Cloudy Days and Connected Nights

If, like me, you were caught in mid-contract by the iPhone 3GS release, the one thing you might have missed by not upgrading (besides the overall speed boost) is video recording. You may know that Apple relaxed control over the camera API just before Christmas, in order to approve the Ustream live video streaming app for 2G and 3G iPhones. Of course, just like magic, or like mushrooms (or maybe like magic mushrooms) a whole bunch of Video cam apps have sprung up in the App Store over the past two weeks. It is like they were all there, in the approval process somewhere behind an Apple dam, and suddenly the dam broke, and they are all loose.

Ustream was followed quickly by Qik (sorry) for the 2G/3G iPhones. Both are technically live streaming apps, tied to their respective video sharing services, but both have an off-line mode that allows shooting and saving a video to your iPhone for later upload. Since they are free apps, I tried them both.

Video on a 2G/3G iPhone is limited (so far) to 7 frames per second…so don’t expect high quality. Still, all things considered, both Ustream and Qik do a decent job of capturing and displaying short videos from your phone. The off-line mode is somewhat limited, since you have to upload before you can do much of anything with the videos, but it is there. Both allow auto posting to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

There are now quite a few 99¢ dedicated video recorders for the 2G/3G iPhone in the App store as well. iVideoCamera, iVidCam, Showtime, Camcorder, etc. It has been a moment since I looked so there are probably two more by now. Just like magic mushrooms.

Each has it’s own unique degree of functionality and quirkiness.

IVideoCamera for instance, is one of the few that will save to your Camera Roll or Photos app. Saving to Photos is important, since the Photos app has a built in video editor. iVideoCamera provides easy upload to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter. However it only shoots 3 frames per second at 160×213. An update is promised that will shoot higher res and 10 frames per second (maybe they know something Apple does not).

iVidCam, which I bought, features a 10x, two finger, zoom, 320×427 video @ 3-7 frames per second, wifi destop transfer, and a YouTube uploader. However, you can not share the video until you upload it, and it does not save to your camera roll…so there is no way to edit the video. In my tests it also produced very choppy video…certainly nearer 3 frames than 7.

Then we have Camcorder for the iPhone, which I also bought. According to the app description, Camcorder shoots 320×426 @ an unspecified frame rate (in my tests, certainly closer to 3 than to 7 frames) and saves to camera roll. Video quality is very similar to iVidCam, and similarly disappointing. You can also email the videos, to yourself (your laptop, etc) or direct to a posting service like Posterous.

Showtime records 320×240 @ 6 fps but in avi format…not in QT. Even though you can email vids out to get them off the iPhone, avi means that you can not send your vid to another iPhone user for viewing. Also it apparently does not save to camera roll. Users are reporting difficulty deleting vids once recorded.

Since Qik Live works well, you can imagine my excitement to see a stand-alone 99¢ Qik VideoCamera app appear in the store. This has all the functionality of the Qik live-stream app in off-line mode (which means decent video and audio quality, including landscape recording), plus it has real-time encoding, really small file sizes, and will save to camera roll for editing. Sharing to Social sites and Qik is promised for a future update. Unfortunately, until Qik adds those features, there is no easy way to get your video off the iPhone, short of a complete sync, since the Photos App does not allow emailing videos, and it is not a feature of Qik. You can, I found by dint of a good deal of experimentation, copy the vid from the player within Photos, and paste it into an email in Mail (only in Mail…it does not work with GMail on Safari or Perfect Browser). I sent video it to myself and it plays fine in Quicktime Player. I have sent it directly to Posterous and it shows up there as a post, but the video plays at double speed while the audio is normal. Very strange. Emailing to self and then uploading to YouTube from the laptop also works. I have not yet got YouTube’s upload by email to work with my iPhone.

So far, both Ustream and Qik offer better video recording, playback and sharing options, albeit tied to their own sharing services. At least they work, which is, so far, a little more than I can honestly say for the stand-alone apps I have tried.

My contract runs out before Apple will release the iPhone 4G next June (if they stay true to form)…so these apps, for me, are a stop-gap anyway. 5mp camera…HD 720 HD video??? Watchawanabet? I can’t wait. But I will have to.

Take a look at these sample vids from the four apps I have on my iPhone right now. (Not the best subject or light…I will replace them when we have better weather.)

