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Five Subversion Clients for Mac OSX

Until fairly recently if you were a Mac user and you wanted to use a version control system like Subversion you didn’t have much choice as far as client apps went. If you didn’t have the terminal skills to work via the command line and wanted use something with a nice GUI then you had to choose from apps that were either incomplete or not particularly Mac-like.

However, the latter half of 2008 brought a lot of change in regards to Subversion client apps for OSX. It’s kind of like with buses, if you wait long enough several of them come along at once ;)

Subversion clients from A (Adobe Dreamweaver) to Z (ZigVersion)

To give the various apps available thorough overviews is beyond the scope of this article, so I’m just going to list the various apps that are available and point out some of their features.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

Dreamweaver CS4 added support for the Subversion version control system, something I’ve long thought would be a great feature and one which via an extension was available to Windows users. However, I don’t think the implementation of it in Dreamweaver CS4 is as good as it could be.

One issue in particular is that the commands for Checking out and committing to a repository are the same as those used for the regular Checkin / Checkout functions of Dreamweaver which I think is a bit confusing as they are very different features. Using these terms is a problem as they don’t match up with the correct terminology used in Subversion. Dreamweaver is often the first app (rightly or wrongly) that people who are learning how to make websites use so there’s a bit of a responsibility for it to teach people correctly and to encourage good habits.

I consider Dreamweaver CS4’s SVN integration to be a good first step but it could do with improvement to make it more usable. Unless you use Dreamweaver already then you’re probably not going to start doing so just to get access to its Subversion integration. But if you’re already a Dreamweaver user then it does offer some useful functionality, and if you’re a DW user but have never used version control then it’s a good enough place to start!

Dreamweaver CS4 costs $399 for a commercial licence but there are also educational licences and there is also a 30 day trial.

→ Go to the Dreamweaver CS4 website

ZigVersion

When I first started using Subversion ZigVersion was the best solution for OSX that I tried. It was the most user friendly / easy to use out of all the clients available at the time such as SVNX, Syncro SVN and SCPlugin. I’ve always used a hosted Subversion repository ever since I started using Subversion so I was needing an application that would allow me to easily connect to an external server. ZigVersion made it pretty easy to do that, and to an SVN noob it was fairly easy to understand what was going on.

Once connecting to my SVN repository it was quite easy to create a working copy and update it from the repository files. After working on files it was easy to find the updated files with a simple click on the ‘Changed Files’ icon in the menubar. Only the new or updated files would be shown which could then be selected and checked in to the repository with appropriate comments added at the same time. It was also easy to get access to revisions of files via the ‘Revision Viewer’ button.

It’s a pretty straight forward application and does the job, one criticism would be that the interface is fairly unexciting in appearance. I mainly say that as this is a review of Mac OSX Subversion GUI apps so the visual appearance is important and the main reason why I’m not including SVNX or Syncro SVN amongst these applications.

ZigVersion costs $99 for a commercial licence but is free for non-commercial use. There is also a 30 day trial period.

→ Go to the ZigVersion website (Zigversion no longer appears to be available)

Versions

We’re now getting into the mac-daddy territory of Mac OSX Subversion apps. Versions was the first of the new wave of Mac SVN apps, despite showing as "coming soon" for over a year and feared by many to be vapourware.

However, although it was delayed the app was launched and it delivered on its promise of providing a much more Mac-like app for dealing with Subversion repositories and the tasks involved with working with them.

Versions’ main tool bar provides buttons for Update, Commit, Checkout and other options, just under the main toolbar there are three tabs, Timeline, Browse and Transcript. The Timeline tab gives you a timeline in the form of a list of revisions and accompanying notes which makes it easy to view the changes made over a period of time. The Browse tab allows you to view the repository files and view history of individual files as well as comparing, managing blame and also a Quick Look option for quickly viewing the contents of files.

There is a quick setup button that will get you setup with an account at Beanstalkapp.com who provide online SVN repository hosting, there’s a free account offering one repository to get you started with various tiered pricing options after that.

Versions deserves credit for really raising the bar for Mac SVN apps, the teaser page had me longing for months for them to launch the app! Although in the end I had give up waiting and buy ZigVersion instead in order to get some kind of GUI access to my repository.

Versions costs €39 (approx $50) for single user licence, there is a 21 day trial period.

