Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3 restores professional features; adds notable new ones.
The June 2011 release of Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X set off a firestorm that reverberated across the globe—at least in video circles. The hotly anticipated new version of Apple’s flagship video software was unexpectedly accompanied by the immediate removal of the previous version—Final Cut Pro 7—along with the company’s Final Cut Server and Final Cut Express apps, from retail distribution. That alone had longtime users jumping ship from the only nonlinear video editor many of them had ever used.
But will it make the pros happy? Or has that ship sailed by now? From what I hear on my only source for things from Digital Video and Convergence FPX is great if you’re working on your own, but no good as soon as you have to deal with anyone else in the workflow chain.
Apple Scotland is having a wee bit of trouble with Siri. Hilarious.
Pretty amazing: Using Hipstamatic on iPhone, Talented Filmmaker Vitùc Creates Stunningly Mesmerizing Stop Motion Film.
This film reaffirms why I believe the iPhone is the single most amazing tool ever - in the palm of your hand you have a digital darkroom with an astonishing array of inspiring post-production tools. In one device you have a camera, post-production editing suite, and music production studio. If you hit a creative mental roadblock, you can relax with a game of Angry Birds.
Via The Digital Convergence Podcast where even someone not interested in video can get pretty enthralled :)
I think I’d try one just to say I did.
Doesn’t that look like a disgusting thing? It’s so disgusting it becomes good! And actually, if you think about it, the Alien Brain Hemorrhage Cocktail seems rather complicated to make. That is, if you base it on the looks of the drink. (Then again, I am no bartender, so I really have no idea.)
Sight unseen I’m going to say that I can’t wait for this to come out. Here’s the trailer, via Geeks of Doom.
Come on April!
Simple story about How Reddit Saved an Orphanage in Kenya. I am proud to be part of this, giving $50 I didn’t have. The results and seeing the pictures of the results made it all worth it though.
While the initial goal was $2,000, TheLake posted an update: “Over $9,000 and I’m in a state of shock.” The next update showed Reddit users contributing a total of $11,000. Donations continued to pour in through the organization’s website, Longonot Education Initiative, was upgraded to a Pro account for two years from its host, Weebly. The company also donated $10,000.
$65,000 in two days. Amazing.
Kudos to go forgetfoo for the link of the New Prometheus Trailer. I so want it to be as awesome as it looks like it will be.
I know the damn kids out there won’t care, but the fact that Rogue Synapse Released ‘The Last Starfighter’ PC Game For Free Download made my day. I still love the movie even though the special effects haven’t held up at all over the years. I still wish I could join the Starfighters…
The plot of The Last Starfighter revolved around a space-set first-person shooter arcade game used to recruit warriors from all over the galaxy for a real interstellar war. The graphics for Rogue Synapse’s Starfighter back in 2006 are based on those of the film’s and the game’s creators have even gone to great lengths to replicate the feel of an authentic 1980s arcade game, right down to the fonts. An 8-bit version of the film’s main title theme composed by Craig Safan and actual Starfighter game audio from the film enhance this amazing retro experience.
You can download the game for free here.
Google Earth 6.2 is out of the gate for Windows and Mac.
Today, we’re introducing a new way of rendering imagery that smoothes out this quilt of images. The end result is a beautiful new Earth-viewing experience that preserves the unique textures of the world’s most defining geographic landscapes—without the quilt effect. This change is being made on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Earth. While this change will appear on all versions of Google Earth, the 6.2 release provides the best viewing experience for this new data.
Some other nice stuff in there too, new search interface, Google Plus integration, and so on.
Don’t Link This asks: Describe your sex live with a movie title and the comments are awesome.
Home Alone.
If you want something on Google Plus a bit more easy to remember than a random string of numbers, check out Google Plus Nick which lets you, for example, point http://gplus.to/alanbailward to [https://plus.google.com/u/0/118382057892892439930/posts](https://plus.google.com/u/0/118382057892892439930/posts]. Handy.
