This weekend I finally got some time to spend with the camera on iPhone 4. I’m really impressed with what you can do on a smartphone. So how good is it? Well – depends on what your expectations are, but I can say I am very impressed and it is a ton of fun. The footage in the above film was shot, edited and exported entirely on the iPhone 4 using the built in camera app and the $5 iMovie available thru the app store.

The footage you see here was shot in San Antonio, TX over 2 days this past weekend. The cemetery is at Fort Sam Houston Military Base. I downloaded the music track off iTunes during a rain delay at the airport and edited the entire piece in the air. I uploaded after returning home.

The Good

There is a lot of good. The iPhone shoots 720p video and outputs at 30fps. This could be an issue with mixing with 24fps in other sources, but being a 5D user, I got used to this. You can conform the footage down to 24fps for a slow motion type effect for use as b-roll without a hitch. The colors render quite nicely. No color saturation or grading was applied to the little movie I shot (more on that in a minute). Focus and exposure work similar to shooting stills. Just simply touch the screen on what you want to focus on and the focus and exposure are automatically adjusted. Very simple. The lowlight performance is quite good. Not mind blowing, but its certainly usable in low light.

The Not-So-Good

The lens flares quite easily. I constantly had to reframe shots because of this. This is expected with a dinky plastic lens.

The biggest problem though is the nature of the camera being in the shape of a phone. Due to the physics here its hard to stabilize the picture as the natural use is to hand hold for your footage. Its shaky. Not as bad as some cameras, but its difficult. One plus here is that iPhone 4 has done away with the rounded edges in the new design. Its possible to set it on a flat surface and film. There are a few scenes my clip where I was able to do this.

iMovie is extremely impressive, but I have 2 small wishes. The first is easy – Apple, can you please add fades to the transitions and the ability to put them on the ends of the timeline? You can cross fade between clips, but you can’t fade up from black at the beginning and end of the start and end clips. I was able to do it above by taking a black still of the palm of my hand and fading into the “first” clip. Secondly it would be nice to do some small color adjustments, but I know that’s pushing the power of the device.

Lastly, when you do panning shots, you see the horizontal line distortion common to shooting video on non-video cameras. This is most noticeable when playing the footage back on an HD TV set. The good news is that the “jello” effect you also see on non-video cameras doesn’t seem too problematic.

The Verdict

There’s a lot to review about the iPhone and I’m just showing the video side of things. I’ve got to say that this is an incredibly useful and fun feature. Will I replace my other video cameras? No. But I always loved doing stills on my iPhone 3G because I always had the camera with me. This combined with the ease of uploading and sharing is a significant contribution to photography – up there with the Polaroid back in the day. Its really nice to see this beginning to extend to video as well.

Content creation

It seems like the number one myth I’ve read in just about every review is that the iPad is a content delivery device and not a content creation device. The way the unit ships out of the box this might be true. But as someone who makes my living doing creative work and understands creative process, I find the iPad perfect for content creation.

Sure you won’t be editing video or replacing Photoshop – but the iPad makes it easy and fun to capture ideas which is at the heart of creative work – if that’s what you actually do. And the touch interface itself opens up a whole new world of possibilities that as the hardware becomes more powerful, will realize a serious advantage to the traditional desktop design for doing work – particularly creating it. Sure the apps are a little crude but at the very least the iPad already has the power of an awesome sketchbook for ideas.

A quick word about third party software – just like the iPhone, apps really define the possibilities of the iPad and are at least half the reason you’ll want one. Having said that the unit has only been out in the US for a few weeks. I’d expect the next few months we will finally see some innovative and powerful stuff released. For the moment though there are already a few gems.

iWork

Apple offers iPad versions of Numbers, Pages and Keynote. I personally feel like these should come with the iPad but either way the are fantastic. I actually think there are some aspects of having a touch interface that make these stronger than their desktop versions. I’ll admit that I did not use iPad Keynote for my presentations last week in fear or crashing or other technical concerns, but I should say that I used my laptop for my own unfamiliarity – not the units reliability. I saw reviews of people who gave presentations the day they got it. This folks, is unprofessional, risky and stupid. If you’ve been hired to speak, you have to be on your game. If I had a few weeks to learn the unit first I might have gone for it, but I didn’t.

