store not only fully supports Macs, but includes a native Cocoa download manager that automatically copies the files into iTunes.

Obama on Palin's Pregnancy

2008-09-01T21:46:13Z

Barack Obama, remarking on Bristol Palin’s pregnancy:

Mr. Obama said the pregnancy “has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president.” He added that, “my mother had me when she was 18. How family deals with issues and teen-age children — that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics.”

“So,” he added, “I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.”

Well-said, and an example of what I regard as one of the finest qualities in his character. His response was supportive and respectful; it’s proof that good leaders want to discuss the issues, not participate in pissing matches.

Field Testing

2008-08-22T01:32:40Z

I got my copy of Coudal Partners’s Field-Tested Books a few days ago, which I’ve been patiently waiting for since I ordered it earlier this month (it came a bit late— I blame PayPal). If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s explained in detail on the web site. Money quote: “Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it.”

So, it’s not really a collection of book reviews. Most book reviewers don’t use their location or period in life as the basis for their article, or at least not significantly. Field tests read more like narratives, with the reviewer explaining some period in his or her life in detail and how the book they “test” played a part in it. That sounds like an assignment you’d see out of a high school literature class, but I assure you it’s better than that. Some of my favorite examples are Keith Phipps’s review of Billy Budd by Herman Melville, and Margaret Lyons’s review of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman.

Of course, the fact that the entire contents of the book are available online for free would, for many people, eliminate the need for a print version. It includes no extra stories or “features”, and the edition at Coudal Partners is quite readable for the web. But “quite readable for the web” is different than plain “awesome”. This book is not for people who want one step up from bad; it’s for people who want a few steps up from “pretty good”.

Reading the paperback just feels right: the layout, the way the book size feels in your hand, and, yes, the typefaces (Linotype Electra looks beautiful in ink). There’s a natural flow that comes from reading each story after another continuously, flipping the pages without interruption until you’re just too damned tired to go on. The short length of each test would make clicking on all of them extremely repetitive.

Oh, and getting a hand-written number of which book you have (out of 500 in the printing) is pretty sweet, for what it’s worth.

Six Things to Idea Men

2008-08-11T17:28:32Z

Merlin Mann keeps it real about execution:

It’s amazing how many sociopaths are out there dashing around, playing entrepreneur, and yelling into a phone about drilling-down — with what appears to be no idea how to actually get something amazing to market.

(via Brent Simmons, whom I also took this quote from.)

20 Album Covers Recreated in LEGO

2008-07-27T07:33:02Z

20 album covers recreated— sometimes with matching background redrawings— in Lego style. Favorites: The Velvet Underground, Black Holes and Revelations, and Nevermind.

(via Luis Sosa.)

Edit: Who forgets a link, seriously?

That Would Be "No", Wired

2008-07-27T00:11:56Z

So this Wired piece was linked to from the MacThemes forums: “Has Apple Bitten Off More Than They Can Chew?” You can guess what’s coming.

I retort.

Convenient Store

2008-07-20T18:29:16Z

So this article’s life got started when I was helping a neighbor with their hard drive-based video camera; specifically, they didn’t know how to export the footage to the Personal Computer Box, and gave me a ring for consultation. Over the past couple years I’ve been seeing more and more consumer video cameras go from tape to hard disk for storage, the idea being that you you record on the camera’s disk, and then, when you’re done filming, export the footage to your computer.

And to be honest, I think this direction is a terrible idea.

Before I start arguing, let me clarify on a few kinds of things I’m not talking about:

Still photography cameras.
Professional video cameras, or any product for individuals who are extremely knowledgeable about video storage.
Tiny video cameras, like the Flip, where the purpose is for “flash in the pan” video and not full-fledged, “family vacation to Disneyworld we want to have around in ten years” video.