→ Go to the Versions website

Cornerstone

This is the Subversion app I’ve been using the most out of all of them recently, although it’s a pretty close race between it and Versions. Cornerstones’ interface is well thought out and well designed and by that I don’t mean just good looks but that it provides a great feature set for working with multiple SVN repositories.

You can easily filter the working copy files in different states such as Changed, Modified, Conflicted, Unversioned and Locked. The ability to filter files this way is an essential feature in an SVN app, finding changed files in order to commit them to the repository is one of the most things I do.

Cornerstone also offers a great horizontal timeline view that displays the various revisions which is great for quickly reviewing the details of each revision such as dates, times, Revision notes and changes made.

Cornerstone costs $59 for a single user licence but you can use a trial version for 14 days to check it out.

→ Go to the Cornerstone website / → Buy Cornerstone from the Mac App Store

Coda

Coda is a text-editor for web development, its main strength being the integration of several aspects of the common web development workflow: text editor, FTP, CSS editing and Terminal. In a recent update the application now has integrated Subversion support which adds it to this growing list of OSX Subversion clients.

Coda’s SVN integration adds a simple source control status window that quickly highlights changed files making it easy to find updated files and commit them to the repository. There is also easy access to a Source Control menu option offering committing / discarding changes, refreshing, comparing and updating the repository.

It is smoothly integrated into the workflow of Coda and rounds out the feature set of the application and it’s aim to provide a one-window web development environment.

Coda costs $99 for single user licence, there’s a 30 day trial period.

→ Go to the Coda website

Closing – Rise of Git

Ironically as all of these Subversion apps start to appear many people are starting to switch to using Git instead of SVN! There are a couple of Mac GUI apps for Git available so far such as GitX and Gitnub so check them out if Git is more your thing.

Update: Couple of new Subversion / Git apps on the Mac App Store

If you’re using Beanstalk for Subversion / Git hosting you might want to check out the app Magic Bean for Mac too. There’s also an app called SourceTree which supports Git and Mercurial and also has some support for Subversion. I haven’t tried either app yet but worth a look I think.

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FlamingoHD – Helping you manage your AVCHD media

FlamingoHD is a new application by Shedworx (the guys that make VoltaicHD), with the purpose of helping you manage all of your AVCHD video footage. Although AVCHD has greater than ever support these days it still presents a challenge when it comes to managing all of the video that you’ve shot, especially as the convenience of shooting straight to disk or card kind of encourages you to record a lot more than you would when using tape!

FlamingoHD provides a solution to this problem by enabling direct import from your AVCHD camera or alternatively importing AVCHD clips that are already on your hard disk. It does this by providing a preview thumbnail of the video footage before you import it, this saves a lot of time compared to iMovie or Final Cut Pro as you can choose only the clips you want without having to convert the footage first.

The user interface is easy to understand as it features a left hand menu very similar to iPhoto or iTunes which contains sections for Devices, Events and Projects, very similar to the iLife applications.

Importing AVCHD footage into FlamingoHD:

The basic process is to select the source of your video footage. You can either connect your camera to your computer which will automatically show up in FlamingoHD as a device, or you can select ‘Import Media’ from the File menu to select either a single clip or a folder containing clips from a location on your hard disk, once selected they will show as a device in the ‘Devices’ section in the left hand menu. It’s also worth clarifying that FlamingoHD will actually import video, audio and images from your source device or location and can manage all of these assets within Events and Projects.

Setting Preferences and Creating Events:

With a device selected ready for import you can then choose which clips you want to import into FlamingoHD, the imported files will automatically become an Event, or more than one Event if there are multiple clips shot on more than one day. This can be controlled by a preference which allows you to switch off this feature if you just want to import everything into one event.

The application preferences are worth checking out as there are a couple of other important preferences to consider. The first is ‘Hide media already imported’ which is enabled by default, this is useful when there are a lot of clips on a camera that you have already imported as it hides the ones you’ve already brought in.

The second important preference is ‘Copy imported media to Library area’, it’s important to set this appropriately because if it is ticked any clips imported from a folder on your computer will be copied to FlamingoHD’s Library which will take up more space and will result in duplicate files. Clips imported directly from a camera will be copied to the library regardless of this setting, the location of the Library for FlamingoHD can be set in the Base Location preference under the General tab.

