Shallow Thoughts
Random stuff for the pixel monkey in all of us. With your host, Kevin Schmitt
 
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Today
 
 
 
 
 
Tuesday Aug 21, 2007
 

Oh, it's on now - "Moviestar" is a go

Take that, Silverlight. Adobe's "Moviestar" version of the Flash Player addresses some now-former shortcomings.[Read More]

 
Wednesday Aug 01, 2007
 

Horn tootin' time

If you haven't seen the piece yet, I ran a bunch of benchmarks testing the Mac and Windows versions of After Effects CS3 on the same Intel Mac hardware, and the results have been posted. Nothing surprising, considering that AE on the Mac has historically lagged behind its Windows counterpart, and it's just the same old same old. Disappointing, though not unexpected.

Anyway, check out the full article if you're so inclined.

 
Tuesday Jul 24, 2007
 

And so it begins

Over five years ago I wrote a commentary piece bitching about OS fanatics (archived here if you care for the additional context), in which the following sentence appeared:

I'd hate to think of [OS fanaticism] progressing to something like a Mac cult deciding to wipe Redmond, Washington off the map because they thought Steve Jobs put some sort of hidden message in Mac OS X.

Now comes word of a man in New Zealand running down a woman at a church, jumping out of the vehicle with his laptop, and shouting Steve Jobs's name. Clearly, this is only the start of the larger OS wars, as apparently those Methodists were all Windows users and had to be dealt with first. I suggest Microsoft beef up security around its campus, as I was obviously prescient in my earlier piece. I guess those hidden messages in OS X took a little longer to filter down to the faithful than I originally thought.

At any rate, I'm sure the Mac haters out there will have a field day with this one. I hope that poor woman pulls through.

 
Tuesday Jul 17, 2007
 

Conditional AppleScript as a sanity saver

Let's go through two very specific scenarios to see if some conditional AppleScript might cure what ails us. [Read More]

 
Monday Jul 02, 2007
 

The circle is now complete

So I'm finally able to break through the thick cloud of iHype (actually, it's been a flood of fairly intense projects landing at once) and finally post again, so I'll make it a quick one while there's a break in the weather. Adobe has announced the availability of the CS3 Production Premium (the one with After Effects, Premiere, etc.) and Master Collection (a.k.a. "the whole enchilada") bundles, so if you've been waiting, well, I suppose you need wait no further. Press release here.

Now back to the regular stream of iPhone-related posts choking teh intarwebs.

 
Tuesday Jun 19, 2007
 

The golden oldies of 3D software

As an exercise in taxing the furthest reaches of my rapidly decaying grey matter, behold my attempt at naming every 3D program I've ever used. [Read More]

 
Friday Jun 15, 2007
 

Anyone else sick of the iPhone?

iPhone this, iPhone that. It's seemingly all iPhone, all the time these days, from the moment it was introduced back at (non)Macworld in January. Here we are, with two weeks to go until the iPhone is available, and the hype is in overdrive. [Read More]

 
Tuesday Jun 12, 2007
 

Seriously... how wrong is this?

I'm sure the novelty of this will wear off by lunchtime (indeed, most of it already has), but I just had to get a screen capture of this. It's the Safari 3 public beta for Windows, running on an XP VM in Parallels Desktop's coherence mode on Mac OS X. Couple more layers of this and I think I could travel through time.

Safari for Windows

So, the question is this: how many times does hell need to freeze over before it stops being a big deal?

 
Monday Jun 11, 2007
 

Monday Miscellany

Couple things caught my eye today, so let's cram 'em all together. [Read More]

 
Friday Jun 08, 2007
 

Where's the user-swappable hard drive?

OK, so the new MacBook Pros are out, and there's a lot to like. But lost in all the enthusiasm over the backlit LED display and the new graphics cards is the fact that there still doesn't seem to be any easy access to the hard drive bay. That's a big reason why I'm holding onto my plain ol' MacBook (Amateur? Anti-pro?), because it is beyond trivial (and won't void the warranty) to add a higher-capacity SATA drive when the need arises. I'm sure there would be some tricky engineering involved to put the MacBook Pro's hard disk in a place where it would be user-accessible, but I can't really even consider one without it, despite the need for at least marginally faster graphics performance out of my mobile machine.

Maybe next time... dammit.