Markree chandelier

Posted on | March 6, 2010 | No Comments

Markree chandelier

Originally uploaded by Tommy Weir

I like using the camera apps on the iPhone which come preset for particular styles. My two favourites are Polarize which does this sort of Polaroid look and Format 126 which recreates the Instamatic look from the mid-Seventies.

If I’m going to take a snap, it may as well have the fetishistic sheen of the crap cameras of my youth.

Make Way for Tomorrow

Posted on | February 24, 2010 | No Comments

The bleak and moving “Make Way for Tomorrow”, 1937, by Leo McCarey. When he ended up getting the Oscar for “The Awful Truth” he told them they gave it for ‘the wrong movie’. New, and by all accounts beautifully restored, release on DVD by Criterion is now available on Amazon. Can’t wait.

Lough Gill Rainbow

Posted on | February 22, 2010 | No Comments

Overhead

Posted on | January 5, 2010 | No Comments

Slipway

Posted on | November 8, 2009 | No Comments

I think I’ll get back to posting photographs here. Been ages since I have.

I like the square format here, the slipway made that possible. Marian’s response was that it stopped it looking like an image from a religious calendar.

So I’ll take that as a compliment.

Apple Tablet – it’s all about content

Posted on | October 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

The speculation about the tablet from Apple has swirled up again.

I’ve always felt that the next generation device for viewing content has been with us for quite a while, it’s called a laptop. All over the world people spend their evenings with them, “duelling laptops on the sofa” as one of my students described her evenings with her partner.

And it’s not just the sofa, it’s extended into the workspace too. Over the past few years, the desktop computer has looked increasingly like it has a quite specific, need driven future. You only install one if you want something either sturdy, dumb and cheap or very powerful indeed. The laptop, increasingly more powerful and connected, pretty well matching the desktop in raw power and capabilities, has ended up being the general computer of choice.

Apple’s proportion of laptop sales reflect this, steadily increasing year on year. They’ll be in no rush to replace or compete with that. Why a tablet at all? If Apple do one, it’ll have to clearly differentiate them.

Many years ago Apple released a tablet, namely the Newton which it then dropped. The difference now is Apple’s focus on content. Content is everything now, we’ve finally reached a stage where all our content is digital and online, that future has actually come to pass at this point.

Kevin Kelly has talked about how all content is merging onto one platform, from news to music, from film to blogs, from books to financial services. There’s but one platform, the internet, and all our devices simply offer different windows onto it.

Apple notably have always pointed out that the internet content flows into every aspect of their machines, that it’s not just for the browser, as Google would have it. That firehose of content can and should be pushed into many different apps. I’ll return to this in a bit, but here is where future exploration lies.

Any tablet, if Apple are to release one, will likely have one guiding principle, how best to present and manage content. Apple have understood how important this is from the early days of OSX, iLife has been a key factor in the successful rebirth of the Mac platform. The emergence of iTunes as the single most important application for Apple has consolidated ownership for Apple of the content creation and distribution arena. Apple also want to establish and control how that content is monetised in much the same way that iTunes does in digital music. They know all too well how content can drive hardware sales.

To speculate, primarily because it’s fun, but also because it presents factors which will are in play.

Resolution and size – It’ll be like a large iPhone, but not that large and probably smaller than most people expect. Apple lead the way in pixel per inch displays in consumer products. The iPhone runs 160 dpi. Given that Apple have settled on 1280 x 720 for iTunes Extras and the LP formats recently introduced, you could be looking at a device 8 x 4.5 inches if the device is 160dpi. This is a perfect 16 x 9 form factor for HD video exactly matching iTunes native HD format. Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half, it’ll be a little smaller than that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple increase the dpi and reduce the size further. They’ll want to reduce the weight.

Weight – You’ll have to be able to hold it comfortably in one hand. It’ll have to be light, and that’s probably the biggest engineering challenge they face, finding some version of their beloved unibodies which can deliver strength with the right weight. It’ll need some body to it for the audio.

