A Great Blog

ACTA in Ireland

2012-01-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

Here's the copy of the email I wrote to my TDs last week and our MEPs. Sometimes I wonder….

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I am writing in connection with the proposed legislation being pursued by Minister Sherlock in relation to copyright material and online services.

I could say I am writing as a resident of such and such an area, and voted here there and everywhere along the political spectrum over the years. But I'll spare you all that.

I am writing as a filmmaker who has worked in many creative fields, from music to art, theatre and photography over the intervening years, I've produced several feature films and had some modest success.

I have also followed the rise of technology since the mid-Eighties, lectured on Computer Animation in Ballyfermot in the early Nineties, and continue to teach in Digital Media in the IT, Sligo. I've over twenty five years experience, researching and tracking the steady advance of digital technology as it has swept over the creative sector, from digital creation, through digital distribution and consumption.

What it is important to understand right now is that we are in the middle of a watershed, a period of transition and various creative media are at different points in their transition. But all of these:
- Music
- Television
- Publishing
- News
- Art/Photography
- Film
All of them have entered the watershed right now. Moving through huge changes. It's, as the word of the day says, disruptive. Extremely disruptive. It's been tough on all in the business.

Each of these media, to a lesser or greater extent, find themselves transitioning, through creation, distribution, combination with each other and the interaction of the public, gradually being absorbed into another medium, Software. Software is emergent as these other forms break apart and transform.

That, from a bigger picture, is what is in play. And a bigger picture likely is a century long viewpoint. At some point, there will just be creative software, it's the key art form of this 21st Century.

It's absolutely vital that we don't get in the way here. The challenges facing the creative sector is not to stem, contain, or alter the creation, distribution or consumption patterns. The challenge is actually one of excellence, we just need to get better, a lot better, at what we do. I, personally, have every faith in the creative and content sectors in getting to do that, excellence and innovation are two keywords we have lived or died by for a long time. We need to embrace the technology and just be better than the pirates, we need, in short, not to contain or stem it, but to actually push it, and get involved in deepening it as this century progresses.

Please I would use your connections to urge the Minister to move away from this legislation and to spend his time and portfolio encouraging the content industries to focus on their own path, to encourage partnerships in particular with our software and technology companies and to pursue excellence in these fields.

I would be happy to discuss this further with you should you so wish.

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What you gotta do…. Anyway please visit http://stopsopaireland.com/ and sign up.

On Software

2012-01-05T13:18:00.000-08:00

Today I discovered that this blog was down, all my permalinks were non-functioning, so I loaded it up to have a look and see what was up. It was an easy fix but over the course of checking through the links I had a read… I've been spending a lot of time on Twitter over the past while and not so much time here. I had been wondering about that, about what it said and why. Perhaps looking at what I'd discussed here, bar posting the odd photograph, held some insight.

I've lost my earlier postings in the previous incarnation of this blog, whatever platform I used prior to Blogger. I'm pretty sure that I was talking about the same area of focus, various bits and bobs on technology and the creative sector. One clear benefit to blogging, even casual short notes, is that such thoughts are captured as some form of argument, a postulation in formation, at least how I practice it. So perhaps of interest to some readers, here's a summary with handy (and functioning) permalinks.

First, back in 2006, I had a note about the music industry, which has always led the way, despite how that industry works. Those guys had issues that the film industry was going to face.

Then in January 2007, some speculation about an iTV, perhaps Apple would release some video device for consuming video. But in fact they didn't, it was something else entirely, "something so interactive, you'd never put it down'. And yes, I still haven't managed to do that. Little did we fully realise that the iPhone was the platform for ubiquitous computing which the public would fully embrace.

In April 2007, when financing creative projects online started, I compared it to our experience financing a feature. And in that month I talked about some people who were doing just that, the gang at Four Eyed Monsters. in July 2007, I welcomed the arrival of Charlie Rose and his content online, the early vanguard of mainstream media. I also noted that interactivity was changing, that search had become the norm, that the structuring of data had moved to algorithms rather than experts providing links, the data equivalent of the democratization of links in hindsight.