Creating Projects:

Once you’ve imported clips into FlamingoHD you can then group clips together into Projects, these projects can then be sent to exported in via several methods, either ready for editing or as final output.

Projects are created by selecting ‘New Project…’ from the File menu, this adds an entry under the Projects section of the left hand menu which you can name to suit. Once the Project has been created you can drag and drop clips from any of the events that you previously created.

Exporting / Converting Projects:

After creating a project you can then choose to export or convert your files. FlamingoHD has options to send files to VoltaicHD, RevolverHD, iMovie and also to the assets folder of other editing applications such as Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro.

You can export by either right-clicking on the Project name or by selecting the Project and clicking on the ‘Media’ option from the main menu. The four options at the bottom of the menu allow you several choices for your project:

Send to VoltaicHD
This option will send your footage to VoltaicHD and it will be queued up and converted ready for use in whatever application you want.

Send to RevolverHD
Selecting this option will send your AVCHD files to RevolverHD where they can be burned as either AVCHD DVD or Blu-ray DVDs that can be played back on Blu-ray players such as the Playstation 3.

Send to iMovie…
This option is specifically for sending your project to iMovie, it creates a new project in iMovie and sends your clips to VoltaicHD for conversion, once converted you can open iMovie and all of the clips will be there in the new project.

Send to Editor…
Using this option will send files to a folder in the assets location of your preferred editing software, you can set this option in the Preferences of FlamingoHD. The AVCHD clips will be converted in VoltaicHD and copied to the folder. You can then open your editing software and bring in the files that are ready for editing.

In Beta and available now!

FlamingoHD has worked pretty well for me so far but it is worth pointing out that (at the time of writing) that it is a 0.1 version, as such it’s beta software and still being actively developed. However, the developers Shedworx have made it available to purchase now for the reduced price of $29.99 while it is in beta, the price will increase after the beta period.

FlamingoHD already provides a very useful application for managing all of your AVCHD media, but one aspect I haven’t mentioned is that it will also handle any video format that is supported by Quicktime so it can also be used for cameras that don’t use AVCHD as the video format. For me this is the key to the application’s potential, it fulfils a function that Apple’s own iLife suite doesn’t provide, that of being a specific video asset management tool.

The only criticism I can see is that it currently doesn’t provide direct playback of the video clips that are imported into it, instead the files are opened into Quicktime player. The biggest drawback of this being that Quicktime player doesn’t currently support AVCHD clips. However, Apple’s next release of Mac OS X, 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’, is supposed to support AVCHD so that will be one solution, but in the meantime perhaps enabling AVCHD clips to open in the open source VLC player could be integrated as this already provides playback of AVCHD footage. The next release version 0.2 will provide a film-strip view of clips which will at least make it easier to examine the clips in more detail without needing to open them.

Give it a try for yourself, there’s a demo version that is limited to a maximum of 2 events, 2 projects and 50 clips, this gives you enough to try it out and kick the tyres. There are also demo versions of VoltaicHD and RevolverHD so you can test out the whole workflow. Finally, don’t forget to give feedback to the developers via the FlamingoHD contact form, they’re keen to consider people’s ideas and to hear about any issues people encounter with the software.

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Atlas by 280North

280North’s Atlas looks pretty amazing, a tool to create web applications (Rich Internet Apps) but not based on Flash / Flex but on the core HTML, CSS, Javascript capabilities of modern web browsers.

Built on the open source Cappuccino web framework which has the advantage of abstracting away all the browser quirks etc and just allowing you to focus on creating really powerful web applications.

It uses a programming language called Objective-J which is built on top of Javascript and modelled on Apple’s Objective-C language used in Mac OS X and iPhone OS applications.

Check out the videos below for demos of it in action.

Introduction to Atlas from 280atlas.com:

Demo of Atlas at Future of Web Apps Miami 2009:

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Quick Review: eduStyle.net / The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design

If you’re involved in web design and development for Higher Education then you may already be aware of the great website eduStyle which showcases examples of website design from Higher Ed institutions from around the world with the aim to provide a place for “web professionals to learn from and be inspired by work of their peers“.

