Tips From Tony Blog

This looks pretty plausible to me. It appears that somebody snagged a 2-megapixel photo taken with the iPhone’s built-in camera. It looks quite nice, though somebody should have cleaned the lens first! There has been a lot of conjecture about the built-in camera.

It looks a LOT better than what my Treo 650 can provide… Now that folks can buy a ten megapixel camera for less than $300, I suspect that our phones will follow suit as well, very soon.

Cameras inside of modern phones are getting better, and the one in the iPhone looks to be quite nice enough (unlike most) to be able to stand in for a regular camera in a pinch.

For a typical example of how wretched our results can be when we tolerate older technology, check out this photo I took with my Treo 650 at the Mirage’s White Tiger Exhibit in Vegas… The image is crappy, un-edited, and yet it was the best one from the entire collection!

I’m a photographer, and I have an extremely high-end camera that was too big and clunky to bring along to Vegas.  Most of the time, I didn’t miss it, but when I DID want it, I had only my horrid Treo with me.

I want it it all… Phone, address and calendar and alarms, Internet access, video and music player, and a camera that won’t disappoint me.  I want it easy to use, I want it high-quality, and I want everything in ONE device that stays with me at all times.  That day is coming soon, and that is why the iPhone is being anticipated so gladly all over the world!
Now, they need to put the camera on the FRONT, so that folks can video-chat with each other’s iPhones and Macs. Once the online speed is consistently high, it would be a snap, given how integrated video-chat technology has become in the Apple world. THAT would certainly bring some interest to iPhone 2.0!

I wondered - I know there is no way to know in light of the fact that this product is not even OUT yet - but do you think the Apple iPhone will blast the competition and make apple a STAR well known company again as some people are saying?

What is your take on this product and the effect it will
have on the cell phone industry??

Well, this is an awfully easy one to figure out, given what I’ve been reading lately.  Thanks for asking, because it gives me an excuse to talk about it…

The buzz out there is INTENSIVE.  Out in the early-adopter crowd, folks are so excited they can’t stand it, but this time, there are more folks involved.  The folks who usually follow our opinions are shoving past us to be the first in line, this time around.

This article says it better (toward the end), but the short version is that Apple is going to sell a pile of iPhones, and Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon are undoubtedly already kissing up to Steve Jobs as we speak.

This thing is going to be huge.

Here’s a quote from a recent article, just to give you a taste:

“A recent study by Harris Interactive suggests that nearly a fifth of all US adults are interested in purchasing an iPhone, but most will wait until pricing and availability improve. The study found that 47 per cent of respondents over the age of 18 had heard of the iPhone, and 17 per cent had an interest in purchasing one.”

Seventeen per cent.  That’s worth repeating - Again, that’s nearly one out of every five adults that are in the USA. The nerd websites are frantically jabbering away, and the excitement just builds. Even Microsoft execs are having public opinions, and it’s not looking good for them. They’re sticking with the current plan, which is to supply the world with old-style phones that use a miniature version of Windows running on them. Yeah, that’s what we’re all asking for. More complexity, please!

So…. Why do _I_ plan to get one at some point, preferably around October when my contract with Verizon runs out?

- It’s all about synchronization with my Mac.  I already have a phone (a Palm Treo 650) that does that in a primitive way, but it’s frickin’ awful.  I never use the camera or the video because it’s so clunky. I hate the music-player, and you can’t force me to browse the web on its horrid little screen. I use the Treo to call people, and to read ebooks when I’m bored and stranded somewhere. That’s it. So expensive, and so little-used.

- I carry a big, heavy fourth-generation 40-gig iPod with the phone when I am out in the world doing things, rather than play my science-fiction audiobooks through the phone. I’d like to switch to one, slim, all-encompassing thing to carry.  I used to have an iPod Shuffle that I loved dearly, but the darned thing was too small, and I lost it somewhere. I keep hoping that it will show up under my desk or something.

- I want something with me that can do the most-important things that my laptop can do, AND fit inside my shirt pocket. My guess is that there will be small, folding Bluetooth keyboards (similar to this one) that will allow me to do better typing if I have to send in an article while I’m on the road.

- I want something easy enough so that 1) I can use anything that is on it, and 2) it has programs on it that I care about and want to use for my own selfish purposes.

- My AppleTV is something that I gladly use every day.  We watch a lot of our current video-based media on it, and it’s always a pleasure that never fails to be easy to use.  The iPhone is going to work using the exact same visual interface, but using my fingers.  Why WOULDN’T I love to use it often?

