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ividly

I spent a big chunk of today finally exploring the integration features in iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. I’m working from a mixed base of assets representing the two most recent camping trips we went on (to Mount Baker in June and to the Olympic Peninsula this month).

As it happens, long-time MacWorld editor Jim Heid saw a prior entry on the topic of helping my Mom learn to use her new Mac, and kindly offered to send a copy of his book, The Macintosh iLife. We corresponded, and he sent a copy, inscribed to her.

I hadn’t ever really even attempted to use the apps as they were designed to be used (with the exception of iTunes), and before I sent the book on, I wanted to work through a demo project involving all the integration features with the book at my side, so I would be familiar enough with it to refer Mom to a chapter as needed. It’s been helpful, although my questions have been a bit more specific and technically oriented than the book is designed for.

For example, I did find a passing reference to the fact that iDVD only supports slideshows composed of up to 99 individual picture files, as I searched for reasons a folder of images was not generating the anticipated button upon drag-and-drop.

So, beyond the passing help the book’s provided, here are the issues I’m having that I think are failings in the suite of apps, speed not being considered (I’m using them on a G4/400 at the very low end of supported machines, and the speed is quite intolerable, something I cope with by time-slicing with household chores such as laundry and dishes).

The best feature that the suite provides is the ability to marry sets of images to selected songs from your music library. Unfortunately, each of the image-oriented apps – iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto – provides this feature with a slightly different implementation, and thus far I have not found a good way to seamlessly combine the various implementations. iMovie, for instance, will render your stills into a sliding, cross-fading quicktime montage using the well-known Ken Burns Effect. Unfortunately, the various transitions available in iPhoto, for example, are unavailable (at least at first) in iMovie, and in particular in the attempt to create a Ken Burns extravaganza. Furthermore, selecting and previewing a song and transition sequence in iPhoto is easy, easy, easy. Duplicating that in iDVD, or iMovie, is not quite so straightforward.

(UPDATE: Yes it is. in iDVD, dragging an iPhoto album from the iDVD Photos selection pane will also bring iPhoto slideshow effects into the iDVD slideshow.)

iPhoto offers an ‘iDVD’ button, presumably to allow you to send your iPhoto slideshow to iDVD. I say presumably because each time I used it, iDVD would launch and then crash. If it launched, would it add the sideshow to an existing project, or close the current project, replacing it with the new slideshow? I can’t say.

iDVD disappointed me in ways that are similar to and reflective of QuickTime Pro, rejecting native mpeg files for drag-and-drop inclusion in menu-item playback. I’ll be experimenting with optimal ways to incorporate the variant mpeg formats generated by our cameras into iDVD, probably routing through iMovie.

As I noted about a month ago, Apple’s applications treat video and photos as truly disjunct, something which made sense prior to the prevalence of dual-media recording devices. This is something that Apple must change to retain the leading-edge cachet regained with Jobs’ return.

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re RFC / JFKFC / cc

Posted on by mwhybark

Pisser

MAL conduit has stopped working, so gracefully that it believes it is working. AvantGo shows no record of attempted syncs after the failure, so I suspect either a local permissions problem or an AG-side server settings change.

Troubleshooting to date reveals naught. As far as I can tell, I can’t even set up a verbose capture of the server-comm dialog, which means I’ll have to figure out how to do it manually in order to rule out that problem. What a giant pain in the ass. Is it even worth doing? Do I really care if I can’t read the Times in teeny bite-size chunks as I ride the bus?

I guess I do care, because I’m so angry and frustrated. But that seems to be more from aggravation surrounding change than a specific need to have a tiny version of the newspaper. I’m mad because the light switch suddenly stopped working, not because it’s dark and I need a light.

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LAN ho!

Some clients, who live far, far away, have a tangled home LAN that I believe I will be drafted to fix in late summer.