Clear for iPhone looks pretty nice, and is a good example of different and cool UI design in the iPhone space. They’ll have to have sync and other options (repeating tasks, etc) to move me over from Appigo’s Todo though. Really looking forward to checking it out!
Quick video from G+ with a look at the new Photoshop CS6 and Camera Raw. Not a huge amount of new details, as expected Camera Raw follows the new setup that Lightroom 4 showed up with, and the only real details about Photoshop itself is that it’s going to default to a darker theme.
Wow is right: Yosemite Time Lapse. If you don’t have a huge monitor to see this on you’re missing out.
Mark Shuttleworth says Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu..
Say hello to the Head-Up Display, or HUD, which will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications. Here’s what we hope you’ll see in 12.04 when you invoke the HUD from any standard Ubuntu app that supports the global menu…
Basically this looks like a combination of the current Unity “dash” menu and the quicksilver/launchbar/alfred program launcher/utility that Mac users will be familiar with. It allows you to not only launch and search for apps from the dash HUD, but also run menu commands.
There are other teams interested in a similar problem space. Perhaps the best-known new alternative to the traditional menu is Microsoft’s Ribbon. Introduced first as part of a series of changes called Fluent UX in Office, the ribbon is now making its way to a wider set of Windows components and applications. It looks like this: […] You can read about the ribbon from a supporter (like any UX change, it has its supporters and detractors ) and if you’ve used it yourself, you will have your own opinion about it. The ribbon is highly visual, making options and commands very visible. It is however also a hog of space (I’m told it can be minimised). Our goal in much of the Unity design has been to return screen real estate to the content with which the user is working; the HUD meets that goal by appearing only when invoked.
I’m not sure I agree with Mark about the MS ribbon interface, the fact he doesn’t know if it can or can’t be minimized is either commendable (going forward and ignoring the competition) or silly (having no clue what’s going on in the same problem space), but the goals are commendable. I see a few issues that will have to be addressed though:
Those all said it is early days and I anticipate that most of these issues are anticipated and dealt with, and the “every app works like VIM” that they mention would be quite frankly, heavenly for about 80% of the time :)
Vivify looks pretty awesome. Check out the link on reddit for more awesomeness and info.
I finally watched the final episode of season two of BBC’s Sherlock (an awesomely excellent show which everyone must watch) and was reminded by my friend @GlasgowGurl75 to find and grab the texting alert sound from it. Took a bit of looking (ok, one google search) and I found the Text Alert Ringtone
Below is a link to the folder containing the iPhone Ringtone file (TheWoman.m4r) that if you have IOS 5 you will be able to set as an alert message for whomever you think worthy. I’ve also included an MP3 version for other phones. (TheWoman.mp3) Just right click or control-click the file of your choice and download it!
WordPress.com added a set of features that are very tumblr-like, including liking and reblogging, as well as an integrated RSS reader. Looks like they have seen the benefits of having all your products users in one place a-la facebook. Looks good, and the mobile version does as well.
Nvidia Optimus GPU Switching For Linux has been released.
Nvidia Optimus is a technology available for notebooks, used to increases battery life by switching the dedicated GPU off when it’s not needed and then switching it on again when it’s needed. When the dedicated GPU is off, the integrated graphics chip is used.
Nvidia Optimus GPU switching is officially only supported on Windows 7, but it’s also unofficially available on Linux thanks to the Bumblebee project.
If I Were CEO. Yup, that’s about accurate.
Great article on Visual Studio 2010 from Ars, relating it to a text adventure game.
Play starts with the spell game. The game has three difficulty modes. In the two easiest modes Visual Studio questers must cast spells to appease a malevolent gatekeeper known only as "the compiler," combining the text adventuring of Zork with the wizardy and magic of Loom. If the player's spell contains even a single faulty incantation, the compiler will respond with a torrent of abuse and spells of its own; the player must piece together clues contained within compiler's response to determine how they went wrong.
Interesting timing that MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds and the Founder Arrested the day after the internet protested about governments getting too much power to do things like, say, take down websites in other countries.