In January 2008, I stopped listening to mainstream radio entirely, moved my listening needs to podcasts. I've been a lover of good talk radio longer than any other medium bar books, but I've never looked back. That month I also noted that I was a Grumpy Old Punk, but thats neither here nor there. in February I celebrated the podcasts of IT Conversations, an unashamed quality stream which broadcasts content from various sources, including conferences, a model which will be developed further I feel. The IT Conversations crew are actively exploring podcast curation around topics, Colleges take note.

In June, 2008, I wrote a short piece about Computer Art and what had happened. And what was beginning to happen now... The following month I revealed my file naming nerdiness to the world.

In January 2009, I had some inkling about personal tastes and software, but the real thing which was developing in my head only became clearer later, in April 2009, when Apple sold a billion apps. The revolution underway was about a relationship between the consumer and software.

Then in August 2009, I arrived at what has become the equivalent of an organising principle for me, how software has become the key artform of this century.

In September 2009, I had some thoughts about iTunes Extras, Apple making a start on digital delivery, and in October 2009. I speculated along with everyone else about Apple's upcoming predicted iPad, about a computer based on content, that content being primarily software. And in May of last year, I talked about Sony's latest efforts in iTunes Extras. There hasn't been enough development here in the interim, I still think this will be the field of apps.

And more recently I've been thinking about curating again. Looking back, it's a little like feeling like the guy who was pointing at the oncoming tidal wave. It came alright and washed over me like everyone else. Time to digest I think. The wave has happened, the transition is in play, and the future is clearly software. And time, definitely, to resume blogging.

My pre-iCloud life

2011-06-22T13:30:00.001-07:00

I thought it might be handy to write down how I handle files and directory structures before iCloud forces me to rethink everything I do.

Because what I have is a kind of belts-and-braces version of iCloud, at least in some regards.

Let me start with the hardware, as one should. I have a MacBookPro, creaking at the knees a tad, but still offering valiant service. To that I can add an iPhone and an iPad, both shiny at time of writing. I am a MobileMe subscriber and a Dropbox user.

So how are things set up? I sort files by type, all my Text documents are in a single folder, called Text Documents, all my spreadsheets are together in another, all my PDFs in another, and so on. I have a rigorous file naming system which Ive blogged about before, but which enables sorting by project and date simply by sorting by name. So a folder filled with thousands of text files is not the jumbled mess you might initially assume.

Three key folders sit inside my iDisk, Text documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations, each with a symbolic link back to my main Documents folder. Default FolderX knows each applications key folder and guides all my open/save dialogs to the right place. And yes, that's my iDisk, not Dropbox. I was helping a friend with their setup and noted that they synced their disk with no issues. Like many early adopters I followed the standard dictum that this was unreliable and you just didn't do it. But hey, it actually works, at least in my recent experience. Perhaps Apple got their act together while all our backs were turned.

So what does this mean?

Effectively, I have the same files available to iWork on all three devices. Sure, when I add a file to one of the iOS apps, it will drop some features, and I have to be conscious to maintain my file naming patterns and save back out. But it's a glimpse of what's to come.

Aaron Koblin - TED

2011-05-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

Aaron Koblin is one of the more interesting artists working in software today. He sees the creative form of the 21st Century to be that of interface...

