Martin Young - Web Designer
July 4, 2008
For a while now I’ve been bookmarking blog posts, news articles, web sites and tutorials I like via the del.icio.us bookmarking service, which is far more useful than your browser’s bookmarks/favourites for one simple reason: you can assign tags to whatever you bookmark. As we all know, tags and/or categories are incredibly useful way of sorting items into manageable chunks. There are other benefits too, but that’s the key one for me.
Recently I’ve been saving less and less to del.icio.us, and suspect it’s because my chunks were no longer manageable. I had well over 100 tags in my tag cloud, and tagging each new bookmark was becoming a nightmare: to assign tags I have to search through the huge list trying to find appropriate ones.
So today I sorted it out.
This is what my del.icio.us tag cloud looked like before:
And this is after 30 minutes of consolidating and deleting tags:
Much better!
Posted by Marty in Not important, but potentially interesting, Web & Tech
June 30, 2008
So. First training run today. I managed 6.57km in 33m21s during my lunch break, running along the Yarra from Fed Square to Punt Road, across the river, back to Anderson St, back across the river, up to the Hoddle St/Swan St intersection, along Swan St and around half of the MCG, then back to Fed Square.
My wife let me commandeer her iPod Nano / Nike + thingy until I complete the half-marathon, so I cleared all the old data and plan to track my progress from now until the run in October.
I reckon I had a bit left in me after the 6.5kms, but I didn’t want to push it on day 1 of the training. My legs will be sore enough tomorrow without pushing too hard this early.
Posted by Marty in Half marathon, Web & Tech
June 25, 2008
I’ve been waiting for this one - iTunes Australia adds TV shows.
A quick look in iTunes shows there aren’t many there yet (only 23 shows, to be precise), and Aussie content seems to be Channel 9 and ABC only, but I’m sure the list will grow. I think I’ll buy/download one just to check out the quality.
Posted by Marty in Apple, Web & Tech
June 16, 2008
I’m curious as to why the web sites of two of the three principals of perhaps the world’s best-known usability consulting firm don’t offer RSS feeds for their content. useit.com and asktog.com use email as their notification method. Is RSS bad, in some way?
Personally I’d much rather find out about new content from gurus such as these guys when I check my Google Reader, which I do four or five times a day. Communicating about new content via RSS is a good enough system for many other experts who share their knowledge. Why not them?
I’m not saying remove the email option, I’m saying offer an RSS feed to complement it. But I’m sure they’ll never find this little blog, so I guess I’m stuck with it. :-p
Posted by Marty in Random thoughts, Web & Tech
June 12, 2008
So on Monday Apple confirmed that the iPhone / iPod Touch App Store will go live in a few weeks. They also confirmed that iPod Touch owners like me will have to pay a small charge (US$10) for a software upgrade so that we can download/buy apps from the store, whilst iPhone owners get the upgrade for free.
“Not again?!”, was my first thought, given that I paid $25 for the January upgrade. I have to pay to get into a store in order to buy stuff?
But I flip-flopped (a) when I read this blog post that suggests that 70% of all iPhone apps will be free, and (b) when I realised that any app that I decide to buy will improve the Touch’s usefulness to me.
That’s the beauty of this device. It’s not like the Walkman I bought in 1988 that had a never-to-be-improved set of features. My wife bought me this Touch last November, it became more useful for $25 in January with the software upgrade, and on June 27 it will become more useful again for US$10.
So the $10’s a bargain, in my opinion.
Posted by Marty in Apple, Random thoughts, Web & Tech
June 8, 2008
Since January’s iPod Touch software update I’ve been consistently using the the Notes app to manage my GTD. It works really well for me, with one slightly frustrating exception, which I’ll explain below.
Here’s how my process works:
- I have four constant notes open in the Notes app: Today, Soon, Someday and Work. Occasionally I’ll also have other notes, like if I’m planning a trip I’ll open a new note just for the trip, but I never have less than those four. Notes uses the first line of your note as the note’s title, which works nicely on the Notes “homepage”.