The main feature of the site is a gallery where you can browse through various sites. Each site has a screenshot of the website and you can then click through to a detail page showing a large image and of course the URL of the site. It also allows you to vote for the site as to whether it’s ‘My Style‘ or ‘Not My Style‘. eduStyle also run the annual Higher-ed Web Awards so if you see a site you like you can also nominate the site for an award via link on the detail page. There’s also a blog with regularly updated articles and info about events etc.

Review of “The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design”

Ok, slightly odd to call this a review when I haven’t even read the book yet! However, eduStyle have published a book titled “The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design”, given that the website is such a good resource then it’s certain that the book will be very useful too. It’s been released as a PDF version initially and will be published in print in due course for those, like myself, that like the feel of real paper! The book has some interesting goals:

  • Get External Validation of Your Design Ideas
  • Learn Best Practices and Common Pitfalls of Higher Ed Homepage Design
  • Get Tips To Improve the Usability of Your Homepage
  • Find Out Leading Edge Design Trends
  • Discover Common Themes Between Noteworthy Winners
  • Understand the Reasoning Behind Your Competitor’s Designs
  • Learn Secrets That Can Get Your Homepage Noteworthy Status

Anyway, that’s enough rambling about a book I haven’t read, you can go to the eduStyle site to read more about it yourself!

~Rick

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Twenty Five facts about me

Ben tagged me on his blog so I thought I’d continue his ‘7 things’ meme.

However, I’ve changed it to 25 things instead as my wife tagged me on Facebook with a similar meme so I’m killing two birds with one stone!

  1. I moved to Guyana, South America for two years when I was 6 years old and was there when the Jonestown suicide took place. I lived across the road from Clive Lloyd the famous cricketer. Our house was once burgled by the very guard we paid to protect it.
  2. I went to an American school whilst in Guyana, it finished around 12.30 every day so my brother and I hung out in the pool every day. I learned to swim underwater and could hold my breath for over two minutes.
  3. I have a degree in Fine Art, a BA (Hons) Time Based Art from Dundee University to be specific.
  4. I have both an HNC and HND in Graphic Design too.
  5. I have been skateboarding since 1985, but I also rode BMX for a few years before that, I still own a BMX now and still ride it at the skatepark every so often. I can still bust out a miami hopper and many other old school BMX flatland tricks.
  6. I was Scottish Mini-ramp skateboard champion in the mid-90’s.
  7. My hair has been blue, orange and red over the years, also green but that wasn’t really on purpose.
  8. I don’t have much hair nowadays and shave my head frequently, but I bet I spend a lot less time getting ready in the morning than most people reading this!
  9. My Dad has lived overseas most of my life which has meant I was fortunate to spend a lot of holidays in my teenage years in Dubai in the UAE.
  10. I used to go running in the desert with a running club in Dubai and once ran a half-marathon at night and finished in the top five. Now those same places I ran in are literally fields of green grass having been made into one of Dubai’s several world class golf courses.
  11. I was a member of both the British Airways Junior Jet Club and British Caledonian Lion Club, and frequently visited the pilots in the cockpit to say hi.
  12. I have been to Australia four times, and have been swimming with manta rays there two times.
  13. I’ve been working for myself / running my own business since 1998. (www.wideopenspace.co.uk)
  14. I would love to fly as a passenger in some kind of fighter jet.
  15. I once went gliding in an old open cockpit World War 2 era glider in Wales which was awesome.
  16. I am an Apple Mac geek and have been since I first used one in 1989. I have some old Macs that I collect, in particular an Apple IIe and an SE30. I have a few more hiding in cupboards in my house.
  17. I once met the band Kajagoogoo in Gatwick airport and got their autographs.
  18. I’m not a fan of the 80’s and especially don’t like the recent 80’s pop fashion revival / nostalgia. It’s one of the main reasons I dislike the London 2012 Olympics branding.
  19. The first CDs I ever bought were by Stiff Little Fingers and The Fall.
  20. I like lot’s of different kinds of music but dislike ‘rock’ bands like Def Leppard, Europe etc, again, kind of a dislike of the 80’s!
  21. I’ve always preferred American punk music much more than British punk music.
  22. I’m 36 years old and have had a provisional driver’s licence since I was 17. I’ve also owned a car for over two years. Maybe this year I’ll get round to learning to drive.
  23. I don’t play any instruments although I did own a bass guitar once and attempted to learn. Sometimes I wish I could play something.
  24. Having graduated from Art College over 10 years ago I’m fortunate to be doing a creative job doing web / graphic design and development. However, I would still like to make some artwork and exhibit some work, in particular one video / sculptural installation idea I had 10 years ago. Current technology would make it so much easier to do now.
  25. In my home I am surrounded by three females, my wife Annie and my two awesome daughters; Natalie aged 6 and Gabriella aged 1. My wife would probably point out here that Gabriella’s name has nothing to do with High School Musical, even though Natalie loves those movies.
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State of the Union for AVCHD: Premiere CS4, MotionBox, VoltaicHD and AVCHD Lite

