Don’t get me wrong, “I come not to burry Flash,” Flash is fantastic, for what it was originally designed for, vector based animation, but when Macromedia (it’s original vendor) took aim at making it a replacement for core web technologies that’s when the rot set in and I got the hump. Not sure of the version but it was probably around Flash MX when they introduced forms that I started to question what they were doing. From that point on, as they moved away from the original core of ultra light vector based animation, a lot of the “innovations” were just bloat-ware that compounded the well known memory leaks and other problems that have plagued the Flash player over the years. These additions seemed primarily designed to maintain relevance or to pander to a market of point-and-click developers who did not know or care about Flash’s raison d’être (or know what raison d’être means). A lot of bad Flash animations / applications have been produced, simply because they could be. I know this because I was often the one called in to fix them after the horse had bolted.

Flash’s departure from the mobile web space is not solely due to its vendor not being able to keep its hands to itself. The other major driving factor and part of Adobe’s reasoning, is that other open standards web technologies have come along in leaps and bounds eroding Flash’s relevance. HTML5 and a plethora of JavaScript libraries / frameworks like jQuery, Prototype and Ext JS have come along and filled in some of the gaps that Flash coveted particularly in the mobile web space thanks to mobile browsers being more up-to-date then some of their desktop cousins. The main point of difference between Flash and the invading benevolent hordes is that they are generally open standards bases, accessible and don’t require any plug-ins.

So we say a fond farewell to Flash from the mobile web space and wish it well doing what it has always done best; creating clever, engaging, animation based games etc. for the desktop environment.

My new position has come with an unwarranted technical imposition. I’ve not managed to convince my employers that I could be more productive on my beloved OS X so I’ve had to chose between the other OS with an X (and a P for pathetic) and any other operating system that I could be installed on a decrepit Wintel box. So I have chosen the famous free Finnish OS, in particular Ubuntu. But why?

As a desktop environment Linux, and distros like Ubuntu, are much more mature then last I used them (about 5-7 years ago) and given a choice between a contemporary OS and one that is nearly ten years old… well? Linux is also a ‘nix based system as is OS X. This is the primary reason I like OS X. I can have a ‘nix based system with all the web orientated Open Source goodness that this entails (Apache, php, perl, tomcat etc.) and also run a majority of business and web development applications that I need to do my work. Given that the main things I need as a web developer are a good text editor and a robust test environment I’ve settled on Ubuntu Linux. Which will come as a surprise to some who think they know me.

I’ve been using Ubuntu now for several months and the experience has been akin to the time I shifted from Windows to the Mac, but much less arduous. Under the hood Linux and Mac feel familiar. The Ubuntu UX is, of course, not that foreign for one who has worked with both Windows and Mac machines and the biggest plus of all is that I can get almost any piece of software I need for to perform almost any task for gratis. I can’t run those well known business and web development apps I mentioned but so far I’m getting on fine without them and discovering all sorts of interesting alternatives.

This then is a heads-up to expect more posts that focus on my experiences working with Linux and possibly making some comparisons between Apples and Penguins.

via SymbolicLinker.

So if you want to watch iView shows on your iPhone, forget it! Right? Well not quite. There is a relatively simple way to get iView video from the ABC’s web site to an iPhone. But first, the journey…

I’ve spent a considerable number of hours Googleing this problem so maybe I can save someone a few hours of their own. There are a number of nerd-linger solutions to downloading content from the iView web site: There’s python-iview, which pretty much requires a computer science degree to install, and ABC iView Downloader for OSX, which is a command-line application which is not very intuitive and can be unreliable. There are a few other solutions out there and if you’re a Windows or Linux fan you will probably find many more but most of these require some level of rummaging around in the guts of your computer in the terminal which if you don’t know what your doing can be a bad idea.

The simplest solution I’ve found so far for the Mac is a combination of an experimental FireFox plug-in called iViewFox (sorry nothing for Safari or Chrome) and an oldie but a goody Handbreak. iViewFox can be installed much the same as any FireFox plug-in with one exception. After it is installed and FireFox restarts it will instruct you to complete the installation by entering some commands in the terminal – don’t panic, this is normal. Once its fully installed an ABC logo will appear in the FireFox status bar. To use the plug-in go to the ABC iView website navigate to a program you want to watch then when you click on the continue button instead of opening the video iViewFox will open a finder window and download the show for you as an MP4 file. To restore normal functionality to the iView website simply disable the plug-in.

