[EDIT: Well, that was quick. There's now a Cydia extension built exactly for this purpose. It apparently will even restart Sparrow if it crashes, or you restart your phone!] [EDIT AGAIN: I tried out that extension, and it doesn't work quite as well as the Backgrounder hack below. For one thing, it seems to break [...]]]>

[EDIT: Well, that was quick. There's now a Cydia extension built exactly for this purpose. It apparently will even restart Sparrow if it crashes, or you restart your phone!]

[EDIT AGAIN: I tried out that extension, and it doesn't work quite as well as the Backgrounder hack below. For one thing, it seems to break background audio APIs (which I assume will be fixed), but it also doesn't allow Sparrow to download the contents of messages, like the Bacgrounder hack does. I'm sticking with my method for now.]

Sparrow for iPhone is an awesome new email client for iPhone. It’s clean, sleek, and information-dense. However, as Sparrow explains here, push alerts are conspicuously absent from the app, mostly because of Apple’s limitations. I won’t get into why this is so stupid, but I have found a fairly involved way of making Sparrow behave exactly like the native Mail app, including offline cacheing (which is actually more than any app is allowed to do through normal push). You have to be Jailbroken in order for this to work, which is kind of a drag, but alas, it’s all we’ve got right now.

The first step, obviously, is to download Sparrow and set it up. When you’re in Sparrow and someone sends you an email, you’ll notice that the email comes in immediately, without manually refreshing, and the contents of the message are downloaded into the app. At the same time, the unread badge on the app’s icon reflects the new mail count. These are the keys to this whole thing. We’re going to trick Sparrow into thinking it’s always in the foreground.

From the Cydia store, search for “Backgrounder.” Basically, backgrounder is a utility that can override iOS’s native multitasking and customize it however you like. The app defaults don’t change much about how your phone works, so don’t worry about messing anything up. You may, however, want to turn off the icons that are present on backgrounding apps by default.

The next step is to set up a custom backgrounding scheme for Sparrow. In Backgrounder, select “Overrides” and add Sparrow to the list. Check the “Forced” option. This means that Sparrow will no longer use iOS’s “frozen” app state, and instead keep running all the time as if Sparrow were constantly in the foreground. I also turned off “Fall Back to Native,” which seemed to be unpredictable, at least on my iPhone 4. I chose to leave the backgrounding icons on for a while, just so I could be sure Backgrounder was doing its job and I wasn’t missing any emails.

Click the Home button, and your device will respring. When it comes back, launch Sparrow. You’ll notice the “forced” icon up in the status bar, and if you return to the home screen, you should see the black “forced” bubble in the corner of Sparrow’s icon. Now, wait for a new email to come in, and Sparrow will vibrate/play a sound (if that option is turned on in the app), and the app badge will reflect your unread count! If you delete or read a message from another synced machine, the badge will reflect that, too, almost in realtime, just like Mail.app.

Now, I should mention that this could potentially come with a performance hit to your phone. I haven’t noticed any memory or battery issues in the one day I’ve been running this, but your mileage may vary. Even if there were a performance hit, though, I think I would call it a fair trade to be able to run Sparrow as my primary email app. Hopefully Apple will wake up and make this behavior possible through official APIs, but until then, this hack will have to suffice.

I recently upgraded my DSLR to Sony’s new a65 (Alpha 65) translucent mirror camera (which technically makes it not a DSLR, but I’ll refer to it as one here). I’m coming from my old a300, so this is a pretty big step up. When I got the a300, I didn’t put much stock in the [...]]]>

I recently upgraded my DSLR to Sony’s new a65 (Alpha 65) translucent mirror camera (which technically makes it not a DSLR, but I’ll refer to it as one here). I’m coming from my old a300, so this is a pretty big step up. When I got the a300, I didn’t put much stock in the DSLR-as-video-camera option, since the 5D hadn’t yet come along to make anyone think of these as video cameras. This time around, though, I find myself making a lot more video and understanding more about how a DSLR works. I’ve been waiting for Sony to make a camera like this one for a while, since I’ve already invested in some Sony/Minolta glass, and I’d like to stay in the family. Until now, their cameras were lacking a few crucial features (24p comes to mind), but the a65 is pretty much the camera I was hoping they’d make.

