The tripod itself is nice. I like the gorillapods and the way you can twist them around anything. But the interchangeable clips are a total failure. There are four clips in the packet, two “high bond adhesive clips”, one universal camera adapter and one “high-end suction cup”. High-end?? It’s tempting to say that it sucks, but that’s actually what it not does. It doesn’t suck.

I put the suction cup on the back of my iPhone 3Gs and I couldn’t even position the iPhone without it falling off. I have several gadgets that use suction to fix to things, like the front shield of my car. And the gorillamobile has the worst suction cup I ever have tested. Totally useless. And I would never use the suction cup to fix it to my bike or anything moving.

I probably should have checked better before buying, but I would have preferred some kind of cradle like the tomtom iPhone car kit. The whole point about the gorillapods are that you can stick your camera to anyhting. If you can’t trust the suction cup to actually hold your camera, the whole point is gone.

One final word: The camera adapter is nice anough so I may be using it for my waterproof camera.

PS. Yes, I tried using the suction cup on the iPhone screen, as the camera is on the back. It was slightly better but the iPhone still fell off everytime I tried adjusting the tripod.

What happened? What took two years?

First of all I made a personal website – oyvindsolstad.com – and moved my personal stuff over there.

Second Twitter came and I put most of my link tips and discussion with people on Twitter. My English nick is @oyvind, and I also use a Norwegian one – @osol. Feel free to use whichever you prefer, and I’ll answer in the proper language on both.

And last, but most importantly: I had a major change in my personal life, and my job changed a lot too. So here I am – it’s 2009 – and I feel it’s time to pick up on brilliantdays.com again. My life is better than ever, and this wonderful weekend I’ve been tossing out old clothes, cleaning the closet, getting my todo-list and projects back in shape, training, sleeping and fixing this site with latest versions of all plugins, a new theme (for now – I’ll keep looking for an even better) and fixing the feed.

Mac and iPhone

From now on, this will be my Mac and iPhone site. I have tons of ideas, tips, links and other stuff related to Macs and iPhones. I’ll post them here on a highly no-regular basis. =)

I have used Macs since the Macintosh SE, and I’m currently on my 13th Mac, my 6th and 7th iPod and second iPhone. I have administered Macs for office use, for sound processing and use in radio, and a large SAN for Final Cut Pro. I have attended WWDC twice, in 2007 and 2009 but not published any apps yet.

I’ll post tips on how to use your Mac in brilliant ways, how to use your iPhone, and I’ll post all kinds of ideas for software. I usually tip software developers all the time and instead of just e-mailing them suggestions, I’ll post them here and let you guys have a look at the same time. That way, the ideas get better, the competitors see the ideas so their apps get better – and we all win. How does that sound? That is – if my ideas are any good!! We’ll se…

In other words: It will not take two years for the next post to appear here!

See my aboutpage for links and contact data.

When you enter a tracking number, it has options for how often it should check. And it supports Growl. So now I know that my iWork-package is at Heathrow, and once an hour Delivery Status will alert me with Growl. Just brilliant.

Delivery Status supports just about any way to deliver a package there is (except pigeons):

- Adobe.com (US and Canada)
- Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.jp, Amazon.de, Amazon.at, and Amazon.fr
- Apple.com (including all international stores)
- Canada Post (Postes Canada)
- DHL (US and Germany)
- FedEx and FedEx SmartPost
- Google Checkout
- Nintendo (US and Canada)
- Purolator
- TNT
- UPS and UPS Mail Innovations
- USPS (United States Postal Service)

As you can see, the Apple.com tracker just shows that the package is shipped, and no details apart from that. So you need to set up a special tracker for TNT or similar.

Try iWork for free

There’s a 30 day fully working trial version of iWork ’08 for download at Apple. I just would like to mention a few highlights: Pages opens AND saves Word documents. The new Numbers app is something as self-contradicting as a cool spreadsheet app! And Keynote has a new, better masking features, animation and new effects.

I’m always interested in social media sites, so I registered and made a profile. I register for just about everything there is out there, to figure out what’s good and what’s not good.

So I entered my gmail info to check which of my OTHER FRIENDS were on Yamky. BUT – I didn’t read the text well enough.

The result: Yamky e-mailed over 800 people an invite in my name! Bad. Bad. Bad.

So for the ones who read my site here: Sorry.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Big mistake from me.

I never invite people to sites like this, except for an few other friends that are just as interested in stuff like this as I am.

Sorry!

(Kitten by Trang Vuong)

Sorry again.

The worst about this is that it e-mailed people I can’t imagine would use a site like Yamky.

It’s a very bad interface that just sends out so many invites without letting you check off which ones you want and which you don’t want.

And I should had read things better. My intention was never to invite anyone, just check if someone I know already was using Yamky.

Yamky seems to have quite a presence of people interested in… how do I say that… mating? So if that’s ok with you, go ahead.

(RSS subscribers may need to click through to the video)

One thing missing though – have a look at the end of the video – no multitouch.

Full instructions at NRKbeta.

#2: One eyepatch good, two eyepatches very bad.

#1: Too much Rum make you forget rule #2

Check out the 3 minutes entry video which says it all:

Then go grab a semi-public beta at Colin Devroe, or just wait a few hours until it’s public beta.

In a few hours, I’m off to the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. A whole week of unlimited Mac fun, learning, meetups, sessions, labs, meeting people and seeing San Francisco for the first time. If you’re there and would like to meet, call me. Or use the contact form. Or the comments below. I’m brilliantdays at AIM, oyvindsolstad at Skype and sol24 at Yahoo.

I’m especially interested in Mac apps for productivity and digital creation (video, graphics, sound). I will be posting about everything here at brilliantdays, in English. And at NRKbeta in Norwegian. Also, I’ll be twittering if you’re into that. Finally, here’s my Facebook badge:

WWDC links

Here are some useful links if you’re off to WWDC.

Apple’s official WWDC site
Attendee WWDC login
Moscone Center website
Moscone West floor plans
Moscone West on Google Maps (street view)

The Rose d’Or (or Golden Rose) is a highly prestigious television award, given annually since 1961 at the Festival Rose d’Or in spring each year. Since 2004, the festival has been held in Lucerne, Switzerland. Before the festival was held in Montreux, Switzerland, thus the Golden Rose of Montreux.

(from Wikipedia entry on Rose d’Or)

The festival also has seminars and presentations on different subjects. This year monday is internet day, tuesday mobile day, and wednesday covers “How to create and produce world class entertainment televison?” and “Scripted formats: A new era”.

My presentation

I will also post from other interesting presentations at Rose d’Or. Come back here for updates later this week.

Feel free to contact me in Lucerne. I’ve made a Rose d’Or group at Facebook. And guess what: No one else has joined. Heh. Now how could that be? TV-people don’t use social sites like Facebook?

Pictures

I’ve put up pictures of the other speakers at Flickr. I will post about their actual presentations too, as soon as I have typed everything and sorted my pictures. Some very interesting days.

What do you think would have happened if founders listened to pre-release comments about selling used printers online (eBay), creating the tenth search engine (Google), building personal computers for hobbyists (Apple), enabling people to tell their friends that their cat rolled over (Twitter), or rating whether people are good looking (HotorNot)?

And…

If you believe in something, go for it. This is the only way to really find out. Mathematically, the naysayers are right 95% of the time, but believing you’re in the 5% is what makes entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs.

Trust your instincts. You will fall on your face quite a few times, but that’s learning too. Without falling over lots of times, you’ll never learn to run.

In English, that would be something like “NRK’s new “sandbox” for all technology, gadgets, new media and other important things in life.” Have a look or subscribe to the NRKbeta feed.

I’m the daily editor, so if it sucks, I’m the one to blame. Feel free to tell me if it does (also if it doesn’t I might add…) We’ve just started so expect things to speed up the next weeks, it’s a little slow and thin at the moment. But hey, it’s a beta!

Vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
Vi vet ikke om gutta kommer levende fra det.
Vi vet ikke hvem som kutter tauet.
Vi vet heller ikke om hun i vinduet hopper.
Vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
For dette er ingen film.
Dette er en reklamefilm.
For DnB NOR.
Og vi vet ikke hva som skjer.
Akkurat som i livet.

(Nowegian text at the end of the movie)

Very clever. I’m curious to see if they are brave enough to NOT show it on tv. Just use the site and the viral world to spread it.

Why? Because TV advertising is STINKING expensive. And why hassle people with ads on tv if they come to see it on your site because they WANT to see it?

The two things I like the most:

Focus
Let’s you focus on a special project or folder of projects. Hides everything else you have entered in the app, so you cab concentrate on the task in front of you. Like a zoom lens on a camera. Very cool feature.

Project folders
You’ll be able to make folders of projects, grouping together projects. Put all your “home” projects in one folder, “work” in another, “you” in a third etc. It lets you organize your projects much better than just a long list of projects. It also helps you see the bigger picture. A silly example: Your “work” folder has 800 projects and your “home” and “you” folders 4…

Combine these two features, and you have a very strong tool to help you do what’s mos important right now. I have two major areas of responsibility at work now, and with the project folders and focus, I can hide the other half while I’m working on one of them.

Get me the beta, and I’ll start using this from day 1.

It’s fun and quite addictive. I certainly can understand why the Facebook owners turned down a $750 million offer.

There are a few things that are a bit strange, but I’ll get used to them. Thanks to Fridtjof I now understand the “wall-to-wall” concept. But I still think the networks concept isn’t perfect. Especially if you live somewhere where few companies and schools are registered networks.

