Jonathan Davies

Apple as of late have starting working with lots more companies to bring a better experience to its users. They’ve worked with Google on integrating YouTube and Google Maps into the iPhone. Yahoo! have also helped integrate some of their widgets into the iPhone.

There has also been an advent of rumors that Apple is working with Google to add live video streaming to iTunes as well.

An interesting idea which has pushed me to talk about how the tech industry especially, are starting to collaborate a lot of their products. Why would they do this?

Increasing awareness is a major factor. Having that name in the search box every time you want to search is a big selling point. I wonder how much Google pays Mozilla to have their search as the default search in Firefox ?

You’ve also got to think about the people that you are trying to reach, maybe you want to go into a new market where making a brand new product wouldn’t be appropriate. Instead you could confer with another company with a strong product already in that market. Sure, the initial cost might be great but if people start to recognize you as a player then half of the work is already done.

Integration is great for consumers, if they can do something with one app instead of another two others they’re happy. It’s a simple message but can be a lot harder to put into practice.

When you go buy an iPod, do you buy it because it is great at what it does or because its an iPod? Its the same with computers; do you buy a Dell because they’re reliable or because everyone you know has one?

Brand matters.

Consumers rarely care about what they buy because of what it does, you can have something that does more than an iPod for a better price, they don’t care - people will still buy the iPod because everyone has one and they are the cool thing to have. I mean, you don’t pull out your new Zune to show everyone on the school bus do you?

A strong brand means you have a better relationship with the consumer, half the work is you promoting yourself to 50% of the people you encourage. The other 50% of the business you get is because the people you sold to liked your product enough to tell someone else about it. That is how you get a household name.

The hoover, for instance. You might not realize it but the correct term is vacuum-cleaner; the brand hoover has become so recognized that it becomes the name, even if you buy a Dyson.

Unfortunately for most people starting out in the product business; if there is already a massive leader (lets say Microsoft in OS software) there is very little chance that you are going to unseat it in your own life time. To build up your brand you need to innovate and let people know about it! There are probably thousands of great websites and blogs out there that no one knows about but are doing amazing things:

Do them a favor and tell your friends about them, just once.

Technology plays a large roll in my daily activities at school. For some lessons I write my notes on my MacBook Pro, I do a lot of video recording and editing for school events. In fact I am going to be editing a whole load of footage over the next few weeks.

Why do I write a lot of my notes on my computer? To stay organized really. All my notes are arranged specifically to the subject and lesson that I am studying. Most importantly; I know where everything is. I am not very good at manually organizing things. I tend to loose pieces of paper and it can take a long time for me to find stuff. If I can’t find something on my Mac, then I simply use Spotlight and get to it in seconds.

The problem with schools and technology at the moment is simply that teachers don’t seem to trust them as a learning tool totally yet. In all the lessons that I do - only a handful am I allowed to take notes for on my computer.

Why are they like this? I think it is simply because of the situation that my school’s network used to be in. There was a point where files could go missing or magically become deleted. This caused a lot of mistrust about the school’s network that I believe is still present today.

Luckily, things are changing, slowly, for the better. Teachers are becoming more educated and IT is becoming a bigger part of learning at my school. Interactive white boards are in a lot of classrooms and projects are more commonly requested to be presented on a computer.

They are small steps, but it’s still progress non the least.

How is technology treated in your learning environment?

Well, it has taken a bit of time but I have finally persuaded my grandparents to switch to the Mac platform!

They’ve been using a Windows Sony Vaio for a while and to tell you the truth it hasn’t been a bad machine at all. But they’ve had a couple too many problems with Windows itself - especially Norton.

I was wondering if you have any advice that I can give to my grandparents, and maybe just new switchers in general when moving from Windows to Mac. They’re pretty much your average users. They browse the web and check email and use skype to contact friends.

As people add comments and ideas, I’ll add them to the blog post.

Now all I need is for my dad to switch…

It may have taken a bit longer than expected to get out But hopefully it was worth the wait.

I’ve had the Canon HV30 for a couple of weeks now and I think I’m ready to finalize my thoughts on it. I’ve decided to go with a reviewing style that I like a lot, similar to Paul Stamatiou by dividing it up into different portions. Just as a disclaimer: this is the first camcorder I have ever owned, so don’t be surprised if a couple of things I find very useful are commodities on most video cameras.

Build

The HV30 on the whole has a very strong build quality, it doesn’t feel flimsy and feels solid in your hand. Of course it should considering it is a $1000 camcorder. However the tape housing does feel a bit loose and you can feel it jiggle around quite a lot. One other slight annoyance is that the cover for the hot-shoe is attached to the body and kinda’ gets in the way of my Rode Video Mic. I would prefer it to be totally removable but I understand why it is there.

The controls are nicely situated so that they are easily accessible with one hand. They have also improved the zoom control, making it larger. If you weren’t aware the HV30 features a large 2.7″ screen that even in the sunlight isn’t blemished. Instead of having a silver finish, in is now black; which in my opinion looks a lot better and makes it seem a lot more professional.