I’m writing this coming from a video-centric perspective, since that’s what I expect to do most on this camera. I may do a follow-up on the stills this bad boy takes, but for now, let’s look at the video aspect.

The a65 is the little brother to Sony’s a77. They’ve got almost identical specs, aside from burst speed, autofocus points, and the physical construction. You can read more about the a65′s specs elsewhere, but here are the highlights: It’s got a 22MP sensor, 1080p video recording at both 24 and 60 fps, and a pelicle (translucent) mirror. The latter allows the camera to continuously auto-focus during video capture, since the light is being directed at both the sensor and the AF mechanism simultaneously. It works fairly well, with some major caveats (more on that in a minute).

I got the a65 kit, which comes with an 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens. It does surprisingly well for a kit lens, but of course the variable aperture through the zoom is not ideal for video. Edges are uniformly crisp around the image, and I don’t detect much chromatic aberration. The other lens I used in my test is a standard Minolta 50mm f/1.8 lens. It’s actually not as sharp as the kit lens, as you’ll see in the sample, but it has a nice wide aperture for better depth-of-field. I’m glad I went with the kit, since these two lenses compliment each other well.

I spent a few hours wandering around New York with the camera and these two lenses, and this is the sample reel I came up with. Note that I did indeed grade this footage, since this will be how I ultimately use the camera. I wanted to see not just how it captured images, but how well the footage held up in grading. (This is in no way meant to tell any kind of story, or even make any visual/editorial sense. It’s just pretty much a dump of all the usable footage from the shoot.)

(Click here for a larger version of the video.)

Here was the workflow: rewrap the a65′s native AVCHD footage into an H.264 .mov file, and then convert that to ProRes HQ using compressor. Bring it all into Final Cut Pro, and apply Magic Bullet Looks to the clips one at a time.

I’m pretty much pleased with the result. Looks worked as well on this footage as on the Canon 7D that I’m used to, and perhaps even better. The noise pattern on the a65 seems a little more “filmy” to my eye, which makes the stock emulations in Looks slightly more believable. There is definitely an element of CMOS jelly on all this footage, so I won’t be whipping the camera around very quickly. I’d say this effect is more present in the a65 than on any of the Canon DSLRs, which is unfortunate. It is, however, in the realm of what I’d call useable under normal shooting conditions.

One of the supposedly great things about Sony’s lens system is that SteadyShot, Sony’s image stabilization system, is built into the camera bodies instead of the lenses. This lowers the cost of lenses, and makes choosing them somewhat easier, since you don’t need to consider IS when picking lenses. It’s worked great for photography before, but it’s not quite as useful when shooting video. SteadyShot seems to work its magic in software, not hardware. I imagine this means the a65 is cropping the image slightly in order to pan around the frame based on a gyro/accelerometer combination of some sort. The problem is that it doesn’t do any of this quickly enough, especially on the kit lens. Starting a pan or tilt with SteadyShot turned on causes some ghosting in the image, since it takes a moment for the camera to realize that your motion is intentional, rather than just handheld shakiness. In relatively steady handheld shots (the purple flowers in my test video, for example), SteadyShot blurs the image slightly every time it kicks in. I haven’t tried this much, but I suspect that this effect is magnified when shooting in 24 fps, since more time passes between frames than at 60 fps. But the fact remains that SteadyShot isn’t quite the godsend I was hoping for. I expect I’ll be leaving it turned off for critical shots, and living with some shake.

Sony touts the a65′s ability to utilize autofocus while shooting video as revolutionary. In a sense, it is – this is the only DSLR-type camera I’ve seen that offers the feature at all. However, it is severely limited. Continuous autofocus only works when shooting in either Full Auto or Program mode. That means you sacrifice control over shutter speed and aperture when you want the camera to shoot with autofocus. This is pretty problematic for shooting anything beyond home videos. In Auto or Program, the a65 seems to prioritize shutter speed to limit light to the sensor, which results in a Saving Private Ryan look (at least in 24p). Granted, a good ND filter might alleviate some of this, but I think I’d prefer control over exposure over continuous AF. That said, the AF seems to work well in these situations, and the a65 can shoot in spot, center-weighted, or full-frame focus modes.