And if you think it’s just a fad, check out the Alexa graph showing the development the last year for Facebook.

I would have bought shares…

Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk already has linked to this. But I have to do it too.

Thomas says:

Cyndie is a single mother of five and the photographs tell the story of her loss of her 10 year old son Derek to cancer. It’s a troubling, moving and emotional series of photographs that show in the most poignent way how powerful photography can be.

Robert says:

I dare you to not cry – The Pulitzer Prize for feature photography goes to Renée C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee. I dare you to look at her work and not cry. Start with the first photo and read the text with each photo (easy to miss cause you have to scroll to read it).

Robert, I cried. One of my childrens friends has cancer. Luckily she is on her way to be cured. It’s the happy ending story. Cyndie’s story is the other story, which didn’t have a happy ending. What a brave mother. Thanks for the links.

Heh. But today a friend of mine called and asked:

What do I buy if I want the most crazy wipes out there for Final Cut Pro?

Fair enough. He makes a children’s program, so he DOES need them. It’s part of the deal to make wacky transitions every 6 seconds.

So I made a list of some interesting things:

The Final Cut Pro wipes list

GeniusDV has a tutorial called “Utilizing Gradient Wipes in Final Cut Pro”. It shows how to use a matte image as source for crazy wipes in FCP.

CHV Electronics has a collection of plugins for FCP. One of them is called “The AlphaWipe-collection V1.0″. I have never tried it, but it looks like you get a lot for your $.

CGM also has lots of FCP plugins, and many of them have crazy transitions. Have a look at the demo movies (links are on the top of the page).

Mattias in Sweden makes a great bundle of free FCP plugins. You can download them at mattias.nu. They are not wipes, but they are free and should go into any FCP setup. Donate him some Paypal $ if you use them!

Digital Heaven in UK has some great quality FCP plugins. I use the DH_Subtitle – a subtitle plugin myself. And when it comes to transitions they have the nice DH_WhipPan. The plugins are cheap, and they are great quality.

And finally: Toolfarm has a list of FCP plugins that does transitions.

Do you have any suggestions? Things that actually work?

I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

Yesterday Apple showed their biggest upgrade of Final Cut Pro ever; the Final Cut Studio 2. With new versions of abot everything (except Livetype).

Let me start off with the single most important thing to me as a video editor: Open Format Timeline. With this new feature in FCP, I can drop all my most used video formats in the same timeline… (drum roll) with no rendering!. I’m going to save hours and hours just with this feature. All these formats are supported by this feature:

FinalTouch = Color

Apple bought FinalTouch last autumn, and now they are throwing it into Final Cut Studio 2 – for free! Yes, it’s part of the package. Either you pay $1299 for the a new package, or $499 to upgrade from Final Cut Studio, or $699 from any previous version of FCP – including version 1 from 1999. That’s a very good deal. Applause for Apple, who have sold more then 800,000 copies of Final Cut Pro so far, and will sell tons more with this upgrade.

Have a look at the new features of FinalTouch, now called Color.

I’ll have a full rundown of all important new features of the new Final Cut Studio 2 package soon.

Special invited guests saw the NBA All-star game in 3D HD on February 18th, and now attendees to the NAB exhibition in Las Vegas, get to see the game and hear about the advanced technology behind it.

“Thomp”, at NowPublic saw the All-star game. And is convinced this is the new thing:

…made me feel like I paid 6,000 dollars to sit among the stars on the floor of the hardwood court. The up close FUSION 3D HD action made me forget I was miles away in a theater wearing 3D glasses and the sound was to as if I sitting at courtside. I felt I was so close that when Jay-Z bent over to whisper to Beyonce, I wanted to tap his shoulder and say she with me! Action seemed so close that when a loose ball flew in to the crowd, several people in the theatre (including me) put our hands out to catch it!

He also has some thoughts on the future of the system:

In summary I can see this technology being a big hit in the future especially to the common folk like me who can not pay the large sums of money to partake in these events live. PACE should not limit itself to major sports events like the Super Bowl or the NBA. This technology can be used to see high priced concerts or highly publicized Las Vegas shows. This can be another viable revenue stream for artist and promoters. Instead of booking a plane and hotel ticket, you can jump in your car, drive to your local IMAX Theater and save a couple of thousand dollars.

And – saving the planet while having a great time, I might add.

How is it done?

The technology behind this is exciting. James Cameron is shooting both his forthcoming movies with the same 3D cameras. The $200 million “Avatar” (2008) and the movie adaption of the manga series “Battle Angel Alita”, called “Battle Angel” (2009), are both shot in 3D HD. Cameron and Vince Pace are the founders of Pace 3D technologies that makes the special versions of the camera. Vince Pace is also director of photography, second unit on both movies.

The cameras are customized versions of the US$115,000 Sony HDC-950, in a specially designed rig. The camera sensors are placed 70mm apart to capture left-eye and right-eye imagery seperately. Pace is also developing the camera system to include the newer Sony HDC-1500 HD cameras.

NBA used six Sony cameras to capture the All-star game:

These camera feeds were distributed via fiber to a portable HD fly-pack system (provided by Bexel) in the arena that included a Sony MVS 8000A switcher and an EVS XT[2] server.

The Sony switcher includes a feature that allowed the director to aggregate multiple camera feeds and lock them together. The director then switched the multicamera production as he would a typical game broadcast; but, to get the full 3-D effect, he often held on shots longer than usual. Instant replays and graphics were also presented in 3-D, using the EVS server.

The output of the switcher (two uncompressed HD signals at about 3Gb/s) was sent to the Mandalay Bay ballrooms via fiber cabling. The larger ballroom was set up in a stadium-seating configuration, on risers to give the full effect. The smaller space was standing room only. Images were displayed with two stacked Sony SXRD 4K projectors in each room on 47ft and 30ft screens. The projectors were fitted with a special polarizing filter supplied by 3-D specialists Real D. Audience members wore special polarizing glasses to get the full 3-D effect.

Sports and concerts

Both Marilyn Manson and Gwen Stefani has used this new technology for music videos, and Universal Music Group’s Interscope Record has signed a deal with Pace to use the technology for concerts. Expect to see Dr. Dre, Eminem, U2, Gwen Stefani, 50 Cent, Sheryl Crow and Pussycat Dolls doing their things in 3D at your local cinema soon.

That is, if your local movie theatre can show 3D. Only 700 of 37 000 US movie theatres have 3D projection screens (I have not been able to numbers for the rest of the world). But Sony do of course want to change that:

“We are ready to roll into any theater with the two-projector system.”

…said John Kaloukian, director of Sony Electronics’ professional display group to Reuters (note: Some Reuters articles only stay up for three weeks so this link may go dead after some time).

Most of 700 movie screens with 3D projection, are delivered by Real D, which even has a blog with interesting articles like this one about “Composing for Stereo: The Filmmaker’s Point of View”:

The other concern I call the strength of the stereoscopic image. That is determined by two interrelated factors. One of them is completely new to the stereoscopic cinema, and has no direct counterpart in the planar cinema – and that is the distance between the spacing of the cameras or the camera lenses. Whether we’re shooting live action, or we’re in a CGI virtual space, the distance between the camera’s lenses is a critical factor. We’re going to call whatever we’re shooting with a stereo camera. A stereo camera, unlike a conventional camera, captures two perspective viewpoints. So we’re not going to refer to stereoscopic cameras. We’re going to call it a stereoscopic camera, and we’re going to say it has two lenses – a left lens and a right lens.

The distance or the spacing between the two lenses is called the interaxial spacing – that is, the distance between the lens axes. If you think about it, if the lenses are superimposed – in other words, if the axes had zero spacing – you’re shooting a planar movie. The farther apart the lenses go, the deeper the image looks. The use of this control is closely related to the focal length you use. Wide angle lenses tend to stress perspective, because objects that are closer to the lens appear to be proportionately larger, and the background appears to be smaller. The stereoscopic depth sense, which is technically known as stereopsis, is weighted or scaled by extra-stereoscopic cues – that is, by non-stereoscopic or monocular cues. One of the strongest of these is perspective – and perspective is often determined by the choice of focal length. So it turns out that with wide angle lenses you can use a reduced interaxial, and for telephoto lenses you can use a larger interaxial.

New tools = New ways of thinking! This also may be technology that take people back to the cinemas. If you have a 50″ plasma/LCD screen at home, a blu-ray or HD-DVD player, a great chair and your kitchen nearby – why go to a movie theatre? With 3D HD you have a new reason, as I don’t think there will be a home version of Sony SXRD 4K projectors anytime soon. Not to mention the players delivering the actual movies.

Editing?

I’m curious, how do you edit this? HD with two seperate cameras, one for each eye? What are your options for post processing? Do you need special software or do you edit in “normal” tools like FCP or Avid systems? Feel free to comment below if you know!

Update

Camcorderinfo.com made a video from the Sony/NBA event at NAB, as seen below (you may have to click through to brilliantdays.com/3d-hd too see the video if you read this in a newsreader).

Screenshot: Joost video – Ministry of Sound music videos

The Joost FAQ says…

TV, the way you like it…

…Hundreds of shows from your favourite channels
…Full-screen, high-quality pictures and sound
…No fixed schedules – watch what you like, when you like, as often as you want

Well. Not yet, at least. I don’t think the quality is good enough yet, and the content are much like the channels you put at 30-99 on your TV remote. In other words: Not your favourites. Yet.