Drawing Apps

Adobe has a wonderful simple app called Adobe Sketchbook that allows you to do sketches and save them in a notebook fashion. A little wonky to get your images out of it, but for a free app its quite brilliant. There is also a wonderful app called Freeform that supports vector drawing much like Adobe Illustrator. While it’s not nearly as deep or powerful as Illustrator it certainly gives you the ability to capture ideas and export them later for further editing. If you need bitmap capabilities, apps like Art Studio are excellent for capturing ideas. And I’d also suggest picking up a $6 pogo pen if you like to draw. Something weird about finger painting everything.

Photo editing

I think you’ll seen some powerful stuff in the coming months, but already there are some outstanding apps being offered. TiltShift Generator was great on the iPhone and now has a nice iPad version. Filterstorm is a really nice photo color manipulation app with cool brush masking ability and it’s free. One downside is the photos app the iPad comes with. Fun for viewing, but you can’t create folders or edit. Everything must be synced in iTunes which is lame.

Battery life

It’s as awesome as they say. Easily 10 hrs and the unit never gets hot.

How does the keyboard feel?

I actually like it just fine. I got the Bluetooth keyboard thinking I’d need it but honestly I’ve used it once. I’m writing this article on my iPad.

Frustrations

Apple, can you please reconsider iTunes? The store needs a massive redesign and why am I syncing everything through a music app anyway? Apple desperately needs to rethink this. I know it’s branded as the go to app but it drives me crazy. I’d like to see more done in the cloud with the $100 I waste every year on the near useless Mobile Me. This would be perfect to clean up and use with the iPad.

Does the iPad replace my laptop?

When traveling – yes. It is a wonderful alternative and the size is perfect. If you need to do any serious photo or video editing, you’ll want a laptop, but personally I don’t want to do that kind of stuff on the road anyway.

Conclusion

If you even think you want one buy it. It is one of the most exciting products that’s come along in a while and with apps being developed and the 4.0 software coming this fall it’s only going to get better.

Do what you can, do it now and get better at it.

Most of this speaks for itself and can be applied to anything. Its kind of like the old joke about how one is to eat an elephant – one bite at a time. However you’ll likely get tired of eating elephant after a while.

I think the key here is to get out of thinking in a linear way. One thing comes after the next. What you want to do is to think exponentially. What you do now lays groundwork and a bed for the stuff that comes later. Everything builds upon itself.

Start somewhere and get something accomplished – no matter how small. Then step away, evaluate where you are and figure out how you can get better.

People are at SXSW to share ideas, make connections, have fun and even make our world a better place. Its so refreshing to see something pulled off as well as this conference is. I can’t even imagine the amount of work it would take to put this on, but the experience is flawless.

The great thing about it is that there’s no heavy commercial or corporate agenda – just a space for people to come together, share ideas and enjoy themselves. Most people are here because they want to be – not because their employer sent them. If you’ve ever thought about coming to this conference and haven’t – stop thinking and start planning for next year.

So what’s SXSW like?

First off – this thing is massive. I’m bad at guessing numbers, but they claim over 5000 last year – it had to be way more that this year. The conference takes up just about the entire convention center and meeting rooms in 3 hotels. Imagine walking around before a basketball game in the crowded hallways – except more than half the people have their heads down twittering on their iPhones and you’ll have an idea of what it feels like getting to a panel. There are more panels than you can handle – you have to get used to accepting you can’t do it all. They podcast most of the material later so you have to just do the best you can with the time you have here.

What else makes SXSW so great?

You’ll make a ton of friends in a very short amount of time. Sure the panels are interesting, there’s a ton of internet and other celebrities who show up, the weather is awesome, Austin is one of the greatest cities in the world… but the people are the reason to come.

