Monthly Archives: October 2011

iCloud

Photography

It’s here and it works.

The last two days were not pretty. The resident Border Terrier wisely kept a low profile while curses flew hither and yonder from the office while his guide and master got the two Hackintoshes to make nice with OS X 10.7.2. You know, the iCloud version. Throw in an iPad, a MacMini, the Apple TV and, tommorow, the iPhone 4S and we can truly say that the old manse is set for the latest and greatest.

Sure, there were issues. The usual hacking ones, which I have only Apple to blame for (because their desktop hardware sucks, and I refuse to use it, preferring Hackintoshes), and the whacked Apple servers delivering all this software goodness – mostly not delivering it, that is – for which someone at Apple should be shot. Twice. I mean, you have $100 billion at the local usurer’s (a.k.a. your neighborhood bank, which you and I just bailed out) and you can’t ramp up for this? Please. How expensive is land in North Carolina anyway?

But there is Magic in the air.

Imagine this.

You fire up the Big Machine in the office. The one with terabytes of storage. You clue it into the iCloud and pick up the iPad, the Border T. at your side on the sofa. And, my Oh! my, the ‘tunes’ are all there seconds later …. You touch one and direct it to play on the Apple TV attached to the LCD screen and its ancient tube amplifier and thirty year old Bowers & Wilkins speakers (a touch Steve would appreciate – ‘British and Best’ as my mum used to say), you pour the evening libation, tickle the pup’s ear and the music plays, the album art displays and you are thinking that maybe the world is not such a bad place.

Especially when the pianists playing four handed on the two big Steinway Ds are the Labèque sisters. And if you have no concept of the benefits of Italian and French parentage, just look:

The Labèque sisters.

Next, pictures.

The iCloud is here and it’s Magic.

Thanks, Steve

Disclosure: Long AAPL 2012 call options..

30 Rock

Photographs

The world center of Art Deco.

Some capitalists – very few – try late in life to redeem themselves. Most prefer to soak the poor as is abundantly clear from data. The disparity of wealth and income, their concentration in a few hands, has never been greater in the Western Hemisphere since 1929 and its looming Great Depression. The pitchforks are being sharpened as I write. One excellent modern example of a capitalist who wreaked great havoc with awful products and monopoly power is Bill Gates. He is mightily redeeming himself through the great work he is doing in the third world with his brains and capital, bringing medicine and health care to the abandoned continent of Africa.

But the shining example of twentieth century American wealth, well used, must be the Rockefeller family. The vision of building the masterpiece that is Rockefeller Center in mid-town Manhattan is as breathtaking today as it must have been in 1930. At the height of the Depression, the family committed vast sums to making the most perfect collection of modern buildings, even if they were to remain largely unrented for the best part of a decade.

In working with our 9 year old son over the weekend on his puzzle of choice – Manhattan and its buildings – I recall the vicarious thrill and flood of memories as we inserted the RCA building, the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center, in its appointed place. More correctly known as 30 Rockefeller Plaza, I recall so many weekend visits back in the early ’80s when New York City was my home. You could still get on 30 Rock’s Observation Deck back then and were pretty much allowed to roam about at will. The art is everywhere, the quality beyond compare.

The rink at 30 Rock, Christmas 1982. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, Kodachrome 64.

There is but a modest selection of Art Deco, or Moderne, on the west coast where I live. If you are serious, you go to Rockefeller Center, the mother lode. If you cannot make a trip, get this book instead:

It’s beautifully illustrated and has copious details on the many artists J D Rockefeller Jr. retained to decorate the vast complex of buildings. It also relates, in fascinating detail, the drama over Marxist Diego Rivera’s stucco mural in the lobby of 30 Rock, where he insisted on including Lenin proudly marching with the oppressed masses, seemingly in defiance of their capitalist overlords. A strange concept given the number of steelworkers and artisans to which Rockefeller Center gave employment. Suffice it to say that the family couldn’t live with the idea, paid Rivera his full $21,000 fee for the half finished work, covered then destroyed it nine months later, replacing it with a supremacist creation from the right wing muralist Josep Maria Sert. Strangely, Sert’s work is maybe even more powerful than Rivera’s, the latter well illustrated in contemporary photographs. Perhaps the best aspect of the book is that it illustrates many pieces you might not normally find – for example the lovely furniture and finishes in …. the women’s toilets in Radio City Music Hall. Not something I might otherwise see! My remaindered copy ran all of $15 but there really is no excuse for missing Rockefeller Center on a trip to New York City. When I take our son a couple of years hence, it will be our first stop. The boy needs to understand what it takes to be a man.

Simple animation

Movies, Technique

A time lapse movie is easy to make.

Our 9 year old son likes to get traditional games from Mindware, a source which specializes in non-electronic toys and games with the common theme of making a child (or adult assistant!) think.

His latest is a study in criminality, also known as the building of Manhattan. First you assemble a jigsaw puzzle of Manhattan, complete with cutouts for all the buildings, then you insert the buildings in chronological order showing how Manhattan, as we know it today, grew. The oldest is the 1812 City Hall, the newest the Millennium Tower, that monument to hubris and stupidity which is an open invitation to terrorists for an action replay of 9/11.

When assembling the puzzle, Winston reminded me that he had taken a movie animation class during his summer holidays, so it was a matter of moments to set up the G3 on a tripod, hand him the wireless remote and instruct him to press the button after each building was inserted. This he proceeded to do with great aplomb, giving the remote a dramatic swing and press each time. David O. Selznick would have been proud.

You can download the result by clicking the picture below. Two things are immediately obvious – the white balance control in the Panasonic G3 sucks (as it did in the G1) and I really should have used a constant light source like an electronic flash. A couple of frames are unsharp, probably the G3 waking from sleep and failing to focus in time. Further the inevitable bumps of the tripod make the result move around a bit. Finally, the Statue of Liberty was not the oldest structure, but as a proud American, Winston insisted of placing it first.

Click the image to download.

I have a pretty good knowledge of Manhattan’s architecure from having lived there many years and because architecture fascinates me, so it was no surprise to find that the easiest buildings to place were those built before 1960 with the hardest dating from the International Style boxes which dominated the subsequent decade. I mean, how do you tell one smooth-sided slab from another? I’ll make honorable exceptions for Seagram for its quality and Lever House for its airiness, both on Park Avenue, but the rest of that period would benefit from a wrecking ball. And if you want something quite unsurpassed for sheer ugliness, try the grandly named 1 New York Plaza on Water Street at the tip of Manhattan, where I worked at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. The miscreant designing this had some sort of obsession with those early touch type elevator buttons because that’s all it resembles.

While you can get a far higher quality result than in this case, the technique involved is simple. Dump all the pictures into iPhoto, click Command-A to select all, then drop them in a New Project in iMovie. I used iMovie ’09. Hit Command-A in iMovie to select all the images then hit C for Crop. Click on Crop to avoid the Ken Burns effect default, which does not work for time lapse movies. Then export the movie (‘Share’). This one has 127 images/buildings, one second for each. The download is just 11mB in size.

Why your next camera should be a phone

iPhone

The demise of point-and-shoot cameras.

Watching Tim Cook’s roll out of the iPhone 4S this past Tuesday, I was struck by this slide:

A typical, disingenuous presenter would have taken the simple way out – shown the iPhone as having some 30-50% share of the smartphone market. Cook was more honest. 5% is the iPhone’s share of the global cell phone market, he stated, and the reason we are showing the statistic that way is that we believe eventually every cell phone user will be a smartphone user.