AFAIK, the topology is like this:

[cable modem] –> [non-apple wireless router + 5 port hub] –> Apple OS X PowerBook, Wintel Latop B, Wintel Box C, Wintel Box D

I believe A(pple) and B are wirelessly on the LAN, while C and D are wired to the hub. I believe they have a shared printer, but don’t know if it’s running off a computer, a print server, or has an ethernet connection. I suspect it’s a locally-shared printer running off of one of the wired Wintels. Roadrunner is the cable provider.

I believe they just plugged in the router and the AP and turned them on. They got the wireless hub a few years after the cable router modem. They’ve complained to me of a mysterious, troubleshooting-resistant inability to establish a VPN to his employer, something that ‘just happened.’

I have been unable to traceroute back to their machines; the trace stops at the cable modem. The net effect of this is that I can’t set up VNC to look directly at their computers’ settings.

I strongly suspect that both the router modem and the AP are acting as DHCP servers; I believe this would account for the network problems they’ve mentioned. They said “Huh?” when I asked if their cable provider had given them docs on configuring the cable modem (to do things like setting up port forwarding, for example).

A series of questions, then:

Given a stable, if reerky, IP topology like this:

192.x.x.x -> 172.x.x.x -> 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, …

where

  • the 172-class number is a DHCP-assigned address from the 192-class modem
  • and the 10-class addresses are assigned from the AP

[UPDATE: it’s unclear if the cable modem is a router itself or if DHCP was provisioned to the home via the ISP’s DHCP on the other side of the modem.]

1. is it going to be possible to set up a dynDNS solution that allows me to use VNC?

2. Do non-VNC remote screen viewers (Apple Remote Desktop and Timbuktu) provide an iChat-like way to route the data through spaghetti LANs so that I can see the local settings and work the problem without going there?

3. What will my options be regarding the cable modem? Can I just replace it with the router, if the hardware connections work? Alternatively, to what extent are Roadrunner cable modems user-configurable?

I am not planning on setting up any outward-facing servers, so I do not believe there’s even a potential violation of the cable provider’s TOS (WiFi notwithstanding).

Finally, in order to do this, I must brush up on my Wintel networking skillz. I’d love to hear some book recommendations.

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SIFF '04 RIP

I pointed this out a few times early in the festival run, but I want to prompt Seattle-area readers or ex-locals to stroll through the amusing doings the various Tableteers got up to over at the Siffblog.

I still need to fix an IE display bug which centers everything, but on the whole I think the experiment worked out well. I think it would be interesting to see Tablet implement something like this as a regular part of their main site design.

A very interesting aspect of getting the blog, um, rolling for them was the relative lack of internet-oriented thinking my friends there have. I asked if they knew what the base traffic of the main site was. This proved to be data that had not ever been sought previously. While I think most of the folks on the Siffblog had a vague idea what a blog was, I don’t believe that they had ever committed their own time to either reading or writing one on a regular basis.

As it happens, yesterday was the one-month anniversary of the blog, and I’m pleased with how it worked out. Never a high traffic site, it still enabled direct, personal writing about the experience of the festival per se.

A few other folks were blogging SIFF as well. Since SIFF draws a dedicated core of pass-holders who can be quite competitive about numbers of films seen, I think next year it would be a really great idea to set up a collaborative blog for passholders as well, possibly scraping film listings from the main SIFF site and allowing the pass holders to riff on that material.

Spatula vs. SIFF runs through June 9, and is (oddly) an audio blog. Being constitutionally averse to multimedia, the content will remain obscure to me for the nonce. But don’t let me stop you!

Artdish did some blog-form previewing, but steers clear of lengthy personal reactions, alas.

Eric at Of Charm and Strange wrote up Sky Blue, Buddy, Open Water, The Five Obstructions, Doppelganger, Touch of Pink, Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, and Torremolinos ’73. He may have reviewd more, but it’s time for me to move on.

MoviePie has a nice listing, with about 64 films reviewed – just eyeballing, I’d say that they rate films more or less as I did, although I have quibbles with a perfect score for Hero, which I predictably view as imperialist running dog propaganda, if beautiful (that’s a mild joke there folks, and yes I do hope to write about it).