I thought it would be good to take a quick look at how support for AVCHD video has progressed over the last year. When I first wrote about AVCHD back in June 2007 there was very little support, cameras had been out for quite a few months but with no real support for the AVCHD format, not even within Sony’s own Windows-only Vegas editing software, never mind any kind of Mac support.

Since then however support has improved and there are quite a few options for working with AVCHD and cameras are in widespread use. Here are a few notable developments surrounding AVCHD video format.

Adobe Premiere CS4

With the release of Adobe’s new CS4 suites brought back a Mac OSX version of Adobe Premiere CS4. What is interesting about Premiere CS4’s AVCHD support is that it is native and doesn’t require any conversion of the video footage when importing. Interestingly it will also support playback of mixed media types all in the same timeline.

Premiere was the first digital editing software I ever used and in it’s day was awesome. This new release does sound like Adobe have made some great improvements and have made a worthy rival to Final Cut and Avid.

Here’s a few links relating to Premiere CS4:

MotionBox Announces Full Support for HD Video Format (AVCHD)

MotionBox is a video sharing site that was the first to implement support for uploading AVCHD format video. It’s actually quite a handy way to share video online and in the process convert your AVCHD video clips as MotionBox will also create Quicktime compatible MP4 versions of your video for your computer and your iPod.

Here’s a link to the feature announcement on the MotionBox blog:

Shedworx’ AVCHD applications – VoltaicHD, RevolverHD and FlamingoHD

I’ve blogged about the Shedworx applications a few times, but where would many owners of AVCHD cameras be (especially the early adopters who bought them in late 2007!) without VoltaicHD?

Although VoltaicHD was originally just a Mac OSX application it has also been available as a Windows PC version for some time too. Among the many benefits that VoltaicHD brings is a low cost way to edit video on Mac, especially for users on older Macs running PowerPC chips that aren’t supported by either iMovie 08 / 09 or Final Cut Studio. Windows PC users can also edit HD footage from their AVCHD camera for a low cost by using VoltaicHD and Windows Movie Maker. VoltaicHD has helped make AVCHD a practical format for video editing.

Shedworx are soon to release the first version of a media management application called FlamingoHD which is intended to complement VoltaicHD and provide management and workflow of HD footage.

Here are links to the VoltaicHD and FlamingoHD product pages:

AVCHD Lite

AVCHD Lite is a new variation of AVCHD which supports only the lower 1280x720p HD format. It actually uses a variation on regular AVCHD so many applications may require a software update to support cameras using the Lite variation. AVCHD Lite is generally targeted as a format for small point-and-shoot digital cameras that take a step up to HD video from the regular 640×480 standard definition video found on many of these cameras until now. Panasonic’s Lumix ZS3 and TZ7 are examples of cameras using AVCHD Lite.

Here’s a few links relating to AVCHD Lite:

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How to make your Nokia N95 more like an iPhone

My recent switch to an iPhone after using a Nokia N95 for the last year and a half has been great, there’s a load of features on the iPhone that just make a load of sense.

I’d always been keen to try out the various apps available from the Nokia Labs website on my N95 so I thought I’d just do a quick post with links to apps that can make your N95 just a little bit more like an iPhone! These will also work on many other S60 Symbian OS Nokia phones and they are also free downloads from the Nokia Labs website!

