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.
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’]
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.
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?]
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?
There has been this rumor floating around for the past couple of months that Apple is planning to sell off its Pro Apps devision, namely Final Cut studio and Aperture. The rumor was dying down but then Robert Cringly over at PBS posted a fanciful story that Apple was planning to sell its pro apps so it could buy Adobe. Of course the idea that they need to ditch their own Applications to make way for Adobe’s is completely ridiculous. It’s doubtful if Apple could afford to buy Adobe even if it wanted to, and Apple’s competing Apps are, for the most part better than the Adobe Counterparts. Having said that I do think here could be benefits for both consumers and Apple if they did buy Adobe (putting an end to Adobe’s insane overseas pricing would be one benefit). I consider it unlikely but not totally beyond the realms of possibility. What is completely beyond the realms of possibility though is the idea that Apple plans to sell off its pro apps.
This all started when Apple announced that they weren’t going to be exhibiting at NAB this year. This sparked immediate and rampant speculation as to their motives. As I work in the Television post production Industry I have first hand experience of it. After the announcement I was having discussions with some of the people I know who work in the industry and the first chicken little reaction was that they must be planning to ditch Final Cut Pro so they can focus on the iPhone. (The iPhone pretty much gets the blame for everything these days) Of course it’s complete nonsense as they are two completely separate and independent devisions within Apple. Anyway, I’m sure discussions like this were being held by post production professionals across the globe. That in itself would have been enough to start the ball rolling, but then take those same professionals, and have them all congregate in Las Vegas under the one roof for a week and rampant speculation quickly becomes a rumor. All it takes is one person in that situation to make the jump from “I wonder are Apple selling off their pro apps” to “I heard that Apple are selling off their Pro Apps” in a hot convention center with several thousand video nerds and you have an instant scandal.
Such was the furor over this that Apple came out and firmly denied that this was to be the case. Mind you that didn’t stop Robert Cringly publishing his piece and multiple sites picking up his speculation and translating it to potential fact. This isn’t the first time this kind of water cooler chatter got out of hand about Apple either. Thanks to a wonderfully bad piece of attempted journalism by the now dead Think Secret, people had pronounced Aperture end of life and there were “rumors” that Apple was going to kill the project. Anyway, you can rest assured that with Final Cut pro’s 44% market share it’s not going to happen.
So why weren’t they at NAB this year and why has there been no major Final Cut updates considering they usually release a relatively big upgrade at NAB every year? I have a pretty good idea as to what’s going on, and the inspiration came, ironically enough from Adobe. When they made their stark warning at Photoshop World recently that they would need to migrate Photoshop’s code from carbon to cocoa in order to take the application to 64bit I realized that Apple was faced with the same dilemma. Final Cut Pro started out as an OS9 Application and has been building on that legacy code ever since. It’s actually pretty inefficient by todays standards too (for example it barely uses multiple processors), and it was only a matter of time before they would have to do a major re-write. Why now though you ask? Well, there is a growing trend in the high end of the industry towards 2K and 4K post production. This is basically even higher resolution than high definition and is used for cinema post production. Cameras like the Red One are pushing this way of working forward into the mainstream and because of the huge file sizes involved I suspect than in order to work efficiently Apple needs to go 64bit with Final Cut Pro.
The reason the weren’t at NAB was simply that they didn’t have anything to show this year. Their main competitor, Avid, was not there and it costs a lot of money to have a space as large as Apple’s usual booth so why waste the money when you’ve got nothing to show. From what I’ve heard from people at the show they might as well have been there anyway considering the amount of other booths showing Final Cut or using Apple technology.
So the upshot of all this is that there is no great conspiracy in action here. Apple is not selling their Pro Applications. Final Cut is not going away. the sky is not falling and the iPhone is not the root of all evil. Rest assured that if they are re-writing Final Cut the end result will be even better than ever. And still way better than Premiere.
[update: Added link to Apple’s denial of the rumors]
[UPDATE: Fixed Broken Links]
Amazing the difference £110 can make.
