Monthly Archives: April 2010

Today’s slideshow

iPad, Photography

Air Mouse comes to the iPad

My big screen TV is also my slide show device. The TV has three inputs:

  • A Mac Mini
  • An AT&T Uverse cable box/DVR
  • A BluRay DVD player (Mac OS X does not support BluRay and I will die before Windows enters our home ever again)

The Mac Mini is the input used most. I don’t watch much TV and BluRay is vastly overrated for a 42″ screen like ours. A solution looking for a problem. Our inexpensive BluRay player is seldom used.

The Mini is set up for four inputs, well actually five with the fifth being invisible. A picture tells the story:

The home TV screen

If you are wondering about the insanely low CPU temperature shown in the menu bar, above, it’s because I do not trust Apple one bit when it comes to cooling their devices, having lost any number to overheating. Do yourself a favor and crank up the Mini’s 1,800 rpm default setting for its single fan to 3,500 rpm using something like Fan Control. A new fan is a lot cheaper than a new Mini.

Movies loads DVDpedia wherein my 800+ movie library catalog resides. Click a movie and it links to the file on the file server (8tB of hard disk drives) and the movie plays instantly using VLC. I replaced the DVDpedia native icon with one more to my liking.

Music loads iTunes where my collection of some 250 classical CDs resides on a separate server.

Netflix loads Safari whose icon I have replaced with a more appropriate one. Safari’s home page is set to Netflix On Demand where I can see my movie queue, which I manage using …. the iPad, of course! One click and the movie plays using Microsoft’s Silverlight, maybe the only solid software product from Redmond in the last two decades. (Netflix is likely forced to use it as their CEO, Reed Hastings, sits on MSFT’s board, poor bugger – just imagine having to listen to that boob Ballmer monthly). The 2.26GHz C2D CPU and Nvidia GeForce 9400M GPU in the Mac Mini despatch video processing with aplomb and, unlike with my former 1.6Ghz Intel Atom powered hacked MSI Barebone TV computer, there is never so much as a hint of a stutter or pause, with iSlayer’s CPU meter in the menu bar confirming a light load on the CPU at all times.

Photos is nothing more or less than iPhoto, but as my photo library resides on the HackPro in my office, iPhoto is pointed to that library to display slideshows on the big screen. This may well be the future for art books – a 42″ screen can really do art and photographs justice. But go up to 100″ and, suddenly, Caravaggio‘s Salome is shown at three times the size of the original canvas. Simply mind blowing!

DVD – this is the fifth and invisible input. Insert a physical DVD (remember those?) into the Mini and it invokes DVD player and your movie plays with full on screen controls.

But was is the secret sauce making the user interface a dream, my great design work notwithstanding? Well, until yesterday everything was done with a wireless mouse on the sofa and, on rare occasions, with a wireless keyboard. No more.

Say Hello to Air Mouse for the iPad.

Click the picture to go to the Air Mouse web site

Now just imagine doing this with a Windows computer:

  • Download Air Mouse to iPad – 30 seconds
  • Download server side app to your PC/Mac Mini and install – 1 minute
  • Input passwords – 20 seconds
  • Start controlling everything you see in the first picture, above, using the biggest touch screen mouse remote north of Cupertino, CA

Right. Isn’t going to happen with yesterday’s technology. But the above did happen with the iPad and the Mac Mini. I know. I just did it.

Air Mouse allows you to use the iPad’s touchscreen as a trackpad for the mouse pointer and also offers many application-relevant controls for a host of apps – Camino, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, on and on, with a touch keyboard available on demand. These include function keys and volume. The cursor is perfectly responsive with no delay or stutter and the maker’s forum shows they are responsive to bug fixes. Plus, at $2.99, what have you got to lose? The maker has had lots of earlier experience with a like app for the iPhone, which helps and let’s face it, who wants to use a phone to control the TV, especially when a call comes in?

Upshot? I have just retired my TV wireless mouse and keyboard. You will too, when you do the above. Mobile Mouse supports two finger scrolling just like on your Mac laptop, so now you can scroll lists on your big screen TV with two fingers on the iPad.

Now there are, what, 250,000 brilliant (OK, only some are brilliant) programmers out there writing code right now for the iPad to address some favorite use or niggling frustration with yesterday’s technology. Just imagine what we will be seeing over the next few quarters. Thank goodness for the ‘closed’ system enforced by Apple over applications and code. The alternative is anarchy, infection and denial, familiar to the users of the other desktop OS. Let’s face it, they just don’t get it.

Mobile Mouse is highly recommended for your iPad. Once multitasking comes to the iPad this fall, switching in and out of Air Mouse will be even faster. As it is, from touch to use is under one second.

Independent test follow-up: I gave the iPad to our eight year old boy to test Mobile Mouse, instructing him to start a Netflix streaming movies for kids. Now if you question his independence, I can assure you that Winston calls it the way he sees it, like any eight year old. No guile, no deception, just the facts. And unlike our politicians, he cannot be bought.