Even in full manual mode, though, the a65 offers some great assistance in focusing on the fly. The flip-out screen and the electronic viewfinder both feature a green box in the center of the frame which lights up when whatever is in that box comes into focus. It might not be true auto focus, but it is a heck of a lot better than hoping for the best on a 5D.

And finally, speaking of the electronic viewfinder, this thing is a beast. The first time I put it to my eye I was amazed that it wasn’t an optical viewfinder. It’s buttery smooth and vibrant, and sharper than my eye can actually see. On the a65, I’m never fully sure if the image is truly in focus, only because my eye isn’t good enough to see any actual pixels. Obviously, this is a ridiculous thing to criticize, and I’ve never been more happy with a camera’s viewfinder.

All in all, I’m happy with my purchase. For true run-and-gun jerky situations, I may be reluctant to turn to the a65 (or I may want to at least turn off SteadyShot), but as an everyday semi-pro alternative to Canon’s big boys, the a65 makes an excellent shooter for the price.

While I was having dinner tonight at the local diner, I had the pleasure of sitting behind a group of four people that who are either in a community college philosophy course, a cult, or a self-help group. Whatever the scenario, the group “discussion” was being led by a 20-something deadbeat with an iPad (a [...]]]>

While I was having dinner tonight at the local diner, I had the pleasure of sitting behind a group of four people that who are either in a community college philosophy course, a cult, or a self-help group. Whatever the scenario, the group “discussion” was being led by a 20-something deadbeat with an iPad (a white one, too). I’m not sure what he does for a living, because he “doesn’t put labels on himself,” but I was able to – for free – glean these gems of wisdom over the course of my meal:

• You only have to smile for a micro-minute for someone to know you smiled.
• Communication is only abstract so much as it is scientific.
• WordPress is computer code that makes websites.
• When criticizing someone, leave a long pause afterwards in order to impart the value of revelation.
• The field of Graphic Designs is evolving.
• Communication Skills dictate that you explain your thesis for 5-10 minutes.

Seriously, this was like reading spambot comments aloud for an hour. I hope these four people aren’t the voting kind, because this just shattered my faith in humanity.

The most popular post on this blog, by far, has been what I wrote about using Evernote like Instapaper. Well, time has passed, and that post is completely outdated, yet it continues to get hits. Here’s what’s different these days. First, both Instapaper and Readability have become a lot more useful as standalone tools. Instapaper [...]]]>

The most popular post on this blog, by far, has been what I wrote about using Evernote like Instapaper. Well, time has passed, and that post is completely outdated, yet it continues to get hits. Here’s what’s different these days.

First, both Instapaper and Readability have become a lot more useful as standalone tools. Instapaper is supported in just about every reading app on every platform, mobile and web. Both Instapaper and Readbility support really rich Kindle delivery, and really nice rich formatting. And as of last week, both services are free. Personally, I’ve been using Readability to manage my reading list, and I’ve given up on Evernote.

However, I know a lot of you are still looking for a good method. The bookmarklet in my previous post linked Readability’s formatting to Evernote’s storage. Well, it turns out that Evernote has removed the middleman, and created a totally self-contained service called Clearly.

Their website does a nice job explaining it, but in a nutshell, it strips away the formatting from a page, presents it in a nice readable format, and allows you to save this unformatted article to your Evernote account. It even parses multi-page articles to present the whole thing at once. Essentially, it does what my bookmarklet did, but better.

So if you really want to use Evernote as your Read Later list, that’s the way to do it. No more janky javascript, no more hoping Readability still supports that script, and the whole thing is streamlined right into Evernote.