On Curating

2011-05-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

Curating has become, in the data flood we are currently floundering in, one of the anchors people are using to find and establish meaning as we attempt to engage with this swirl of endless cultural material. It's become particularly prevalent in the film industry.
I was a curator once. An actual one, one who works in a gallery or museum, who puts on exhibitions and so on. I left the role at a particular juncture within the visual arts industry, when curators were moving front and centre. That time was held a personal journey for me as I moved from Dublin to New York, from a burgeoning visual arts scene to a highly developed one.
My first job title in Dublin was ‘exhibition organiser’, where the role was clearly on logistics. Get the list of work, establish the values with the artist, organise insurance, transport, the installation and hanging, manage the production of the catalogue and poster, liaise with the writer and designer, work with the director on promotion, and liaise with education on talks.
The creative aspect of the role rose and fell with the artist in question, usually in terms of the decisions around the catalogue design and the exhibition layout. Some artists needed more support than others, some less. In short, the engagement with the material was mainly functional in nature and creative only to a point. Co-ordinator is the term in popular use now and it’s used in many industries, today co-ordinators hop between creative sectors quite easily, it’s a set of transferable skills.
At the time, the act of curation, for me, became an extension of that kind of work. Making a decision to show this artist, in your space, at this particular time, and to craft an exhibition of their work. Having learned the technical skills of exhibition-making, it was time to engage with why this person, at this time in that space. Not that there was always an entirely rational reason for the selection, quite frequently it was from a gut instinct, with the various contexts being nonetheless fully borne in mind.
The curator steered their way through the emerging culture, finding things of interest. For me successful curation lay in being interesting in turn, where your take on things, somehow, contributed to the forward momentum. And having a take meant literally what you picked up to look at.
In a way the act of curation was simply selection added to those earlier learned logistics. It was the job of the artists to provide the work, my role lay in ‘look here’ and opening the door.
There were shows where the artists managed everything, self curating in short, the exhibition making broadly came from them. Blue Funk, a media group who dealt with issue based work was one, Derek Spiers, a photojournalist was another. You selected them, you facilitated them, and that was that. There were others where you stepped in more and the shape of the exhibition emerged from the engagement with the artist, the material to use, the amount and the presentation all formed through the interaction.
In each and every case, the artists made the work and the artist’s work was front and centre. The exhibition was a point of encounter with the work, that was its point.
Then I went to New York.
My first gig was an exhibition of Irish artists for NYU. I was called a curator and introduced as such to the industry there. I rolled that term around seeing how it sat. I had always viewed the term as pertinent to a museum where scholarship underpinned exhibition. In one of my first evenings there, we went for dinner, and there on the top of the Anarchy Café’s menu was “menu curated by....”. It was the first indication to me that the term might have had some slippage, that it might mean something different.
The second indication lay in my visit to Exit Art, a gallery on lower Broadway which my contacts in the visual arts had suggested as a possible venue for exhibitions I might curate. I visited over several months and it became clear that their view on exhibition-making was that an exhibition was a piece of work in itself which used artists work as its raw material. The curator was front and centre here.
Which in a broad and diverse world, is all well and good. The problem for me, is that this view has become the dominant view of curation. Curators set themes now and seek work to amplify the theme.
The exhibition title lies as some clue, a divination rod for the public to unearth hidden meaning and perhaps a stick for the curator with which to poke around and uncover work. In addition, this ‘mature’, developed notion of curation has become allied to a stagnation in personnel. Gallery directors have long lives it appears, and younger independent curators are barely fostered. And in the absence of an ongoing venue, independent curators cannot develop or ascribe meaning through a succession of shows, a programme, instead each exhibition becomes the event, a here’s-what-I-have-to-say.
There are some interesting developments, my students rarely indicate ambition to be shown in the major venues. It’s almost as if it was in a different realm, instead they seek to do their own work and self-exhibit. There are many pop-up spaces emerging in Dublin with artist led events. The circle closing again perhaps, it recalls Independent Artists and Living Art from the seventies. And independent curators, who feel equally excluded, have the relationship with artists that inspires some hope, there are projects, however isolated it appears to me, which seem to ring with a sense of authenticity.
Curation has entered the film world’s vocabulary. One of the outcomes of the digital revolution has been the diminution of films prominence in popular culture. As the net engulfs ‘content’ filmmakers have had to adopt multiple roles in order to keep afloat and to establish meaning. We are not just to produce work, we must promote and exhibit work, not only our own but also work we believe in. A return to the original meaning of curation at least in how I saw it, ‘Look here’ and open the door.
I personally hope that we keep that naive simple view, that we leave the art of being interesting to our filmmakers.

Pitching

2011-05-06T06:01:00.000-07:00

I quite like pitching and I've only realised why quite recently. At first I thought it was my natural tendency to sell something, I’m usually happy when I am in the space of selling an idea.

But now I realise that it is closer to me than that. Over the course of making a film, many films are made; the films in all our heads as we push a script through development, the films in the financiers and partners heads, the actual film you shoot, the scenes you don't get to shoot, the unused sequences that lie in Final Cuts bin, the rough cuts, the final cuts and the film you get to release into the world. And then when you show it, you realise that, in the end, there's no actual film. There’s just the films we all carry in our heads, no one even sees the same film when it's on screen. That at least explains the reviews I read, or the responses you hear after a screening, the film is more like a trigger to something, a pitch in itself.