MTV is in with some content, so is some European broadcasters like DR (Danish Television). Ministry of Sound is a new channel this time, with the right content for young males (Let me guess: Football and girls will rate high on the Joost popular lists the next weeks…)

Screenshot: Joost video – Italy vs. Norway

I guess the big content producers are waiting too se how this goes. But even if I think there’s lots of room for improvement, Joost is going to be huge. When enough people join, the big names will too. The quality will go up, both for content and technical quality. Broadcasters and content makers should pay attention now, get their feet wet and try this out from the start.

If you want an invite, check out my little competition. Have fun, and see you on Joost.

Kjære krimvenn!
Jeg sitter i disse dager fordypet i skrivingen av neste års kriminalroman om lensmann Ole Vik. Handlingen tar til på Korsneset syd for Bergen, men vil forflytte seg til andre deler av Norge etter hvert som krimdramaet skrider frem, og selvfølgelig til mitt fiktive paradis, Fjellberghavn. En del av handlingen vil også finne sted i utlandet. Boken vil omhandle mennesker med ulik sosial bakgrunn, alder og yrke, noe som gir meg en herlig frihet i valg av skjebner. Dermed åpner det seg en unik mulighet for deg som leser: Kunne du tenke deg å bli drept i denne boken?

Med en snedig begrunnelse, en spennende historie eller en artig fortelling om deg selv, kan du bli skrevet inn i evigheten, bli berømt og få en flott nekrolog lenge før du selv dør. Det er ikke mange forunt!

De fleste boklesere ønsker å lese om spennende mennesker og deres skjebner. Din skjebne i boken er å bli drept. Kanskje skjer dette nettopp på grunn av en av dine helt spesielle sider? Skisser gjerne hva som er spesielt ved deg i svarskjemaet nedenfor.

My English translation (and do feel free to correct me, and make a better translation!)

Dear friend and crime lover!
These days I’m writing next year’s crime novel about police officer Ole Vik. The novel takes place at Korsneset south of Bergen [Norway's second biggest city], but I want to move parts of the plot to other parts of Norway as the drama thickens, and of course to my fictitious paradise, Fjellberghavn. Parts of the book will also take part abroad. The book will have people with different social backgrounds, ages and professions, something that give a wonderful freedom when picking destinies. Which opens an unique opportunity for you as a reader: Would you like to get killed in this book?

With a good reason, an exiting or fun story about yourself, you can be written into history, get famous and get a great necrology a long time before you die. Not something that happens to lots of people!

Most readers wish to read about exiting people and their faith. Your destiny in the book is to get killed. Maybe you’re killed because of one of your special behaviours? Tell me what’s special about yourself in the form below.

How about that? The winner will be killed in the book, and some runnerups will get book prices. He as already gotten over 200 entries, so be sure to enter before 1. May.

I’m not sure if you have to be Norwegian? I would guess so, even though the rules doesn’t say anything about it.

I just thought this was a wonderful way to get interesting content for a book. And what a great way to market your future book. Brilliant.

• Graphs that show your progress over time, either with the same route, or how far you manage to run in (example) 60 minutes.
• Map integration. Let me put my runs on a map like on Nike+
• Route playlist planning. Don’t know if that would be useful, but I thought it would be cool if I could put up a map for my run, grab data from previous runs of the same route, mark different sections of the run with a marker (like part 1, part 2 etc), and then drag in songs from iTunes to fit the different parts. Like power songs in the hills, slower stuff when it’s flat etc.
• Some way to integrate the running with iCal. Bitch me if I’m lazy!

If you have any ideas, put them here or in the thread at Flickr. Ditto if you have any good suggestion for other Mac software that uses the data the Nike + iPod collects.

Photographer: Hallgrim Haug Halfilms
Skier: Howie Arnstad Howie

The two things I like the most: Syncing and Quicksilver integration. Syncing worked flawless on my Mac. I had a few tasks in iCal already, synced from another GTD app; Actiontastic, which went open source some days ago. When I synced iGTD, it got these tasks from iCal with no problem.

And this is a good lesson if you are developing a Mac GTD application: Syncing with iCal. One GTD application that doesn’t have this is Midnight Beep Inbox. So there’s no way to get my tasks over to another app. Bah.

I also like that I can use Quicksilver to enter tasks into iGTD. And a nice menubar item with direct access to the app.

The date entry (for entering due dates) is very old fashioned. There’s no pop-up calender to click dates, and you can’t type “today” or “next monday” as some of the other apps can. It doesn’t even recognize 20.3.2007 as 20 March 2007, but as 20 March 2020. Weird.

So the race for the best Mac GTD app is still on. In my heat of possible winners are now five:

Actiontastic
iGTD
OmniFocus (not out yet)
Ghost Action
Midnight Beep Inbox

Which one do you like the best so far? I have big hopes for OmniFocus, based on the quality of the other apps Omni make. Of the other four, I think Inbox looks beautiful, but it’s soooo slow. The other three are great apps, and all have syncing that works. It’s too early to pick a winner for me.

how I keep in touch with (some of) my friends?,
originally uploaded by geirarne.

Brilliant table by Geir Arne. How would your chart look? Put up 10 of your friends, and check them off for e-mail, phone, sms etc.

Mentally superimpose the above graph on your desktop (or if you really want, draw it as your background).

Drag the resources (URL locations, documents, graphics, audio files, forms, whatever you’re working with) to the appropriate quadrants on your desktop. URLs are the exact pages on a site with which you need to do whatever task it is. You can chunk a bunch of related items for a discreet task in a folder.

Now rename the filenames to “verb-noun” (ie. “handle tax returns” URL item links to the online filing page on the IRS.gov site)

I find Sean’s tip on using the desktop quite interesting. I drag stuff to the desktop all the time. I will try to organize them according to his tip for some time, and see if that make sense for me. And I think he is spot on when he says that…

Anytime you find yourself uncomfortable contorting your processes to match the latest and greatest productivity religion, I think that’s bad. Ultimately you should learn the fundamentals of various different productivity religions and pick and choose the elements that work for you and make your own.

But – and this is an important but – sometimes it’s better to just use a system someone has spend quite some time thinking about. And not start spending days and hours and months trying to tweak it into your the “perfect-productivity-system-for-you”.

Use Exposé

If you decide to use Sean’s tip, here’s a productivity tip to the productivity tip: Set up Exposé with the upper right corner of your screen to be “Desktop”. When surfing, just grab the link from the browser, move your cursor up in the upper right corner, and wham – all open apps and windows disappear. And you can put the url exactly where you want it on the desktop, on your new urgency/importance grid.

The free (as in “free beer”) part starts tonight. The code (as in “freely available source code”) will follow when the overhead of a new team won’t crush the project under its own weight. Those with experience getting to 1.0 will understand what I mean.

Opening up this project for community participation is the best possible thing that I can think of doing for its future. Great things are on the horizon for that sweet intersection of the web and the desktop. I would rather discuss them openly and collaborate with other like-minded people than hide any of the details just to make another $29 shareware sale. I am not opposed to the idea of shareware in general and have purchased quite a bit of it myself over the past year. It’s just that shareware isn’t the right path for Actiontastic.

It will be very interesting to see what this leads to. I like Actiontastic. It’s fast, clean and solid. Download the latest non-expiring version here.

When “Optimize System Performance” appears during the update process do not touch your computer and definitely do not launch any applications. Just back away from your computer box as if it were a swarm of bees.

I always do this, and if you’re setting up a new Mac, and instaling lots of apps: One at a time. And reboot between every install. Saves you lots of troubles up the road.

Yoo get a Google map showing the location (and you can zoom out on the map to see other trusted places nearby). There’s a “People who liked this also liked…” function. You can add pictures and tags, put up your own review or send an invitation to friend to go to the restaurant with you.

It all works very nicely. The design is clean and simple, and speed is ok (I hope it scales with more users!)

The site mostly UK yet, but you can add other cities and even countries easily. One thing that doesn’t work outside UK, is the map function. You can enter the address of the restaurant, but TrustedPlaces only shows a UK Google map. I talked to Sue, one of the people behind TrustedPlaces about this:

…although the map function isn’t working correctly as yet for some locations outside the UK, people can still join up and load reviews and we will ensure that they are mapped correctly in the very near future.

Check out new features and other tidbits at the TrustedPlaces blog. One of the things you can read about is how TrustedPlaces members have started bumping into each other in bars.

If you know me, I’m Oyvind at TrustedPlaces. Feel free to invite me as your friend!

When the nice meal is finished, you’ve visited the trendy bar recommended, and you come back to hotel, do remember to hide a secret in the hotel room (yes, you can wait until the next day).

Post a link to brilliantdays.com or one of my articles on your blog/site. And put the link to your site in the comments below. I’ll pick out two next week. Hint: One of them will be for best post…

Update

Click through to the comments to see the details on the invites!

Update: E-mail

It’s no use to just put your name in a comment. Or just your name and your e-mail address. You will not get any Joost invites that way. One thing you will get, is spam. Spambots crawl websites looking for e-mail addresses, and if you put them in the open here, you will get more spam.

The rules for this little competition is simple: Put a link to this site on your blog or site. And I’ll pick some winners when I have more invites. At the moment, I don’t have any invites.

Nevermind! Go bananas! Just pust your name and e-mail here if you want an invite. I don’t have any, but others may have.

Just remember: If you post your e-mail here, you will get spam. Not from me, but from the spambots crawling the net.

And if you do have some extra invites, please post about it here too!

Update 3: More invites!

Just got some more invites, so the competition is on again. It works like this: Link to brilliantdays.com from your site or blog, and I’ll pas you a Joost invite. The four first will get an invite.

It’s also ok to ask others for an invite in the comments below, but I’m only giving away invites to people linking to brilliantdays.com.