And finally a sample on the Qik Live site.

Okay, so maybe everyone already knows about this. I know I tried it months ago, on my Windows XP netbook and found it not worth the trouble…but now, maybe updated, and running on Windows 7 on a much more powerful CULV based machine, I do not know how I managed my blogging life without it.

To put it plainly, creating a blog in Live Writer saves significant time and stress over creating it on the WordPress.com editing page in your browser of choice. At least it does for me. It might for you too.

For one thing, Live Writer downloads your theme info, for as many blogs as you want to register, and formats the composition page to the exact width you have to work with for each, plus providing an appropriate background and the correct typefaces. That sized to width thing I find invaluable! I don’t know how many times, when composing on the WordPress page, I have struggled to figure out how image placement is going to effect text flow, or how wide an image can be before it breaks out of the theme.

Second: instead of the little cramped composition box on the WordPress site, Live Writer provides a full sized composition page, similar to a wordprocessor layout, with menus and a toolbar at the top, controls along the bottom, and a side-bar on the right for context sensitive actions. I find that breaking out of that WordPress composition box is amazingly liberating. And the toolbar is always there for links, pics, etc. (I find that I am always scrolling around the WordPress page to get back to the controls at the top of the composition box.)

Third: spell check is quick, easy, and accurate.

Forth: Live Writer does tables…and does them well.

Fifth: at least in Windows 7, you can insert a pic from a website by simple copy and paste. Live Writer does the linking for you. Resizing is as simple as grabbing a corner and scooting it up or down to fit the column. It will either snap to edge or provide an auto margin. Just select the pic and hit either hyperlink icon, or right click and choose hyperlink from the pop-up, to bring up a dialog where you can back link the image to its source page. Very fast and very intuitive. It is also easy to specify a margin around the image in the actions panel on the right. The only thing I have not figured out how to do is to add a caption to a pic.

Sixth: you can manage and compose all your blogs from one central app. Live Writer will connect to as many blogs as you own, and, as above, tailor the composition space to each one individually.

Seventh: Live Writer saves local drafts, and, of course, you can easily compose a whole blog without any internet connection, and publish when you are connected again. This is truly liberating for those of us who spend significant amounts of time in the air (or at least will be until they take our netbooks away from us on airplanes).

There is, as far as I am concerned, a lot to like about Live Writer for the blogger. I now use it all the time.

Maybe best of all: it is free!

Get it here.

Way back when Push on the iPhone was brand new, iTwitter was the first Twitter client to implement it, albeit only between iTwitter users.  I reviewed the app, and found it to be, apart from the push issue, one of the more elegantly implemented clients then available. It had a lot of, at the time, relatively unique interface elements, but overall, it was a pretty basic client compared to the powerhouses of the moment: Tweetie and the then just released Twittelator Pro 3.0. Tweetie was, and is, the established standard by which all other Twitter iPhone clients are measured, and Twittelator Pro simply outclassed iTwitter (and everything else then available) on features.

Soon after, SimplyTweet implemented full Push, and, with its rich and constantly growing feature set, became my own personal standard…by which all other Twitter iPhone apps were, and continue to be, measured.

iTwitter very soon, due to legal issues with the name, became TwitBird, and then TwitBird Pro ($2.99, also still available free as TwitBird, and, somewhat confusingly, as TwitBird Premium for $.99) I downloaded and installed every update, just to keep up with how the app is developing.

And it is developing very nicely indeed. Version 2.1, just out, has added some very interesting features, which now make it a real contender for anyone’s full time iPhone Twitter client. [See additional features for 2.2, just released, at bottom of post]

Standout features:

• multiple accounts;
• universal push ($2.99 in app purchase):
• clean, elegant UI design with easy access to full feature set, plus pop-up controls on List Views for Reply, Retweet, and favorite;
• Twitter lists (best implementation I have seen so far);
• unread counts for Home, Mentions, DMs, and any Twitter lists you have created;
• full edit profile, including pic (plus direct link to profile from Home Page, and second link to view your own tweets);
• viewing of linked images directly on the Tweet view;
• quotation of replied to tweet within Tweets,
• grouping of DMs by sender, and conversation view of the DMs themselves;
• location linking for tweets
• post audio tweet
• selection of pic services and read-later choices (including saving the link in-app)
• drafts
• nearby tweet mapping (pretty amazing UI experience on this one!)
• themes (so far pretty limited, but attractive none-the-less)
• access to hastags in the compose view