Audio – It’ll certainly have good speakers, Apple have focussed a lot on speaker technology lately. They’ve excellent small speakers in the new iMacs and they’ve progressively made the internal speakers on iPhones and iPods louder.

OS and App Store – It’s going to run a version of OS Touch like the iPhone, with full screen apps running at 1280 x 720. Yes, this will take time to develop. Yes, developers will grumble and scramble, as they quickly rush to embrace it. Given FCC clearance times, there’ll be some advance time prior to market release. The App store will be king, no other way in bar jailbreaking it. The App store has been a huge success and moneyspinner for Apple. They’d love to extend that model. Apple’s approval process will annoy and present new challenges for developers, but won’t ultimately matter a damn to the market. Apple understand one thing very well, the key shift here is the relationship between the users and applications. Users have a simple uncomplicated relationship with Touch apps, Apple will do anything to protect that.

Bundled apps – The principal focus will be on viewing media of various forms from movies to albums to photography, the internet and email, lightweight document production. There may even be cut down but ever improving Touch versions of iLife and iWork bundled. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kindle app is in there too at launch.

Price – my guess, it’ll be 800 bucks. It’ll ship with all the iPhone aerials, GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G and a SIM slot. Hopefully Apple have learned not to tie themselves into a carrier, It’ll be unlocked and be available from carriers at a discount.

Connections – a version of the dock connector for sure but that’s probably it. Much as I would like USB and an SD card slot, I can’t see it. They’ll expect you to use wifi and bluetooth for connection with other devices, be they printers or storage systems. MobileMe users will have access to their iDisk everywhere.

The geeks will complain about the closed system, Apple’s control over applications, the limited feature set, yada yada. Everyone else will swoon. Emotionally and functionally, it’ll be perfect for 90% of people. It will do pretty well everything most people want from a computer, email, browse, word processing, photo and video management and of course, listen to music, watch films, read books and magazines and check the net. You know, look at stuff. A platform for content of every description.

The one thing it won’t be is a general purpose computer.

We’ll still be using them in our offices and workspaces. I couldn’t work without VoodooPad and DevonThink Pro Office, Nisus Writer Pro and Bento, Photoshop and RapidWeaver, or without access to my years of data and I suspect that most people will discover their own version of that pretty quickly.

But a lot of people will not be lugging their laptops home at night.

It’s almost old-fashioned in it’s limited feature set as I have outlined it, almost like the computers in the early eighties with physical buttons for word processing and databases. I think most people will find a comfort in that, eating it up, a computer which ‘just works’ the way their iPod does with all the stuff they like. But for me, that’s not really the full potential here. Despite the controls Apple have in place, despite the limits on features and focus on experience, or maybe because of all of them…other newer possibilities emerge.

I’ve blogged here before about the shift with the App Store. A fundamental change between how ordinary people and applications interact. People feel about apps the way they do about songs or movies. They’re personal, a reflection of you, what you do and what you’re into.

I see applications as a new content form. Both a form in and of itself but also one with the power to work with all existing content too. We’re going to see the creatives who develop the best apps celebrated as widely as other artists as this century progresses, where apps become expressions of ideas and emotions.

This device, like the iPhone before it, could be very significant in the development of that, as software developers begin to fully explore the fact that, given that all content is digital now, they are ultimately the shapers of how that content is communicated to all those people on all those sofas.

It could even end up being the device where that old dream of computer art actually takes place.

32A DVD is here and out in the wild…

Posted on | October 20, 2009 | No Comments

Yes, see the link to the right for purchasing options…

or here at the main Janey Pictures site

32A DVD is coming…

Posted on | September 23, 2009 | No Comments

Delighted to say that the DVD of 32A is coming soon. It’ll be released on October 16th, Friday in Ireland available nationwide in Xtravision and for sale via the Janey Pictures site and via Amazon.

It’s actually available now for preorder on Amazon.co.uk. This will take a little longer to come, November 9th.