All in all I thing that the HV30 is a very well built camcorder, though it has a couple of design flaws that might annoy some.

Specifications and Quality

The HV30 records up to 1080i high definition onto standard DV tapes. It has a standard HD shooting mode, but also has a 30P mode and a 24P mode (which I have yet to delve into). You can of course shoot good old regular standard definition. And as I learnt. If you want to use it to stream live on Ustream.tv it needs to be on that mode.

You can, as with most video cameras you can take stills, but if your looking for anything with quality then you probably want to look at a point and shoot which will be leaps and bounds over what this camera can produce. If you want to take still photos then you will need to get a micro SD card to put in the camera.

As for quality. It looks good, very good. There is something about it that makes it look clean, just how clear the footage is makes it look good. The following link goes to a piece of test footage that I shot outside. It’s at 720p so it looks pretty good. I think that any camera at this price is going to reach a limit where the video really can’t get that much better until you have a much larger budget.

Usage

Filming with the HV30 is very easy and controlling it is even more so. The interface is very easy to use and to understand so the use of the instruction book was not needed at all. Though you did have to dig quite deep to change some of the settings and when trying to change the quality of the video it didn’t have a clear guide to what I was actually changing.

One nice feature that I liked was the ability to change the time it takes to zoom in and out by just slightly pushing it or pushing it all the way.

One thing that I was very surprised about was the I didn’t really need any extra lighting when filming indoors, I thought I would. The HV30 has above average from the sound of things, low light performance that I was impressed by. Some said that I would be limited while using DV Tapes which the HV30 records onto. Personally, I have found them very easy to use and to work with. My only slight annoyance has been finding thing the right spot to set Final Cut Express to capture the footage. Though it’s very comforting to know that you have all your footage stored away on DV Tape.

Conclusions

I am very happy with the HV30, it really is the sweet stop for consumer cameras. It offers good performance for a good price.

However, I’m not sure if the HV30 is necessarily that much better than the HV20. But looking at Amazon, currently the prices of both are pretty comparable so the choice is up to you. If you want to produce video for the web then this really is your best option. You get very high quality video that can be noticed and frankly you’re not going to see much difference between this and a few thousand dollar camera on the web.

Any thoughts?

I knew this post would come up sometime, I didn’t know when. But I think it’s now the right time. For the first time since purchasing my Mac I am starting to feel the limitations on the hardware, ever since venturing into the video space.

Just to put it into context here are a few things to bear in mind:

I’m running on a Santa Rosa 2.2GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.

I am recording my video at 1080i with a Canon HV30

I am using Final Cut Express to edit the footage.

The main problem is not the performance in editing and putting the clips together to reach one final piece, but instead the time it takes once I’ve put together the story - for it to render and export the footage. I find myself having to wait over an hour while I wait for a five minute video to render.

Admittedly, it was a 720p high definition. But really, this is the sort of quality I am aiming at. I want good content that looks good. I want people to be able to download this content and play it on their big screen TVs. As I’ve said before about this podcast I have decided not to take the half hearted approach and gone for the best equipment that I can afford .

To put it bluntly: I don’t put up with crap so by should other people?

After not even having my Mac for a year I am already contemplating the next computer I will be purchasing (though it may not be what you expect). The problem with the Mac is that it as soon as it shows you all these amazing things you can do with it; it’s obsoleting itself while trying to show you the best it can do.

NB: I’m not to sure if my last sentence made sense. Please leave a comment if you don’t understand it, it will just take a very long comment to explain it any better

Yesterday I received yet another parcel in the mail. This time from Apple, as they delivered my 500GB Time Capsule. I whizzed through the setup with ease and am now using it for not only backing up but also as my n router (we were previously on a g network).

I found the setup very interesting. Strangely easy. The fact that you didn’t have to know all the lingo and if there was any, for those who actually know what they are doing, it explains simply what this will do and tell you what “you” will want.

However I am having doubts about the range of the device. It doesn’t seem to go much further than my g router, something I thought to be one of the advantages with an n router. As for speed I am very impressed. Straight away I could tell the difference of now having n instead of g.

The last problem I have found is that the box has to be hidden away downstairs as the wired network around the house isn’t working properly. I guess I will have to wait a bit longer before ordering that printer…

Last weekend I put in my order for a 500GB Time Capsule. On Wednesday if it found out that you can now use an external drive, with an Airport Extreme to get the same effect. I already have a 500GB external drive. So do I now regret ordering my Time Capsule (which by the way, hasn’t arrived yet)?

The short answer is, no.

My main reasoning behind it is that I would then have to pay £120 for the Airport Express (for the n networking), and if you add that on top of the pricing of my hard drive it would make it over the £200 price of the Time Capsule. So I will not have 1TB of external storage. Some that I can have hooked up directly to my Mac when I am at the desk and another 500GB when I am about the house, but still don’t want to keep on my main hard drive. IT’s kinda of like that when I am at home I have a 620GB hard drive. It sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Some may ask why I don’t just sell my 500GB hard drive and put it towards something else. My reply to that is this. I have just come into the possession of a Canon HV30. Why you probably know records at 1080i - so I’m going to need a lot of space to fit all of that content on. And that 500Gb hard drive is probably going to be getting a lot more use then it would have if I hadn’t got my hands on the HV30.