Just sayin'.
Birds, Ducks and Robots is a look at basically how there is no "perfect" twitter client for iOS. I loved Tweetie and the official twitter app it turned into until the current version. Even ignoring the new layout ("connect", "discover", etc), it's slower and feels more memory and CPU hungry.
After Tweetie was acquired by Twitter Inc. and rebranded as Twitter for iPhone I slowly stopped enjoying the app. First it was small things like removing power user things such as TextExpander touch support. Next it was putting more focus on things relevant to Twitter's bottom line more than my use of the service: trending topics and top tweets. Next, the infamous #dickbar.
I've personally switched over to Tweetbot but it's missing some of the niceness that the official twitter app has, but does give me the light and fast feel that I expect.
Launching ahead of their media event today, At their 7am PST media event, Apple Launches iBooks 2 with Interactive Textbooks, also iTunes 10.5.3 to support textbook syncing. Sadly the textbooks are US only, but I presume more will be showing up soon.
Apple is partnering with McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on the textbook front, with the three companies currently responsible for 90% of textbook sales in the United States. McGraw-Hill and Pearson are rolling out a handful of introductory titles today, with more coming soon.
I wonder what's left to announce at the event? Or maybe it's just going to go through the tools in more details....
Oops, completely missed that it was an EST announcement, not a PST one, so when I saw the links at 7am this morning that was after the announcement :)
Bruce Springsteen has announced a new album called Wrecking Ball, available March 6. Good news for fans. You can get a peek at the track over on his facebook page or directly on youtube.
Apocalypse Later, Surf Now, An Apocalyptic Surf Music Video. Not much to say, other than needs to be watched full screen and in high def :)
Super trippy to watch: The Mind-Boggling Upside-Down World Beneath the Surface of a Frozen Lake
Today Stop SOPA day all around the net, with major websites blocking their content in protest of a (quite frankly) ridiculous bill that the US is trying to pass which, in addition to being completely stupid from the technical perspective (ie: wouldn't do anything) does have the potential to really mess things up on the Internet. Moreso for "normal" people than techies, who (as usual) will have no problems circumventing any of the blocking systems put in place. Not only that but the US government doesn't exactly have a good record in terms of regulation and getting their paws in the Internet's business.
TorrentFreak has a good wrapup of what's going on, and what the sites that are blacked out look like.
Think you're all cool with your Project 365 (photo a day every day)? Bah, so old school and lame! Check out instead This Is What Madeline Schichtel Did In 2011, 1 Year In Under 8 Minutes, the same idea but applied to video, and with sound. Very nifty!
Great news for my Android brothers, the awesome game Osmos is now available on Android. They also have it at 40% off for the first week.
Good blog post about some Exposure 4 Details at the Alien Skin blog. If you don't know, Exposure is a very sweet Photoshop plugin to add texture and effects to photos, and it looks like version 4 is shaping up to be pretty sweet! It'll be available in February 2012 for $249, or $99 upgrade costs.
Fun post outlining what people would play what parts if Star Wars Episode IV were made today.
Making Love to WebKit via Daring Fireball. Pretty amazing use of CSS magic.
Wow.
Has to be the coolest mashup I've seen so far: 'Wall-E' Meets Ridley Scott in 'WALL-ETHEUS'.
Sorry folks, bit of a busy day for me, and sadly that makes a slow news day here at UFies.org. However if you're on the road you may want to check out the new HTML5 Music Player that Streams in the Background from Grooveshark. Works great on my iPhone, and any html5 compliant browser. Not goe-restricted either, as I can play it in Canada (unlike spotify and it's friends).
Thanks to JWZ for linking to the I believe I can fly video, embedded below. Best watched in high def and on a huge monitor.
Those guys be crazy!
Great video from a TED talk in 2010 on how Gaming can make a better world.
Great video of Jimmy Carr destroying some hecklers on his various specials. Absolutely awesome stuff.