For those of you not based in the UK or Ireland, it’s a PAL disc with Region 2 encoding. So you’ll need a multiregion DVD player and television to match. That or a good laptop…

iTunes Extras – a start at least

Posted on | September 10, 2009 | No Comments

Well it’s a start.

It’s always interesting to see when Apple put a new element into the media mix. With iTunes extras, they’ve placed a marker in the sand, acknowledging the need to address additional content. but they have not provided a full solution. That’s a while away. I think that’s probably Apple’s take on this too, given the short amount of time it got at the presentation in San Francisco for iTunes 9. The independent sector is in full flight at the moment examining new ways of engaging audiences using additional content amongst other things, but there’s only studio offerings here.

Apple have taken one thing on board, that digital downloads provide a thin experience compared to DVD. The additional material is popular and acts as a piracy deterrent. Up till this point it has also been a deterrent to buying on iTunes. The public would sooner own a DVD with extras for the same money as a download. This decision is a step towards addressing that. Kudos to Apple for being the first major player in the market to step in and start providing a solution. But my hunch is that Apple have taken an interim measure to see how this shakes out. This has the vague air of the AppleTV about it in terms of Apple’s commitment.

iTunes extras are essentially websites bundled into a package for download. iTunes has Webkit built in for quite a while, it’s what the iTunes Store is built upon. As such the extras are designed for a specific screen size, resizing windows won’t scale anything, it’s a set frame. This means it won’t migrate to the iPhone or iPod Touch. it certainly could work well on an AppleTV, but there’s no news on that possibility. AppleTVs would need a system update, which is probably in the works, it would make sense. The extras would also have a lot of appeal on a future tablet which Apple may release.

When you download one, you get two files, the main movie file and the extras version, which also includes the main movie file. The main movie file is presumably for popping on your iPhone or AppleTV, the extras version is for watching on your computer. So flexible on one hand but, given the repetition, a bit clunky on the other. it would have been smarter to see a version that knew what it was playing on, but that’s not how they’ve been built, and it’s not how iTunes works. The Wall-E movie file is about 1.4 Gb and the Extras version was 1.8Gb, pretty big chunks of data given space and download caps. This clunkiness extends unfortunately and has implications.

The first howl of protest you’ll hear from the buyer is ‘No commentaries?’ and on first look through the offerings, there’s none. A closer look shows why.

The way iTunes extra versions are set up means that the original movie file, which comes with two soundtracks, stereo and surround, is bundled into the package. For Apple to provide a director’s commentary, it would have to be included in the main movie file as an alternate soundtrack. Or they would have to bundle into the extras version a different movie file with a commentary included. However…

- that movie file would have become more attractive to pirates. Metadata like commentaries are key now in providing a richer experience away from piracy. Studios may be slow to release this increasingly valuable additional material, this may be a negotiation issue.

- there could also be a technical issue, stemming out of the overall structure of an iTunes extra file. For example, there would have to be some way of having a movie file play with one soundtrack and not another from a javascript instruction. I’m unaware of that being a possibility, perhaps at some point.

So you’ll see a lot of ‘introduced by the director’ pre-scenes as well as deleted scenes with extensive introductions and afterwords, certainly in the Wall-E iTunes Extras version. Apple are seeking to re-invent a little here, skirting around the missing commentary. I wonder what process the films which are included went through with the iTunes team, would be interesting to hear. Clearly a fuller, deeper look at how metadata and films are to be presented digitally is still a ways off.

And on the front line? Indie filmmakers know that, like musicians before them, it’s increasingly all about a direct relationship with the audience and building up a conversation with them. Compared to real time interaction, continuously developing material and new forms of cross platform material, the iTunes extras look a little dated, taking on some of the aspects of the DVD which they seek to replace.

San Francisco

Posted on | August 15, 2009 | No Comments

As any of our friends will tell you, we loved San Francisco which we explored during our screening of 32A at Mill Valley last year. Wel, two of my photos from my SF Flickr set have been included in the Schmapp guide to San Francisco. Which is pretty cool.

California Academy of Sciences

Transamerica Pyramid