azazil.net

The funny thing about Twitter is that as much as I kept reading how you either get it, or you don’t — I never really believed it. I joined up about a year ago when the craze first swept across the intertubes, and made a couple of experimental tweets; I found a few interesting looking people and began following them; I installed twitterriffic (still free, despite appearances) and watched with feigned interest as those same interesting-seeming people droned on about the boring minutiae of their day. And that’s how it stayed until just a few weeks ago.

Twitter for those who don’t get it

Much as I had vainly cast aside the notion that I just didn’t get it the whole while, everything finally clicked for me when I started following people who were referred to by others I was following. @bynkii posted a tweet for the benefit of @flargh, so I followed @flargh and so on. Before long I was watching a little network of people commenting about their day, and about each others’ days. People weren’t casting their 140 characters into the void without reason after all, there was interaction!

With hindsight, my problem was that I had been thinking of Twitter as blogging in the small. But with no followers, there was no-one to read what I was writing, and thus nothing to engage me to take part in it actively. Twitter isn’t like blogging at all it’s more like instant messaging… if I had set the @Replies setting in my twitter profile to “show me all @replies” sooner, I would have certainly noticed these little pockets of conversation and started following the people being addressed. And some of them would have reciprocated. And I would have being taking part instead of watching, bemused.

Twitter for those who do get it

And now that I have some followers to read my tweets, and occasionally tweet back at me about them, I not only mention the minutiae of my day to the annoyance of everyone else who doesn’t get it yet, but I take part in conversations with other people who are following me. It’s kinda neat!

Now that’s all very well, but I want to incorporate my part of the twitterverse into my online life. I want to build my blog readership by tweeting when I put up a new blog post. I want to build my twitter followers by engaging my blog readers enough to be interested in what I’m comment about with other like-minded people at twitter.

I thought I’d found a great way to do all of that (and more!) with [Alex King]‘s WordPress [Twitter Tools]. I have it set up to automatically tweet new blog posts on my behalf, and to collect summaries of my tweets into daily posts. Except that having my blog posts drowned out incessant trivia and my half of various out of context conversations is more likely to drive you, gentle reader, away from my blog that to turn you from a twitter don’t get it into get it over a few days.

The problem is that twitter conversations are essentially throw away, and don’t generally have enough substance to generate further blog comments. Essentially they don’t belong in a post. I think what I really need is a way to show my last handful of tweets in the sidebar. Any pointers much appreciated!

Over the next few days, I’ll delete the Twitter daily summaries, and search for a wordpress rss widget to integrate into azazil, so as to try to pique your interest in Twitter. I might even write a post to try and persuade you to sign up for a free account and follow me at twitter. I’m one of the many people who will reciprocate the follow bit on anyone that follows me, especially as I’m now painfully aware that twitter just doesn’t click until you reach a critical mass of followers to pull you into the never-ending twitterverse conversation…

Following up on John Gruber’s recent post about iPhone web apps: I absolutely agree that right now there is definitely something that makes certain applications work better as a web application in your browser, where others seem more suited to running natively on the operating system. I’m also right behind John when he says:

Imagine [...] an Apple-designed next-generation [...] embedded runtime for net-based apps that “kills” Flash [...] by out-classing it[;] enabling Mac OS X- and iPhone-quality user experiences in apps that reside on a server, not the client.

There are two things that split applications between those that work well in the browser, and those that work better as native desktop applications:

1. The richness of the interface a developer can provide;
2. Whether network access is an integral part of the application.

John’s next-gen net application runtime certainly solves the first, and if it can truly provide an equivalent user experience to the same application running natively, then what would be the point of writing Cocoa applications in the first place? Network access. I don’t care how well written google mail is, if I can’t search my mail archives or queue a draft email for later delivery while I’m away from a network connection, then I’ll stick with Apple Mail!

I’m sure that we’re only a decade (or two at the most) away from always-on high-speed mobile network access (probably from telcos whose current business model is falling apart slowly as the population discovers internet telephony), and all Apple needs to do is have a great web-app SDK in place well before then. Perhaps that’s what they were trying to do by not releasing a Cocoa SDK for the iPhone, but until those two things that prevent certain web-apps from working as well as an equivalent native application are solved, few users will want to forego their native applications.

Unfortunately, the browser market is still splintered enough that simply providing John’s next-gen net-app runtime isn’t enough to win mass user mind-set. Apple is, however, ideally placed to do so. In addition to providing a rich user experience and clean development environment, Apple can showcase their runtime by using it to host the applications on some future revision of the iPhone, along with an reimplementation of the dotMac web interface, and some of their key software. Say, iTunes and iCal? You can bet that FireFox will follow suit with their own implementation, and if Microsoft doesn’t want to miss out on the party altogether, they had better follow suit before all their users migrate away from Internet Explorer to either FireFox or Safari.