The MP4 file that iViewFox downloads appears to be an oddly encoded FLV file in an MP4 wrapper. QuickTime 10 and 7.5 and iTunes did not want to have anything to do with this file (even with Flip4Mac and other codecs installed). The only app that would play these files was VLC but then it would not transcoded them so they could be put on an iPod. I tried every app I could think of on my system; commercial and open source (see a partial list below) but none of them would transcode the file. One possibility is that being on a 64bit Snow Leopard server and many of these apps being 32bit and relying on underlying OS command line apps is not a good combination. Not even my trusty old copy of VisualHub (RIP) would do it. Then my pilot light came on and I thought of Handbreak. I’m not a big fan of this app mostly because the UI is not the best for bulk conversions but I think it just one some big browny points. First there is now a 64bit version and second it had no trouble converting the strange FLV/MP4 files produced by iViewFox. Finally drag-and-drop the files produced by Handbreak into iTunes, sync and off you go.

via fruux – Just Sync, No-frills!.

Worth keeping an eye on especially if you think paying for a Mobile Me account is a rip-off.

Unzipped Kitty

Aviary’s entire suite of media editing tools is now available for free. I’ve watched the progress of this, very ambitious, project for some time now and jumped out of my seat when I heard this news. Online media editing tools, some hands-down better then those offered by the big boys (Adobe), all for free:

• Phoenix – Image Editor
• Peacock – Effects Editor
• Raven – Vector Editor
• Falcon – Image Markup
• Myna – Remix audio
• Toucan – Swatch Editor

Follow Aviary on Twitter to stay up-to-date with the project.

I’m on a Mac, of course, so read no further if you live on the dark side.

I use Photo Mechanic and Aperture for my day-to-day handling of  photos so this is where I started. There’s no plug-in / extension for Photo Mechanic that I could find and I didn’t expect there to be one but there is one for Aperture, Facebook Exporter. On the whole I found this unreliable and tedious to use. Its only at version 0.5.2 so I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it shows more promise. Next – staying completely in Apple land – I tried using the iPhoto (’09) Facebook uploader, even though I try to avoid having my picks in both Aperture and iPhoto. The iPhoto uploader does work seamlessly and uses the captions (titles) you give your photos on Facebook but not the faces data. In iPhoto you basically turn an existing folder into a Facebook folder so if you are an iPhoto fan this may be the solution for you. Don’t change  your mind and try to back out of using iPhoto though because if you delete a Facebook folder from iPhoto it will delete it and all the photos it contains from the Facebook site.

Not happy with iPhoto, my search continued with Google’s Picasa and the Picasa Uploader. I had some trouble installing it but got it working after a few tries. If you need to install the Facebook button (Picasa Uploader) by hand it needs to be put in the following folder: ‘/Applications/Picasa.app/Contents/Resources/buttons’. Of course now I was back at the same place I was with iPhoto. I did not want to have to use another photo organizing application just to upload to Face book even if it did do a reasonable job. If your a user and fan of  Picasa I’d recommend it but not for me. I don’t use the Picasa web site for images, and I’ve never been a fan of the Picasa application (possibly my least favorite from Google and I love most of them) which I find clumsy and unintuitive at times. In particular Picasa doesn’t have the smarts to combine the RAW and the Jpeg of the same image into one reference thumbnail. So sorry Picasa you still have not won me over.

What I thought I needed now, in the absence of a decent plug-in for Aperture, was a stand-alone application that I could use in conjunction with my chosen photo organizing application(s). There is the Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook based on the Adobe AIR platform. Not sure why they called it ‘Photo Uploader for Facebook’ as it really is a more general Facebook client. The uploaded is reasonable but has some drawbacks. You cant see images that are already uploaded to an existing album and when you tag people in photos it is blissfully unaware of your friends list it can also be painfully slow at times but then again I’ve never been impressed by Adobe AIR applications in general. So thumbs down to that one.

That just leaves one final serious contender that I could find and whilst it does have some serious bugs / annoyances it is my pick of a very average lot and that is Bloom. “Bloom is a multi platform desktop app that let you upload your photos and videos easily and efficiently to Facebook, download albums and view your friends’ photos”. Could not have put it better myself. For me this does the job. You can drag-and-drop photos from Aperture (and iPhoto for that matter) or the finder, caption photos quickly and tag your friends easily using a list that is aware of your friends (even shows you an avatar of them in case you forget names like I do). Its quick to, probably because it only uploads small size images. Which is all I really want when sharing the family snaps. Being  a Java app it can be a little flaky. I suggest always checking the albums you create with it on the Facebook site have all the correct settings. There is one major bug to look out for: If you have a photo with a caption selected and then select all the photos in an album Bloom will set the caption of all the photos to that first photo’s caption, really annoying but avoidable. So despite these few niggles Bloom is my choice today for uploading photos to Facebook.