What does it lack in features that I rely on (all are in SimplyTweet for instance):

• unread indicator on the iPhone Home Page: most apps add a number to their icon when it has pushed.
• TextExander support
• easy quote tweet or repost tweet (it does have Copy Tweet, and you can paste into a new tweet, but that is unnecessarily cumbersome)
• Reply to all (reply to all Mentions (@…) in a tweet)
• Reply to selected (reply to multiple tweets at the same time)

Take a look at the screen shots below, which are pretty self-explanatory, and highlight my favorite features from the list above. 

With this new version TwitBird Pro earns a place on my iPhone as a backup to SimplyTweet. It is certainly maturing nicely. More themes and additional features are promised for a soon to be released update. TwitBird Pro just could be the Twitter client you are looking for, especially if an elegant interface has appeal to you.

[Version 2.2 just hit the App Store with a few additions and tweaks: Dark theme (if you like that sort of thing), better Japanese localization, and some performance enhancements and bug fixes.]

Acer Aspire One 10in. on top. HP Mini 311. Dell 13.1 inch below.

[NOTE: while much of this is still true, I have now replaced the HP Mini 311 with a CULV based Acer Aspire Timeline 1810TZ. To see why, read Atom + ION: empty promise?]

Just over a year ago I wrote a piece on my Point & Shoot Landscape Blog called Netbooks for Traveling Photographers. It is among the most popular posts I have ever written, and is still getting regular hits a year later. It is still worth a read if you are new to the subject of Netbooks, and have specific questions on how they manage a photographic work-flow.

Until a week ago I was still using the Acer Aspire One 250 that is described in that article. I have processed more than 2000 thousand images, primarily in Lightroom, on that little Netbook in the past year. I have had no reason to regret my choice and I still highly recommend a Netbook to any photographer who spends much time on the road. It is hard to match the simple portability, and they are certainly powerful enough from all but the most demanding tasks. And, there is nothing quite like a Netbook for ease of doing all the daily stuff you need a computer for. Load up a browser (I use Chrome for preference), subscribe to a Google account, and you can do email, calendar, news feeds, Twitter, FaceBook, etc. etc. With a copy of ThinkFree or Open office (or even the real MicroSoft Office), you can even tweak the occasional PowerPoint for work…or run numbers in Excel: all on a machine that requires very little effort to carry. I have made two trips to Europe in the past year without my work laptop: just carried my Blackberry and my Netbook and I was good to go.

Within the past five months, however, I have gotten more heavily into HD video, and, while you can edit HD on a conventional Atom powered Netbook like the Aspire One, no one would claim that it is an enjoyable experience.

Lightroom's Develop Module on the Aspire One

About that same time, the first announcements of a new class of Thin and Light laptops, some not much bigger than your average Netbook, began to appear. The smallest of the Thin and Lights are 11.6-12.1 inch screen machines with a screen resolution of 1366×768 (16/9 wide screen, HD video format), and are powered by the new CULV processors from Intel (Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage). The CULV processors come in various shades of single and dual core, and are based on the more powerful processors used in real laptops. They are several times as powerful as the Atom processors used in Netbooks, but due to low voltage circuits, get just as good battery life. They are paired with the more capable Intel integrated GM4500 graphics as well.

Lr's Develop Module on the HP Mini's larger screen

Also, about that time the first ION based Netbooks began to be announced: primarily in the form of the HP Mini 311. This Netbook combines an 11.6 inch, 1366×768 screen with the same Atom processor found in the majority of Netbooks, but uses the NVIDA ION graphics processor instead of the usual Intel integrated GM950 graphics. Since graphic performance, especially the ability to render complex 3D graphics and video streams, is one area where Netbooks are noticeably deficient, the ION platform, at least on paper, offers the promise of real improvement. For one thing, today’s graphics rich OSs should be a lot happier on an ION based machine.

Couple that with the Adobe announcement of an upgraded Flash plugin which specifically takes advantage of the graphics acceleration offered by the ION and GM4500 graphics processors, and we are beginning to see some new possibilities opening for Netbook sized laptops.