It took him a little while to get the hang of two finger scrolling and at first he persisted in looking at the iPad’s screen rather than at the TV, but once he got it, it was off to the races.

Winston, a man of few words, has but three ratings in life:

  • Awesome – meaning it rocks!
  • Cool – damning with faint praise
  • Daddy, can I please watch the TV? You figure it out

To cut a long story short, Mobile Mouse got his highest rating, ‘Awesome’, and a glazed look often seen on the faces of those experiencing true magic.

Disclosure: No financial interest in any vendor cited above.

Another iPad Photos anomaly

iPad

RAW does not work well.

Yesterday I commented on how long it takes to email a photo using Photos on the iPad if the original you imported using the Camera Connection Kit was in RAW format. Bottom line is that it takes so long (>4 minutes) that it’s a waste of time. (At this point Apple fanboys, blinded by Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field, can pour themselves a tall glass of STFU and exit stage left).

Today, I took a RAW snap, uploaded it from the G1’s SDHC card to the iPad using the Camera Connection Kit’s SDHC card reader, then emailed it from the iPad to a poor unenlightened individual who has the misfortune of using Windows 7 and MSFT Exchange at work.

The reply came back: “I cannot open the file”. Now being an empirical type (meaning I don’t write “it works” until I have tried it, unlike some of the jerks posting comments here), I also copied myself on the email to Mail app in Snow Leopard. I could see the JPG preview attached to the RAW file fine, and also noted that the RW2 RAW file, some 12mB in size, was attached to the email. However, all the Windows 7-using addressee could see was an RW2 icon which he could not open, not having the necessary RAW converter on his PC. Further, the large file size of the JPG to which the RAW file was attached may well have been blocked by his employer’s email system. So he saw nothing save an RW2 icon which he could not open. Like so:

I fished around in Photos on the iPad and also in iPad’s Settings->Photos but could not find an option to send only the JPG file as an email attachment. So, if you want your iPad-emailed photos to be visible to all email addressees, it seems that the right thing to do now is to forget RAW and shoot in JPG. That way only a JPG will be sent, visible to one and all.

Further, unlike sending photos by email using iPhoto on a Mac – which gives you a choice of which size you wish to send – there is no such option at present in iPad’s Photos app, meaning that whatever resolution you shoot the JPG with will be the size emailed. As my native JPG in the G1 is set high, that makes for large JPGs – not very useful when all an email generally dictates is a photo with a long side no more than 640 pixels.

iPad Camera Connection Kit

iPad

Not very useful.

I just received the iPad Camera Connection Kit from Apple:

It includes two adapters which plug into the base socket on the iPad – one for direct connection of a camera, the other to allow download to the iPad of images stored on an SDHC card.

I tried it with a direct connection to the Panasonic G1, noting the following:

  • 20 RAW images took some 10 seconds to download to the Photos app on the iPad – not bad
  • The JPG previews are 1336 x 2000 pixels (2.7mB), which is what you will see when you email yourself the photo, in addition to the underlying 10-12mB RAW file
  • You cannot sync photos downloaded to the iPad to your desktop. Right now iTunes only allows sync from desktop to iPad, not the other way around
  • The only way to get a photo to your desktop is to email it to yourself
  • Try to email more than one RAW image at a time (approx.11mB per image) and the iPad chokes
  • Sending a single image take 4 minutes which is as good as useless
  • Preview on the iPad is fine but that’s as far as it goes as Photos has no processing capability yet
  • Most disappointingly, you cannot use the iPad as a giant Live View preview screen for composing studio pictures, as the G1’s EVF is diabled the moment a camera cable is plugged in. Other Live View cameras may differ.

SDHC connector and camera connector – you supply the cable

Connecting the SDHC card reader and inserting an 8gB SDHC Transcend card saw the same 20 pictures loaded to the iPad in 7 seconds. Not bad at all.

  • All the other limitations, above, apply – not good
  • If you are using a camera which uses CF cards, use a CF->SDHC card adapter in the camera as the Camera Connection Kit does not accept CF cards

    So what’s needed here to make the iPad more than a cursory review device is the following:

    • Software for the iPad with processing controls
    • Two way cable sync between the iPad and a connected computer to allow speedy moving of files from the iPad to the desktop.
    • Panny needs to update its software to allow piping of Live View images to an external device

    However, long time readers of this column will know that Dr. P. is anything but a quitter. Check my earlier piece on iPhone Explorer, written when the only people with iPads were Steve Jobs’s kids and a few guys in Cupertino, CA sworn to secrecy on penalty of death, and you will see that you can look at your iPhone files by simply firing up iPhone Explorer on a Mac to which your iPhone is connected. Well, guess what? It works just fine with the iPad!

    iPad files viewed on a desktop Mac using iPhone Explorer

    In case you are wondering about the two XMP sidecar files shown above, those were generated by the iPad when I emailed the related RAW files to myself. I did not email the third, hence only two XMP files.