This is why you don't mess with a proper comedian :)
JWZ points to Wipeout Quantum!, using the cool (literally) quantum levitation from a while back in it's completely natural application: slot cars.
Cool to see that the program Corel 'AfterShot Pro' Brings Lightroom Competitor to Linux. If you aren't enthralled by Dark Table this might be worth a shot.
Photoshop CS5 simulator built with HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript. I'm honestly blown away by what can be done with modern code. I admit I'm by no means a Photoshop expert, but this pretty much matches what I see when I use it!
Color me there! Now I just need a 3D Printer. And to play Minecraft. Looks awesome though :)
Articles like Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time make up for 10 of the "tweet choir".
[...] 4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that's mysterious -- clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the "now." Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)
Seriously, what sort of brain damage do you have to think that the Microsoft Tweet Choir was a good idea? I know that any press is good press, but who takes these clowns seriously? This is supposed to be a fortune 500 (or 100 or 1000 or whatever it is) company at their last showing at the biggest consumer electronics show.
When people say things like "Well [favorite company here] doesn't make any good stuff, they're just really good at marketing", maybe send them this video. I love Ballmer at the end, just enjoying the hell out of it.
Intel fakes Ivy Bridge graphics on stage at CES via SemiAccurate (course, you can take the article at whatever value you give to a site called "SemiAccurate.com".
Intel Ivy Bridge graphics are still so broken that company executives have to lie about it to the assembled press. Yes, I did say lie, and it is a direct deception, as intended.
Don't you hate it when you lie and get caught?
Update: The SemiAccurate site is a bit slow, here's another link with more / better info.
Well, as many predicted a beta of Lightroom 4 has been released. For photographers this is a pretty good deal. I haven't had a chance to really dig in, but here are the high points:
As with the other Lightroom betas, you can't upgrade your current libraries to the new format (a good thing), so you have to create a new library to play with things. This is a free download that expires March 31, 2012, so download and play around with it!
Some other resources:
Rob Malda writes about how Everything2.com Seeks New Ownership.
Everything2.com was created by Blockstackers not all that long after Slashdot, starting life as everything.slashdot.org. In the years that followed it took on a life of its own, getting its own domain name and growing into a successful community with a culture all its own. For years we supported its staff, but as time passed, it became only a hobby to its founders.
It's a little sad, and I hope that E2 continues in some form or other (even if it's just uploaded to the internet archive as disk images). I honestly haven't gone there in ages, though my page and all my 104 nodes still exist there.
According to mashable the spnKiX motorized shoes are now a reality, thanks to their kickstarter campaign. The fact they raised $71k astounds me, if only because I find it hard to believe that that many people are potentially going to be actually using these things in real life. I can't wait.
Also I hope the flying cars are coming soon.
Ever wanted to relive the glory of restarting your windows 95 computer? Or MacOS 7? Or NEXT? Or Windows XP? Well now you can with The Restart Page!
The master of small flashes (photographic stuff I mean, you pervs), Joe McNally has his review of Shooting the Nikon D4.
The D4 is an entirely new chapter in the history of the pixels. It arrived in a nondescript box. We all stared at it, like it was something that got sent from a sci-fi movie, and if we opened it, we would find the still beating heart of an alien life form.
Anyone want to contribute a bit of $ for the "Buy Alan a new DSLR Rig" fund?
Beautiful video and story by Jeff Harris, who has been doing One Self-Portrait a Day Since 1999.
I'm a bit worried about the upcoming Lucas movie Red Tails. I really want a kick ass World War II flying movie. I really do. I really hope that Lucas doesn't go all Episode 1 on it, or make it look too CGI (some of the scenes in the trailer scream "this is done on a big render farm!". I'm also worried that it'll be more about race relations that absolutely kick ass flying scenes.
This trailer helped with my worry, I cannot wait to see this movie.
Great profile of the awesome company Evernote in Inc Magazine for their Company of the Year. If you know evernote you probably love it, if you don't run out and get this app and start using it now. Seriously, it's awesome, cross platform, and their podcast is hilarious. The article has some nice detail about how the company almost died, what they do, and a nice look at the team and tech behind it all.