The success of VHS in home video came about because of how it easy it was: you record your footage, store it, and play it back whenever you’d like. That is what makes the idea of home video so appealing in the first place; your average camera buyer doesn’t really care whether your camera uses tapes, disks, flash memory or sunflower seeds for storage as long as it’s easy and reliable.

This idea has been applicable to almost every video format before hard disks, be it reel, VHS, Hi8, or MiniDV. Playback is a matter of connecting a video out cord— something which almost always ships with the camera— and pressing “Play”. And, barring any sort of horrific disaster to the closet you store your tapes in, it’s guaranteed to be watchable in 10 years (which I even think is an extremely conservative number).

But a hard drive camera entirely eliminates this lovely procedure. I see the process going something like this:

Plug the camera into your computer.
Drag the footage onto your hard disk.
Burn a DVD of it and store it.

And those three steps have a lot of variables, namely:

What format is the footage in? MPEG, MOV, AVCHD?
Do I have DVD burning software that doesn’t suck? (and if you’re on Windows, the answer is usually “no”.)¹
What software do I need to convert the formats to the ones that the DVD software will support?

Even if you’re savvy with computers, there’s no way one can argue that moving the footage from hard disk to computer hard disk to DVD/other storage medium is either, a) easier than tape; or b) not a waste of your time.

So the easiest route with hard disks is to just move the footage to external ones or buy extras for the camera itself— forgoing DVD burning altogether.

(oh, and yes, it is unreasonable to argue that one could just leave the footage on the camera for the span of its usage. That’s stupid.)

So by this token, hard disks are just as convenient as tapes, but still far less reliable. For one, hard disks are prone to total failures that tapes can’t experience, and they’re much more sensitive: dropping a tape, in almost any case, will just yield some anger towards butterfingers; but would you have the same confidence if you dropped a 60GB disk with your family vacation footage on it?

Now, to say hard drives don’t have their place in film entirely would be foolish; if you’re a professional videographer storing large project files and capture scratch folders, storing them on disk is extremely convenient (as I do). But most computer users simply don’t work like that— more often than not, they’ll probably just want a direct print of their recorded video to playback.

“But Austin”, you might ask, “Tape gets old too, you anti-hard drive bastard!”

And by golly, you’re right about that. And I don’t believe tape will last forever either, because eventually, all tape will degrade to the point where it just becomes unviewable.² My candidate for succession? Flash memory.

Why:

The price of flash memory is depreciating quickly.
It’s extremely reliable— probably more so than tape.
Most flash drives are small enough to store comfortably.

I don’t know if any cameras actually do this yet; many accept flash memory for still photography, but if you know of a camera that’s utilizing them for recording, please let me know.

To video camera manufacturers: give me a camera that accepts regular CompactFlash cards, holds a good hour of video on each card, and uses nice formats like MPEG-4 or QuickTime, and I’ll be the first in line to buy.

That neighbor’s hard drive camera I was talking about? Software crafted from turd nuggets. Once you got the footage on the Windows— and Windows-only— computer, you had two options: a) leave it in its proprietary format at its native resolution; or, b) convert it to MPEG-1 and downgrade the quality to 720x480. I know this isn’t true for all hard drive cameras, but I’m sure such crap isn’t an anomaly; on top of that, the solutions are completely inconsistent across the board depending on the camera’s manufacturer. ↩
But also because capturing tape is sooo old-school. ↩

Guitar Hero Embraces Rock Band Instruments, My Wallet Rejoices

2008-07-18T19:33:06Z

If there’s anything I actually dislike about Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it’s that their instruments aren’t completely compatible with each other; Rock Band guitars don’t work in Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero guitars don’t work with Rock Band on certain platforms, et cetera; it’s a huge mess, and in the end, it’s the consumer who loses.

So I tip my hat to Neversoft— developers of Guitar Hero: World Tour— for doing the right thing and adding complete Rock Band instrument support to the game:

Such a move might seem surprising to those who observed previous compatibility battles between the Rock Band and Guitar Hero camps. [Brian] Bright [Neversoft director] has no hard feelings, though. “Look, it’s ridiculous to expect people to have two, three drum sets,” he pronounced emphatically.

