If you have an iPhone or are soon to have an iPad, and if you have movies on your computer of nearly any format, then you really ought to check out InMethod’s Air Video App. Perspicacious readers will note the emphasis on “any format” and realize that the iPhone does not play formats such as .avi or .divx and that is one of the coolest things about this program. But I’m getting ahead of myself . . .
Air Video works like this: you install the Air Video server application on your computer, and point it toward a folder or folders (I have mine going to an hard drive partition that is connected, not to my computer, but to my Airport Extreme router). Next, install Air Video’s iPhone app on you phone. You’ll need to get some numbers from the server application so that the iPhone can connect to your computer, but the process is easy and well documented. Then you can stream any video from your computer to your phone.
It’s that simple. And the most impressive thing about it is that if the file is, say a divx or an avi file, the program performs an on-the-fly conversion, letting you watch video that you would otherwise have to take the time to convert before loading onto your phone. I’ve watched programs on the bus ride home and sure, over 3g the quality isn’t the best, but it’s impressively good for the fact that the program is streaming and converting at the same time. On wifi, the quality is very good, and I would be interested to know if it was good enough to hook up to a television and watch it on a larger screen. Still, with the iPad coming out, I can see this program taking off in a big way as the screen size of the iPhone, while ok for the occasional lazy watching of QI from my bed, isn’t something I’d want to watch an entire movie on. However, I could envision curling up on a couch or in bed and watching a movie on the iPad. (Ok, granted I’ve never held one or seen one, so I might not find it that appealing in the end, but still, from the images I’ve seen I think it would be a decent way to watch a movie.)
You can even try Air Video for free, although the limitation is that the program will serve up random files from your video folder instead of letting you see all of your videos. Still, it will give you a good feel for how well the program works. I started with the free version and paid for the full after about 20 minutes of seeing what it could do.
This is one of the more impressive apps I’ve seen for the iPhone in terms of media, and while I don’t use it a lot, I like having the option to pull up and watch nearly any video I might have on my hard drive anytime I want. If you check it out, let me know what you think.
I recently composed a short story, “Garlic in the Air,” entirely on my iPhone while I was at work. Why the iPhone? Primarily because I was having some issues with my wrist and what might be some mild carpel tunnel issues and the iPhone didn’t aggravate those symptoms. Because I’m using Writeroom on my phone, my work is automatically backed up to the Simpletext servers, which I can then access on any computer with web access or on my home computer which has a Simpletext application that syncs a local folder with the server. I don’t think I’d write stories on the iPhone if I didn’t have that kind of syncing capability.
But what, I can hear you asking, is the process like writing on that little touch-screen keyboard? Not great. I certainly can’t type as fast as I can on a keyboard and it’s even slower than writing on paper. However, I’m not sure that is always a liability. Having to slow down a bit makes me consider my words more. It means that I am paying slightly more attention to the individual words and sounds than I might otherwise. I type moderately quickly, somewhere between 65 – 80 wpm depending on the computer and the ergonomics. Often, this speed means that I’m typing the first thoughts as they come into my head and stream through and are then gone replaced by the next thought and the next thought. Being forced to go slower means that each thought gets additional . . . well, thought before being committed to pixels. Also, I’m learning to ignore errors more on the iPhone and keep going because it’s much more tedious to fix misspellings on the iPhone than on a computer or even by hand. The truth is that when I misspell something I don’t have to fix it while I’m writing since it’s easy enough to fix later. Yet on a computer, I’ll break my train of thought to go back and fix any word in read I see. So, while on the one hand I’m slowing my thoughts down, I’m also training myself to keep moving forward instead of breaking out of the flow of the story to fix the mechanics of it.
Would I sit down and attempt to write a novel straight through on the iPhone? No. But because of Simpletext, I’m thinking of routinely writing first drafts of stories using either Textmate or Writeroom and saving them in my Simpletext folder so that I have them accessible wherever I go, whether that is on another computer or my iPhone. Scrivener remains my choice for longer projects, and as a place where I may very well import short stories after a draft or two, but keeping it simple with plain text files and a server that provides access wherever I go is making me rethink the tools and workflow I use for short works and early drafts.
If you’d like to read “Garlic in the Air,” you can find it at The Dueling Quill.