    Now you can drag and drop the files onto your connected Mac and transfer is lightning fast. The three RW2 RAW files from the G1 came over in 3 seconds with the iPad connected using the standard USB cable. They open fine in Lightroom which sees them as RAW files:

    RAW files from iPad downloaded to LR using iPhone Explorer

    I had hoped that maybe you could just use LR’s “File->Import Photos from Device” menu option but unfortunately LR 2.6 does not see the iPad as a device. Given the awfully bad blood between Adobe and Apple at this time, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for LR to recognize the iPad any time soon. No matter, someone else will figure it out. Obviously, if iPhone Explorer can see the files, it’s not exactly nuclear physics to make a photo processing Mac application see them.

    Well, it’s a start. At least you can move files quickly to the iPad by sidestepping email but there’s work to be done in Apple HQ.

    Disclosure: No AAPL position.

    Follow-up:

    I have received several comments from readers who assure me I am doing something wrong and that I merely need to load iPhoto on my Mac to transfer photos from the iPad. Clearly, none of these readers have tried that. Talk is cheap. Expertise rare. It will be a cold day in hell before I publish drivel like “You are doing something wrong” with no suggestions as to what ‘right’ is. What possible value are you adding by wasting your time typing that?

    However, I have found out what I was doing wrong, no thanks to these useless Comments. Where do you people come from?

    Here’s the fix.

    I was connecting the iPad to one of the USB outlets on my Dell monitor. These are low power outlets (0.25 watt if memory serves) and clearly do not generate sufficient power to force recognition of the iPad in iPhoto. I twigged this when it occurred to me that you can use these low power outlets for recharging the iPad , if slowly, only when the iPad is asleep. Otherwise, the iPad displays a ‘Not charging’ message. Aaah! More power is needed.

    So I connected the iPad to a motherboard outlet on my Mac and, voila*, the iPad and its picture album popped up in iPhoto and download was speedy and easy.

    Let me repeat. Comments which add value will be published. All others, like this jerk’s, go to spam status.

    * Or ‘viola’ as those asinine commentators would put it.

    • No more dead forests

    iPad, Photographs

    Magazines on the iPad.

    Much as I enjoy my monthly fix of fashion and gossip, not to mention some of the best photography on planet earth, which arrives in the mail in the guise of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, I always think when I recycle these what a stunning waste of resources they represent. Forests and nasty chemicals to make, fuel to deliver, fuel to recycle, and so on. Now while I’m not some nutty global warming crazy, it just seems wrong that we should be destroying the world’s resources in search of the latest in clothing and fashions.

    Zinio to the rescue! They have just released an iPad app, and while it’s a work in progress it looks very promising. Some magazines don’t get it yet – meaning that links to articles, advertisers, related web sources, etc. should be clickable (Duh!) but it’s a start. You pay, download the magazine and can take it with you to read at any location with the caveat that any links that are present dictate the need for a wifi connection if they are to work.

    National Geographic doesn’t get links, yet, (I sometimes wonder if they get anything judging by their poorly engineered archive DVDs) and the issue takes a minute to load, but that’s not long to wait for some of the world’s greatest photography. I’m reproducing what follows at full iPad screen size so you can get a sense of the quality:

    National Geographic downloads ….

    Here’s a typical photo display:

    A photo in full screen display:

    And another – an absolute show stopper from Gerd Ludwig:

    Here’s the subscription screen for Harper’s with a lovely Demi Moore on the cover:

    I forget what I pay for the print subscription but suspect it’s more than the $8 asked for the iPad one.

    Macworld most certainly does get clickable links, and they have a very nice implementation, ads and all. No issue with the latter as they add value to any user interested in what’s out there.

    I learned of the availability of Macworld on the iPad by accident and shame on the publishers for doing such a poor job of advertising it. It’s excellent and as my print sub just expired, I’ll be renewing for the electronic version which is far easier to read than their free web site in Safari.

    There are a few British magazines and many Chinese (!) ones available. The British ones are simply clueless on pricing – an annual subscription typically being twelve times the cost of one issue. Double Duh!

    Otherwise, what’s not to like?

    Disclosure: Long AAPL common, now appreciated 68.7 32gB iPads at the time of writing. You do the math. Short AAPL covered call options at the time of writing.

    Just walking the pup

    Photographs

    Sometimes you get lucky.

    Though I’m no great fan of the “always carry a camera” exhortation, preferring to argue that you seek out good pictures and they rarely just happen, I was walking the dog yesterday and spotted these five in the space of 2 minutes and twenty yards. All I had was the iPhone 3G but it seems to have done OK in the circumstances.

    Awning.

    AT&T

    GTO

    Dodge

    Corrosion

    Always carry …. an iPhone!

    A note on iPhone photo files sizes: If you email a photo taken on the iPhone the size is 640 x 480, or 0.3 mp. By contrast, if you download it to Lightroom or iPhoto by connecting the iPhone to your desktop or laptop, the full size of 1600 x 1200, or 1.9 mp is downloaded, which is still not great but offers far better definition.