Long before all the parts of this future come together, we have the promise of Google Gears to make running web-apps without net access less painful, and Web 2.0 technologies to make our user experience a lot nicer while we are online. The rest is just a simple matter of programming :-)

Apple has confirmed today that with the next major revision of OS X, entitled Leopard, the release is set for next Friday 26th October! They also have some new pages advertising some 300+ new features, and a whole page with video describing the very cool looking back to my mac facility for .mac subscribers like me :-)

The back to my mac feature looks like something I’ll be able to make great use of on the road, but I’m also pretty excited about:

1. the new scripting bridge that will allow me to write Cocoa applications with Python (which I know), Applescript (which I should know) and Ruby (which I’d like to learn);
2. the new Automator watch-me feature that will record and play back UI interactions with an application;
3. lots more stuff being synced over .mac to make keeping my desktop and laptop in step even easier;
4. live document previews in finder icons, so that converting an image from tiff to png won’t leave an anonymous image icon anymore;
5. Dtrace instrumenting in the libraries and kernel (I know, I’m a geek);
6. Time Machine for automated backups.

There’s lots more goodness in apples 300+ features page, but these are the ones that really make me want to upgrade.

Note that if you bought a new machine this month, Apple’s Up-To-Date Programme will send you a copy of Leopard for just $9.95 (£5.95 if you’re in the UK) saving you $119 (£79)!

Apple are taking preorders already, but I will be waiting until I visit Dallas in a few weeks before I get mine. Let’s see, US$129 + 6.25% Texas sales tax comes to $137.07 in Dallas, compared to £85 or $172.55 (at todays rate of US$2.03)… that’s more than a 25% discount if I wait! Actually, since I am paid in US$, my bank charges me closer to US$2.20 for every UK£ I buy (after commission and wire transfer fees at each end of the transaction), so in real terms it would take around US$187 from my US salary to buy a copy of Leopard in England, costing me 36% more than the US price in real terms. Actually, I’ll probably buy the family version for US$199, and split the cost with my Dad, since there are now 4 macs in my family!

UPDATE: Amazon is taking orders for Leopard with a $20 discount and free shipping, making the real cost of buying in the UK a whopping 47% more expensive!

On the bright side, the cost of living will return to affordable levels when I leave England again in a little over a month :-)

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I ordered a shiny new iPod touch from the Bull Ring Apple Store to collect along with my reincarnated macbook. As it turned out, demand for the new iPods has been so high, that it took them almost another week to fulfill their backlog of reservations, but true to their word they called me last weekend to let me know they finally had one with my name on it, and would hold it for 24 hours for me.

24 minutes later, after weaving hurriedly in and out of the busy Saturday traffic on my MT01, I arrived at the store :-) The assistant brought a box in a bag from the storeroom, and informed me in hushed tones that I should put it in my pocket inconspicuously as there had been a spate of muggings outside the centre that ended with newly purchased iPods being liberated from their owners :-( I guess I was sufficiently inconspicuous to stay under the Birmingham iPod Liberation Front reconnaissance radar. Or being 6′ tall in biker leathers made me a high risk target… either way, I am now the proud owner of a rather fabulous 16GB iPod Touch.

The net is already awash with glowing reviews, so I needn’t labour that point here, except to say that I keep finding more neat little things in the interface that show how attention to detail can make a huge difference to the user experience. My latest revelation, and something I haven’t seen mention of elsewhere, was discovering that repositioning the cursor in a line of text is not the horror story one would imagine (remember that your finger obscures the text you are gesturing over), because a helpful magnifying glass element pops up above the insertion point showing the very thing that your finger is covering, and tracks back and forth as you slide your finger across the text. Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, iPod salivation aside, I was in two minds about whether to try to put together an iPhone (and by implication iPod Touch) style theme for azazil.net; on the one hand, a major feature of Safari Mobile is the ability to browse the actual websites you can see on a full-size computer, and not some dumbed down subset of the real internet like WAP; on the other hand, sites that have an iPhone optimised view to serve their full content genuinely are more pleasant to use on the iPod. So, for now at least, I’ve installed Content Robot’s iWPhone plugin to make azazil render as shown in the headline screenshot for iPhone users…

This is the final part of a short series of posts about installing Mac OS X. Today’s article shows how I manage without a TV. If you missed earlier parts, links are at the end of this post.

Having been on the road for almost a year now, I haven’t been able to keep up with my favourite shows which run on different schedules in different timezones, and neither have I been able to get at my DVD collection which is in storage somewhere in Herefordshire. Worse, I let myself start watching some new shows in America that won’t make it to air in the UK for a few months at least.

