bitdepth

Graphic Converter 4.6

One of the applications that I have fallen in love with is Graphic Converter. I used it years ago and then I started using Photoshop and didn’t think that I’d use anything else. Then OS X came along and the Photoshop version took a long time to come out. Then I wasn’t able to upgrade to version 7, but I needed to do a lot of image processing as I was working on “When Voices Rise…” and I didn’t want to do a lot of work in Photoshop 6 in Classic as I was using Final Cut Pro 3 under OS X. I scanned hundreds of photos and documents and needed to resize and crop them to make them more manageable. I found Graphic Converter, tried it out, loved it, and bought it. Small, efficient and fast. I used the Browse feature to select images and resized and adjusted them for use. Then when I was authoring the DVD I had almost 100 images that I wanted to use in a slide show for the DVD, but I needed to rescale and resize the images in a non-proportional way and also to place them on a black background. GC’s Batch was able to save me a ton of time doing that. It’s what I use to resize and prepare images for the Web and iStockPhoto when I upload stuff there. It even takes a lot of Photoshop plugins!
There have been a few updates over the last year to GC and I dutifully download them, but I hadn’t been using it a lot. But for some reason I hadn’t poked around in it a lot. Then I had an image open I noticed that there was a new Stamp tool! That was the only thing that I really, really missed from previously using Photoshop as the colour-correction, levels, and other image adjustments work great in GC. The browser has also been updated (in an iPhoto-like way) and there is a neat catalogue HTML export that I may play with as well. I have to check out updates a bit more carefully!

April 30, 2003 graphicconverter, os x, photoshop, software

iTunes 4

Wow! It was a busy day at work…end of the term and lots of marking and adding and wrapping up. In my brief glance at Apple’s Web site this afternoon I saw that they launched the music store and updated iTunes to version 4. Even though I’m in Canada and we (along with the rest of the non-US world) can’t buy songs yet, it’s a pretty amazing leap. One of those Apple things that you look at and say, “Hey, that makes sense.” I can see me impulse-buying stuff as soon as it’s possible. There are still some gaps in the music that is available, but they’ve got a lot and the presentation is great. The staff picks are idiosyncratic and I suspect that they reflect the folks at Apple. It looks as if the whole thing was a massive task. Over 200,000 songs, tons of album art and a whack of encoding. The other neat features of iTunes 4 are sharing via Rendezvous and AAC encoding (higher quality at lower bitrates…just the same as encoding audio for DVDs).

A very cool feature for iTunes 5 or maybe 4.5 would be “Upload My Songs” to allow independent musicians to make their work available via the Music Store. Now that would be the next step, but would the record companies allow it? The video that Apple has (in the new “Music” button on Apple’s site that replaces the “Switch” button) introducing the store and new iPods has a rather smarmy tone about the music industry, so maybe it’s not too far-fetched. I love the new ads for the music store… they feature people singing as they listen to music on an iPod. A neat exercise in contrasts.

April 28, 2003 applications, itms, itunes, music, rendezvous, software

NetNewsWire Goes Pro!

It’s great when you get to see something develop and grow and come to fruition. My favourite new app has gone pro and you can register it to help the development continue. NetNewsWire Pro is the only thing other than Mail that runs constantly on my PowerBook. It has been developed by Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software and it’s the best way to quickly catch up with all of the RSS feeds that make collecting information and opinion so much easier than aimlessly surfing around for hours. I also use it to edit the Movable Type ‘blog that I use with the Screen Arts students at NSCC where I teach. Yay!

February 12, 2003 movabletype, netnewswire, nscc, ranchero, screenarts

Blosxom is Released

Congratulations are in order for Rael Dornfest who has officially released version 1 (and then 1.1) of Blosxom, which efficiently has been powering this ‘blog since I started it. One of the neat features is static rendering which makes for a more logical and efficient archive for me. So now categories and dates will let you go to entries with a logical hierarchy. i.e. http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/2002/ for all entries from 2002 (with http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/2002/12/ for just December of 2002) http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/film/ for all of the entries in the “film” category. Keep up the great work Rael! I’ve updated the site with it and it took only a few minutes. Then I set up the static archive along with a little cron job to generate it automatically…a bit geeky, but it’s nice to have a simple system that works well that is easy to understand and use.

January 25, 2003 applications, blosxom, raeldornfest

Presentations and Storytelling

Doc Searls got me thinking about presentation software which has become a current topic with Apple’s new Keynote software. PowerPoint dominates presentation software and I really hate it. Maybe that’s not completely fair. I hate PowerPoint in the same way that I hate Flash…not so much the software itself, but how it’s used. With most applications there is a way that you are supposed to use them…it’s how they’re designed. You can work with them in a different way, but you’re going against the grain. PowerPoint seems to tend toward mediocrity in the direction that it pushes people.
Derek K. Miller explains “Why PowerPoint is like a sauna in a Saab” and Doc’s article “It’s the Story, Stupid” should be read before anyone prepares a presentation.
Years ago I had to make PowerPoint presentations for other people as part of my job. On the 7100AV that I used it was slow and an incredible memory hog. I didn’t help it a lot since I’d usually make up the shows in Photoshop as a series of images and bring them in. I much preferred doing things like that using Director and later Flash. But one of the hidden, but very useful features of Adobe’s Acrobat reader is the full-screen mode that turns a PDF file into a presentation. I’ve done some presentations that way.
The last presentation that I gave was supported with slides that I created in Photoshop and then assembled with QuickTime Pro as a series of stills. It worked well.
Now when I’m writing something more structured I’ll start in OmniOutliner which is probably the best outliner I’ve every used. Most other things that I write will be in BBEdit (where I’m writing this now). Whenever I have to do another presentation I’m thinking of using BigShow which was written by Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch. It’s very small and simple and uses XML. I’m thinking that if I organize things in OmniOutliner and then maybe use a bit of AppleScript to reformat things into the proper XML it can be a quick way to whip something up.

January 18, 2003 aaron hillegass, applescript, bbedit, big nerd ranch, bigshow, derek k miller, director, docsearles, flash, keynote, omnioutliner, photoshop, powerpoint, presentation, quicktime, software, xml

Changing the Face of the Web

It’s rare that something indispensible is added to your toolkit after a number of years. It is even rarer when an application can change the way you do things. The Web browser did that and now I’m thinking that NetNewsWire has done that for news and ‘blogs for me. When RSS feed first came out I thought that they were cool and I wanted to use them, but never got around it. Meerkat did (and still does) a great job, but I was too lazy to set up my own mobs to use it more efficiently. In the last few months it seems that many things have clicked into place: the explosion of ‘blogs into the more mainstream consciousness, the proliferation of feeds, and Brent Simmons releasing NetNewsWire Lite. I was trying to explain to Carolyn how much I love NetNewsWire, but I said the best way to figure it out is to use it and she did and understood. So now a big chunk of my online reading happens through the RSS feeds that are aggregated by NetNewsWire Lite. It lets me spend more time getting to the good stuff and less time surfing and more time reading what I’m interested in. There are only two applications that are constantly running on my PowerBook: Mail and NetNewsWire.
I started thinking about this more when I read Meg Hourihan‘s O’Reillynet Megnut column “Dial Up Revelations” where she talked about using dialup while in France and how NetNewsWire Lite helped to ease the low-bandwidth pain. The other encouraging thing that I took from her writing was that the sites that work well and translate to various devices are the ones that are standards compliant. It’s an exciting time…now if only more people would write great software like NetNewsWire and create standards-compliant web sites…

January 11, 2003 carolyn, france, meerkat, meg hourihan, megnut, netnewswire, rss, software

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