Invites bonanza

Just about everyone who asked for an invite now has got one. And I still have A LOT left. So keep asking, and I’ll do my best mailing them for you. I guess Joost goes out of beta pretty soon, but it’s still cool to have it NOW.

Closing the comments

After 701 comments, I’m closing the comments on this post. I hope all of you have got invites. I certainly have sent about tons of them! Hope you enjoy Joost, and that we soon see some more quality content in there.

I’m not sure. I think the other Omni icons are way better. Here they are, presented with the three “main” competitors OmniFocus have:

If I were in charge at Omni, I would have followed the style of the two other apps, a slanted document with something in the lower right corner. A checklist with a magnifying glass was my first thought. The color is ok, so keep that, but change just about everything else. Maybe keep the clip, which looks good.

The other three apps all look great when they are this big. At smaller sizes, Ghost Action look the best. Clear and simple. Actiontastic is a little to complicated for smaller sizes, but the concept is fun: Hit those tasks with a hammer.

OmniFocus out soon

I think OmniFocus is pretty close a release. This is the status message GTD guru Merlin Mann of 43 Folders sported yesterday:

“That thing you want? It’s almost done, I swear.”

Could be he’s knitting some amazing productivity wool socks for his friends… But I think it’s OmniFocus he’s referring to.

“Saw your posts about multitouch. How do you think this interface technology will impact software engineering and what kinds of applications can be developed?”

Good question! I’m not sure it will impact software engineering much at first. It’s the end user that will experience the biggest revolution. I guess Apple would have to make a set of tools for software developers, and these wouldn’t have to be much different than the ones used today for trackpads and other input devices.

Applications? I have mentioned a few examples at the end of the “Multitouch will revolutionize your computer” post. With examples how multitouch could change (a lot) existing apps in Mac OS X.

New applications? I’ll have tgo think about that. Give me a day or two. And if you have any suggestions, feel free to use the comments.

The first one is Xsan tuner, that comes with Xsan:

Speed is calculated to 186 MB/second.

We use DeckLink Extreme HD cards in the Macs (10 bits uncompressed SDI). Blackmagic also has their own test tool for disk speeds, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test:

Now, the same disks show 136 MB/second.

Which one to trust? BlackMagic make dead solid products, but on this one I hope their tools show the wrong results…

If you need to test your drives for speed, whether you use BlackMagic cards or not, download the DeckLink drivers for Mac OS X or Windows XP, and you’ll get the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test application when you install it. If you don’t need the actual drivers, just “hide away” the app, and uninstall the drivers again.

Xsan tuner can be downloaded from Apple.com.

Why a difference?

Do you have any idea why the two apps show different speeds? 136 MB/second up to 186 MB/second is almost two more streams of uncompressed video in realtime. Less rendering, more done.

O’Reilly also has this video that shows how much cooler multitouch has become in just a year. Go back to my original multitouch post and have a look at the video there. Now, Multitouch is a whole wall.

(Click through too se the video)

But – and this is an important but – there’s still no real OS behind it. When will we see a real operating system using this? The iPhone already has multitouch on it, but that’s only a small screen. And on a closed system: You can’t develop your own apps using multitouch on the iPhone (yet). My guess: Within a year.

Revolutionary

As I was sorting lots of old photos on a table today, this image of me doing the same thing digitally on a wall came to mind. Fast-forward a year or three. Huge LCD-screens are now at a price level where people not driving Ferrari can afford them. So you got your 100″ LCD-screen. Multitouch is now integrated in the OS, and you bring up the photos from the last month in Aperture 2008. All the pictures are in a pile in the middle. You start dragging them into piles according to themes you see. Change them around. See new combinations. Move again. Zoom in on a picture to see details. Zoom out again. All while standing in front of this gorgeous screen and using the best tool ever existed on earth: The hands of a human.

I think Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he compared multitouch to the mouse and the click-wheel at his keynote in January, 2007:

We have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market – the mouse, the click wheel, and now Multi-Touch.

And just as with the iPod, we don’t see the huge changes this will make. I think multitouch will change the way we use computers, a revolution.

Try this: If you know kids that use a computer, watch them find their way around on it, play games etc. They are fast. It’s second nature for them.

Now watch the same kids playing; Lego, toys, dolls, puzzles, drawings – whatever their favourite is. If they like to draw, and do it a lot, watch how fast they move their hands, change the angle, move the paper, grab a new pen or crayon, put it back and pick a new one. It’s like they don’t watch their hands at all: It just moves around. Precise and fast. Watch kids who build with Lego – look how fast they find tiny pieces, pick them up, turn them in the right position, position them and make something.

Your hands are 100x superior to your computer mouse. Or tablet, trackpad etc.

Of course, you still will be able to write your name lots nicer with a pen than with your finger. And you still will need special input devices for special tasks: Like a shuttlewheel for video editing, a tablet for illustration.

But for lots of the things we now use a mouse on the computer, using your finger is much better. I move around the screen much faster on the Powerbook, than on the MacPro, because of the trackpad. And the trackpad is only one finger! Or actually two, as two fingers scrolls the screen. The thing I miss the most when I’m working on the MacPro, is the two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Very intuitive and time-saving.

Which apps?

I want Final Cut Pro with multitouch: Zoom in and out on the timeline. Move clips around on the timeline. Trim or expand with two fingers. Mix the sound with 10 fingers, right on the screen. Manipulate videos in 3D space. Colorcorrect.

Aperture with multitouch: Make stacks of pictures on a virtual table. Sort. Mix. Change. Zoom in and out. Retouch or colorcorrect. Drag pictures into albums. Move them around. A lot. And really fast.

Soundtrack Pro with multitouch: Expand loops. Timestretch and pitch change. Mixing again. Tapping the rhythm to change tempo. Same thing with Logic. Tap different drums. Play a piano right on the screen for easy note entry without your keyboard with you. With real chords.

And Finder with multitouch! Move files around. Stack them and sort them. Zooming and panning on a huge desktop.

Suddenly the worlds most advanced OS, Mac OS X, seem so old-fashioned and restrained…

Update: Multitouch Logic

Infinite Loop at Ars Technica is on to similar thoughts:

Basically the rumor is this: There will be no Logic 8. The successor to Logic 7 will have a new name. The unnamed application will be 10.5 only and will work with a new line of touch sensitive Apple displays. Also, it will be an OMG PROTOOLS KILLER!@!!

I’d love to throw out ProTools. Talk about overrated!

Well if Gates believes that Apple’s claims about Vista and Macintosh are a pack of lies he obviously thinks that they’re powerful lies because he appears worried. And why wouldn’t he be?

The part about a Vista upgrade being major surgery and the PC guy offeing to donate his peripherals if he doesn’t come through it has some real elements of truth.

Refering to the new I’m a PC, I’m a Mac ads (also in HD).

Like the fact that 90% of all music sold is infact without DRM. It’s called CDs.

And that there are three options for Apple when it comes to DRM: Continue as today (with DRM in iTunes), license FairPlay (not an option, says Jobs) or third: Get rid of the whole DRM thing:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

Impressive. It will be very interesting to see if any music industry leaders react to this. Do they even put their thoughts online like this? Also interesting to see Steve Jobs doing it. It has been a rather strict Apple policy to not “blog”.

Note to Eirik: Steve is on your side.

Update: Gruber

And as always, John Gruber has an excellent analysis:

In other words, the music industry wants a magical DRM format that gives them — not Apple, not Microsoft — complete control over all digital music. And a unicorn and a rainbow.

(Ghost Action screenshot. The app looks slightly different than this screenshot, as I use Uno).

I still have big hopes for OmniFocus, but Ghost Action looks clean and simple, and very similar to Actiontastic. It looks like it’s made using technology by Omni, the same way Actiontastic does.

Ghost Action syncs with iCal (both ways), something Inbox doesn’t do yet.

I had some problems when entering text into new actions. The text just disappeared after hitting Return. This happened twice on about 20 actions. I’ll try it out for some days. One “fun” thing is to see what happens with tasks already in iCal, synced from Actiontastic. Do the two apps live nicely together?

But I seriously think Bill should leave Microsoft now. Why wait until July 2008? Now he’s just making a fool of himself. This is what he told Steven Levy of Newsweek the other day:

NEWSWEEK: If one of our readers confronted you in a CompUSA and said, “Bill, why upgrade to Vista?” what would be your elevator pitch?

Bill Gates: The most effective thing would be if I could sit down with them and just take them through the new look for a couple of minutes, show them the Sidebar, show them the way the search lets you go through lots of things, including lots of photos. Set up a parental control. And then I might edit a high-definition movie and make a little DVD that’s got photos. As I went through, they’d think, “Wow, is that something I could use, would that make a difference for me?”

That’s it? You have a sidebar with widgets, sorry – gadgets. You can search things, photos too? You have parental control? You can edit in HD? You can make DVDs? Come on. That’s it?

Lying in front of people

Bill also thinks Apple got all their ideas from Longhorn:

NEWSWEEK: In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

Bill Gates: You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

What an utterly STUPID thing to say! I’m speechless. This must be the most stupid lie Gates ever has told. “Security guys break the Mac every day?” Plain lie.

I’m sure Vista is much safer that XP. And if it’s safer than Mac OS X, then a big applause! Good for computers, good for people. But the CEO of one the world’s biggest companies can’t lie to Newsweek.

I’m a PC, I’m a Mac

Then Gates talks about the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ads.

NEWSWEEK: Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?