Thankfully, there is some excellent software for the Mac to help me get my fix of the movies and television shows I’d like to see — and better yet, I don’t have to sit through 3 minutes of commercials for every 7 minutes of actual programming. For a few months now, I’ve gone without a television altogether or rather, when I have had access to a television I’ve only used it as a giant monitor:

1. Handbrake

Before galavanting off around the world, I ripped thirty of my DVDs to disk in iPod video friendly resolutions. Some were old favourites that I hadn’t watched for a long time, and the rest were from DVDs I had bought but not watched yet. At this resolution, a 90 minute movie takes up about 500Mb on disk. Because I keep my iMac in England set for region 2 disks, and take my macbook on the road set to region 1, the ripping process makes it easier to manage my movie collection and play the movies back on either machine regardless of whether the region of the DVD matches the region setting of the machine I’m watching on.

I was thinking of adding the new 160Gb AppleTV to my travel gear as a mobile repository for movies and tv shows I wanted to take with me, and to add to as I moved around. But, it needs an HDTV to play back on… a luxury not yet present in many furnished apartments or hotel rooms. I got by perfectly well using my video iPod with a TV lead for the last year though, so I’m happy to wait another few years until HDTVs are more widely available.

Price: $0

2. iTunes Store

The selection of movies and TV shows in the UK iTunes Store still pretty much sucks, but the American store is packed with great shows that, in some cases, will never even make it over here. Season premiers are often free, to entice you in to buy the rest of the season, and of course there’s a whole slew of video podcasts to download. The iTunes store makes it easy to watch what I want to watch, and when I want to watch it, without the annoying commercial breaks, and all at a pretty reasonable cost in the US (or a more expensive but affordable cost in the UK store).

I’m currently watching LA Ink and Human Weapon from the US store.

Price: $0 to $9.99 for a full movie

3. XTorrent

By now, there are plenty of BitTorrent clients for the mac, but this was the first good one that came along, and has lots of cool functionality like bandwidth throttling, torrentcast subscription and downloading only some of the files from a torrent. This is the best way to get a hold of TV shows from studios that refuse to provide digital content to their customers.

Price: $24

4. TVShows

This little application allows you to subscribe to your favourite shows, and then runs quietly in the background waiting for episodes to show up on BitTorrent. When they do arrive, it tells XTorrent in my case (or whatever client you are using) to queue it up for download. Having left my DVDs of Alias in storage without the foresight to rip the unwatched episodes of the final season before leaving the country, this application was a lifesaver in locating and downloading them in the background for me so that I could still watch them. It might also be useful to you if your rips are not in the resolution you wanted, or you simply don’t want to leave your computer running at full pelt for days on end to do the rips in the first place.

Price: $0

5. Visual Hub

It’s a sad fact that many of the torrents I want to watch will arrive on my computer in a non-iTunes compatible format, which makes transferring it to my iPod for watching with the TV Out cable a no-no :-( That’s where Visual Hub comes in as a one-stop transcoder, that will convert from pretty much any format to just about any other format. The latest version even has an output mode optimised for the iPhone. I’ve also used it to convert my old mpeg rips to the smaller and better looking H264 format.

Price: $23.32

6. Flip4Mac

Pretty much everyone should know about this codec by now. Again, it’s a sad fact that many of the videos I find on the internet are in the awful windows media format, wmv. Rather than contaminating my gorgeous Mac with Microsofts third-rate media player, which can’t handle skimming through a video at speed without stuttering or crashing, Flip4Mac installs a wmv codec into the Quicktime player. So all those wmv’s on the ‘net will play through the Quicktime browser plugin too!

Price: $0

7. DivX CODEC

There are hordes of different codecs to download and install if you have the time to track them down. In practice, with the Flip4Mac wmv codec and this DivX codec, I rarely bump into a file that won’t play in Quicktime, and when I do I can almost always convert it into something that will play using Visual Hub.

Price: $0

8. VLC

VLC, however, is my plan B. When all else fails, the surprisingly mac-like VLC will play almost any video format you’re ever likely to meet. For a long time VLC was the only way to play QuickTime movies in full screen without ponying up $40 for a QT-Pro license, though Apple haven’t done that for a long time now.

VLC also plays DVDs from either a disk image or the optical drive itself, and best of all it’s entirely Open Source!

Price: $0

9. Realplayer

I admit it. I’m an American Football nut. I’ll even admit that I’ve been supporting the ailing Oakland Raiders for the last 15 years. For some reason (probably an expensive licensing deal), all the free game highlights at NFL.com as well as the downloadable games for subscribers come in RealPlayer format, which is so proprietary that not even VLC can play it. This is the last line of defence for when there is absolutely no other way to watch a video on my mac.

Price: $0

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