It looks like Apple’s on the job, and I trust them to do it right. They do simple and elegant better than anybody else.

Most folks don’t know this, but ever since Apple came out with the OS X 10.4.9 update, certain newer, “UVC-compatible” webcams can be plugged into your older Mac, and they will work right away with iChat.

Why would anybody bother? To stay in touch with family-members… To share love across the miles. “Hey Grandma! Look at Junior’s new tattoos!” Once it’s set up, it’s free forever, and it works whether you have a Windows PC or a Mac, as long as you have a fast Internet connection.

I set this up all of the time, and it’s always gratifying to see family-members cooing at each other across the miles. Holiday gifts being opened simultaneously across a continent are a big hit in our household.
Tell everybody in your family to get a webcam (see below), and then they should all go to AIM.com and get a free screen name. Once everybody has e-mailed each other with the new screen-names, then the Mac users should use iChat and the Windows family-members should download the newest verson of AOL Instant Messenger. Why? Because it’s the simplest way to share vision AND sound between the two platforms.
Ever since Apple stopped production on the iSight webcam, prices have skyrocketed for used iSights on eBay. Some have asking-prices as high as $299! Very discouraging.

I’m still doing research on which webcams are guaranteed to work, but here is one that is known to work, and is highly rated:

If your laptop, eMac or iMac already has a microphone, then the Xbox Live Vision webcam ($35.99 on Amazon.com) is a good choice. To see if your computer already has a microphone built-in, pull down the blue Apple menu, go to System Preferences, then to Sound, and then to Input. If an “Internal microphone” shows up, you’re in business.

If your Mac does NOT have a built-in microphone, then there are other choices for very little money:

There are good things being said about the Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Pro, or the Logitech Quickcam Fusion.

You can also use Logitech’s support-page to see which of their models support “UVC”, which is required for proper, driver-free iChat compatibility. This one looks very nice, and for only $41.40 after rebate.

Once everybody in the family has their free chat names from AIM.com, then all Mac users should fire up their Address Book software and add the chat names for all relevant people. Then, fire up iChat and answer a few questions until iChat is up and running. On the Buddy List window, hit the “+” button on the lower left and start adding people to the Buddy List.

Hopefully, once the Windows folks have added everybody to their AIM Buddy List as well, you should see a nice green camera next to one of your buddies’ names. Double-click on it, and they will hear a “brrring!” sound. They’ll also see a window pop open, saying that you are requesting a chat-session. If they click “Accept”, then the video-chatting can begin!

Technically, I’m here for business, not monkey-business. I’m here for the NAB convention until tomorrow, learning all about digital video and the future of broadcasting. What the heck does this have to do with me, or my clients, you may ask?

Well, I am here to observe trends, detect patterns, and get set for what is going to be important to the folks that I help, a few years down the line. I’m observing software features that will be dirt-common in days to come. I’m looking at expensive hardware that will be cheap-cheap in five years.

For instance: I’m seeing plenty of signs at various booths saying things like “Up to 5 PB”, and at first, I was puzzled, until I figured out that they were referring to five petabytes… five million gigabytes. Gosh, that sounds like an awful lot of storage, and surely only big businesses are able to afford so much storage. But, based on so much past experience, I just KNOW that there will be five petabyte keychain drives being handed out for free at baseball games and banks in a few years. Remember when ten-megabyte hard drives were like infinity stretching out before you? I do.
Apple has announced their new suite of professional-class video-editing programs here, and in my opinion, everything else here runs a distant second-place finish. They’re dominating all of the news coverage. Their “booth” is the biggest thing here, and it’s always jammed. They have a huge theater for continuous presentations, and every seat is always filled. I’m seeing the usual, middle-aged, paunchy conventioneer-types, but I’m also seeing an enormous number of young people clustered around the Apple displays, and standing at the back of the rows of seats being hogged by old folks.

Apple hired a Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer to supply some high-quality photos for this event, so I’m not going to try to compete.

Being an enormous geek, I was mesmerized with Apple’s wall of horsepower… Technically referred to as a big ol’ pile of Apple servers (268 processors) and networked hard drives (300 terabytes). In every direction, Macintosh displays were demonstrating smooth, snappy powerful new software. Everything flowed so nicely, thanks to those stacks of servers, slaving away behind the main stage. This was brought forcefully to my attention when I was admiring this wall of flashing winky lights while the guy around the corner was demonstrating the audio-editing software. I could hear the sound of a Ducati motorcycle screaming away, on and off, and the winky lights in front of me were going bonkers in perfect sync. Cooooool.
This all seems very esoteric, expensive and far away from most people’s needs, doesn’t it? No, not really. The newest high-end Macs have eight processors inside. New laptops will have four processors in around one year. Intel expects to have 80 processors inside of one chip in about three years.

