bitdepth

The Long Tail Up Close

While OS X and most Apple stuff is well-designed and simple, there has always been a bit of room between the smooth lines for utilities and software that make it just a bit better. Fascinating little economies and ecosystems spring up around things like the iPod or Dashboard or the iPhone and the indie Mac developers are there making their stuff and being part of the community. It really hit home with me as I listened to the first Core Intuition podcast with Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece.
I found out about podcast through Daniel’s Red Sweater Blog, which I found out about because I use (and bought) MarsEdit (which I’m writing these very words with). My using MarsEdit for writing blog posts came about because it was originally developed by Brent Simmons, who also writes NetNewsWire, but Red Sweater took it over. It was originally included with NNW and then became separate and I bought both because they’re useful and I like supporting the little guys in the same way that I like supporting indie bands.
In the Core Intuition podcast it is just two indie Mac software developers talking about developing software and the world that they live and work within. Not overly geeky (a bit geeky, I guess) or technical, but very real and human, which I like. (Cyborgs generally aren’t interesting in a podcast.) So much of the software and films and music that we use now is made by large groups of people with massive amounts of money, and I realized how the Long Tail really applies to the small Mac developer who isn’t developing things for the biggest market. For me it’s the same as buying food and produce at the farmers market as you’re a lot more connected with what you’re getting. It’s about the people and the connections.
Manton’s shareware product is Wii Transfer, which I’d thought of trying out (it lets you listen to music, view photos and move video to your Wii), and now I took the plunge and bought it before I tried it. Luckily I like it and I’ve no regrets. While I don’t think that the intention behind the podcast is to drive a massive amount of sales, it does show how having a voice and a presence can have indirect benefits. It’s nice to be connected a bit more to the people who make things that I use and I think that it’s great both ways as you’ll make better stuff if you know your customers by name.
Even though they’re both relatively far away geographically, it feels like I’m buying locally as they’re members of my community in terms of software and what they do. That’s why I also love being able to buy from indie developers and keep their virtual factories running.

June 5, 2008 longtail, marsedit, people, podcast, software, wiitransfer

Bitdepth Year 6

Six years ago I started this blog and it’s been my online home for that time as everything changed around it. Now everything is spread out much more and overall it’s a lot easier to do this stuff and you don’t need to get your hands very dirty with HTML and SQL and CSS to have a blog. As I write this, I’m not even using my own laptop and not having my laptop with all of the files also gives me the opportunity to reflect on how things have changed over the past few years with the technology that I use to communicate with you and how everything ties together.

Continue…

May 19, 2008 43things, bitdepth, blog, blosxom, flickr, history, marsedit, twitter, wordpress

Favourite Software of 2007

I’m not a fan of big expensive applications (with the notable exception of Final Cut Pro), but I love open source and shareware that is the product of small companies or individuals. There is something satisfying about sending money to someone who crafts something useful and affordable. Over the past few years I’ve come to rely upon a small collection of applications to read, write and create things for the web. With many of them I didn’t realize how much they have become part of what I do until I switched to my newer MacBook Pro and there were a lot of things missing.
Essential software for me would be NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Pukka, Twitterific, Flickr Export, Graphic Converter, and Transmit.
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December 23, 2007 del.icio.us, flickrexport, graphicconverter, lists, marsedit, netnewswire, pukka, shareware, software, transmit, twitterific

Changing Bitdepth

When I started this site in May of 2002, I was using Rael Dornfest‘s amazing Blosxom script that takes text files and converts them into postings. It’s worked without a hitch for over five years, but I’ve been wanting to use a more comprehensive system for a while now. Yesterday I installed WordPress and migrated over. Importing my previous posts was a bit of a pain, but I was able to do it. The biggest changes are in the look and in the addition of comments to the site. One of the reasons that I haven’t been here as much over the past while is probably the lack of comments and interaction as there is nothing like an audience to motivate you and I’ve been spending more time where I’m connecting with people.
Things have changed a lot with web hosting and blogging systems over the past five years. Configuring and installing systems is much easier now and for many people, they won’t have to use MySQL commands or even use the terminal to set up and configure things. I think that I’ve struck a good balance between a system that I install myself and can configure and change without a lot of effort.
Now instead of using a text editor for posts, I’m using MarsEdit and I have to say that it is a fun and geeky day for me and I hope to be writing more and to be hearing from you as well. Thanks for being here and enjoy the new look and site.

