SCOtutor Apps now Universal

It's been a bit quiet on the SCOtutor app front since releasing the iOS versions of the apps back in December.

There are currently three apps available, SCOtutor for Mac, SCOtutor for iPad and SCOtutor for Lion.

Already available on both the Mac and iPad, we were missing an iPhone/iPod touch version, to allow you to download the apps to your truly mobile device.

Well I'm delighted to announce that the Universal iOS versions of all three apps are now available for download via the iTunes App Store. The Universal apps are a free upgrade and include support for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4/4S iPod touch (3rd and 4th Generation) and all iPads - basically, anything that can run iOS 5!

The great thing about being able to put the apps on the iPhone is that you can carry them around and either watch on the device, or watch on a big screen TV via Airplay.

Now that the SCOtutor framework app is complete and fully supports iOS and Mac, I'll be looking at publishing some additional titles via the App Store route in the near future.

Perhaps some iPhone specific titles would be good!

I'll include some links to the updated Apps in the Apps store but they should show up as updates if you've already purchased them. Please be aware that the video content has been reformatted so it will re-download the video. The apps also contain refreshed Retina graphics so they'll look very smart on your new iPad or iPhone 4/4S. The videos already look gorgeous on the new iPad!

SCOtutor for iPad (Universal App)

SCOtutor for Mac (Universal App)

SCOtutor for Lion (Universal App)

More ratings and reviews are always appreciated!

If you've not tried them out, go ahead! You can find more information about the individual apps on this page:

ScreenCastsOnline Mac & iOS Tutorial Apps

Or just search for SCOtutor in the iTunes or Mac App stores.

I can't finish off this post without extending a huge thanks to Simon Wolf (@sgaw) of Otter Software for his incredible efforts at bring the SCOtutor Apps together, along with Jamie Peak (@jamiepeak) for the fantastic graphics support.

Replacing My Mac Pro with a MacBook Air - Part 3

This is the third and final (for now!) update on my experiment of using my 11" MacBook Air as my main production machine, in place of my 2008 Mac Pro.

Since taking delivery of the 27" Thunderbolt display, the MacBook Air has been performing admirably as my main machine, and the experience has been surprisingly positive!

27" Thunderbolt Display

The display is a joy to use. Pinsharp with glorious colour.

The ability to connect all my desktop peripherals to my MacBook Air with a single cable is fantastic. I do feel Apple have been a bit stingy with the number of ports. Ideally, I'd have like more than three USB ports and just the single Thunderbolt port seems an oversight, two would be better!

Beware of the glossy screen, it really is very reflective, but I'm used to it now and hardly notice.

Mounting the Display

I have a custom built "Triple Boa" stand made by Monitors in Motion. This allows me to have three monitors, all hanging off an articulated cross member, raised off the desk by a single post. The 19" screen on the left is connected to a Mac mini running Mountain Lion, the central monitor is the 27" Thunderbolt display connected to the MacBook Air via the Thunderbolt connection, and the right 19" monitor is connected to the Mac Pro.

The "Triple Boa" utilises standard VESA mounts, so in order to attach the 27" Thunderbolt, I had to purchase an optional VESA adapter from Apple. To fit the VESA adapter to the Thunderbolt display, you have to remove the original one piece stand using the kit supplied with the Apple VESA mount. A fairly simple process, once I'd tracked down a YouTube video showing me how to do it. The VESA mount went on just fine, and I had no installation issues.

I decided initially to just temporarily install the cabling so it was all a bit of a mess. Now I'm happy that my experiment will work out, I'll dismantle all the monitors over the next week or so, and re-cable for neatness plus remove any unnecessary cables. Will post some photos when it's all nice and tidy.

Screencast Recording & Editing Configuration

With the 27" Thunderbolt connected to the MacBook Air, I have the perfect screencast recording configuration - recording the screen capture off the MacBook Air display, and having ScreenFlow running full screen on the main display. This way, I can record a segment, then immediately edit in ScreenFlow. The video capture files get saved straight to the LaCie so I've no worries about running out of disk space, or filling up my SSD.

I use a couple of peripherals when editing, namely a Contour Shuttle Pro and Wacom Intuos 5. The Contour Shuttle Pro is an editing jog wheel with programmable buttons, and the Wacom is a pen tablet, useful for precision editing. Both are USB, so can connect to the Thunderbolt display, or to the USB ports on the MacBook Air.

Interestingly, when I used a standalone keyboard previously for the Mac Pro, I used the Wacom as my mouse replacement. Now with the MacBook Air, I find I'm hardly using it, and relying on my MacBook Air trackpad more.

Storage and File Transfers

The performance of the LaCie is great, allowing me to boot easily from multiple builds, use as a separate RAID 0 partition for saving my project video capture files, and acting as a file store for encoding jobs when encoding on the MacBook Air. With the Gigabit ethernet permanently connected, if I need to transfer the large video files or Screenflow project files to the Mac Pro, file transfers are very speedy.

The only extra step I need to do when disconnecting the MacBook Air is to make sure I eject all the partitions on the LaCie first. I found a neat little script/application called "Undock" that allows me to do that with just a couple of keystrokes in "Alfred".

Portability

As an added benefit, with the MacBook Air, the LaCie and the Intensity Extreme, I very nearly have the ideal portable screencasting studio (once I get a solution for high quality audio recording on the go). The only downside is the size of the 11" screen. It's extremely portable, but perhaps a little on the small size for video editing, especially in vertical height. Perhaps an excuse to buy a new 13" or 15" new generation MacBook Pro if they follow the styling of the MacBook Air when released.

It's certainly a workable desktop solution in conjunction with the 27" Thunderbolt display, and one I'll continue to use instead of my existing Mac Pro.