As important as HD video was to my deliberations as I read the first reviews of the new machines, one of the major reasons I was looking was screen resolution. After a year of living with the 1024×600 10 inch screen on the Aspire One, I was beginning to feel just a little cramped. 1366×768? I could imagine how Lightroom would look on a screen that big (big being relative…I was determined to say as close to the Netbook form factor as possible: I really value the portablilty!)

Suffice it to say that I did my research and opted for the HP Mini 311 with ION Graphics. For one thing, while more expensive than a conventional 10 inch Atom powered Netbook, it was still less expensive than the dual core CULV machines. For another, reviewers rated the ION graphics performance significantly higher than the GM4500, and the new Flash beta is optimized for ION at a slightly higher level than it is for the Intel chipset.

And, perhaps as important in the end, the HP was available when I was ready to buy and the dual core Aspire 1810T (my other strong contender) was not. On such little things the tides of decision turn…at least, it seems, my decisions!

PhotoShop Element's Camera Distortion Filter

So far the HP Mini 311 has met all my expectations. It is not too much larger than my Aspire One. It still fits in the same over the shoulder backpack I used for the Aspire. The extra screen real-estate makes a huge difference in viewing images and working in Lightroom (not to mention Powerpoint and Excel). With 3 Gigs of memory installed, it runs both Lightroom and PhotoShop Elements at the same time…flicking back and forth between them instantly. And it runs both programs faster than the Aspire One ever managed. The speed increase in noticeable and welcome in Lightroom, on every operation, but especially on complex actions like the graduated filter effects…but it is totally amazing on PhSElements, turning a real sluggard, which crashed way too often, into a working proposition for the first time in my experience on a Netbook. This has significantly changed my post-processing work flow already, making it possible for me to use PhotoShop Elements as my external editor while running Lightroom: for those times I need to apply layers, local edits, or use, for instance, the Correct Camera Distortion filter (see Distortion City…and how to cure it! on P&S Landscapes). Slick.

With the Atom processor, HD video editing is still a challenge, but along with the new computer I discovered a new video editor: Corel Video Studio 12, which does the trick of creating low resolution stand in files for HD video as you import it into a project, so your editing is done quickly and easily, and then the edits are applied to the original HD files when the final project is burned to disk. Corel runs just fine on the HP Mini 311.

HD Video in Windows Media Player

The 311 even runs HULU desktop…something it should not, by the specs, do. And, with the new Adobe Flash 10.1 beta installed, it does really well on HD video from YouTube or other streaming sites. Windows Media Player handles raw MP4 video straight from the camera with ease. Impressive. Watching an HD video on a 1366×768 16/9 ratio screen is, in fact, a real pleasure.

I should mention that the HP Mini 311 I bought came with Windows 7 Home Premium. It provided my first experience of Windows 7, and while I will never be a real fan of Windows, it is the best implementation I have seen yet, and seems well suited to the Atom/ION platform. It is notably faster in almost every operation than Windows XP, at least on the 311, and many of the rough edges of XP seem to have been well and intelligently smoothed. Every program I rely on has, so far, run at least as well under 7 as it did under XP, and maybe even a bit better.

It is still Windows, of course.

I will have to wait for more extensive reviews of the newer CULV machines to see my somewhat impulsive buy was, in the end, for the best…but I am very impressed with the HP Mini 311. In another year there will undoubtedly be CULV machines with more powerful graphics processors. Combine the CPU power and a dedicated graphics accelerator and you would have a Netbook sized machine to rival almost any laptop on the market. We will see. Nothing is forever, but for now my HP Mini is pretty much this photographers dream of the mobile image processing station!

Corel VideoStudio 12

almost full sized key board for very easy typing.

iBird Explorer Pro

A while ago I posted an update to the iBird Pro and Plus reviews based on a beta submitted to the App Store. Long story. Turns out there was a really long delay in getting it approved, having to do with the new stricter rating system on apps that use internet access, but it is finally live and available. Though the posted review listed the new features as applying only to the Pro version…in fact they are available in all versions of iBird. You can read about them here: iBird.

For full reviews of Pro and Plus, go here: Pro \   Plus

For a detailed comparison of the different versions of the app, go to the product finder on the iBird.com site.

To purchase iBird from the App store click here: iBird on the App Store.