Lately I’ve been using Dropbox as a place to store backups of stories and other writing projects. I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about my workflow and why you should look into the free account with Dropbox. Of course different media require different back-up strategies and a free 2 gigabyte account is not necessarily going to be the best solution for backing up your photos or your music, but for a writer who wants to protect their work, Dropbox is an excellent way to make off-site backups.
There are any number of ways to create regular backups of your computer, but as any writer or student whose hard drive has crashed with all of their recent work could tell you, the trick is to make sure your backups are a) up-to-date and b) easily recoverable. Additionally, backing up to cd or another drive won’t help if something happens to your apartment or home. Having an off-site backup is important, even if the odds are agains you ever needing it. All it takes is one fire, or one hurricane, or one tornado, or one flood to make you really wish you had your writing somewhere safe from disaster. I’m not going to bore you with all my various strategies for backing up, but I am starting to rely more and more on Dropbox as the place where I keep my currently active writing projects.
First of all, though, what is Dropbox? Basically it’s an online backup and file-sharing solution that you install on your computer (Windows, Mac or Linux).1 The installation creates a folder on your computer that you can then use like you do any other folder. However, the folder will, invisibly and with no need to perform any complicated set up, back itself up to Dropbox’s servers whenever anything in the folder changes. For any of you working on multiple computers, what this means is that you can have one folder that is continually synced across a number of computers and different operating systems. For some, that is the primary reason to get Dropbox.
However, if you are like me and do most of your work on one computer, what this means is that you can have instant and continual off-site backup of your important documents. Because the folder resides on your computer you don’t have to go out to the web to retrieve any of the documents inside your Dropbox folder, which means that you don’t have to be connected to the internet to access your files. However, after making even the slightest change to your document and saving, the file will auto-magically sync itself to the server version whenever your computer is connected. Even better, it does the sync incrementally, so instead of uploading the entire file again, it only uploads the changes to that file. Even even better, Dropbox’s servers take a snapshot of each document before making changes, so if you realize that the changes you made yesterday to your story were really stupid changes, and you don’t have any other local versions, you can go to Dropbox’s web interface and retrieve previous versions.2
For the writer, there are two ways you could use Dropbox most effectively. The first, is simple use the folder as the home for all your current projects. That way, if something happens to your computer you know that all your latest work is backed up and easily accessible via another computer that you authorize with your account or through the web interface. Sure, 2 gigabytes doesn’t sound like a lot (and you can always pay for more if you need it), but you’ll be surprised just how much text can fit in that kind of space. If you are a student, you could probably fit years and years worth of papers into those 2 gb. This solution is probably best for those who keep their writing projects in discreet files and folders, however there are some of us who use programs like Scrivener as their primary writing tool and because these programs actually save dozens or even hundreds of small documents in a bundle, working directly out of the Dropbox folder can be problematic.
I’m lucky, because my program of choice, Scrivener, actually has a simply backup command what will put my whole project into a zip file and save it in any folder I choose. So lately I’ve been creating the habit of selecting that command whenever I finish working on a project. I figure that maybe once a month I’ll cull the folder from some of the older backups, but in the meantime, I just backup and enjoy the knowledge that even if something happens to my computer or my Time Machine disk or my regularly updated disk clone that I could still get access to the stories and projects I’m currently working on. Additionally, I may, on of these days, get around to creating an Automator action that will regularly zip certain folders and then place the zip file in my Dropbox folder.
If you aren’t working with huge amounts of research and with programs like Scrivener, I would suggest just saving all your documents to your Dropbox folder and feeling secure that you have a safe and up-to-date backup of your current or most important work . . . and all without giving it a second thought. Having a strategy like this is especially important if you have only one computer and don’t really pay attention to backing up on a regular basis (ahem – yes, I’m looking at you).
Go over to the Dropbox website and check it out, look at the tour and check out the video presentation. If you decide to sign up and you use this link to do so you’ll actually get both of us an additional 250 mb of storage space but I’m not posting this to get people signing up under my account (though it would be nice). I think there are a few of my friends and acquaintances out there who could use this service and save themselves some possible headaches down the line.
If you have thoughts about Dropbox or backing up documents in general, I’d love to read them, so drop a comment if you have the time.