There’s certainly a unique culture here and there are many ways to get the most out of it. Twitter is obviously a huge part of it. Every panel and party has a hash-tag for the backchannel and this really opened my eyes as to the possibilities of using Twitter. In fact, I’ll be honest – this has really opened my eyes to the Twitter being beyond the basic “what are you doing now” stuff. You realize in a situation like this that its not as much “what you’re doing” as it is “what is happening”.

Incidentally – Twitter had its first popularity spike at SXSW in 1997. The conference took daily usage of 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000 and this story is quite a legend here. This year Twitter announced its @anywhere service during the keynote.

I’ll write more in the coming days as I have time to digest information I’ve collected, but for now lets just say I’m already looking into booking a hotel for next year. I’ll certainly be back!

I’ve used the “Notes” app that comes on the iPhone/iPod Touch and found it to be a piece of junk. From the stupid looking felt tip font and the yellow notepad background to the odd syncing into Mail.app on my computer – it simply doesn’t work for me.

However I’ve tried a new combination at SXSW that has worked beautifully. I bounce back and forth between my laptop and iPhone all day so sync is fairly important to me.

This technique requires 2 apps, both are free.

On the iPhone/iPod Touch side there’s an app called SimpleNote. You sign up for a free account and it will sync all notes to their server. So you could actually stop here considering you can access your notes from a web browser. The app is wonderfully minimal and clean. You are still using the iPhone keyboard, but its the best I’ve used. No frills – it launches quickly and you can get your data written down. If typing is still tough – there’s some great cut and paste apps that I’ll talk about in another post.

On the Mac side you can either use the SimpleNote website to get your apps, or you can use a desktop app that will sync with the service. Notational Velocity works great and its free… same simple, no frills interface – its all about collecting data and this is exactly what I’m looking for when taking notes. You want to collect data, not miss data while you’re fooling around with options.

So the result is amazing. You add text to your notes (or create new ones). Both apps sync automatically to the SimpleNote server – you don’t even have to save. I just open the note on whichever platform I’m on and append to what I was working on earlier. Completely seamless and smooth.

Notational Velocity:

The Lovely Miss Holly Radicello

For the smARTphone tours at the Dallas Museum of Art we very deliberately chose to go with a web based app over an iPhone app. There are a variety of reasons that we’ve done this which are:

1) iPhone apps only work on the iPhone 2) We want to encourage visitors to view the content on their own devices – whatever they may be 3) We want a system that will adapt to future technologies and trends 4) We want a system that resides in “the cloud” that can store unlimited resources and assets

Now having said that, there are many institutions that have opted to build an iPhone app. Some of the benefits to this route are:

1) Ability to take advantage of a more powerful programming toolset 2) Visibility in the iTunes store 3) Option for viewing content without an internet connection

If these options fit an institutions criteria then the iPhone app route is a good way to go. We discussed some of these options in depth, but for us there were some reasons that countered the above.

1) Objective C and Cocoa are simply awesome, but an iPhone app is platform specific. Those without the device its coded for miss out. 2) I wouldn’t really call the iTunes store a hub of social networking 3) On the scale we are producing content, expecting users to download huge amounts of data just to have them offline is way too unreasonable.

Now having said all that… I realize that it sounds MUCH more cool to say you’ve designed an iPhone app than it does to say we have a mobile website optimized for phones… I promise you there is no bigger Apple fan boy than myself – trust me. But I think its much more important to look at the bigger picture.

Last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google CEO Eric Schmidt (until last year on Apple’s board of Directors) cited some interesting statistics in his keynote. His point in the keynote is the growth rate of mobile devices is way accelerated way beyond what we saw in personal computers over the last 20 years. Most of the real power, he states, is when you have small devices that have the ability to connect to server power via cloud computing.

Now Google is an amazing company. They are really good at developing some of the most interesting and useful technology available today and are also really bad at promoting it all.

For those who are familiar, Apple denied Google approval of the Google Voice app on the iPhone. Google has responded by building one of the strongest web-apps I’ve seen. They’ve leveraged HTML5 to build an online phone app… that can make calls from your phone. Simply amazing.