Bill Gates: I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

I can understand that lots of people don’t like the ads (and some of them ARE lame). But they’re not about PC users! They’re about the machines!! There’s a clue here. The ads always say “I’m a PC”, not “I’m a PC user”. Bill Gates doesn’t get it.

PC users are not klutzes. And not dullards. But PCs are more complicated to use than Macs, even though I understand that Bill Gates can’t admit that.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball and Peter Cohen at MacWorld came to the same conclusion: Bill Gates is lying.

Or simply FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. My dictionary on FUD: “fear, uncertainty and doubt, usually evoked intentionally in order to put a competitor at a disadvantage”. Exactly. Joy of Tech is spot on.

Why Vista

I have a Windows Media Center with XP. Is there any reason why I should upgrade to Vista? The PC is wicked, so that’s not an issue. Are there any really good reasons to spend lots of money upgrading the Media Center?

Aperture solves that, and so far I’m very happy about the 1.5 version.

And just the other day I was putting “figure out how to export lots of pictures from Aperture to FCP quick and easy” in my todo-list. Then comes “Aperture to Final Cut Pro” from Connected Flow. Check. Great work, Fraser! There’s a dead-easy manual online and the price is nice (read: Free).

Also check out the excellent Flickrexport for iPhoto and Aperture.

Lego iPhone,
originally uploaded by gilest.

Why wait until June? Make your own iPhone today.

Now, mr. boss of huge movie company: Let me buy the movies! I have my credit card ready. I’m willing to let my computer download all night to get the movies in HD. I would even tolerate DRM (but would prefer not). I find it absolutely amazing that here we have an industry that doesn’t want to make money.

And when (if ever) you start putting whole movies in HD in iTunes… check your atlas. Or wikipedia. There are 6.5 billion people on earth. 300 million in the US. You do the math.

Final Print is a standalone application which prints a list of markers from a Final Cut Pro sequence. This provides a very useful workflow enhancement when handing off a project to someone else for further work.

Excellent little application from Digital Heaven. I also recommend their Final cut Pro plugins, of which I own DH_SubTitle. It does what it says: Make subtitles. (I’m so lucky that I live in an European country where we DO NOT DUB foreign movies, but subtitle them. Going to movies in other European countries (or watching other European channels) is a total nightmare. Dubbing ruins movies…)

Now, back to subject. Digital Heaven is run by talented Martin Baker, who also has made the VideoSpace widget, a widget all video editors should have on their Dashboard.

I didn’t even know that I could import NovaMind mindmaps into DevonThink Pro, so this was a real eyeopener!

Tynonym: Definition. So what is a tynonym? It’s a word that you get as a suggestion on your mobile phone when you spell a word with T9 on.

January 10th, 2007 “Ksimsarian” made a new entry in Wikipedia, about T9onym:

A T9onym is a word that shows up on mobile phones that have T9 text entry that is equivalent through T9 to other words. T9onyms appear by pressing number keys while in T9 mode. For example, Bus and Cup are T9onyms. Other examples are If and He, Book and Cook, Sophie and Roshi. T9onyms can usually be reviewed and selected by placing the cursor at the end of the word and pressing the * (star) key to select an alternate T9onym. T9onyms are slang for those words generated through T9, in general these are referred to as textonyms.

(History for the Wikipedia page here.)

Update

The T9onym page on Wikipedia has been deleted by The_Epopt. Oh, well. I don’t bother to ask why. Some Wikipedia people are really stubborn, and I really don’t care. If you have the time, ask him why. And feel free to comment her if you figure out why… Now back to the original article…

I’m just curious: Did anyone hear about T9onyms before it showed up on Wikipedia?

Jason Kottke writes about it today:

As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool…both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter.

Hey, Jason. Didn’t you get my tip in November?

Update 1: Google research

Found a couple of links in Google when searching for T9onym, and yes, in in this messy post, quite a bit down, there’s this:

Hi Guys,
I wanted to know if there is word for ‘like-typed’ words on a mobile phone using T9.

For example, to type Cool you need to press 2665. This combination also gives you Book and Cook.

Also, certain combinations give you antonyms. For example, to type Reject, you need to press 735328. This also results in Select. Is there a word for this?

Can we call these words T9onyms?

Cheers,
Mayur

Great word: T9onym. It’s easier to say Tynonym, but I guess T9onym makes it easier for (at the least for the more nerdy) people to understand what it is. So I credit Mayur for the word.

Update 2: Coudal

On Coudal today:

Lovely coinage. T9onyms. Pronounced “tynonyms,” two words made by texting the same numbers on a cell phone pad. jc-today

(link to archived post and screenshot on Flickr)

Great idea: Write it T9onyms, pronounce it “tynonym”. Although English teachers will go bananas…

2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed on the majority of computers sold the last couple of years…

Add these together, and you have the perfect portable book reader. Here’s what Booksquare thinks:

We’ve noted in posts past that that an unheralded feature of the iTunes store is the ability to serve up PDF files. Go back and read that sentence again because one key element of the iPhone is its tight integration with iTunes (in retrospect, woefully misnamed). See, if you can browse the web and use iTunes, you can, theoretically, download PDF files. Not a heralded feature, but we have faith in Steve Jobs and his design team.

In other words, you can read lengthy texts. Articles. Short stories. Novellas. Books. Compendiums. On your cell phone/miniature computer/portable media player/killer device.

Setting aside the comfort issues, the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.

E-reader to new levels

I have bought quite a few books for my (now retired) Palm Pilot. eReader.com has over 17 000 titles, but reading books on the sharp, but way too small screen on my Sony-Ericsson K800i doesn’t cut it. The Palm had a bigger screen. A lousy screen, but a bigger.

The books are DRM’ed, which of course is a nuisance. But I can live with it. If i WANT to, I get the texts out of the books, but I seldom do.

Tie text and audio together = killer app

Booksquare’s idea is brilliant. If I could buy books for the iPhone in the iTunes store, I would. What if Apple made an app for the iPhone that let you have the same book in both text and audio together? They already sell thousands of audiobooks in iTunes, and if I – for a slightly higher price – could get both audio and text at the same time, that would be a killer. The text could follow the audio when I listen to it, and if I read the text, and later were in my car, the audio version would know where I left reading the text. Let me have a way to set bookmarks with my voice when I listen to the audio version, and let people copy smaller passages and send them by e-mail or by bluetooth. That will help spread the word, and good books will sell more.

The next thing Apple should do with Google: Get all those Google-scanned books into the iTunes store. Let me use Spotlight to search all my books, and give me the most amazing e-reader ever made.

—

Apple let the iPhone out of the box today… and wow! It’s a revolution, especially on the UI side.

So now we know where the multi-touch technology that Jeff Han demoed at TEDtalk in february 2006 went. In the iPhone.

Just to remind you, here’s the video at Google again:

And for rss readers: Here’s the direct link.

Now, watch how it is used in the iPhone.

Where do you think all the other cool things Jeff demoes will go? Obviously 10.5. All MacBooks and MacBook Pros could use the same technology with the touch pad. Or maybe the rumoured new Apple display will have a similar multi-touch feature as the iPhone? Just think about it. Apple has already done this now, on a small scale in the iPhone. Mind-boggling.

Used in Pro apps

Imagine having this way of working in the pro apps; Final Cut Pro, Motion, Logic. Zoom in and out of timelines. Zooming on video effects. Controlling faders and graphs directly on the screen. And you could use your fingers to draw vectors for movements, and easier graphics work. It would be so much more organic. Like playing on the computer, using it more like a musical instrument. I would love it.

4 minutes into the video, Jeff moves around lots of pictures with his hands. Imagine using that to organize your content before putting it on the timeline.

The new OS?

What if the new OS X worked like this in the Finder? Zooming into folders, organizing content. Sorting and analyzing. That would certainly be something different than Vista!

So Eirik, it’s Apple-shares you should buy.

The guys behind it are setting up a company and hope to put it into production. Where can I buy shares?

Or rather – bought. Apple shares went up 8.3% today.

Eirik also has a nice video of the screen in action at Siggraph 2006

Update: TED blog

Several blogs write about this, including the TED Blog. Chris Anderson asked Jeff Han about multitouch, and he answered:

The iPhone is absolutely gorgeous, and I’ve always said, if there ever were a company to bring this kind of technology to the consumer market, it’s Apple. I just wish it were a bit bigger so I could really use both of my hands.

Hm. Does it make you any wiser? A bit secretive?

Just to make this a little more fun, seven different computeres at Apple read this post some minutes after it was digged… Read into it what you want. I still think 2007 will be an amazing year for Apple.

Update 2: Exciting updates coming?

Now Jeff Han comments on the project page for multitouch:

Update: Yes, we saw the keynote too! We have some very, very exciting updates coming soon- stay tuned!

(via daringfireball). Still in doubt something big is in the works?

Update 3: Fast company

Fast Company has an article about Jeff Han, which was done before the iPhone launch:

Not everyone is sold on Han’s idea. Ben Shneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland and a founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, calls Han a “great showman” who has “opened the door to exciting possibilities.” But he doesn’t think Han’s technology would be suitable for a large-scale consumer product, nor as useful as a mouse on a large display. If you are standing in front of the screen, Shneiderman wonders, how would people behind you be able to see what you’re doing?

One way, Han counters, is for the demonstrator to simply move his ass out of the way. Another: Use a drafting-table display, as Han did at TED, and project the image on a wall-size screen.

But criticisms like these are a million light years from Han’s mind. We’re in his cluttered and cramped office at NYU. Books line a shelf, and a skein of wires unfurls across the floor. A computer circuit board is half taken apart (he stopped losing screws long ago), and a nearby whiteboard contains blueprints and sketches of the touch screen, plus a clever trick for hacking programming code.