So, why do I like pitching? Why is it close to me? Well... for a brief moment, between you and the financier or partner, your film lives, right there in the space between your heads. And when it goes well, the financier has had a good time or at least the desire to see more. And so, why not, let's make a film, floating somewhere above the coffee, as I lean in and say "Well... it's really-"

Sony's latest iTunes Extras is another step after Apple's start

2011-01-05T02:48:00.000-08:00

PaidContent profile Sony's latest release, a Will Ferrell movie, The Other Guys, which will have some interesting new features available in their iTunes version.

iTunes Extras are as I've noted before at least a start from Apple in acknowledging the issues facing film in the digital era. They re-introduce the idea of DVD extras, available only when you purchase the movie via iTunes. To date, they've been a predictable set of additional video clips and slideshows along with text. So far, not really a new deal, all very familiar. It's limited, in fact, by the unavailability of directors commentary in the current format.

In the Sony offering you can search for any word in the script and the movie will jump to that spot in the dialogue. Which is pretty neat. Other options including sharing a clip on your social networks and having direct links to the songs on iTunes.

A step forward after Apple's start perhaps. Good to see studios stretch a bit and interesting that Sony was the one to do so first. Perhaps it stems from their experience in the music industry, a few years ahead of the film industry in dealing with the digital revolution.

The PaidContent article talks about one-upping DVD, but the reality is this is about one-upping piracy. The key differentiator in the future for legitimate paid for content is to offer more than the pirates, to make purchasing the digital film compelling. The article makes some good points about how the Extras format pushes consumers to buy rather than rent. I think there needs to be some preview of additional material and functionality in the movies iTunes page for that to be a compelling factor.

The overall issue, of course, is the limitation that the film be viewed in iTunes at all, and the relative clunkiness of the Extras .ite format, a bundle of HTML, CSS and Javascript. There's only so far it can go here. The main creative act in the Sony offering, the 'wouldn't it be neat if..' is the script integration. We need a lot more of that, deeper too, looking to interaction with story itself.

All our future viewing devices, large or small, will be precisely that, devices, computers in various forms. The future here surely lies in some format, as yet undetermined, whereby content is not simply presented, much as a player might do, but also available through creative programming to be interacted with. The future of film lies as an application running on a device.

There's a lot of experience in the gaming industry, there's a lot of talent in the film sector. Apple have fundamentally changed people's relationship with applications with iOS, essentially shifting the public's perception of them as a new content form.

All in place. But not here yet. My gumption is that it'll start in two ends of the spectrum.

First, a major film will plan a digital release as an application, iOS, but also Windows and Mac and perhaps Android, offering only rentals via Netflix, iTunes etc. It'll be big, it'll be expensive. It'll be along the lines of a game, or at least employ a lot of gaming style interaction, and it'll probably be a lads, sci-fi, film. At some point the money on that will make sense, including the marketing requirements they'll face. They'll target the gaming market as a core and build upon it. They'll make this approach the story and get a lot of media attention.

Second front could even be first off the bat, small teams will form where filmmakers will fold programmers into their team at story stage and will fashion the shoot around the requirements of the planned application. They will release on iOS and perhaps Android alongside their Festival release, they'll embrace mobile as part of their strategy. The film will be made by respected indie filmmakers and will get a lot of attention as a result.

This all builds upon the revolution in production and distribution and marketing the film industry has been dragged through over the past years. The filmmaker's role has expanded from maker through to distributor and marketer and curator as Ted Hope has expounded upon at length. Transmedia, storycubes all of these exploratory approaches will end up forming ways of exploring the question of "how to make a compelling interactive rich narrative which isn't a game?" I'm hoping, that here, on this end of the spectrum, we'll see some diversity in approach and theme.

This year, perhaps, we will see the first one. If not, by the end of 2012, for certain. There, that's my new year's prediction, time for a resolution or two, methinks...

Facebook Contacts linger longer than you might think

2010-10-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

Okay… Like most people at some point, I asked Facebook to check to see if any of my contacts were on Facebook. It did its thing, I selected some and moved on, never really thinking much more about it. What I didn’t realise is that Facebook keeps all that data.