- In the morning, usually when I’m commuting to work, I’ll review all my notes, moving items between notes if necessary (and that’s the frustrating thing - no Copy-Paste on the Touch means I have to retype if I want to move).
- I try really hard to knock over all the items on Today. Sometimes it doesn’t happen :-)
- When I have brainwaves, or more often when my wife reminds me of something I’ve forgotten, I key the new item into whichever note is most appropriate.
That’s pretty much it. Sure, it’s a bastardisation of the Notes app, there’s no Mail integration (although there could be), no iCal integration, it’s not a real GTD app, etc etc, but I’ve been using it for almost 6 months, so I can certainly call it successful. It doesn’t feel forced, it doesn’t put me under pressure, isn’t a hassle, and I get stuff done. And isn’t that the point of GTD? Whatever works for you, geekboy.
Part II of the story. Today I read that web designer Elliot Jay Stocks was trialling an alpha software Mac OS X app called Things, so I decided I’d give it a 5 minute look, but not with any real enthusiasm. I want my GTD app on the device I carry around (almost) 24/7 - my iPod Touch, not on my laptop.
But after 2 minutes of trialling it I realised that Things works the way that my personal GTD process works, which was a big plus over the other GTD apps I’ve looked at and tried. And then I noticed this at the bottom of the Things homepage:
Things for iPhone is a full-featured task manager, that can be used on its own or as the perfect companion for your desktop version. It will be available for purchase from the iTunes AppStore.
Which is very likely to be in two days time.
I’m not sure how the AppStore is going to work - presumably it’ll be like the iTunes Store - but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there’ll be some way of trialling any apps that aren’t free. I’ll also be hoping that Things works just as nicely and looks just as good on the iPhone/Touch as it does on my laptop.
Check it out at http://culturedcode.com/things/.
Posted by Marty in Apple, Web & Tech
June 4, 2008
The other day I wrote briefly about the tiny Flip Video cameras. I’ve since discovered that whilst you can’t buy them in Australia at the moment, they might be here soon.
I’m attracted to the idea of the thing, but in my other blog post I wondered whether I needed one, given that I already own a 7mp digital still camera that has video capability. (I also own a cheap-ish Sony MiniDV camcorder, so three video devices seems a bit unnecessary).
I had a spare 20 minutes this afternoon, so I thought I’d shoot a quick video with both my current devices (at the same time), upload the vids to the web and compare the quality, speed of upload, filesize etc.
First, the video taken by my still camera (a Pentax Optio W20)
It took me 2 minutes to transfer the 90-second, 100mb .mov file to my MacBook via USB, 3 minutes to import it into iMovie, 30 seconds to crop it to 30 seconds long, 2 minutes to export it to .mp4 format at 640 x 480 (that’s native), and 2 minutes to upload the 4mb file to Revver over my relatively slow internet connection.
(the video’s not live on revver yet … so here’s a screenshot of it playing in Quicktime)
Second, the video camera (Sony DCR-HC26 mini DV)
3 minutes to transfer 90 seconds of video directly into iMovie via FireWire, 30 seconds to crop it to 30 seconds, 5 minutes to export it to .mov at 640 x 480, and 14 minutes to upload the 30mb file to Revver.
Ignoring the highly boring subject matter(!)…..
- even though the the vision on the HC26 is noisy (light was poor), it’s way better than the W20,
- sound is almost non-existent on the W20, but the hiss on the HC26 is pretty loud,
- getting the footage off the HC26 into iMovie was simpler than from the W20,
- the final file size of the HC26 video is almost 8 times larger than the W20, which makes for slow exports and slow upload times, plus more bandwidth when downloading/watching.
I hate videos with crap sound, so despite the long upload time I think the HC26 wins this round, but it’d be really interesting to see how the footage quality of a Flip stacks up against these two, and how quickly a Flip’d let me get footage live on the web.
Maybe there’s a sweet spot between the still camera’s file size and the video camera’s quality.
Posted by Marty in Video, Web & Tech
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