That seems right. One of the unremarked, yet very significant, features of the latest iPhone, the 4S, is that for the first time no computer is required to use it. Most of the world’s citizens still do not own a computer. Most wish they did. Now the iPhone comes to you with over the air start-up and maintenance, including back-up and remote storage. No computer is required. It is a computer. You might say that the iPhone is the computer for the rest of the world much as the Macintosh was the Computer for the Rest of Us all those years ago.

I ordered the new iPhone 4S as soon as the online page to do so became available. There are several reasons, but the most important is that I am a huge fan of the process of early adoption of new technologies. For those who are always waiting for Version 2 of anything, the cheaper, debugged one, I say “Your time is worth little and you value your life even less”. Every day represents a higher percentage of my remaining time on earth and that means a lot to me. The math is the same for the late adopter, the result different.

I set forth my beliefs concerning early adoption in The Unfair Advantage. Later, writing about Steve Jobs’s last days as CEO of Apple I stated:

“Transduction is increasingly a matter of speech and touch rather than hitting idiotically disposed keys on keyboards designed around the mechanical limitations of a bygone age. ”

That day is rapidly approaching and the first likely usable realization for the man in the street will be the Siri voice recognition technology in the iPhone 4S. The keyboard’s days are finally numbered. I was especially attracted to the use of the new phone with Wikipedia. I encourage our son to do his homework using Wikipedia on the iPad. Now he will no longer have to type his query. He will just speak it. And I very much want to confer the Unfair Advantage this suggests upon him. Remember how Jobs showed the very first iPhone to a friend and asked him what he thought, only to be met with the reply “You had me at scrolling!”? Well, the iPhone 4S had me at Siri.

So as Apple and Android continue to do a number on dumbphones, Apple has just announced the death of the worst possible thing about computing, the keyboard.

But there’s another nascent seismic change in the iPhone 4S, and in other better smartphones, and that’s the new Sony 8mp camera. Now, goodness knows, I’m no fan of small sensors. After all, I really like large prints and small sensors don’t cut it there – yet. Meanwhile, we have foolish efforts by the likes of Nikon and Fuji who are making cameras with miniscule sensors at less than miniscule prices. Given that everyone has to have a phone and as every smartphone comes with a camera with a like sized sensor, why on earth would you shell out $600-1,000 on these short lived toys when you can get much the same capability in your phone? And the iPhone’s Sony camera boasts some non-trivial features, features to which Apple devoted very substantial time in its product roll out this week:

Click the picture for the feature list.

With improving ergonomics – no need to switch the phone on to take a snap, under 0.5 seconds from snap to snap, a better disposed shutter button (the latest iOS variant allows the use of the side/top mounted volume buttons to take a picture), better definition, high battery life, HDR, 1080p movie mode, vibration reduction and so on – you get a lot of what the designers looking in the rear view mirror at Nikon and Fuji want to charge you $700 for. Plus, at the touch of an icon my iPhone snaps will be in the cloud, available on all my devices. No upload/download/frustration cycle to deal with and you always have a decent camera with you. And unlike the tired offerings of the camera makers, when you upgrade your iPhone two years hence at no cost, selling the old one for a profit to some Eastern European, its replacement will come with an even better camera while your Fujikcanon rots in the desk drawer, obsolete and worthless, aired annually at Christmas.

So the nascent technology in the latest generation of smartphones will not only kill the keyboard. If I were a manufacturer of point-and-shoot mass market cameras, where I make my bread and butter, I would be seriously scared and looking for new directions in my business. And I already know that I can only sell so many large sensor behemoths to the ‘serious’ crowd, allowing me to downmarket to the rest. The point-and-shoot camera’s demise was announced this week, coinciding neatly with Kodak’s impending bankruptcy.

Stay tuned here for my experiences with the camera in the iPhone 4S, which I should have in a few days. My tired old iPhone 3G? It’s already programmed for use as a universal wireless remote. Ivan can buy his elsewhere.

Can cell phones take pictures? Wrong question. Photographers take pictures.

Disclosure: Long AAPL call options.