All of it. Not just the friends you add. They keep the contacts you didn’t add too, that includes work, business, confidential numbers and emails etc. If you go and look at your Facebook Phonebook (no, I didn’t realise I had one either) you’ll see the full list. And you’ll quickly see not just your Facebook contacts but everyone who you had in your contact database when you checked for contacts. Be it your Apple Addressbook or your Outlook contacts or Yahoo or whatever.

Your Facebook Phonebook is available by Clicking on Account then choosing Edit Friends and selecting Phonebook from the sidebar. Up it pops.

Now here you see the first listing of my contacts. None of them are Facebook friends, actually only one of them is on Facebook. That doesn’t stop Facebook keeping their telephone numbers and email address however.

Friends who are in your address book but not on Facebook (or use a different email address for Facebook) will appear with ‘Invite to join Facebook’ down the bottom. Their telephone numbers are listed and presumably their email addresses are stored too. Friends who are on Facebook have an ‘Add to Friends’ link.

Spot the small ‘Learn more’ in the top line above? Clicking on it brings up the following dialog box.

There’s no actual instruction how to disable the feature on your mobile device but my bet is most people uploaded a contact file at some point. Clicking on the ‘this page’ link again at the end brings up this dialog box.

This is a by now standard Facebook wording designed to discourage you from protecting your privacy. Their standard approach is to discourage through planting some uncertainty every time you protect your data.

Clicking ‘Remove’ brings up this.

The troubling thing is most of you who know me probably have my numbers and addresses in yours….even if you’re not my friend on Facebook. I have over 3,000 contacts in my Mac Addressbook, and only a few hundred contacts on Facebook. But Facebook has held on to those telephone numbers and email addresses years after I checked when I first joined.
There’s very little hope of them all being deleted, most people won’t be bothered to do it.

The answer lies in Facebook’s hands, but the simple courtesy of not storing data after a contact list check seems to be beyond them.

Position

2010-03-14T15:03:00.001-07:00

We had a Mother's Day picnic here on top of Knocknarea. This was actually taken on top of Queen Maeve's cairn on top of the mountain. And it's not one of us, a tourist. It's a tradition to bring up rocks from the bottom and carry them to the top.

Pinnacle

2010-03-12T14:25:00.001-08:00

A quick snatched shot while I was in traffic in central Sligo end of day. I liked the bird at the end of the buIlding… and then the plane obligingly flew into view.

Markree chandelier

2010-03-06T09:11:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-24T07:39:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-22T03:23:00.001-08:00

Overhead

2010-01-04T17:52:00.001-08:00

Slipway

2009-11-08T14:09:00.001-08:00

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

2009-10-20T07:26:00.001-07:00

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...

2009-10-20T07:24:00.001-07:00

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

or here at the main Janey Pictures site

32A DVD is coming...

2009-09-23T15:58:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-10T00:36:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-15T00:35:00.001-07:00

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

Software as the key artform of the 21st Century

2009-08-14T03:18:00.001-07:00

Isn’t it time we stopped talking about media and returned to the term artform?

A medium is ultimately physical in our understanding of it, no matter how enhanced or extended it may be.

For me, one of the main achievements of the digital revolution is to have separated creative content from media. Now, no longer bound by the existing hardware models with all their limitations, we are free to explore our various artforms via software, a far more natural environment for creative material.

Technology has always impacted upon cultural development, in particular the arts. All you have to do is look at the Russian avant garde and the impact of the machine on art, or in the explosion of media in particular, from radio on up throughout the 20th century.

The rising tide of digital technology as the end of the 20th century which has matured at the start of this century, given the wide dispersal of computers and the emergence of broadband globally, gave birth to a new internet culture which has impacted hugely on existing media.

We’ve been distracted by how digital technology mimics a medium really well, how it extends them and combines them with other technologies. Those three steps are present in each of the creative fields, most clearly in music. There it took on the genre of music completely, extended the creative options for musicians and spearheaded the new distribution channels for music. These cultural forces, experienced as rapid changes to humanity, are almost alive in how unstoppable and progressive they are.

