thomas fitzgerald.net

Great YouTube mash up of a title sequence for “Lost” done in the style of “Battlestar Galactica”

Check it out, this is a really cool image of Darth Vader made entirely from type. (Scroll down the page a little)

After hearing so much about it I purchased the flip video camera while I was in New York this week. It’s a fantastic little camera. Here’s a quick snapshot of the 5th Ave. Apple store for no particular reason!

Uploaded to Flickr’s much protested but excellent video service (It’s much better quality than you tube)

From Macworld UK:

When Apple ships its iPhone 2.0 update - and the accompanying App Store for distributing third-party software for the phone - you won’t have to wait too long for native iPhone apps built by Google programmers. “We expect to have applications at Day One,” said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering.

[Read Google has native iPhone apps ready]

From Macworld:

O2 CEO Matthew Key confirmed that the cellular provider will make an iPhone-related announcement in conjunction with Apple “in the coming weeks.”

File under: “Duh”
[Read O2 confirms new iPhone ‘in weeks’]

I am on holidays (Vacation) in New York City for the next few days so updates to the blog will be somewhat less frequent, but I’ll do my best! In the mean time, here’s a cool; shot of NY at night I took from my hotel window last night

From Amazon’s Blog of all places. Interesting list though. I have jailbroken my iPod touch, but I’m reluctant to touch my iPhone what with June just around the corner. Still, there’s some pretty neat stuff out there already, and it’s not clear if some of these things will even be possible with the SDK.

I Love typography has a great round up of websites that make good use of type. this is well worth a look because some of these sites are simply gorgeous.

From Shawn over at CameraCon:

Our first TimeShoots have been great - the Flickr page received pictures of
moose, housecats, indoors, outdoors, lighthouses, beaches, beer, ice, at
least one person in a bathtub and shots from four different continents!

The pictures come from all kinds of photographers - beginners, intermediates
and pros - using all kinds of cameras. It doesn’t matter what kind of camera
you shoot with or what level of photographer you are. There’s no critiquing
of your photographs or judging you as a photographer.

We’ve got a (new) Flickr site where the pictures will be posted and where
you can see the shots from the previous TimeShoots:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/timeshoot/>

And an email address for you to send your photos to (they will automagically
show up on the TimeShoot Flickr site):

“help14army (AT) photos.flickr.com”

All you have to do is send an email with your photo attached. Use the
email’s Subject Line to put a title to your photo and use the Body area of
the email to send along any other details - where it was shot, what kind of
gear you used, camera information, your name/website URL, etc.

You can send up to a maximum of 3 photos. You retains all rights to your
posted images.

Remember, take photos wherever you happen to be under whatever circumstances
you happen to be in at 12pm ET (actually, you’ve got a 10 minute leeway on
either side of 12pm ET) and send your best shots to “help14army (AT)
photos.flickr.com”.

You can use this web page:
http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

To figure out what time 12pm ET is in your Time Zone.

Seems like a lot to digest all at once but once you get the hang of it, we
hope you’ll be able to participate and join in!

I missed this the first two times it happened but it’s a great idea. I will definitely try and participate this time. Should be about 5pm here in Ireland.

Aperture is a great piece of software for the most part. However, there are a few additions that I would really like to see Apple make that would really round out the feature set. None of these are particularly major, I don’t think (well, one of them is) but | think they could really add the icing on the cake to an already excellent application. So, in no particular order….

1. Add the ability to save the entire adjustments stack as a preset. Basically, this would mimic the “develop module presets” from Lightroom. Yes, I know it’s a Lightroom feature, but it’s one that is badly missing from Aperture. It would also be great if you could also export and import these presets for easy sharing.
2. Open the “bricks” up to third party plug-ins. If you’re not that familiar with Aperture, the individual modules within the adjustments panel are referred to as “bricks”. By default a number are turned on but you can add and remove bricks to the image processing stack. If this were available to plug-in developers this could make Aperture an awesome piece of software, as it could allow truly non destructive filters.
3. Develop an “Apple Camera Raw” plug in for Photoshop. One of the main things that keeps people from using Aperture I believe is the fact that if you want to open a Raw file in Photoshop that you have processed in Aperture, Adobe Camera Raw doesn’t recognize the edits. By writing their own camera raw plug in for Photoshop, one that was basically Apertures raw engine in a plug-in they could solve this problem. Why would you want to do this I hear you ask? Well there are many times when you need to be able to open the raw file directly in Photoshop, especially if you use it in conjunction with CS3’s smart objects. Even if you just want to open a raw file in Photoshop without Aperture creating a version. I think by having their own plug-in it would be really useful for people who use Photoshop a lot.
4. An archive project tool. As I discussed in a previous post, it’s not always ideal or necessary to keep your Raw files online. What would be great is a tool that would let you create an archived project with all the raw files and adjustment information, and replace that project in the Aperture library with a duplicate project containing full resolution Jpegs of the originals. Using the high resolution presets does not work for this task unfortunately as you can’t use them within Aperture once you disconnect the raw files. A simple to use archival mechanism would be a really powerful addition to Aperture’s tool set.
5. A Burn to Disk function. It would be nice if you could burn Images (both versions and masters) to disk, directly within Aperture in the same way as you can in iPhoto.

So there you have it. As I said earlier, I don’t think any of these are too complicated to implement (except the whole Camera Raw thing) but it would really make life easier for Aperture users. Feel free to add your own suggestions to the comment section.

From Ars Technica:

Vodafone announced this morning that it would offer the iPhone in ten markets worldwide—the largest single iPhone rollout yet (well, assuming they all launch at the same time).

What’s interesting about this is that Telecom Italia have also stated that they plan to carry the iPhone adding further weight to the rumors that Apple is abandoning it’s single exclusive carrier model.
[Read Vodafone, Telecom Italia announce massive iPhone rollout]
[Related: What Happens if Apple Sells iPhone Unlocked?]

I’ve just noticed that some of the links I had placed in the last couple of posts were triggering the Lightbox plug in I use for viewing Images and was screwing up the links. The reason this happened is that I’ve been using a beta version of ecto which allows you to insert additional tags into Image links, but unfortunately with the last update it seems to have started putting those tags into normal links as well.Of course it’s my own fault for not having checked those links, but anyway apologies to those who’ve been reading recently and have been frustrated.

Incidentally, those people visiting from the Macrumors story please note that the link they have is escaped incorrectly. Wordpress, the system I use on my blog unfortunately takes the title literally and makes the url out of it, inverted commas and all. It seems as though when Macrumors was linking to it, whatever system they are using has interpreted those as smart quotes, which is a different unix escape sequence than straight inverted commas and is sending to the wrong URL. I can’t change the url now because numerous other sites are linking too, but I’ve emailed them and asked them if they could fix it.

Thanks everyone for your patience.

All this talk recently about the possibility of Apple buying Adobe has me wondering, what would happen if such an earth shattering acquisition did happen. I’m not trying to discuss the likelihood of it, because frankly it’s pretty remote, but imagine for a second if Apple did go down that route. It would send ripples through the technology industry the likes of which have never been seen before. Windows users would immediately go into panic overdrive and cries of “monopoly” would be heard across the globe. But what would it mean for the average consumer? Who would be the winners and losers if such a take over took place?

[Read more]