According to Macworld UK….
Carphone Warehouse is now out of stock of 16GB iPhones, following the fast sell-out of 8GB models of the device last week.Both Carphone Warehouse and O2 have also sold out of the 8GB iPhone, following their application of a £100 discount on the device last month.
Also interesting is the fact that Neither Carphone Warehouse or O2 Plan on re-stocking ahead of the “rumored” launch of the 3G iPhone
From Macworld UK:
Apple has moved to dismiss rumours that it plans to abandon its video products.These rumours first emerged when the company confirmed it had no plans to exhibit at NAB. But the rumours are false, said Richard Townhill, Apple’s director of marketing for professional video applications.
He also announced that they’ve sold their 1 millionth copy of Final Cut Pro and now own 49% of the professional video editing market, which is pretty damn impressive considering how entrenched Avid was not too long ago.
[Read Apple committed to Final Cut - ProCreative - Macworld UK]
With the recent demise of HD-DVD, the success of Blu-Ray as the next generation successor would seem assured, yet many pundits are wondering if the format has long term success. They quote recent reports that Blu-Ray will be superseded in the near term by high-def download services and that there isn’t really a future for the format. Yet despite these reports, Blu-Ray is starting to show significant traction. Samsung recently announced that they were significantly increasing their forecast for their Blu-Ray business. The argument against Blu-Ray is that with the music industry clearly going towards digital downloads the movie industry must surely follow suit. Yet there are some clear differences as to how both segments of the entertainment market work.
A ringing endorsement from Kermit the Frog, who sounds remarkably like a young Bill Gates (or more disturbingly a young Bill Gates sounds remarkably like Kermit the Frog)
With the recent five year anniversary of the launch of the iTunes music store it occurred to me that in all that time it was amazing that no one ever really successfully competed with Apple’s music store. Considering the sheer number of attempts by various competing stores you would have imagined that someone would have at least come a close second, but even big names like Sony and Microsoft couldn’t catch the iTunes juggernaut. The traditional theory is that it was the iPod that spurred sales of iTunes and the fairplay “lock in” that meant music purchased on the iTunes store would only play on iPods was what caused the store to dominate. Yet, theoretically, that should have had the opposite effect. Now that music is available DRM Free on Amazon, effectively removing that lock, you would have imagined that Amazon’s mp3 service would have taken a significant chunk of iTunes sales, yet numbers from NPD show it’s barely made a dent. So how is it that iTunes has been virtually unopposed all this time? The answer, I believe, is actually pretty simple.
Apple’s idea behind the iTunes store originally was that, in order to successfully deal with pirates, the answer was not try to fight them head on but to compete with them. iTunes launched as people were reeling from the collapse of Napster, and had grown accustomed to the idea of being able to download virtually any track whenever you want. I think that Apple realized that it was this aspect of downloading music that appealed to people, perhaps even more than the fact that it was free. When iTunes launched they provided that same feeling of being able to get any track you wanted at a moments notice. Granted it took some time for the library to grow to the size it is now, but that feeling of instant gratification was always there.
The real genius though, the thing that no one else ever managed to emulate to the same extent, is that when you buy music on iTunes you don’t feel like you’re buying music. The whole “buying” aspect of it is so well hidden from the user that you can happily download songs without the “I’m spending money” part of your brain kicking in to stop you. Several people have coined the phrase “iCrack” to describe the phenomenon. iTunes brought impulse buying to the next level. It kept that Napster tradition of being able to get any music you wanted while making it as painless and transparent as possible so you still felt like you were just downloading music. People would get a song in their head and go to iTunes and end up buying loads of other tracks too, without really considering that this was actually coming off their credit card.
The funny thing is too, that one of the record company moves to limit the hold iTunes has been to protect traditional album sales. Yet iTunes works so successfully because it is geared towards that “song in your head” impulse, instant gratification purchasing (that doesn’t really feel like purchasing). I know many people who buy lots of music off iTunes, but when they make a conscious decision that they want a specific album, will go out and buy the CD or ironically enough the LP (which seems to be a new trend). Had iTunes been limited to Albums it’s doubtful it would ever have taken off as much as it did.