Not all existing media fare well out of this, television as a medium was in trouble long before digital culture emerged. The structure of television, top down, one to many, rigid control of content, only a few outlets per nation, had been incredibly limiting over the years, and it had ended up myopically examining itself as the last century closed with top ten shows focussed on television’s own inventory. If music had faced similar limitations it would have withered and died.

The net disbands completely these kinds of structure, they have no place there. The recent economic downturn and the shift away from advertising saw those old models crumble alarmingly quickly, it became clear that the boom and advertising were all that was holding up the existing ways of doing business.

This dispersal of content creation opens up the very basics of each artform for questioning. As a creator of course, It matters not whether it’s individuals or groups of individuals, active independent content producers or production companies, all bets are off. And ultimately one major question we all face is that of production finance. Who’ll finance these?

Our focus now, both on creative work and it’s dissemination should be on exploring developing software with a view to creating work and it’s expression and communication. The creators of software whether it’s new services online or applications, are the structuring limitation or future liberators, the new artists in our mix. If Film was the artform of the 20th century. Software is the key artform of the 21st.

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Earlier thoughts on software here and here.

Design decisions for iPhone

2009-04-26T12:45:00.001-07:00

I attended DevDays, a useful one-day conference for iPhone developers, enjoyed it thoroughly, had a good positive chat with the folks from Apple and enjoyed most of the presentations. The slideshare presentation below was from Des Traynor of Contrast. It was a good positive talk where the route to making your app was clearly outlined as a concrete series of steps, decisions that need to be made.

Design Decisions for iPhone applications

View more presentations from Contrast Contrast.

One Billion Apps

2009-04-23T17:35:00.001-07:00

A billion apps downloaded. In just nine months.

What does that tell us?

It tells me a lot. It tells me that people have a very different relationship with applications on the iPhone than they do anywhere else.

That really made me stop when I thought that.

Because that’s a big deal, that’s the game changer right there.

For decades now, installation, even choice of apps, has been the domain of the lone specialist. Groups, whether they be families or companies, trusted nerds to specify, source, install, train, maintain, upgrade, replace them when needed.

That’s all gone. Everyone does it now, all that's gone on the iPhone.

I’ve been long fond of saying that Everyone’s A Nerd Now. That we all use computers and software to do whatever it is we do, but the reality is that most people used a trusted guide to structure that experience still. But here it’s clear that is over.

Why is this big for me? It’s big because it opens up the possibility of exploring that relationship. That people, individuals, will start to engage with software on the same level as they do with books, or songs, or film, other creative material. That it’s personal in a real way which it’s never actually been before, not shared, not mediated, not agreed or consulted about. But direct, immediate, intimate in a way.

Is this what Apple’s finally done after all these years? Ignited the personal in personal computing?

Choosing unpopular software

2009-01-26T15:10:00.001-08:00

You know I don’t know what it says about me... but... I always pick the underdog.

I don’t use MarsEdit. I use MacJournal.
I don’t use Yojimbo. I use Together.
I don’t use Tweetie. I use TwittelatorPro.
I don’t use Twitterific. I use Twhirl.
I don’t use Preview or Adobe Reader. I use Skim.
I don’t use OmniFocus. I use Things, and occassionally TaskPaper.

I used Mailsmith for years until it became clear that development was just not going to happen and all sorts of cool plugins became available for Mail.

I’ve stopped using MS Office a long time ago. I use Numbers and Keynote, keeping Pages for simple page layout. I do my wordprocessing in the really rather lovely Nisus Writer Pro.

I don’t know. It says something. I just can’t figure what.

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Obama - Man on Wire

2009-01-22T03:05:00.001-08:00

There’s been a lot said about this remarkable man, I’ve no intention of rehashing it.

I just have an observation... in Obama’s coolness, his calm handling of what is surely the largest burden going, I kept thinking of Man on Wire, and Petit’s incredible ease with his extraordinary act....

[youtube EIawNRm9NWM]

The key thing about Petit was his faith that it would be done, the sheer scale of his ambition and his willingness to risk.

He took a lot of strength from his support network. He brought people along a brave and risky path, and while they all made mistakes, they managed to achieve a truly remarkable act.

But also his strength came from his own devotion to just doing the work. And here he evokes our new President even more clearly.

I can see a difficult balancing act in Obama’s future, but like many people, I think he’s going to pull it off.

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