Han is explaining why he formed Perceptive Pixel. “I want to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating,” he says. “I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It’s every researcher’s fantasy.”

Update 4: Fingerworks

According to both Engadget and Charles Arthur, it is FingerWorks technology that is inside the iPhone. Apple bought their technology some time ago.

If you head over to FingerWorks.com, you’ll see…

Important note!

FingerWorks has ceased operations as a business.

FingerWorks products are no longer available for resale, and no further updates to software drivers will be developed.

The fun thing is that both Jeff Han and FingerWorks call their technology Multitouch.

Update 5: Revolution!

You may want to know how multitouch will revolutionize your computer/…

Update Nope. He didn’t.A bit strange that Merlin just qoutes TUAW, when he is actually working with Omni on the project.

Please consider this letter notice of your termination, effective immediately. Despite clear expectations and requirements — January temperatures not to exceed 40° F, consistent snow and blustery conditions, minimum of one blizzard with white-out per annum, &c. &c. — you have failed to date to meet expectations and deliver even rudimentary winter weather. A forecast high of 72° today in New York City is clear proof of your failure to do your job.

Make a template, a form, a petition – whatever. I’m so gonna sign this too, Meg!

Now it’s raining cats and dogs again. It’s supposed to be -10 C (14 F). My daughter said today “Dad, do we have something we can cover the snow fortress with?”. A friend and her collected absolutely ALL the snow in our neighbourhood, to make a snow fortress that covered both of them – if they were flat on the ground and didn’t move (it was 30 cm/a foot tall). This is miserable winter.

In response to very popular demand (to the tune of 150+ requests on the Labs CS3 forum), I’m happy to say that Adobe is now making it possible for Windows customers of Photoshop CS2 to get a Mac CS3 beta serial number, and vice versa. To request a number, you can send mail to photoshopcs3beta@adobe.com & include your CS2 serial number.

We made this decision a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t want to publicize it widely until the staff was back at full strength after the holiday break. Please note that this is a manual process on our side right now, and we appreciate your patience as we handle requests.

Related: If you find that you want to switch an Adobe product license from Mac to Windows or vice versa, please contact Adobe Customer Service. They’ll walk you through the process.

Record companies – listening?

I wish more companies were thinking like this. The principle here is simple: We have a customer who bought something from us, and now he/she wants to change the carrier of the product. It’s almost no cost for Adobe. They will get good PR. And probably sell more software because people know they can change platform if they want.

Now imagine if records companies could start acting this clever? Stop acting like idiots and announce the following:

Do you have a huge stack of LPs you never play anymore? Sure you do. And you paid for those. The artists have already got their money for the making of the music. Now guess what: We are going to start being nice! As of monday 29. January 2007 you can upgrade your music. You have already paid for the art, so you only pay for the actual CD (or downloadable DRM-free file if your prefer), shipping and a small handling fee.

Go to www.musicupgrades.com, check if your LPs are covered with the new MusicUpgrades Plan, order stickers to the nearest central. We have one in most European countries and USA/Canada.

Yes, sure… Anyday now…

I’m finishing a major upgrade (way, way too long in coming) and starting to look for new ways to make the filters bigger, faster and better.

He also want’s you to help with the new filters, so if you have some answers on these questions…

• Which filters do you use most?
• What formats are you working in? (SD, HD, HDV, DVCPRO, Red, etc)
• How did you first learn about Joe’s Filters?
• What other plugins do you use?
• What kinds of new tools would you like to see? (existing things done better, or things that haven’t been done yet)

His e-mail is in the sidebar, bottom right at joesfilters.com.

I use lots of Joe’s Filters in Final Cut Pro, on almost all projects. I can highly recommend them. They are great value for your money, and you can try them out before buying.

For $95 you get…

Joe’s Levels
Joe’s Sampled Color Levels
Joe’s Saturation & Colorize
Joe’s Simple Saturation
Joe’s Threshold & Posterize
Joe’s Bevel & Emboss
Joe’s Drop Shadow
Joe’s Inner Shadow
Joe’s Channel Blur
Joe’s Diffuser
Joe’s Motion Blur
Joe’s Generators
Joe’s Ellipse
Joe’s Shapes
Joe’s Color Noise
Joe’s Levels Noise
Joe’s Noise Reducer
Joe’s Saturation Noise
Joe’s Soft Stuff
Joe’s Soft Ellipse
Joe’s Soft Gradients
Joe’s Soft Shapes
Joe’s Soft Spot
Joe’s Color Glow
Joe’s Flexi-Smear
Joe’s Gradients
Joe’s Maximizer
Joe’s Pixelizer
Joe’s Frame Rate Adjuster
Joe’s Time Bender
Joe’s Broadcast Legalizer
Joe’s De-Interlacer
Joe’s Field Blender
Joe’s Field Fixer
Joe’s Multi-Frame Blender
Joe’s Y/C Corrector

…I think sometimes developers can get caught in a trap of trying to make things too “perfect”.

“Like Chinese Democracy” Kirstin said.

To which I replied- “That’s the perfect analogy. I’m going to blog that.”

In case you haven’t heard of it already, Chinese Democracy is an album that Axl Rose, the singer of Guns N’ Roses, has been working on for a very, very long time. The hold up is because he wants to get everything “perfect”. So it never ships.

First-time sex

Merlin Mann has been talking about something similar in a podcast he called First-time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0. Quoting Merlin:

Everybody is so busy making things perfect the first time around, that you never actually make anything

Yup. That’s now officially declared the “Chinese Democracy Syndrome” (or CDS for short). Trying so hard to get version 1.0 perfect, that it never ships.

This applies to other things than software, like complex projects. I’m working on a presentation on something that’s quite difficult to explain to people. And I found myself planning and planning and researching, and not working on the actual presentation. Gus talking about CDS made me think about what Merlin said about the first draft, and now I’ve put together a really bad version 1.0: Fonts, colors, facts, timing and length – everything is bad. But it’s version 1.0 and it’s so much easier to fix version 1.0 than making it (this does not necessarily apply to building houses, bridges and spaceships, I must add…)

The secret of Google and VG

Loving the beta-version is also one of the key ingredients of Google’s success: They make a 70% good product, get it out to people, tag it beta, and let it improve by getting feedback from users and their own experience with it. In Norway the tabloid VG is the biggest website, far ahead of the others. They do the same thing: Get things out. Sometimes they fail miserably, sometimes they score big successes. They would never have known if they just kept the projects on the harddrives, tweaking and tweaking them.

Screenshot: The latest creations in the Flickr Amazing Circles group

But now there are 1 002 members in the Amazing Circles Flickr group, and member number 1 000 is JJjunki from Tsukuba, Japan. Welcome! Here’s a circle JJjunki made.

The group now approcahes 10 000 Amazing Circles, with the most active members close to 200 circles each.

Also, a big applause for Nadano Kamome, who started this with the picture “How to edit Reversing world” in October 2005. I almost met Kamome in April 2006, when I visited Japan with my family. Almost, because we couldn’t find a spot and time where we both could be at the same time. I think we even passed each other on different trains between Kyoto and Kobe at some point! Next time, Kamome, I promise! I’m definitely going back to Japan, which was just brilliant. Remind me finishing my Japan series that I started (brilliantdays.com – tag “Japan”), but never finished.

If you do a Google search for “Amazing Circles”, you’ll get over 37 000 hits. That’s a quite a bit for a name I “invented” only 15 months ago. According to Trendmapper (Amazing Circles chart), it has been as high as about 95 000 hits back in May 2006. And when Digg caused a stampede in February 2006, the site went down. Heh.

Some people have gone bananas with pictures of themselves. So if you want to make some really scary new year’s cards…

Screenshot: Front page of Apple.com as of 2. January 2007

The Power Of Video Editing Video – video powered by Metacafe

Related on brilliantdays: How to make special effects in movies

…a “power ring” that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower.

Great. So for 2007 I decide that you all start behaving. Ok? No more hitting each other in the head or taking things from each other. And start sharing stuff, ok?

You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 70% Superman 65% The Flash 65% Iron Man 65% Hulk 60% Supergirl 56% Robin 55% Spider-Man 50% Catwoman 45% Wonder Woman 41% Batman 30%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Update I’m in the “Green Lantern Club” with Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble (who really doesn’t like memes like this – I think that’s what he’s trying to say).

(Screenshot of Projects pane when adding a new action and assigning it to the @mac context)

I like Vitalist. It’s nice, clean and easy to understand. It needs to get a bit faster and responsive, as I had to wait a bit every time I entered something (even on a fast Mac and a very fast line). It should be as fast as the pages on Flickr when you update them.

There’s also a few things I see already (it’s a beta) that needs to be fixed:

I couldn’t find a way to edit contexts. I added contexts as “@online” and “@mac” but Vitalist added a “@” itself too. Easy to fix I guess.

(Screenshot of contexts with @@)

There’s no “Forgot your password” so be sure to write it down. This is something beta sites often forget.

The biggest “problem” with online GTD solutions is – as always – what do you do when you’re NOT online?

I’m online most of my time, but I couldn’t use a system where I’m not able to at least see my tasks even when I’m offline.

Sync to iPod?

One way to solve this is syncing with iPods. Like the excellent Mac OS X software Actiontastic (still in beta) does. Check a button and all your projects and tasks go to your iPod as notes. You can’t edit them but you can see them and – most important of all – DO them!