You know you’ve gotten them – those American Express or Chase gift cards that can be used just like a credit card, anywhere, to buy anything. Sounds great, except you can’t, really. Typically, these cards have pretty finite expirations, and after 12 months, a “service fee” starts being deducted from the card each month. Worse, [...]]]>

You know you’ve gotten them – those American Express or Chase gift cards that can be used just like a credit card, anywhere, to buy anything. Sounds great, except you can’t, really. Typically, these cards have pretty finite expirations, and after 12 months, a “service fee” starts being deducted from the card each month. Worse, you usually can’t use up the entire balance of the card, because you can’t overdraw them. Essentially, you have to keep track of the balance on your own, and hope that a merchant can split your purchase once you reach zero.

There’s a better way. Well, kind of. If you do a lot of online shopping from a single source, like Amazon or iTunes, you can easily apply the balance of your gift credit card to your account on one of theses services. This prevents the monthly charges, and allows you to use up the entire card on purchases.

The trick is to buy yourself a gift card. I’ll use Amazon as the example, but this should work for any other service that lets you maintain a gift balance in your account. From Amazon, simply click the “gift cards” like toward the top, and order a gift card (a digital one!) for the exact amount left on your gift credit card. Make sure you make your own email address the recipient.

When it comes time to check out, use your credit gift card number, its expiration, and whatever name the card company prefers you use. For some, like Chase, you’ll have to register the card on the bank’s website so it’s linked to your name. Others, like American Express, tell you to use a specific name, like “Gift Card Recipient,” and your own address. (Check the company’s website for how to use the cards online.)

Once you pay, you’ll get the gift code from Amazon in your email inbox. Simply copy-paste the code into the redemption center at Amazon, and this balance will hang around in your account until the next time you make a purchase. If you go over your balance, you can simply pay the difference with whatever real credit card you want, and actually use up the full amount of your gift!

Among the other benefits of this method is the fact that you can buy Kindle books this way. For some reason, Amazon only lets you purchase ebooks using 1-Click, which is linked to a specific credit card. However, if you have a gift balance, this is depleted first.

I should mention, too, that this is a great way of combining multiple credit gift cards. The amount in your Amazon account is one lump sum, so it doesn’t matter how many gift cards you send yourself – it all winds up in the same pot!

Last week, Netflix announced that it would be spinning off its physical disc rental business and rebranding it as “Qwikster.” A lot of pundits seem to think this is totally crazy, and anti-consumer. Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, has said multiple times that this move is forward-thinking, and will position the company better in the future. [...]]]>

Last week, Netflix announced that it would be spinning off its physical disc rental business and rebranding it as “Qwikster.” A lot of pundits seem to think this is totally crazy, and anti-consumer. Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, has said multiple times that this move is forward-thinking, and will position the company better in the future. My suspicion (and I’m surprised I haven’t heard this elsewhere) is that this will indeed purposely kill their disc rental business, but it will also bolster their streaming offering pretty drastically.

Netflix has become a behemoth of a service. Blockbuster, their closest competitor in the disc rental space, was driven to Chapter 11, and Redbox isn’t really competing much at all with their kiosks. Other than those two, can anyone even name another disc rental chain? Netflix completely dominates physical rentals, which means that the majority of rental licenses paid to film studios comes from Netflix. In a nutshell, the rental business belongs to Netflix.

I suspect many of Quikster’s subscribers will wind up there just because they were Netflix subscribers. If that service fails, I doubt many will go out and seek a new disc rental option. They’ll learn to embrace streaming instead. This leaves the lion’s share of rental customers leaving physical discs behind altogether.

Then, what do content owners do? If the whole disc rental market tanks completely, there are vast swaths of content that no one can rent. Studios will have to make more of their catalogues available through steaming in order to make any money on those properties at all.

I think Qwikster is a calculated move not just to kill Netflix’s disc rental business, but to kill disc rentals entirely. Reed Hastings is making the bet that without the old-time distraction of physical disc rentals, the studios will be forced to focus on new streaming licenses, and Netflix will be ready and waiting to negotiate them. And that’s great news for consumers.