December 2, 2007 blog, blosxom, marsedit, wordpress

What Happened and What’s Next

The online world was very exciting for me in 2004. Blogging kept plugging away and I rediscovered Blogger which Google purchased. The great thing with the evolution of the Web is that finally CSS started to be embraced. With Blogger there was some great Javascript that made blogging even easier and faster. They also removed the ads on the Blogspot hosting, but opened the possibility of revenue from Google ads if you want.
The other cool Google-related discovery for me was Gmail, which has changed the way that I look at email. I try to keep everything organized and I’ve been using email for a long time and I don’t easily switch email programs. While I use Apple’s Mail a lot, I find that I’m using and loving Gmail a lot now and I think that I’m starting to use Gmail more than Apple’s Mail program. The Gmail beta is fascinating as it is viral. You can’t really sign up, you have to be invited by someone who has it. It’s an interesting way to beta test something like a mail service as you want to have people who use it and the alpha geeks who are testing it will tell other alpha geeks about how cool it is.
The biggest chunk of my time online recently has been spent in the completely addictive Flickr. When I started it was just to share a few pictures with family and friends, but when some of the public photos that I posted received comments I started to get more of a sense of the community that was there. I didn’t think that I would like the social component of it, but I started to realize that I shared a lot in common with the people who were looking at my photos. It’s a great way to communicate visually and I notice that the community is more international than many communities that depend on language as the primary means of communication. The response to the photos that I post shape what I now choose as a subject. While I only joined Flickr in August, I posted 1424 pictures last year. My posting (and photography) increased dramatically as the year went on to the point where I posted 700 photos in December. I don’t think that I’ll continue at that rate, but I will probably post over 2000 images in 2005 I gladly paid for a Pro account which gives me a gigabyte of uploads every month (and my 700 photos last month got close to 50% of the capacity). I just realized some of how Flickr works thanks to the antenna blog which points out the Flickr is based on online gaming code. It’s like a game where the object is the share your photos. You have quests with fellow group members and share your triumphs. It’s great to be part of the community.
The tags on Flickr enable lots of connections between the images that you have uploaded and the images that others have classified in the same way. The tagging on Flickr is based on the tagging that takes place on del.icio.us where you create your own tags to classify links. It’s been called a folksonomy and now I store a lot of my bookmarks in my del.icio.us space to keep track of things. The next step for me is to use my del.icio.us bookmarks with some of the other stuff I’m doing on my blog.
Viewing the web and keeping track of what’s happening on sites and especially blogs has been made much easier with NetNewsWire, which continues to evolve and is the other program other than Mail that I constantly run. Now if I site doesn’t have an RSS feed, it isn’t as interesting to me. While there are many options for RSS readers, I love how NetNewsWire works and as MarsEdit (a weblog editor) evolves I think that I’ll use it more and more as well.
The combination of RSS with audio enclosures caused podcasting to burst out onto the world. It’s an exciting development that is really only months old, but is evolving incredibly rapidly with Adam Curry at the forefront with his Daily Source Code podcast setting the pace for what a podcast is, as well as highlighting what is happening in the podcasting world which is a close cousin to the blogging world. It’s changed things so fast that the latest beta of NetNewsWire supports podcasting and now I’m using it to download podcasts. Podcasting will be very big in 2005.
Yesterday I began to explore 43things, which I looked at before, but now it really clicked as I became a member. 43things is like Flickr for to-do lists. You share your list of things to-do and things you have done as well as leave messages and comments about what you want to do and what others have done. With gentle prompting and an understated interface, I realized right away that I’d be spending a lot of time there. It connects you with people through tasks and tags and collaboration seems to be built into the DNA of the site. While I just started yesterday, I’ve already connected with strangers and realized that the whole thing is a way that people who may not blog or want to blog will be blogging without knowing it. I’ll write more about 43things later, but I think it will be another big thing in 2005. Exciting times ahead online as we focus less on the technology and more on the people and community.

January 1, 2005 43things, adamcurry, blogger, del.icio.us, flickr, folksonomy, gmail, google, mail, marsedit, netnewswire, podcasting, tags

Bye Bye Browser

I’ve been using the browser less and less since I started using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds. It’s one the best shareware investments that I’ve made. It’s simple, well-designed and works well. Most of the time I can quickly get a lot of information via the feeds and NNW lets me check out things that I’m really interested in. When I used to click on a link it would open in my browser which is usually Safari, but I’m using Firefox a bit now. Now I’m using the latest beta which makes a good thing even better. Support has been added for Atom feeds and the weblog editor has been broken out into a new application called MarsEdit. The thing that has changed the way I look at things the most is that now (thanks to WebCore) I view pages within a tab that pops up in NNW. It’s a great idea and now I’m going outside to the browser less when I want to check something out. Simplifying things is always good.
MarsEdit is something that I wasn’t sure I’d use that much. But I’ve been using it a bit and I think that I’ll use it more. I’m not using Movable Type as much now which is what I used the weblog editor for before, but I am using Blogger and I can post to Blogger using MarsEdit with the quirk of not being able to set the title, but that’s on the way. I’m also thinking of using it a bit with this blog which is Blosxom-based with me editing the posts in BBEdit. The change in the interface of MarsEdit is that it now works and looks a bit more like email, which makes a lot of sense. The email workflow is closer to how blogging works intellectually. That being said, why am I writing longer posts now?

October 17, 2004 atom, bbedit, blogger, blosxom, firefox, marsedit, movabletype, netnewswire, rss, safari, software, web