Conversation

SMS management on the iPhone is great as it gives you a view that’s similar to that found in an instant messaging app like iChat / MSN etc. It’s great as it allows you to see the messages in the form of a conversation. The Conversation app from Nokia allows to you something pretty similar.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/conversation

Contacts on Ovi

This app mainly provides an Instant Messenger experience but also adds some cool features like status updates and location updates. If you’ve been envious of the Brightkite app for iPhone then this is something similar.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/contacts-ovi

Friend View

If you need a bit of a Twitter fix (ok, I know that you can get actual Twitter apps for Symbian!) or want more of a Brightkite experience then Friend View offers location and micro-blogging service.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-friend-view

Nokia Audiobooks

The iPhone is, obviously, a great music player that will also play audiobooks with various controls. The N95 in comparison is an ok music player but isn’t up to playing audiobooks. However, Nokia Audiobooks fills that gap by allowing playback of highly efficient audiobooks by using tools like bookmarking and browsing chapters.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-audiobooks

Set your camera to low quality and don’t record video

Ok, this last one is a joke. It’s true that in comparison to the N95 the iPhone camera is not great, it’s poor in low light and doesn’t support video recording at all. So if you want an authentic iPhone experience on your N95 change your picture settings on the N95 to their lowest and you’ll get something similar to the iPhone! (although probably still better!).

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The iPhone Apphabet

When I was bored one day I realised you could make words out of some of the apps on the iPhone, it got me to wondering if you could find iPhone apps with all the letters of the alphabet.

The answer? Yes you can.

The iPhone Apphabet

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Macworld 2009 Keynote – Highlights

So, Macworld SF 2009 Keynote, where was the iPhone Shuffle!?!!? Devastated.

Oh well, I thought I’d point out some of the highlights of the announcements, at least the things I picked up from following various live bloggings of the event! So I guess it’s kind of a live-blog of live-blogging! I’ll possibly write some more at a later date if there’s anything that really grabs my interest.

iPhoto ’09

Facial recognition tagging support and syncing with Facebook and Flickr. Any photos that get tagged on Facebook will sync back the tags into iPhoto, I think my wife is going to like that feature as she is a major Facebook image uploader.

iMovie ’09

I was one of those people who liked the iMovie ’08 already, but this new version of iMovie seems to provide all the missing features that people were looking for. The new version was demoed by Randy Ubillos who was the guy who re-engineered iMovie in the first place, I hadn’t realised that he was actually the original creator of Adobe Premiere. So I guess this proves he knows his stuff.

Garageband ’09

The ‘Learn to play’ feature looks pretty cool. There are lessons for both keyboard and guitar from popular artists like Sting, Nora Jones and Fall Out Boy. As my daughter just got a guitar for Christmas I think that will be pretty useful. There are 9 free lessons included and you can buy more via a built-in store in Garageband.

iLife ’09 – Available now on the Apple store →

iWork ’09

Some nice new features, Keynote can be controlled via the iPhone / iPod touch using a new app that you can buy from the App Store. Pages has a full screen view, a bit like the edit mode in iPhoto, which makes full use of all screen area (I remember Mac OS 6 had this ‘feature’ built in, you could only run one app at a time!). There’s now linking between Pages and Numbers so data driven features in Pages can use Numbers as a source.

iWork ’09 – Available now on the Apple store →

iWork.com

Ok, so this is connected to the iWork suite but it’s a cool enough and notable feature I thought it was worth highlighting by itself, if for no other reason than to point out how dumb the iMovie in the cloud rumours were! iWork is initially a free beta but will eventually be a paid service (I think Apple learned a lot from the MobileMe launch!), basically you can share iWork documents online and people can view them in the browser and comment on them or download the file to edit and make changes. Very similar to Google docs.

Mac Box Set

As all the iWork and iLife apps only run on Leopard Apple have released the Mac Box Set which brings iWork, iLife and Mac OS X 10.5 in one pack for £149, that’s a pretty good deal. It’s interesting that there’s no mention of Snow Leopard here at all!

Mac Box Set – Available now on the Apple store →

17" MacBook Pro

The rumours were right of course, a non-removable battery! Now before you go complaining it’s for a very good reason. It supposedly provides 8 hours of charge and can be charged 1000 times (compared to 200 – 300 charge cycles on a regular battery).

Other key specs are up to 8GB if RAM, 320GB HD by default with 256GB SSD drive as an option, also an optional non-glare screen! 2.93Ghz processor, 60% greater colour range on the screen. I’m sure it’s going to generate a lot of discussion due to the fixed battery but as it’s less than an inch thick it’s pretty impressive, especially if it can run for 8 hours driving all of that screen resolution! Available at the end of January for US $2799 or UK £1,949).