No kidding.

Video: Radiohead's "House of Cards"

2008-07-17T08:47:09Z

Radiohead's In Rainbows is a great album— one of my favorites of 2007. And this music video for “House of Cards” is outstanding; beautiful visuals, color and, in this writer’s humble opinion, wonderful music.

From The YouTube:

In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards”, no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

On Linking To iTunes, Among Other Things

2008-07-14T18:48:47Z

Jeff Atwood wrote a post a few days ago about iTunes; it’s called “iTunes is Anti-Web”, and I recommend reading it.

Now, the article starts out with a complaint about web browser links to iTunes, and in the end he really argues two things: number one, that links to iTunes are inconvenient and that this info should just display in your browser; and two, that having an integrated store is hostile to the user experience. I like his website, Coding Horror, and while I think he’s right on the linking issue, he’s dead-wrong on the Store’s integration with iTunes.

But let’s start with iTunes links, because frankly, they are pretty damn annoying. Having an external application start that I didn’t click myself bothers me, especially considering that most links to iTunes don’t forewarn you of that in advance. For a writer, an easy fix is to add something like “(iTunes Link)” before or after your actual link, and adapt that general idea so it fits with textual or image links.

Of course, not everyone does that (thanks alot!), and in a perfect world, an Apple-provided solution would work even better. After clicking on an iTunes link, a preflight page would read something along the lines of, “This page will open up the iTunes Store”, and then provided an “OK” button and “Automatically redirect” checkbox. Feasible, and doesn’t leave the bad taste of auto-launch in your mouth.

The best solution, however, would be an extremely simple track listing in your browser. I imagine a page like this:

(pardon the late-night Photoshop job.)

Now, second order of business: the iTunes Store experience:

It’s downright user hostile to demand installation of a special application merely to browse the store, and it is most certainly against everything the web stands for and was built on.

A core feature of the iTunes application— if not the most important one— is the integrated store, and the integration of it with your own music library. The one-click procedure from buying something to adding it to your library is ridiculously appealing to potential customers. Downloading individual songs from a website, opening up your Downloads folder and dragging the files into iTunes is actually too cumbersome for most people. Of course, Jeff Atwood knows how to do these things inside and out; what I don’t think he understands is that most people don’t.

The iTunes Store isn’t a part of your “regular” web experience; it uses web technologies, yes, but it’s inherently designed to be part of the iTunes experience. One-click buying, previewing, and account management all work seamlessly within the iTunes app, functions of what you do with music, and iTunes is the app you use for music.

Integrating the entire store into a web browser, besides the fact that it would mean compromising its feature base to work with older browsers, serves no advantage to anyone except to fulfill Atwood’s purist belief that all Internet content should remain in your web browser.

It’s funny when he uses words like “blasted” and “hostile” in the article, hyperbole that makes you take it a bit less seriously. Kudos for the AOL jab too, which is, you know, totally different than what iTunes does; AOL served as your application to the entire Internet, whereas iTunes fulfills a very specific need for it.

Crap Store

2008-07-11T16:39:14Z

Mike Lee, with my favorite summary of the iPhone launch so far:

When people started talking about 500 apps on the store for launch, I counted all the developers I knew. Then I wondered where the other 450 apps were going to come from. This lower 90% seemed like it might be unpleasant, and oh my sweet chocolate lord did that turn out to be so.

The whole App Store launch— quiet and submission-lenient— strikes me as very cautious on Apple’s part; but once it really gets rolling, I’ll be expecting more stringent submission rules.

(okay, not expecting as much as hoping. Total freedom, and the App Store might turn into the unfiltered mess that is the Dashboard Widgets download page.)