I think Google have made some extremely progressive strides in mobile cloud computing – the example I just mentioned, voice recognition, image recognition, the ability to search or translate on the fly… it goes way beyond the simple concept of “where am I” types of applications that have been popular to this point.

Now does our system contain this type of functionality? Heavens no – I wish! We are on version 1.0. But the idea is to have a system that can grow to fit our needs. This functionality can certainly adapt to specific needs down the road – we could integrate into an iPhone app, we could integrate to any platform specific device if it fit a need for us. The power is in the cloud, not on one type of phone.

I think this is where things will be down the road – not just for us but for everyone.

smARTphone Tours are provided as a mobile web app… that is it works on any web-enabled device. Use your Blackberry, iPhone, Pre, G1 or whatever you prefer and access additional museum content including audio, video, additional images and content for free. Don’t have a smartphone? We have iPod Touches available at both visitor services desks. We’ve also got headphones if you’d like them for your own device.

smARTphone Tours can be accessed at http://dallasmuseumofart.mobi

It is important to note that this is a mobile optimized web platform and not an iPhone app. This has been our plan all along to NOT be device dependent. Our priority at the museum is the quality of the content we produce. We view the mobile platform as a delivery system to get the content out. While there are certainly advantages to doing apps as well – the web based solution was the best choice for us in terms of support and accessibility.

Now I have to admit something. I thought that without provided iPods, we wouldn’t have as much interest in the web app. For whatever reason I just thought people would rather do tours on provided devices. Last night we did a soft launch at the museum with the opening our our Lens of Impressionism exhibit. The decision was that the iPod Touch units we have available wouldn’t actually be launched until Sunday. But all the signage was up and we’ve had some press promoting the tour. People could just pull it up on their own phones. I was completely blown away when I got to the museum to see people on all kinds of phones not only curiously checking out the web app, but also in the exhibit taking it all in! This makes hard work and insanely crazy hours all worth it.

I think the strongest “sell” for systems like this in museums is the transparent nature of the whole thing. You can walk around and access additional information that you want and customize what additional stuff you want to see. There’s not a lot of touch screens or kiosks out in the galleries that could actually be viewed as distractions at times. Its a completely personalized experience. You want additional content – we have it. If you don’t want additional content you won’t see it. Want some quiet time with some amazing art? There’s not a noisy film or kiosk distracting you.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that I am creating explaining how everything works. Next time I’ll get more into the technical side of things… but before I wrap this one up…

I get emails constantly asking when this will be done and if it will be open source.

We developed the prototype for this that “soft launched” last summer. This enabled us to go thru the whole process, do user evaluations and tweak some more before our official launch. This is where we are now. The entire thing will be open sourced as planned all along. We have some clean up and tweaking to do to the backend, and should have the whole thing packaged in the next 2-3 months.

And if you’re really curious, I’ll be speaking at Museums and the Web this year in Colorado on a panel discussion of various mobile solutions with several other institutions. Speaking of…

Some serious shout outs and thank you props to a few of my colleagues that we an invaluable resource to this project. Rob Stein, Charlie Moad and the rest of the awesome development crew at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This is one of the most talented, prolific and awesomely generous bunch of tech guys in our field. Their work is consistently nothing short of stunning and their generosity and willing to share is extremely humbling.

Also thanks to Chris Alexander who now works as an independent museum consultant. Back in his days at the San Jose Museum of Art he developed one of the first mobile museum tours. He’s a super cool guy even if he has to bail on a podcast early to go to the beach…

And finally a super big thanks to Nancy Proctor at the Smithsonian… Nancy heads up the MuseumMobile project and literally knows everyone at every museum in the world and knows every mobile project and prototype in existence. Thank you Nancy for your support, kindness, and generosity. If there is someone who selflessly brings our community together and tirelessly evangelizes the advancement of technology and practice in our profession, and how it makes sense creating a fulfilling experience to users and visitors – this is Nancy.

More to come…