Please read the article before continuing on. (The Article)

Greg’s App

Function

Greg Hughes should be commended for trying to push the boundaries and provide a feature that wasn’t available at the time on iOS devices. However his choice in what app to build was not well thought out. It should have been obvious that Apple was actively developing a solution that would also allow syncing without a wire. It should have also been apparent that the app would be rejected under the duplicating existing services clause in the App Store.

Icon

The icons in question.

Greg’s icon uses two icons one denoting wifi and the other syncing.  I am having trouble tracking down who came up with the wifi symbol used in both icons but I can tell you that the exact shape of the wifi icon was used by Apple long before it was used by Greg.

The wifi portion of the icon in question was used by Apple as far back as 2005 in the AirPort Extreme Base Station manual. This is at least 3 years before apps for what is now iOS were even developed by anyone outside of Apple.

Screenshot from 2005 manual.

The sync portion of the icon in Greg’s layout was not ripped off by Apple on any level.  The arrows align much differently and Apple’s sync arrows align the white space to a full circle. Greg’s icon is very likely just icon’s drawn by another party other than Greg that were slapped together.

The Good News

So I think that Greg did the perfect thing.  He went underground and is selling his app for money to jail-broken phones. He didn’t, as far as I know, throw his hands up and complain but instead found a way to profit from the work he did on the app development.

Why this Article Bugs Me

The nerd nirvana that is the WWDC keynote was held just a few days ago.  This event announced the following:

• iOS5
• Lion
• iCloud
• Twitter integration
• iTunes Match
• Over-the-air sync
• Disk-less OSX instal
• PC free iOS devices
• Newsstand

With all these significant changes, why is an icon knockoff story top of news? The tone of the headline is meant to communicate that Apple is ripping off developers in some way. To me the real story that should have been written is “Developer Makes Money from Rejected App”.

Secondly the article frustrates me because if any icon stealing was done it was most definitely in reverse. Apple was using both the wifi and sync icon’s well before iPhone, iPad, or iOS existed.

So, MacRumors I’m calling bologna sandwich on you here. Get back to writing real stories.

Last fall my fiancé, Jessica, was worried about one of our dog’s weight. Jess put Henry, the hungry puggle, on a friend recommended green-bean diet. Basically a portion of Henry’s dog food was substituted with calorie-free green beans. This worked and Henry dropped weight. However it  was a nuisance  and mildly expensive. It was also tricky to get everyone on board with remembering to portion out the green beans.

Chief & Henry

Jess knew that the cheap food we were buying wasn’t the best. We went to Tractor Supply to see what ‘diet doggy food’ could fix our bloated puppy. We asked the store hand if he knew anything about dog food. He fetched the manager who was surprisingly knowledgable about dog food.

We asked her what was the difference between the cheap dog food and the various options of healthy dog food. The manager gave us a comprehensive 20min college lecture on the digestive track of a canine and then a short history of puppy food production. I was ready for a pop quiz, and Jessica had already started making flash cards. The manager basically said the following.

Dogs are built to eat meat and certain vegetables. Dogs are not meant to eat corn, wheat, or soy. Cheap dog food is made with readily available corn, wheat, and soy. Cheap food leaves dogs fat, bloated, and generally less healthy.

The expensive food is made from meat with specific vegetables. This food generally leaves a dog at a better weight, with more regular bowl movements, better hair, and less overall health problems related to aging.

Dogs don’t eat grains

So lets review here: corn, wheat, and soy are grains. Dog’s that eat grains are not healthy. Dogs that eat meat and vegetables are healthy. Both our puppies are served 1 cup twice a day of 4health brand dog food. At our recent veterinary visit our dogs passed with flying colors. The doctor even commented on how Chief, our beagle mix, had perfect abdominal shape. The doctor also said that keeping a puggle at a healthy wait was near impossible. This is due to the fact that pugs overeat by nature. They both weighed in at 33 lbs.

Chief & Henry's food

Dog Food Details

• Meat is the primary ingredient
• Contains no corn, wheat, or soy
• No artificial coloring or flavoring
• Has proper Omega fat balance

Okay why did I just read all this about dog food?

Now get ready for the big news. Human’s are the exact same.

Check back soon for explanations to all this stuff about grains being bad and how eating like a dog has returned my dad from the brink of type 2 diabetes, dropped 25 lbs from my mom, taken my waist from 34″ to 30″, and cured my seasonal allergies and migraine headaches.

FotoMagico Pro export settings

I put the software to work, quickly remembering how well it is made.  It does a superb job with snapping guides which make a Ken Burns effect that put Aperture, iMovie, and Motion to shame. It has export presets that make your Apple fanboy mouth water (e.g. Apple TV, HD(720 or 1080), iPad, iPhone, and Screensaver ). I had a montage of the shots from the day set to music with highly tweaked variations of the Ken Burns for each image in under 30mins.  Keep in mind I was cold to the software for over 2 years.

So I had something I liked and I went for export.  I choose HD 720p @30fps like a champ and clicked ‘continue’. There I wait for over 30min while my 2x Dual Core MacPro flexed its render muscle. It took over 30min for 1:58min of video with 1 audio track. Less than awesome if you ask me.  I felt kind of sick. What if I had two or three shoots and I needed to comp and export two or more videos that could very easily double or triple in length.  That creeps in to 3+ hours of render time, without one of them needing the occasional re-render from sloppy editing. I quickly remembered why I avoided video work in school. Rendering.

The mini-render factory

I went back to the export options and saw a magic checkbox which read, “Use Turbo.264 HD Accelerator.” It was grayed out and not checkable. A quick google search revealed that this Turbo.264 HD was some kind of hardware device made by Elgato that you plug in to the computer that cuts the render time of H.264 videos by 50%-75%.  Of course this costs money and I impulse-bought this item via Amazon faster than I bought Angry Birds.

Check this box for awesome!!!

A few days later I have a new set of photos of baby Abby, who had since joined the world. This time I was armed with my new shiny, I mean flat-black, Turbo.264 HD. This time the video was 1:36min long with again one track of audio. I went with the same options 720p @30fps and proudly clicked the once disabled ‘Use Trubo.264 HD Accelerator’. What happened next was magic. The render was complete in under 4min. I did it twice just for fun. Video quality as far as I can see is identical. It was well worth the $90 I paid for the device.

Both FotoMagic Pro and the Elgato Turbo.H264 will be part of my workflow for some time to come, because they make my one-man operation so effortless.

I did get the results I was looking for using a 580 EX II and a 430 EX II.  I used the remote trigger ability of the Canon 7D’s onboard flash. Very little work was needed in post.  Just a couple electric outlets to remove from the wall.