Hancock

2008-07-03T08:41:27Z

Despite the lackluster reviews, I enjoyed Hancock, Will Smith’s latest high-budget action movie. While the screenplay is relatively generic and the special effects not particularly impressive, Smith and Jason Bateman both have solid performances; the former has come a long way since The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

As one of those kooks who enjoys reading about the movies he’s seen immediately after watching them, I poked around the Wikipedia page and learned that the spec script was written in 1996.

If Film Studios Developed Videogames

2008-06-18T05:56:44Z

Screenwriter John August writes something for the "funny cuz it's true" category:

Puzzle Farter needs a love interest, someone who can match him toot for toot. We think Rachel McAdams would be perfect.

Also, players need to be able to select gender, so as not to eliminate the gay gamer demographic.

So the question becomes: is this why most movie games are dreadful?

The Use of American English Quotation Marks Vis-a-Vis Punctuation, Namely Commas and Periods

2008-06-15T08:42:59Z

Or, Skip All Of This If You're Not A Grammar Nerd.

For about a month now, I've been bothered by American English's approach to quotation punctuation: that is, the practice of placing commas and periods inside a quotation mark as opposed to the outside. I even wrote a draft about it a few weeks ago, which I never got around to publishing¹.

So it strikes me as crazy that, by complete coincidence, Joshua Bryant published his own thoughts today on the issue:

Let's have us an example. Take this sentence I just wrote:

Like, for instance, the word "definitely."

Now, in my head, that's correct punctuation. I should admit that I had to retake English 2 times in University, so there's a high chance I'm wrong, but at least its what I've been taught. But it makes no sense to me. To me, it should look like this:

Like, for instance, the word "definitely".

Apparently, that's not correct. But it feels right in my head.

First of all, you probably don't know how happy I am to not be alone.

Secondly, I don't recall I've ever agreed more passionately with someone on something as miniscule as grammar. It feels crude and strange to me too, and here's why:

When used for "air quotes" purposes, it implies that the comma/period is part of the phrase in the quotes. And almost 100 percent of the time, it's not; if I have a friend named "Nigel" and someone quotes the name as "Nigel," they're technically spelling the name incorrectly.
When used for quotation purposes, the problem is even worse. The idea behind a quotation is that you get a verbatim copy of a particular piece of text. By putting marks on the inside that weren't originally written or spoken, you are, to a certain extent, invalidating the purpose of a quotation. Thus, the practice is only acceptable if you're quoting the end of a sentence.
The rule doesn't apply to semicolons or colons, nor is it a universal English mechanic.

I also recommend this Wikipedia article on the differences in usage.

Which brings me to my next point: "American English" (the inside way) and "British English" (the outside way) have different solutions to this. In contrast to American English, the British variant places periods and commas outside of the quotation marks, so sentences look like this instead:

Your friend's name is "Nigel", yes? I'll have to meet him sometime.

Compared to the American way again:

Your friend's name is "Nigel," yes? I'll have to meet him sometime.

Please, someone-- explain to me why this weird, crude practice exists. I'd love to know, especially if it could make me stop breaking out in weird grammar fits.

Would you publish a lengthy rant about proper punctuation mark usage?
Just to be clear, I am not the most consistent grammar fiend; I'm sure you could pick out examples of this in my earlier articles. So, it's even stranger that this particular issue bothers me so deeply.

Ebert on "You Don't Mess With the Zohan"

2008-06-15T07:14:09Z

Roger Ebert's website review for "You Don't Mess with the Zohan":

This is a mighty hymn of and to vulgarity, and either you enjoy it, or you don't. I found myself enjoying it a surprising amount of the time, even though I was thoroughly ashamed of myself.

I'm weirdly inclined to agree. I wouldn't want to tell someone I actually enjoyed this movie, but deep down, it actually hit my liking for stupid shock humor pretty well. Of course, if you don't like Adam Sandler, don't bother-- but if you do, you might have an idea of what to expect.

(Via Andy Ihnatko.)