Cinecultist weighed in every now and then with dispatches from one Seattle Maggie, and last but not least, Mena and Me, at a not-long-for this-world radio.weblogs.com URL, took the time to drop some lines on SIFF as well.

In other news, I just shipped a review of SIFF Golden Space Needle Best Film winner Facing Windows – look for it in this Wednesday’s Stranger. More than that I dassen’t say. I did take the opportunity to interview director Ferzan Ozpetek when he was in town. It was my first-ever interview with a non-native English speaker. It included the services of a translator. I think it went well enough, but of course, I can imagine how to improve the experience next time. I don’t have an assignment to use the material yet and thus will keep mum about what we discussed.

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Ricketied

In other news, I think I have a temporary dataprocessing system demoed at work that will greatly compress the pick-and-pack process for order fulfillment. In essence it allows the pick-and-packer to do a warehouse run in the morning to grab everything in the previous day’s orders, and then to package them by priority and efficiency: multiple orders and special-handling orders first, followed by gangs of single-item orders grouped by the ordered item, which makes labeling and packing much simpler. Yesterday in about three hours of actual packing time I closed and shipped over fifty orders.

Sounds good, right?

Alas, it’s all ricketied together in Excel and Word and relies on mail-merge features. next up is some intimate familiarity with Access. It’s an intimacy I’ve had previously and the prospect of which makes me long for slow, easy-to-design-in FileMaker. A nice hefty reference book was already proving useful this afternoon as I left work.

I would like to note in my own defense that my baling-ware is intended purely as a temporary implementation, and part of the impetus in evolving it was to provide me with enough use-case material that I can develop early-stage design docs as an aid in evaluating third-party prospective solutions for our inventory and fulfillment management stuff.

When FM 7 launched, there was some noise about FM being something like a front-end for [insert fave open source DB here]. Is this in fact the case, FM is now a suite of bolt-on tools for [your database software here]? Cuz it should be, and that would be neat.

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What is the title of the window?

As I noted the other day, I’m helping get Mom up to speed on her new Powerbook, over the phone and, sadly, screenblind for the nonce. It’s quite exhausting, something like playing chess while blindfolded with a novice chess player who may or may not understand the verbal conventions used to describe the chessboard but who probably knows the basic rules of the game.

It’s fun, though, to spend so much time on such a minute series of tasks with someone you love. We’re spending two to three hours on the phone or voice-and-video chatting every night. The most challenging part (aside from the blindfolded chess aspect) is unpacking my own assumptions about what a given verbal description of a user-interface gesture means.

Commenters on the previous entry noted a resistance to the idea of employing a conventionalized, consistent vocabulary to describe computer user-interface elements among older new users they’d worked with. Thankfully, that does not appear to be the case with my mom. Every day, she gets a bit more oriented, and is able to both recognize and use the new vocabulary.

One commenter, jbelkin, on the earlier entry noted that .Mac membership grants access to some Apple-produced training movies, which are described as the “How to Use Panther” movies.

If you have the inclination, signing up for .Mac lets you access the How to use Panther QT movies – they start from the beginning and they are as clear as day – there are about 80 movies and they start with MOUSING to ATTACHING A DIGITAL CAMERA and using iphoto. All the basics and some not-so-basics are covered.

I looked and looked, but could not find these. I did find the .Mac Learning Center, though: could these be the films referred to?

I gave my mom the assignment of working through the “Mac OS X Basics” presentations and will check in on her tomorrow to see how effective they are. Then, tomorrow night, I will take my dad through patching iChat to enable USB video sources.

Tonight, we used iChat video and voice quite painlessly for about two hours. For some reason, Mom’s audio connection was unusually good, and I found myself continually glancing to the shelf where my speakers are located, involuntarily expecting to see her.