[...] Today, the company is swimming in tens of millions of dollars in cash from both VCs and profits. Evernote is buying companies, tripling in size each year, and drawing 40,000 new users a day. If you live in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, where Evernote has reached cult status, none of this probably surprises you. Otherwise, you must be wondering: What the hell is Evernote?
Via the Evernote blog.
Trey has some follow up from his article yesterday on why DSLRs are a dying breed. The article, Scott Bourne and Other Fallout from DSLR Dying article... & Saving Money is great, and a good read.
When you see the title: And now a video of a kid getting hit in the face with an iPad for being a douche it sort of gives the video away. Still, this is a use of the iPad that I completely endorse under these circumstances.
Was passed on this video from Canada to the US on the year of their election.
Fun little video comparing Mac Classic II vs. MacBook Air: which boots faster?
Have the "new new" Facebook timeline but don't have the photo chops to put up a super-awesome cover image? DB is giving away a few Free Facebook Cover Images to get you started with an epic cover image for your facebook timeline.
Tasty story my friend @curtismchale sent over to me: Former Employee Sued for $340K for Taking 17,000 Twitter Followers With Him
A man in California is being sued for $340,000 by his former employer. What did he do? This isn't a case of bringing home the stapler from his cubicle. After resigning from the company, he took his Twitter followers with him--all 17,000 of them.
Scary stuff.
Marco (of Instapaper fame) has released Second Crack on github, his static blogging engine. The FAQ section of the readme is particularly awesome.
I hadn't actually heard that GPS Sucks On The Transformer Prime but reading the breakdown of why was simply stunning. A fail of epic proportions.
At this point, I'm sure you've heard that the Transformer Prime has GPS issues. Issues so bad that ASUS even removed GPS from the Prime's list of features. Under normal circumstances, we would all sit back and wait for a software update to roll out with a fix, but that's not going cut it this time.
So Trey, the HDR / Stuck in Customs guy has an interesting blog post of interest to the Photographically-interested folks out there: DSLRs are a dying breed.
I can't picture myself investing any more money in DSLR bodies and lenses. The new Nikon D4 that is coming out? Not interested.
I don't know if I agree with him 100%, more so with the time frame of 5 years or so than that DSLR technology will fade away just like Film did and non-smartphones are. The biggest issue I have with all of them is the viewfinders (I have yet to find a non-optical viewfinder that doesn't suck), but as he says, this too shall pass.
Kudos to Trey for starting a really interesting conversation :)
So the latest furball furor to hit the net is Google ranking "Sponsored Posts" about google chrome. Search engine land has a big article called Google's Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome and OSNews has a good write up as well. Basically it appears that Google is doing what their anti-spam people specifically prevent people from doing to try to get higher google rankings.
I'm not ready to believe that this is really Google being evil, probably more a marketing plan that mis-fired. They have lots of ads and content out there for Chrome already, from their chrome videos to the "want a better browser" logos that'll pop up when you visit a site on a non-chrome browser. And quite frankly Chrome is good already, they don't need (IMHO anyway) more marketing, especially grey-hat stuff. Just let the better product win, as based on the browser results showing chrome passing firefox and IE steadily losing ground (good!) it already is.
Interesting to see how this pans out.
Nice pointer from Forever Geek on how to Geek Up Your Twitter Profile with an online app called InstaBG, which will pull in images from your Instagram feed and dynamically update your twitter background image.
You can pull down your own images, by category, by tag, or anything from your feed. A very cool setup and a neat app in need of further investigation.
This link has been sitting on my desktop for a while so I figured Monday morning is as good a time as any to post it. A nice tear down of the Nest thermostat that I linked to in October.
So to kick off 2012, and in an apology for it being so quiet around here over the holidays, check out the video below of Rollerman, a French Daredevil With a 31 Wheel Roller Suit.
Or as I'd call him, a crazy mother....