Apple ProApps Store: More than just plugins

In which I suggest that Apple could use their expertise in creating an App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch to create a store for post-production professionals.
Now is the time to start guessing about the new features Apple might introduce in the ProApps that will make up Final Cut Studio 3. Most people are [...]

I met two people at a party…

…after a while the conversation ran a little dry, so I asked them what they did for a living.
The first one said “I’m a problem solver.” I understood, but didn’t know what kind of problems they fixed. “I work with a group of people who wait for calls for help of various kinds. We’re ready [...]

The next step to the Holophoner, the smFrontczak

Either Microsoft is terrible at creating videos, or they have a good sense of an ironically bad video. Check out this submission. I think they know what they’re doing:

Their newly announced product available from Microsoft Research automatically generates accompanying music to any words you sing into your computer. You can choose key and musical style. [...]

100,421

Although I’ve been using the personal pronoun a little more often recently, this post will be the most self-regarding for a while.
Earlier today, Google Analytics told WordPress that I had had over 100,000 ‘hits’ – that’s somewhere between 100,000 people visiting one of my pages once to 1,000 people visiting 10 of my pages 10 [...]

Video doodles

As Vimeo kindly gave me ‘Plus’ membership, you can now watch these videos in HD right here (if you click the full-screen control), until I run out of HD plays. After that, you’ll still be watch them in HD at http://www.vimeo.com/alex4d

This is a little long, in widescreen so that the limited bandwidth is used [...]

Playlists of the future 3 – Combination podcasts

On the BBC iPlayer, as well as watching TV from recent days or weeks, you can also listen the output of national and local radio stations. Most music shows can only be heard for seven days. The podcast versions cannot include any commercial music. For example, I can listen to the Adam and Joe show [...]

Playlists of the future 2 – TV singles and albums

What if my visual feed was similar to my audio feed – the way music is played on radio. What if media organisations had playlists that I subscribed to?
Maybe the visual channel that I will tune into will be made up of four to five minute vignettes. Longer than traditional previews, they’d be excerpts from [...]

Playlists of the future 1 – Radio

Some radio stations are different from others. They can be divided into two groups: entertaining and stimulating. On the entertaining stations, the vast majority of the tracks I hear, I like. On the stimulating stations, things are less certain. DJs who care about music more than the musicians. People who are still DJs (instead of [...]

A sign of success: dilemmas

I thought it would be months until I had a couple of high-class dilemmas like the two I have at the moment. They’re no big deal, but for an (as yet) unprofessional writer such as I, I’m surprised that they’re already here.
The first one is simple. As I’ve managed to get a good number of [...]

Say goodbye to looking out of the window drudgery

On my way back from Liverpool by train a while ago, I held my camera up against the window for a while.
If you have a portable media player, and need to go on a journey in the dark, you can play this video instead of looking out of the window.

Click the Vimeo button to [...]