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Bringing Mom to the Mac

My parents just began an experiment. My dad bought my mom a Powerbook. She’s had difficulty mastering Windows, probably due to inadequate education and training resources combined with the myriad of little frustrations that can accompany the user experience on that platform, and this has been compounded by my relative lack of experience in acting as helpdesk on Wintel.

I have long encouraged them to consider trying a Mac, and one of my primary arguments was that I would finally be able to provide reliable helpdesk support to them. This will help me to effectively gauge the level of user-experience versus education needed to bring them into a happy relationship with their computers.

This is the first of several blog entries I will be producing to document some of the written support I will provide them. The bulk of this entry concerns local and online resources for reference, help and user education.

One of my future entries will deal with the vagaries of disentangling a LAN to enable port-forwarded service mapping – all from the security and comfort of my office chair, on the opposite coast from the physical LAN itself. Current smart money is on the active presence of two competing DHCP routers in the LAN. That will be fun.

Mac Reference Books
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition
by David Pogue – Amazon link.

This is essential. If you only pick up one of these books, make it this one. Pogue nearly invented the modern user-oriented computer book, and has been writing in that vein, and about the Mac, for about twenty years.

The Little Mac Book: Panther Edition
by Robin Williams Amazon link.

This has been the long-standing standard introduction to Macs. It is written with the assumption that the user has no experience or knowledge of computers at all. Williams style is exemplary and inclusive, communicating the sense of affection and joy that so many of us on the Mac side experience with our machines. It should be noted that I have not seen this edition of the book.

Mac OS X Hints
by Rob Griffiths, David Pogue – Amazon link

This is a compendium of the public-contribution website linked above. All of us are smarter than one of us, and these hints are great. The website is the best single place to go when you have a specific question such as “How do I…” or “Can I…” or “Why does it…”

Rob’s website is also a genuine phenomenon, and he deserves high praise for the way he took the tiger by the tail when it became apparent that he’d created the most crucial independent information web site for users of Mac OS X. The fact that this good fortune – both his and ours – resulted in publication may do something for those seeking proof of a just world.

Mac OS X for Windows Users: A Switchers’ Guide
by David Coursey – Amazon link.

I am not directly familiar with this book, but Peachpit sets the standard for user-oriented Mac books, and it may therefore prove of value. Anyone actually had face time with this book?

Useful Websites
MacWorld
MacAddict

MacWorld and MacAddict are the two main US-market Mac-oriented magazines. MacWorld’s website is much deeper than MacAddict’s and includes hundreds of articles and reviews.

Mac OS X Hints
Mac OS Hints is the basis of the book suggested above.

MacFixit
MacFixIt is a long-standing, community driven website for Mac users to share knowledge. They have a tiered access policy, though.

Apple
Apple Discussions
Apple Support
Since my parents have Applecare, they are entitled to as much technical support as you’d like. Please note, however, that there is a difference between support and training, and issues which reflect a lack of training will probably produce a somewhat brusque response. By all means, do complain if that’s the case.

Personally, I have found the discussions board (the second URL above) a much better source of help and information, particularly on issues of training. At the moment, the site is inaccessible from my computer, but that won’t be the case forever. I often find myself looking here first for information.

Unfortunately they rotate the messages offline after only about three months, which is a real shame, but this is the online location where you will find the highest density of courteous and helpful Mac users in any area of need you might have.

Other Sites
I haven’t linked to a raft of other sites such as TidBITS, Macintouch, The OReilly Mac Dev Center, and so forth, primarily because those are sites that are most helpful to experienced users. I will introduce my folks to them in time, but not yet – wading through the data at those locations might well prove overwhelming at this stage.

Connecting Wintels and Macs
Connecting Mac OS X to Windows PCs, by Wei-Meng Lee and Brian Jepson. 11/19/2002 article at O’Reilly’s Mac Dev Center.

This article may be a little dated. I know that I myself am in need of a brush-up regarding wintel networking and this may be a helpful place to start.