Getting from DVD to iPhone (pod, mp3 player etc) may sound simple enough and the most common of question I get about it “What tool do you uses?” belies the fact that some times it just aint that simple. For starter the Mordorian idea of one tool to do it all unfortunately does not exist. In my experience I’ve never been able to find a peice of software that allows me to put a DVD in the optical media drive and buzz, gurgle, whir the content I wish to watch as been magically copied to my iPhone. Many tools claim to be able to do this but they often get stumped by a number of DVDs in your collection. So I brake the process down into small steps. First “ripping” the DVD. In my case I aim to make a soft copy of the DVD on my hard disk. The only tool that seems totally reliable and efficient for this task, on the Mac, is Mac the Ripper.

I tend to rip content then store it to either watching on my desktop as a DVD (in DVD player etc) or converting it to another format for a portable device (iPhone). Rather then have loads of folders full of AUDIO_TS, VIDEO_TS etc. folders I like to keep things neat and tidy by bundling them up into ISO image files. For this I use DMGConverter to make UDF filesystem .iso files. You might think this is a little excessive but OS X can open and mount ISO files, like disk images, if you double click on them (not sure if all versions of OS X can do this BTW). A number of apps can handle ISO files without any additional tools including VLC Media Player, HandBrake and of course DVD burning software such as Burn and Toast. ISO (ISO 9660) is also a universally accepted standard so it makes sense as a container file.

If you have Toast, it provides another way of mounting ISO files. Open the Toast application and click Utilities in the menu bar, then Mount Disk Image, navigate to your ISO file, select it and click Choose. This  will mount the ISO file as if it was optical media (CD / DVD). I’ve searched high and low to try and find how to do this without Toast but no luck so far. The way Toast does it is via an application called ToastImageMounter which is bundled inside the Toast application bundle. Being able to mount ISO files as virtual optical media has the advantage that applications such as DVD Player and Mac the Ripper which expect optical media will not be disappointed. Of course having Toast open to just mount ISO files is a little OTT so if you prefer to keep things simple get a copy of ToastMount. Toast mount is a GUI for the ToastImageMounter application. If you keep it in the dock you can drag and drop ISO files on to it and they will mount on the desktop.

Now comes the tricky bit. There are loads of choices, free and paid for, for converting your DVD content to iPhone / media player compatible formats, AKA transcoding. Toast does a nice job as does HandBrake and my personal favorite (especially for batch conversion) VisualHub (sadly no longer available). All have their pros and cons but the one con many of them have is not being able to handle some of the more tricky DVDs. MTR rips copies of DVDs with some vagaries intact so the transcoding software needs to be able to deal with these. The one piece of software I’ve had consistent success with in this area is MPEG Streamclip. MPEG Streamclip has not skipped a beat no matter what I’ve thrown at it and its free software. Well almost, whilst MPEG Streamclip is free you cant transcode DVDs without the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component from Apple, but this is not an expensive piece of software. In my case I forgot I’d brought it a couple of years ago but when I returned to the Apple online-store and went to my account page it was still there waiting for me to download again and it “just worked.” On thing  MPEG Streamclip do is work out which clip on a DVD is the main movie, instead it presents you with a list of clips and as some DVDs can contain more then twenty clips it can be laborious trying to find the right one. In this case what I do is return to Mac the Ripper. First I mount the ISO image as a virtual optical disk using ToastMount then I use Mac the Rippers Main Feature Extraction mode to extract just the clip I want and customize the audio tract and subtitle selections (if any). Finally MPEG Streamclip does the transcoding for me. Its admittedly somewhat convoluted but I only have to do this for some of the tricky DVDs so whilst I’d not recommend MPEG Streamclip for batch conversion (as its not well designed for this) it does handle virtually any transcoding job you care to throw at it..

• Hold down the option (alt) key when clicking the zoom button
• Use the menu option – View > Switch to / from Mini Player
• or use its short-cut key combination of shift+command+M

As I said this is all over the web, so why am I adding to the noise. Well being a bit of an Apple Automation nut I’ve come up with a silly little app for those who want the one-click mini player option back. Download Zoom iTunes*, open the disk image and drag the app into your applications folder, drag it onto the dock (next to iTunes say) and you have a quick convenient (some might argue pointless) way of zooming to and from the mini player with one click.

N.B. It can take a mo to get going sometimes.

• All care but no responsibility taken.