That huge, expensive wall of power probably cost more than a million bucks, and required a technical team for assembly and maintenance. By the time you buy your next Mac, YOU may command nearly as much power!

Off-topic, I have to say that I DID squeeze in some fun last night - SPAMALOT is well-worth seeking out when you get to Vegas (or Broadway, though the Broadway tickets are usually sold-out months in advance). If you’re a fan of classic Monty Python, you will NOT be disappointed.

Vegas has changed a lot, and there are construction-cranes everywhere. Expensive, glitzy casinos are replacing the old, tired classic dumps, and Sinatra’s ring-a-ding-ding has been replaced with REM and Beatles music everywhere. Baby-boomers rule here, now.

I’ll predict the future: In ten years, there will be industrial-strength shop-vacs at the exits leaving the Las Vegas Strip, just to simplify things. Nobody goes home until every wallet and purse has been emptied! NOTHING here is free, or even inexpensive, without a taxi-ride away from the Strip.  It’s too far to walk, even for a bank - I’ve tried.
There have to be EIGHT separate Cirque du Soleil shows in town, and my, aren’t they expensive. Every major casino has one of these shows, and I can see why… scanty garments, but not TOO scanty… You can bring the wife and kids.

I’ve done my best to be abstemious, so far away from my daily routine, but I’m failing miserably. It costs 22 buicks to use the gym, so I’m not spending a lot of time there, and my waistline is mysteriously expanding. It MIGHT be due to the incredible meals that we’re enjoying every day. Most nights, I feel like a python that has swallowed a goat! My vices don’t include drinking, womanizing(!) or gambling, but I can ALWAYS be tempted by high-end chocolates or a perfectly-prepared steak.

Dennis and I attend the conferences and walk around the convention floor by day, and do tame, expensive stuff by night. We are SO middle-aged!

I’ve had the new Home Theater setup installed for a few days, and I plan to be hosting that High Resolution Popcorn event soon. I’ll be gone for a week - I’m going to the NAB show in Vegas. After that, I’ll be sending out the invitations.

For now, I’m doing some intensive playing with the AppleTV - It’s full of potential, and well-worth the $299, though I can see lots of room for improvement. Its job is to turn your big-screen TV into a high-resolution iPod that plays the video, music, podcasts, audiobooks and iPhoto albums that exist on your computer(s), somewhere else in the building. I never thought that I’d care much about such a concept, though it is definitely growing on me. The AppleTV has become just as essential to our family’s enjoyment as our five iPods put together.
First, the good stuff, and then the wish-list:

It’s awfully simple to use, and I can easily see a technophobe like my mom getting good use out of an AppleTV without a single complaint. Apple definitely nailed the “elegant and simple” part, right out of the gate.

When fed with good-quality media, the AppleTV really shines. I can see that my low-resolution Tivo’s days are numbered, because it puts out horrid-quality images that almost hurt your eyes. I never noticed this until we retired the old picture-tube TV to the upstairs bedroom, and now we never watch it. We’ve become media snobs, frankly. I haven’t used a VCR in years.
I take a lot of multi-megapixel photographs, and the AppleTV is the best way to enjoy them, hands down. I’ll take a bunch a photos at an event, and then gather the family for a nice slide-show. The quality is astonishing.

GETTING media is a problem for most folks, unless they use Apple’s online store. The visual quality of what you can buy there is pretty stinky, given what the AppleTV is capable of. Being a media snob, I’ve been converting my other media files and DVD’s so that I can get maximum quality for our viewing pleasure. I use VisualHub to convert existing media files (AVI files, WMV’s, etc.), and I use MediaFork to convert DVD’s to AppleTV format. Watch both of those programs very closely, because new versions keep coming out that really make them more and more AppleTV-centric. Now that the AppleTV is out, you will see other file-formats withering into irrelevance.

I was originally planning to buy an actual antenna for our new high-definition system, to pick up HD channels! Why would I even consider going back to rabbit-ears? Because I’m a cheapskate - I couldn’t imagine paying something like $100 per month just to get high-definition channels. We’re skating by on Cox with Basic Cable, which is something like $13 per month for local channels, and no HBO or Cinemax. We don’t need them, and won’t pay for them.