With this method of storage I can separate out my data and have one hard drive for this purpose and the Time Capsule for the other. THe HV30 is arriving sometime today. Expect my initial thoughts on Monday,

We are now at the point in computing where there is not a massive difference between the power of a desktop and a laptop and I sometimes wonder (with the exception of professionals and gamers) why anybody even still purchases them. There are of course a couple of pros to owning desktop:

• Expandability
• Normally slightly cheaper with a higher spec
• They tend to run a bit cooler

For some, the desktop will always be “their machine”. Knowing it’s reliability, and the lack of damage through transportation. All the above points are valid but I think as time progresses they will become less and less important. With such advances as the Time Capsule (which I am about to place an order for) and wireless printing we can have our laptop anywhere but not loose the functionaility of a laptop. If the screen is too small - plug in an external monitor. If you don’t like the keyboard - there are a menagerie of keyboard out there for you to choose from. Power? If all you do is browse the internet and write with word then you’re off your rocker, and even then you can still play a lot of games and do some light video editing with a standard laptop.

However there is always a but, and this is no exception. Some people do need power, some people need a maxed out Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM and two 30″ Displays (well I need one too!), but most people could easily work with a laptop - even something with similar specs to the MacBook Air.

My concluding thought is that the desktop is on it’s way out for the average consumer, I have already seen people getting rid of their desktops and replacing them with laptops. Even in the enterprise area, a large amount of business’ use notebooks with docking stations rather than desktops. However there is still a large enough market for the desktop PC - with professionals, but the gap is shrinking and the only way to keep things where they are now is to increase performance without price, something thats not to easy.

Do you think desktops are dying?

As soon as I purchased my Mac I realized that just having that wasn’t enough, that to really make the most out of your computer you need to make some additions which will help you in the long run. So in this post I will explore five good looking and useful accessories to add to your Mac setup:

Speakers - Altec Lansing FX6021

These amazing looking speakers will be perfect next to your iMac or Apple Display; they brushed aluminum finish goes for the pro look. With not only looking good they produce a good solid sound (though I have heard the bass isn’t fantastic at times). These powerhouse speakers are sure to drive the amount of music you listen to through the roof - and also your neighbours.

With the product you get a Subwoofer and two speakers for your desk. One of the cooler features of the speakers is that they are wall mountable; just in case you think they take up to much desk space - but with their sleek design I don’t know why you would need to.

Hard Drive - Western Digital My Book

After being thoroughly disappointed with my LaCie hard drive I am on the hunt for a new one. Though I see myself getting a Time Capsule I still want to get a drive to put a load of files on. Many people have recommended the My Book drives, they are cheap, durable and have a very good build quality. They don’t look half bad either.

You can get the My Book in a varying amount of sizes and ports: some with FW800, FW400 and some with plain USB 2.0. The sizes vary from 250GB all the way up to 2TB. I’m sure you’ll find one to suit your needs.

Picture Credit: Flickr User CamFlan

Keyboard and Mouse

John Foster says that one of the best ways of making your old Mac feel new again in getting a new Keyboard and Mouse - I agree. And with the endless combinations of keyboards and mice, sleek, ergonomic etc. there is sure to be one that meets your needs. Personally I am a fan of both Microsoft’s and Apple’s offerings.

If you want a good solid keyboard with a fantastic design then go with Apple. Of course, if you want wireless then you’ll have to give up the number pad; which for some could be more then they want. However I have not missed it at all. Many people don’t like the Might Mouse - I like it and I don’t really have any problems with it - in the end it is up to you.

Microsoft has a very good collection of keyboards, which I won’t go into to much detail about here, though they might not look as good they are some of the best in the business.

Laptop Stand - Griffin Elevator

I uses a notebook as my main machine, that means that a lot of the time I am sitting at my desk looking down at my computer. This is not very good for you if you do it for a long time and can lead to back and neck pains. So enter the Elevator; a very simple laptop stand that does a very good job. Due to it’s design it stops your notebook from getting very hot as it leaves a long gap for air to flow underneath.

This is also a very good option if you are planning on running an external monitor (look bellow!) or if you just want to run both your iMac and MacBook together at the same height. Either way it’s a great deal.

Second Display - Dell

Believe it or not, Apple doesn’t make the best displays - if you don’t believe me read this post. Adding a second display to your setup can increase your productivity dramatically. They can also enable you to; if you want both portably and a big screen compromise with being able to un-plug and take your notebook everywhere but also have a big workspace at the office.

Dell offer a massive range of sizes; from 17″ all the way up to 30″ (if you have the money). Even if you like Apple’s design, you can’t say the Dell monitors look ugly can you?

Conclusion

So there you have it folks, five great accessories to add to your Mac, got any that I missed out. please don’t hesitate to tell me!

Have you got any of these great accessories? OR are you planning on purchasing some of them? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!