I think there are three ways to sync online GTD tasks to an offline device: A standalone program, a mobile phone (not a cell phone) or an iPod. Making a standalone app is not something I would expect most online systems would do, as this would be just as much work as the online system itself. And people would compare their offline app with other specialized GTD apps like Actiontastic and Inbox.

Syncing to mobile phones would be perfect for most customers, but there are so many different phones. A total mess to make something that just works.

Syncing with iPod is an easy and consumerfriendly way to go.

My sister is visiting from halfway across the country. I asked her how long she’s staying. She said “Till Sunday.” And I realized… that meant absolutely nothing to me.

This is a good thing. A thing worth celebrating. I had (for that brief time) achieved a state of blissful disconnection from the Real World… to the point where I truly had no idea what day of the week it was. Woo hoo. Here’s to holidays from clocks, calendars, and duties of all kinds.

That is the real beauty of holidays: A “blissful disconnection from the Real World” – what a wonderful expression. And having “…no idea what day of the week it was”.

Thanks, Mary-Anne! You put words on something I have been feeling the last days.

If you’re a U.S. resident, listen up: You must rid your vocabulary of the term “cell phone”. We’re one of the few economies on the planet to refer to a mobile phone accordingly. If you care to find yourself in any of the worthwhile mobile development circles, begin using terms more widely accepted: “mobile” or “mobile phone” or “handset” or “handy”. If you’re not sure which, go for “mobile”. Such as, “Yo dog, check out my new mobile.”

I live in a country where 102,5% of the population has a mobile phone. That doesn’t mean that all have, but that many people have more than one number (and a few still doesn’t have a mobile). In comparison, 82% of all homes have a landline, and 44% have a DSL (or faster) broadband connection. Even with 5 and 6-year olds, 6% of Norwegian kids have their own mobile. By the age of 8, the number is close to 40%, by 12 the number is over 90%.

Make sure your site look good on mobile browsers. I just installed a WordPress plugin for mobile browsers on brilliantdays.com. There’s also a similar plugin if you want to make your site look good when browsed on a Wii.

Then I realized that I had recently installed the WP-mobile plugin written by Alex King (although I hadn’t yet had the chance to test it out on my Treo using Blazer.) So, I whipped out my phone, hit scottburkett.com with my phone’s browser, and voila, the theme was switched to the default theme. It turns out that I had not properly followed the instructions provided by Alex in the plugin archive.

The WordPress Mobile Edition plugin detects if your site is viewed on a mobile device, and delivers a lighter and friendlier site for small screens. But I made the same mistake as Scott Burkett; not reading the install text:

== Installation ==

1. Drop the wp-mobile.php file in your wp-content/plugins directory
1. Drop the wp-mobile directory in your wp-content/themes directory
2. Click the ‘Activate’ link for WordPress Mobile Edition on your Plugins page (in the WordPress admin interface)

Ah. So dropping the whole WP-mobile folder into the plug-ins folder was not the right way to do it. We’ll see if brilliantdays.com stays “nice” the next 24 hours. The last four days it has changed back to the default theme a dozen times.

And if you have a mobile phone or other handhelp device with a browser, go to brilliantdays.com and see if the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin does it’s job ok.

Then Matt Mullenweg wanted some advice on which dress his girlfriend should wear in an upcoming wedding:

(original Flickr posts here and here.) And the winner was the dress on the left. The jury is still out on Matt’s tie…

This is the new web: Communicating with others, and letting you decide. Just as Time Magazine have figured out too too:

In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

The “help me decide” tag

What if we tag all posts like this “helpmedecide” – in one word and no spaces? Tag your posts for Technorati (tag: helpmedecide), your bookmarks for Del.icio.us (tag: helpmedecide) and your pictures for Flickr (tag: helpmedecide) (and similar services).

I’ve created a Flickr group for this. So if you want the world to help you decide, just take pictures of the different choices you have, and make a new thread in the Flickr group. Buying a house? A car? A dress? Can’t decide on the christmas presents? We’ll help you decide!

And feel free to post links to posts and pics in the comments. I’ll promise to vote!

Twice the last 24 hours it has changed back to the default theme. Very strange. So if brilliantdays.com looks like it just has been set up, now you know why.

(googling “switching back to default theme by itself”…)

Update: This is getting ridiculous. I thought it would help to delete the standard theme. But then WordPress just changes the theme to the empty theme, making the whole site go totally blank for the whole night. Aaaargh. If you have any idea what this is caused by, please leave a comment here.

Update: Problem solved (I hope).

Automatic syncing of household digital content. Any device on the network that buys a song, TV show, or movie from the iTS will inform the server of its purchase; a specialized iTunes iServ app will make a copy of all content purchased on authorized household systems. This copy will serve as both an archive, as well as a source for streaming or copying the file to other authorized devices.

Exactly. I said:

It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

Just this evening I have been IMing Eirik for a long time about solutions for sharing thousands of pictures between several computers. This is a quite common scenario in modern families. You have parents and kids who all have photos that belong to several groups:

• The ones all in the family would like to have on their Macs all the time, both on portable and not portable machines.
• The ones that you just want to keep for yourself.
• The ones that you want to share with just one other.

And so on.

As far as I know, there are no solutions that does this. Add backup that works flawlessly and syncing between machines, and you have a huge project that I really hope half of Cupertino is working on (the other half, please keep working on FCP 6 please). Add music, video and recorded tv, and you need a very clever system to keep this clean and simple.

What features would you like to see in the Xserve Home? Or iServ?

With Xsan cataloging using Proximity artbox and project level integration between artbox and Final Cut Pro, users are able to acheive streamlined collaborative workflow.

Artbox has partnered with all the big names in the video production industry: Apple, ENPS, Avid, Chyron, Discreet, Grass Valley, Omneon, Quantel and Sony.

This is a perfect match for Apple, and I’m sure they’ll develop Artbox into an ever better product. Apple don’t even need to change the name – “Apple Artbox” sounds just as good as the other names in their pro video portfolio.

(Screenshot: Artbox asset management)

Have a look at the screen shots or the tutorial video.

I’ve been testing Aperture for some time, and it’s an amazing program. But I like iPhoto a lot too. There are many features in iPhoto that Aperture doesn’t have, and the other way. So I find it difficult to decide which one to use. If I could have one wish for Aperture and iPhoto: Use the same database and folder structure. I don’t care which one, where or how. Just use the same database.

So that everything I do in iPhoto (tagging, easy picture manipulation like removing red eyes, putting together some calenders and books), also shows up in Aperture.

And when I do advanced editing/correction/tagging in Aperture, it should immediately show up in iPhoto. And be available in all apps that tap into the media from the iApps, like Pages, iWeb, Keynote, Comic Life, Disc Cover etc.

I agree with msjenbee: “This thread is far better than any makeover show I’ve seen on TV.”

But what on earth is Andrew talking about? “See, I was going to say “You look Norwegian,” rather than German.”

But an independent review is to recommend the terms are not extended, a well-placed government source has said.

Gee, let me think. So “Love me do” will be out of copyright in 2012? Out of copyright as in f-r-e-e? Hmmm. Better start selling…

After reading all the six Harry Potter books – a number of times – for my daughter, I consider myself quite an expert. I’m writing a longer post on what I think will happen in the final book. Coming up after christmas some time.

Harry Potter movies at Amazon.com

On your blog, personal webpage or e-sales site, you set up a Plugoo (very easy to do, by the way !). Visitors on your site can see the Plugoo and type a message in it to send it to you !

This Plugoo is directly connected to your Instant Messenger and forward you in real time all the messages your visitors send you. You answer to the visitor directly from your Instant Messenger, LIVE !

So if I’m online, you’ll see it in the box below. I’ll install it in the sidebar when it moves off the frontpage.

Which made me think of a new word I’ve made up: Tynonym. I googled it and found only two hits, both of which I think is just spelling errors.

Tynonym: Definition

So what is a tynonym? It’s a word that you get as a suggestion on your mobile phone when you spell a word with T9 on.

As you may know, T9 is a system that most mobile phones use, that make it easier to type words faster. You don’t have to press “8-7-9-9-9-4-4-4-6-6-4″ to spell “typing”, but just “8-7-9-4-6-4″ and T9 figures out that it was “typing” you were going to write.

When I type “typing” with T9 on, I also get a second suggestion, the word “typhoi”. Which makes typhoi a tynonym for typing. Get it?

My built-in OS X dictionary doesn’t know typhoi, there’s no entry at Wikipedia, but Google has 3,200 hits and also suggests “typhoid”, which is a word I know. So T9 thinks I’m about to write typhoid but not pressed the final “d” yet.

Some other words and their tynonyms:

Dog. Tynonyms are fog, eng, doi, enhl, emi, foi and eni.
Cat. Tynonyms are act, bat, abu, cau, cav, acu and bau.
Mobile. One tynonym: Mobilf. ???
Web. Tynonyms are yea, wea, zea and zeb. Lots of odd words!
Sex. Tynoyms are sew, pew, rew and rey.
Apple. No tynonyms!
Microsoft. Ditto: No tynonyms.
Internet. Tynomyns are intermet (what is intermet??) and governet!

Obviously some of the tynonyms for the shorter words are only the first three letters of longer words. It’s also interesting to see whether a word is first in the list or not when you type it. Like “cat”, which was only second in the list, while “dog” were first. This will change from phone to phone and person to person as the T9 software (I think – does anyone know for sure?) notice if you choose a word further down the list all the time, and then move it up the list.

Your suggestions

Do you have some examples of funny tynonyms? Maybe tynonyms that mean the opposite of the word you’re trying to type? Post them in the comments below.