I’m not going to talk about the sharing features here, since my interest in the services is mostly as a document backup solution, however, the sharing features are pretty nifty if you are working with other people on a project. [↩]
This is not meant to be a replacement for other versioning strategies, but it is a nice benefit. [↩]
For those of you using WordPress – you need to make sure you are running the latest update because there appears to be a large scale hacker attack on WordPress blogs.
Yes, I’m just the kind of person who went out yesterday and bought Apple’s new operating system Snow Leopard and have spent the majority of last night and today playing around with the new features and setting my computer back up (since I decided to do a totally clean install and reformatted my hard drive before installing—of course, that was after making a series of backups). You certainly don’t have to go through the effort that I did and if you are upgrading, you should be just fine upgrading on top of your current system and thereby keeping all your files and settings. I just felt that it was time I did some cleaning up of files and applications and starting from scratch is sometimes the best way to do that. Here is my current desktop:
There are a lot more qualified people that can talk about the real advantages of Snow Leopard, but I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve seen and discovered about the operating system.
Dock and Exposé
Not only do Stacks have a greater range of functionality, allowing you to drill down into folders from the grid view, but now the list view matches the display style of the grid view, as does the display you get when you right click a program on the dock for the options available:
As nice as those touches are, and they are very nice from an aesthetic point of view, the Exposé functionality for individual application windows when you click and hold an icon in the dock is way more cool. Here’s what I mean:
Also, when you active Exposé the old fashioned way, to show all your open windows, the windows are arranged in a much better fashion rather than the previously sloppy fashion:
Quicktime
Quicktime now allows you to do basic screencasts, as you just saw in the above example. It certainly won’t replace more advanced screencast applications because there is no editing functions other than a basic trim function. But for something quick and basic, if you wanted to show someone how to access a function or perform a task, Quicktime could easily become a useful tool, especially since you can export to YouTube, MobileMe, or iTunes right from the program. Quicktime isn’t just for screencasts, either, it will allow you to record both audio and video using your computer’s camera and microphone as well.
Services
The coolness of the new Services is probably a bit on the geeky side, but even if you aren’t a computer wiz, there are lots of ways they could be useful. For a really great introduction, you should go over and watch this video produced by PixelCorps which will give you a nice sense of what you can do with the new Services architecture.
One of the neat things you can set up are specific websites as services that you can then invoke with a keystroke. For example, here’s a screenshot of a Facebook HUD (heads up display) that allows basic interaction with Facebook without having to open up a full web browser.
You can do the same thing with Twitter and with web-based email services. Sure, full blown applications will offer more versatility than what are basically mobile versions of these websites (although you can use Safari as a setting when creating these Web Pop-up automations/services), but as quick and easy ways to interact with specific websites with a simple keystroke combination, the new interaction between Services and Automator is really exciting if you have any kind of regular task that you’d like to automate and reduce to one or two keystrokes.
Other Miscellaneous Thoughts
The Keyboard Preferences Pane sets out the keyboard shortcuts in a much more organized and easy to view manner. Did you know that ^F3 will shift focus to the Dock and you can use the arrow keys to move between Dock items?
It’s about time you could easily add the date to your menu bar next to the time. Sometimes, as much as an Apple fan as I’ve become since switching, I can’t help but wonder why it took so long for them to fix some of these little things. Now, if only they would change the look of Spotlight so that it matched the rest of the look and feel of OS X.
There are lots of features I haven’t played around with yet and we won’t see some of the benefits to the new technologies under the hood like OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch until programs begin to take advantage of them. Casual users might want to wait for a few months in order for an update or two to deal with the inevitable few issues that arise with any new operating system, but given the price, the aesthetics, the new usefulness of Services, and the upcoming programs that will take advantage of some very cool aspects of the operating system, I certainly think most people should upgrade by the end of the year if not sooner.
Just remember, even if you are doing an install on top of your current installation, always make a backup, preferably a full clone, of your system before installing a new operating system.
UPDATE
I’m noticing some issues cropping up around my Airport Extreme, with occasional disconnects, particularly with respect to the hard drive I have attached to the router that acts as a networked drive for my music and media.
I’ve also noticed some odd behavior in the Finder while working with files on those networked drives. Several times when deleting files, the finder has switched views from column or list into icon view when I’ve moved a file to the trash.