The biggest irony of all this is that the technology that makes iTunes so seamless, so easy to impulse buy is “one click” licensed from Amazon, who are now considered Apple’s main if somewhat distant competitors, and their service simply doesn’t have the same disconnect from downloading music and actually paying for it that has made iTunes so successful.
In a break from its usual routine of announcing products on a Tuesday, Apple today announced an incremental upgrade to its iMac line. The all in one machine now tops out at 3.06ghz and comes with 2gb of memory on all but the entry level 20″ (which still has only 1gig).
When Aperture first launched it was touted as being the solution to the workflow problems of modern digital photographers, solving the issues of working with hundreds or thousands of Raw files. Adobe’s Lightroom followed shortly thereafter making a similar claim. Both applications combined a database for organization with raw processing tools for developing digital images. They both seemed like an ideal solution for the problems of dealing with the masses of files that the digital era of photography presented. Yet, a recent survey showed that a large percentage of photographers (over 60%) were still sticking to their existing workflows and applications. So is it just inertia on the part of seasoned Photographers or is there a little more to it? I have been doing a lot of processing of digital photographs recently and I think I have figured out what might be one of the main issues that may be holding back more widespread adoption of both of these programs.
Both Aperture and Lightroom were built with the idea of being able to catalogue and handle large quantities of Raw files. In other words it is like being able to have all your negatives constantly at hand. The irony is that it is the combination of database and raw processing that are these applications strengths that may be putting people off. I’m willing to bet that the majority of photographers like to process their images then put the originals away. With Aperture and Lightroom your Raw files are constantly online. In a way it is like your post processing is never finished. It’s like always viewing your “negatives” instead of dealing with your finished prints. Raw files can take a lot of space, and even with the relatively low cost of hard drives these days you can still run out of space quickly. Yet the space is not really the main issue here, it’s more of an habitual mind set. People want to process their shoot, put the originals away and then just have the finished processed files to keep in their database. Thats the way people workd with film, and how many worked with digital before either of these applications came along. Although there are ways to do this with both Lightroom and Aperture, existing workflows of using bridge and camera raw or some other raw processing application seem to suit this way of working better.
Like I said though, there are ways to make this kind of workflow work with both Aperture and Lightroom. Both can generate high resolution previews which remain in the database if you move the originals. In Aperture you can choose the “relocate masters” command to move the raw files to another location and archive them off. An even better alternative is to export the whole project and save it to another location, thereby keeping your raw edits intact. In Lightroom you can just move the folder where the originals are stored and the previews remain in the library. Both of these options have their problems though. Aperture does not let you work with the previews to the same extent Lightroom does. You can’t export the files out of Aperture (except through the systems media library) or create books, web pages etc without first re-connecting to the masters. Lightroom does let you do more with the previews, but there is nothing equivalent to Apertures project structure so it’s harder to archive individual projects in the first place.
What I’ve ended up doing with older projects is to export the masters as jpegs, archive out the project, delete it then re-import the jpegs into a new project. I’m sure this process can be automated too thanks to Aperture’s scripting and Automator capabilities. What would be ideal though is an “Archive Project” function, which would do something similar. Archive off the Raw files with adjustments intact and replace them with full resolution jpegs, perhaps with the option to keep any edited files (such as PSD files) online. I think this would go a long way to addressing what I personally find to be a shortcoming of the software.
Both of these programs are great tools, both relatively young in their respective life spans, and will take some time to become the mainstream way of working. I don’t want anyone to think I’m railing against either application because I think that they are definitely the way forward, but I also think they should address the mindset of people who like to work this way rather than try and get the photographer to adapt to something that may seem alien to them. A few extra functions should make it easier for those with the edit-process-archive mindset to work with the programs better. Perhaps for version 3? In the mean time I’m off to do some Applescript coding.
Next,
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