17" MBP – Available now on the Apple store →

iTunes

All iTunes music will be DRM free by the end of this quarter! There is also new pricing ranging from $0.69 to $1.29. iTunes Music Store on iPhone / iPod touch can now be accessed via 3G network too. All songs will be in the 256k format too.

Some interesting statistics they told were: 6 Billion songs sold, 10 Milion songs available, 75 Million iTunes accounts. I think the flexible pricing was what it took to get the DRM free music, it was definitely needed seeing as Amazon MP3 store has had a lot more DRM free music than iTunes for quite some time.

Yikes, Macrumors.com Macworld Keynote live blog haxx0r3d

Macrumors.com Keynote Liveblog getting haxx0r3d

I had 3 web pages open with liveblogging of the event when suddenly random messages, rude words etc kept creeping in and then it went completely pear-shaped!

No Mac Mini, no iPhone Nano and no Snow Leopard demo!

Two updates that didn’t appear though were a new Mac Mini and the fabled iPhone Nano. Now the iPhone nano I was dubious about anyway but the Mac Mini I was sure was going to get an update, perhaps they’ll do a soft-announcement soon? Also missing was a demo of the OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’, a lot of people expected to see a demo or at least get some hint of features or progress. I think the Mac Box Set kind of indicated that there wouldn’t be anything being released in the near future.

Well, that’s my live-blog of live-blogging over, time to go check out the Apple website to read more about it all!

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iMovie in the Cloud? More like head in the Clouds…

Every year when Macworld Expo in San Francisco draws near it sparks off a bunch of rumours about new products to be launched. I’ve already written a couple of posts (iPhone Shuffle, Mock Mini) in response to some of the rumours.

However, as obviously fake as the mockup of the rumoured Mac Mini update was nothing takes the dumb award like the rumour of an online version of iMovie! A few sites including Techcrunch have written about this rumour but there’s one simple reason which make it unlikely: Bandwidth.

Space Bandwidth – The final frontier

Broadband connections in the UK and US vary between about 2Mb – 20Mb, probably the average connection is about 8Mb1 and even then that is affected by the usual ‘distance from the exchange’ deterioration. Most broadband connections are asymmetric so the download speed is much faster than the upload speed regardless of whether it is a cable or ADSL connection. For the typical 8Mb connection the upload is likely to be less than 1Mb, probably more like 512Kb, so basically you get 1/16th upload speed compared to download. However, even as download speeds increase the upload speed often doesn’t increase at a similar rate, it can reduce to about 1/24th or 1/30th of the download speed.

A camel through the eye of a needle

A basic feature that an online version of iMovie would need to do is allow you to upload video files so you can edit them. It would presumably have to be capable of editing HD video too seeing as most consumer cameras, especially things like the Flip Mino HD,Kodak Zi6 etc are HD capable.

However, HD video footage is big, disk space per hour of footage is at least 6GB2 therefore a 1 minute clip would be at least 100MB in size. Uploading this file on an average (but perhaps generous) broadband connection with 512Kb upload speed would take around 30 minutes! On 256Kb upload that would be an hour!

When you look at those figures you can see the biggest weak spot of any kind of online editing system, especially HD.

iLife / iWork in the Cloud?

It is feasible that Apple could release some more advanced online tools to accompany their iLife / iWork suites, after all the MobileMe Mail and iCal apps are pretty good web-based tools. I think a more obvious choice would be for some kind of online version of iPhoto in the vein of Photoshop Express or Picnik (notwithstanding that full size raw images would present a challenge for uploading too, nothing like the challenge of video files though).

Apple have always been very forward thinking, declaring the floppy drive dead with the launch of the original iMac and declaring 2005 the year of HD with the launch of iMovie HD and Final Cut Express HD. However, I just can’t see that Apple are going to be so forward thinking in regards to improvements in broadband speeds that they will make iMovie into a web app!

It will be interesting to see what is announced on Monday 5th January, I’m very much doubting that I will be eating my words here! I’m still hanging out for the iPhone Shuffle though ;)

1. These speeds are a guesstimate but I imagine they’re not far from the truth.
2. One hour of HD footage in AVCHD format is 6Gb, sizes can increase to 100’s of Gbs for other formats, bit rates etc.