Neither of these are proving major issues (so far) and I’m hopeful that they will be addressed in the next update.
UPDATE
Just another reminder, before you upgrade any operating system make a backup of your computer.
With support for page creation and editing, comment moderation, and, most useful in my opinion, landscape typing, this version is a whole lot more powerful and usable for blogging while on the road (or when you are in bed already and don’t want to get up to post an entry). While certainly not the fastest way to write an entry and not ideal for writing at length, I can definitely imagine blogging more from my phone than I could before this update. And if we get Bluetooth keyboard ability with iPhone 3.0 . . .
I am a product of my culture and a bit of a computer geek and, as such, have an affinity for getting the newest, most up-to-date x (where x = “pretty much damn near anything tech/computer related). Of course, I have never had the income to really pursue that affinity to the lengths that I might want. However, even if I can’t afford to get the newest, coolest x, not having it produces a vague sense of dissatisfaction1 . Ironically, I find that by switching to a Mac as my computer and buying an iPhone I am able to excise some of that dissatisfaction and be content with my current set of tools.
Investing in Quality
My Macbook Pro is the most expensive computer I’ve ever purchased and it’s almost 20 months old–which is like 5 of our people years. Since then, the line has had a minor refresh and a major overhaul with the new (pretty!) unibody construction. Until I switched to a Mac, I was always buying low- to mid-end computers that meant I wanted to upgrade every 6 to 12 months. I wasn’t actually making a serious investment in my computer equipment, so I was seeing each computer as temporary, merely a brief stop on my way to the next, better computer. Not so much these days. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think the new Macbook Pros are gorgeous, and if someone were to give me one, I’d surely take it, but I honestly don’t feel like I just have to have the newest and latest model because my computer remains an excellent tool that is more than sufficient to my needs. This is partly because of the quality of Apple products and partly because I consciously invested in getting a computer that would last 4 or 5 people years.
Updates? We don’t need no stinkin’ updates.
I have a jailbroken iPhone. Primarily for two reasons and secondarily for one reason. Mainly I keep my iPhone jailbroken for 1) Video capability–even though I haven’t had a use for this, I like knowing that I could capture video if necessary and 2) tethering, which can come in handy if there’s no other source of internet access. Additionally, I like being able to individualize the look of my iPhone and have a theme that I think is actually nicer than Apple’s (though many of the themes are not). One of the ramifications of keeping my phone jailbroken is that I need to be careful when updating the phone and this is forcing me to reconsider my knee-jerk reaction to hearing about updates to any of my technology which has generally been, OMG I need to update NOW!
Patience, they say, is a virtue, and my (jailbroken) iPhone is helping me learn a bit more patience than I have previously maintained . . . at least in this one area of my life (but maybe it’ll bleed over into other areas).
Using a well made tool will make any task more enjoyable than using an ill made tool, and Apple products, beyond their sleek design and sexy looks, are well made tools that are helping me focus a bit more on how and why I use technology instead of just wanting to play with the newest, coolest, most cutting edge x out there.
For over a year, I’ve bemoaned the fact that Apple’s iWork suite doesn’t perform auto-saves considering that nearly every other office suite or stand-alone word processing program offers this feature. Maybe I was wrong and Steve Jobs was right. I’ve been working with Office 2007 at my temp job to put together reports that combine text and a significant number of images. And every so often, as I’m working, the program stops responding while it creates an automatic back-up and I wait for the back-up to finish. The wait isn’t long, mind you, but enough to stop my work flow and annoy the heck out of me. So I’m reconsidering my stance on the whole auto-save situation. In the end, I think I still wish iWork offered the option and, instead of timed back-ups, performed them whenever there was no activity happening in the document (I think that’s how Scrivener and some other programs handle the process). However, I can sort of see the logic of not including this feature in iWork. I still think its a flawed logic, but I will probably complain less about the lack of auto-save than before.
As I write this, I’m listening to RadioParadise.com’s music stream on my iPhone while on a moving Amtrak train as I compose and post this entry.
I know that technology cannot solve all of the problems we face as a species. I have to admit though, that I think our scientific and technological capabilities, not to mention what is right around the proverbial corner, make me glad that I’m living now rather than any time in the past.