Well, it turns out that cheapskates are extra-blessed: If you use Cox Cable without a cable box, then you get all of the local high-definition channels for free. If Channel 15 is the old, traditional-style PBS station, then channel 15.1 is the PBS HD digital channel. Not only that, by tuning into the channels right around Channel 100.1, we shared somebody’s pay-per-view enjoyment of the movie “Borat” (including the rewind after that person’s bathroom break), for free. No antenna needed. Somebody let me know if this is true for Time-Warner and other providers.
I’m not kidding - Our two-year-old Tivo box is providing low-resolution images that would make your eyes water. We’ve stopped using it - We’re ACTUALLY WATCHING COMMERCIALS AGAIN! That’s not gonna happen for much longer.
So, now we are thinking about replacing the Tivo. We MIGHT upgrade to the Tivo 3, but the idea of paying $100 per year for the subscription service is annoying. Did I mention that we’re cheap? We are also considering using the Macs around here to take the place of the Tivo, by using something like the EyeTV from El Gato Systems. I suspect that this might be a viable choice soon, since there will undoubtedly be a version coming up that is 100% joined to the AppleTV at every step.

As always, the problem with buying an AppleTV version 1.0 is that there are all sorts of compromises.

It doesn’t yet support surround-sound, so we’re not getting the full experience of our best material.

It’s not super-duper high resolution, to match my zingy 2007-model TV. Incidentally, the TV is a wowser - a big LCD that has better specs than a plasma. It took almost two weeks to arrive from New York, and the wait just about killed me. The only complaint I have about it is that I’m going to have to remove the back panel and glue a metal washer to the inside. The security slot is too big to safely secure the TV to its cabinet with a cable and lock. My 1918 Craftsman-style bungalow’s living-room is a dinky thing, and that humongous, expensive-looking, highly pawnable screen is visible to anybody on the front porch. We’ve got a couple of ginormous Lab Experiments to guard the place, but I would still feel better knowing that things are locked down.

The AppleTV supports VERY few file-formats. Having to convert media to work on it is a pain. My laptop is running 24 hours a day, and it’s currently converting the BBC Life on Earth series. Yes, folks are hacking the AppleTV so that it can handle more file-formats, but I can’t be bothered with all of that, at least so far. I’m on the end-user-enjoyment end of things, not the twist-it-until-it-breaks end.

It was expensive, switching from the old analog TV to the new, zoomy Home Entertainment System. I can’t believe how many things I can’t wait to leave behind, such as the idea of going to a movie theater, watching commercials, videocassettes, and even DVD’s! Our existing DVD player does a bang-up job of “upscaling” its output to match our high-end TV, so it gets a reprieve, at least for a while.

The biggest downside to the rush to Home Theaters is the social cost - Why would we want to leave the house when we can get everything that we want, right here? Will future generations even have the experience of shared communal high points, such as when the very first Star Wars movie came out? I can still feel the fevered anticipation as we stood in lines that stretched around the theater and down the block. I remember the roar of the crowd around me as the Death Star blew up… even now, thirty years later.

I used to host huge, popular dance parties a few years back.  I can’t get them organized any more, because the general public has fractured, and can no longer be reached by traditional means. When everybody is on a zillion different websites, blogs and mailing-lists that are centered all over the world, we lose the ability to have a central, unifying connection for local news. Traditional-style clubs are failing everywhere - why join a club and commit to helping out, when you can just join a mailing list and click a link to unsubscribe when you’re bored? Why leave your high-res screen and your comfort-zone?
The AppleTV and its surrounding hardware are getting cheaper, easier and even more tantalizing.  I plan to stay conscious about my need to be among friends and getting exercise,  because it’s awfully tempting to wallow permanently in the megapixels and the Dolby sound.

Actually, Apple calls it the “8-Core Mac Pro“, but the nerd network has been calling it the “Octo” for months and months, since Apple’s new top-of-the-line Mac tower has EIGHT processors inside.  Now that the new Adobe Creative Suite 3 has arrived and is selling briskly, you just KNOW that it will work much better with some newer hardware.

I’m surprised that the Octo hasn’t shown up before this - Nerds have been swapping the newer chips into the existing towers since November, with absolutely no problems.

If you’ve been sitting around, waiting for the newest thing to come out before upgrading, the waiting is officially over.  This one is a definite money-pump for any business, and it’ll be a good workhorse for years to come.

A SPECIAL REQUEST:

If you DO want to buy a Mac, and would be willing to help me gather bonus-points from Apple, you can order your new hardware online, here.  It won’t cost you a penny more, and you can customize it to your heart’s content.  Then, on the very last page, it’ll ask for the “Agent Code”. I’d be plumb grateful if you’d put this in:

AA071743

Thanks!