Finally: When I type “tynonym” on my phone, I get no suggestions. So tynonym doesn’t have a tynonym…

Update BoingBoing reports that there has been some strange things going on with their feeds. As of today (updated 28.12.2006), they have “only” 506,067 readers…

There’s a screencast showing how it will work. And it does exactly what I need it do.

Edit Google Calenders in iCal

So now I can make a shared calender in Google Calender, subscribe to it in iCal, edit it in iCal, and sync the changes right back to Google. Wonderful!

My next question is obviously if several people can edit the same calenders? I would guess this is possible.

But does Spanning Sync keep track of things, so if I edit a calender in iCal, and then try to sync it back to Google Calender, Spanning Sync will warn me if the calender has been changed between this and the last sync.

The screencast is also available at Google Video. And there’s a Google Group for discussion and feedback to and from the developers.

I guess you could send large files to a client with some of the many services that lets you do that: Upload huge files. But Xprove focuses on viewing and commenting on clips. Clips can have different states; “active”, “approved”, “archived”, “offline”. This is typically what a client might see at her end:

It’s a free 30-day test period. After that prices are from $15 to $40 a month for the different plans, depending on bandwidth and storage. If you’re not sure which plan covers your needs, try the nifty calculator to find out.

If you’re using Xprove and have any comments, I’d love to hear what you think!

Simple interface, but maybe too simple for my taste? Not sure yet. I think the tasks should have had more importance (in style), and the buttons under them be less visible. But I must admit they have great taste in colors.

It worked flawlessly in Safari on Mac and Firefox on Win XP. Dragging things around works and editing is fast and responsive.

Todos kan be tagged with tags, which can be used like David Allen the way David Allen suggests you set things up with contexts.

You can also set dates for tasks that need to be done before a certain date.

You can sign up for a free test account but I couldn’t figure out if it was always free, or if there was a fee after some time. Data can be exported out of the system. They haven’t got around to write an export feature, but they will send you your data if you cancel the account.

Try it out! I wish there were an offline system to go with it, but if you’re always online and trust Tedium to also be, this could be your next way to get things done.

Which reminded me of something I thought about this summer while driving around Norway with my family. Our TomTom ONE told us exactly where to go at all times, with great precision. My partner is an excellent map reader, but with the GPS onboard she could enjoy the scenery and the summer.

Every time we approached a turn, the GPS told us which way to go.

Now, what if it could tell us about the places we approched? What if it worked like this: For every geographical place in Wikipedia, there was a condensed text-version, that took – let’s say 30 seconds to read. When you’re planning a route, your GPS searches Wikipedia for entries that are along the route, and downloads these condensed versions to the unit. Either if connected to a computer before going, or via a mobile phone when driving. A text-to-speech unit in the GPS unit then reads up these texts, like if a guide was sitting there next to you. Or, if bandwidth weren’t an issue, Wikipedia hosts 30-second mp3s with this information.

Would this be possible? Of course. Maybe not today, or next month. But as GPS-units get better processors and if Wikipedia adds the right tags, it would be very easy to do.

If you live in Norway, you can give money to Medecins Sans Frontieres by contributing when people are coming to your door today. See the official site of Leger uten grenser (Medecins Sans Frontieres in Norwegian).

Watch the screencast to have an idea of what it does. I just imported the whole iTunes library. Wicked fast and no problems.

So when I heard about Tangerine, an application that scans my iTunes library and figures out the BPM – Beats Per Minute – on all my tracks, I downloaded it immediately.

Perfect for running

I would use it like this:

• Scan all my tunes, and get BPM for all of them
• Make a test run, and figure out which pace that fits the running I’m doing
• Make playlists that starts at a certain pace, and speed things up at the end
• Or make playlists that mix paces, slow at the start, then faster, slower again etc.

Tangerine does all this. Tags my tunes with the right BPM. Make playlists. Very cool!

Except that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t find my iTunes music library. It may be because I have an Norwegian version of OS X, so the music folder is called “Musikk”. But other apps using the iTunes music library finds it, so it’s just a guess.

Tangerine is still in Beta, and others reports having the same problems as I do. Others tell that it works flawlessly. I’m really looking forward to the next version and hope that it will find my music library and start tagging it.

Do it manually (or maybe not…)

In the meantime, I’m using the bpmWidget. It works like this: Download and install (as a widget). Start a song in iTunes, and tap the widget with the beat for some seconds. Then hit the small note icon to copy that BPM value to the current song playing in iTunes. Repeat 8 000 times for all your songs. Sigh… Tangerine! Where’s that next version?!

Now, let’s add things up here:

• Apple has said that Shake is not to be updated.
• Apple has bought Silicon Color and the Final Touch color correction app
• Motion never became the killer app Apple wanted it to be

Motion is way cool, but I’m not sure that most Final Cut Users have discovered it yet. As I written before; I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

So getting better color correction in Final Cut Pro and Motion is reason number one for buying Silicon Color. Number two isn’t that obvious but I’m sure it’s a just as big reason for Apple: Aperture. Put the color tools of FinalTouch inside Aperture, add the realtime engines of Motion and finally the Core Image and (the new) Core Animation.html of OS X 10.5. What do you get? A app for processing photos that can compete with Photoshop. And lots more.

Steve Jobs loves photos. I don’t know whether he’s a photographer himself, but search for “Steve Jobs keynotes” on Google Video or YouTube, and watch when he demonstrates iPhoto. Always great photos, always quality. I’m sure Aperture – already an amazing application – will take giant steps forward with the color tools from FinalTouch added in the 2.0 version.

First, download the new Amnesty Generator from Mesa Dynamics. It’s a small app for OS X. Next, head over to Google and check out all the so-called Google Gadgets. These are small pieces of code that you can install on your page, blog, site, MySpace whatever.

Click “Add to your webpage” when you find something interesting, and paste the code in Amnesty Generator. And voilá! A new widget with that Gadget running inside.

Brillliant. And think about all the useful widgets you can make. Here are a few suggestions:

• Technorati tracker
• Uptime monitor
• Digg News
• Wine Spectator Daily Wine Picks
• Bejeweled
• Google Videos

Babelfish

Some of these may have OS X Widgets already. But especially in the Tools section on Google Gadgets, you’ll find lots of useful things worth putting in an OS X widget. Be aware that some may not work, and Amnesty Generator is a 0.5 version. Very beta. But most of the ones I tried making, also worked in Dashboard.

Kate Winslet about to get her left foot removed.

Notice the cool sound effects…

Cool stuff. And even if I haven’t shopped at them (yet), I immediately like a shop with a blog – called the Hideout – where customers can comment, a community (or forum if you like) and their IM nick in the footer of every page.

Thanks, Luke!

Fireflies,
originally uploaded by BURИBLUE.

…and this is what you get. Amzingly cool photo by Toby Keller (“Burnblue”). Put your camera on a tripod, and open the shutter for 323 seconds. Yes. 323. It must have been very dark when shot. But look at the great colors. And the fireflies seem to have been flying on command.

See my other favourites at Flickr here.

Update: 92 seconds ain’t bad either…

Note the little RSS icon after the URLs (I should probably make a better mockup with the new feed icon).

Now, in Mac OS X 10.5, coming early 2007, there’s an dedicated API for RSS inside the OS X. Which means that every app in OS X can get and display RSS feeds, if programmed right.

Having a display in my IM program that shows new posts for my contacts is a great idea (I use Adium X – you’ll find my nick on the about page). But I want to manage these feeds in my Address book. That way, all programs using the people in my Address book can use the feeds associated to each person.

Waiting for spring 2007 takes to long. I would like David Watanabe that makes NewsFire to make a new function for NewsFire. Scan all contacts in the Address book, find all URLs, load up these URLs and find the feeds for these pages, make a special folder in NewsFire called “Contacts”, then make a sub-folder for each contact, and put the RSS feeds for each contact in the right folder. That sounded a lot more complicated than I think it would be, but I’m not a programmer. So how about it, David?

It has a name. It has a team of engineers working on it, a user interface guru mocking up modes and widgets for it, and a product manager whose Herculean job it is to herd this whole mess towards an elusive ship date.

Great! If it’s only half as good as OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, it will be better than all other GTD apps out there.

At the same time, Midnight Beep has a new beta of Inbox out (previously on Brilliantdays). Inbox looks amazing, and Omni is known for their clean and good-looking UIs. So if you want to get things done on the Mac, there’s no excuse anymore.

Also see previous posts in the GTD category, and especially “Getting things done with automator and spotlight”.

Update
And now it turns out that Ethan J. A. Schoonover – who makes Kinkless – is developing OmniFocus with Omni. In “Hold breath. Exhale. Focus.”, Ethan explains that …at some point it became clear that the next logical step would be to consider Cocoafying the whole shebang. And continues:

Having the chance to take everything I’d been thinking and working on with kGTD and see it turned into something bigger and better and brighter is like making a doodle on a piece of paper, handing it to da Vinci and seeing it turned into a full color oil painting. Even better: it’s like Da Vinci letting you sit around and gab at them while they do this and ask for “a bit more cobalt-blue in the sky” and “a few more peasants in that bit on the left”.

And what’s more: Productivity guru Merlin Mann is in on the team: Mostly I just stand around like a fat man at a construction site, drinking coffee and shouting pointless suggestions. Ethan and OmniGroup listen patiently, sometimes complying with my random requests, and that’s all the pay I could ever hope for

Two modest guys, eh? I think OmniFocus will be my third most used app in no time… And it will be really interesting to see how Inbox works when it’s finished.