New Mac Pro?

It's pretty much a given that Apple will release revised laptops soon, most likely restyled to match the MacBook Air. But what about the new Mac Pro?

The jury is out on whether Apple will produce a new Mac Pro at all.

The previous reasons for the existence of the Mac Pro included performance and expandability. The advent of Thunderbolt and the eventual release of more and more affordable Thunderbolt enabled peripherals may well remove the "expandability" justification.

Leaving performance as a justification for the new Mac Pro.

For pro video and graphics users, there will still be the requirement for a high power machine with lots of memory and many processors. The issue is, with the power and potential expandability of the latest consumer machines, the target audience for these monster machines must surely be shrinking.

Whether it's feasible for Apple to create a new Mac Pro to service this possibly shrinking market, it's difficult to say. If they do, it's most likely going to be hugely expensive and very much a niche product. My gut feeling is that we probably will see a new Mac Pro this year, probably in early summer.

Will I get one?

Probably not, but never say never!

For my purposes, I feel it would be more cost effective for me to stick with a high performance, Thunderbolt enabled laptop moving forward. The experience of moving to just one primary machine has been very refreshing. I'll be very interested to see how Apple update the MacBook Pro range in line with the current rumours of adopting some of the design principles of the MacBook Air.

I may be tempted to upgrade to a MacBook Pro/Air with a 256GB SSD, 8 or 16GB RAM, new Ivy Bridge processor and a 13" or 15" HiDPI Retina Display.

That would do nicely!

Replacing My Mac Pro with a MacBook Air - Part 2

Following on from my post yesterday, here is part 2 of my experiment in using a 11" MacBook Air as my primary work machine, in place of a 2008 Mac Pro. In this section, I take a look at some of the extra kit I felt was required to fully replicate the current level of capability provided by the Mac Pro.

Storage

The Mac Pro has a 256GB SSD boot drive plus three additional internal drives, two of which are configured as a RAID 0 drive for working files.

The MacBook Air only has 256GB of on board storage.

I could really do with a big, fast drive for project based storage. Only for current projects, as I back off all my data to other storage devices.

The 27" Thunderbolt display includes Thunderbolt, FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. I felt that using FireWire or USB for external storage would compromise the overall solution, so I opted for a relatively expensive Thunderbolt solution.

I decided to purchase a Thunderbolt LaCie 1TB Little Big Drive.

This is a small compact unit containing 2x500GB drives that can be striped for even faster performance. With Thunderbolt connectivity, the external drive performs close to the speed of the internal SSD drive. The drive is small and portable, although does use an external power supply and is relatively expensive. In my Studio environment, with the drive positioned a few feet away, it is possible to notice a small amount of fan noise, but the sounds of the other equipment does seem to mask it. When used in isolation, for instance in a hotel room with just the MacBook Air, the sound is much more pronounced.

The LaCie has dual Thunderbolt ports allowing me to daisy chain Thunderbolt devices. This is useful as the 27" Thunderbolt display only has a single Thunderbolt port.

One of the techniques I use on the MacBook Air, is to have a separate partition with a "clean" build on which to record my screencasts. At recording time, I reboot and boot off the "clean" build. With the LaCie, I could move the "clean" build off the internal SSD drive to the external Thunderbolt drive and boot from that. Performance is virtually indistinguishable from the internal drive. And of course, I have 1TB of disk space to play with, so I can create multiple partitions for various builds and backups, as well as making a big RAID 0 partition for working files.

Video capture

The only specialised device I have with my Mac Pro is a Matrox MX02 mini which I use occasionally for video capture. It uses a proprietary card installed in the Mac Pro. I needed to find a way to replicate this functionality on the MacBook Air.

Two options, both Thunderbolt based:

Option 1 - Matrox have released a Thunderbolt adapter for the Matrox MX02 mini so it's simple to interface with the MacBook Air.

Option 2 - Black Magic have released the Intensity Extreme. A dedicated HDMI video capture box with Thunderbolt.

I opted for the Black Magic Intensity Extreme, although there are a couple of software solutions now for iOS capture namely AirServer and Reflections. This allows me to do full HDMI video and audio capture to the MacBook Air. It also includes a breakout cable for component or other audio sources. The Intensity Extreme only has a single Thunderbolt port, so it needs to go at the end of the Thunderbolt chain. Usefully, it's powered by the Thunderbolt cable so no external power brick is required. The unit is very small, and very portable.

Audio

Within the studio, I can continue using my existing audio setup with the MacBook Air as it uses an Edirol USB interface. For portability, I might look at replacing this with an integrated Thunderbolt solution when a prosumer level device becomes available.

In part 3, I'll cover my findings of using the MacBook Air as my main production machine.

Replacing My Mac Pro with a MacBook Air - Part 1

Interesting experiment for the last week or two. I've been using my 11" MacBook Air as my primary work machine - for everything!

Background

I use two Macs on a regular basis, a Mac Pro as my primary desktop work machine and a MacBook Air as my secondary machine. The Mac Pro is an 8 core 2008 Model with 16GB RAM hooked up to a 30" Dell monitor.

The MacBook Air is a 2011 model with an Intel 1.8Ghz Core i7 processor with 256GB SSD and 4GB RAM.

I've been hedging my bets on when (or if) Apple will release a new Mac Pro as I've always assumed that I would replace my existing Mac Pro with a new Mac Pro as my primary desktop machine.

The main Dell monitor on my Mac Pro has been starting to display some intermittent faults, so I've been contemplating what to do when it needs replacement. I've always been a bit concerned about paying the Apple tax on monitors, and I'd anticipated getting another Dell monitor for the Mac Pro.

However, with the advent of the 27" Thunderbolt display, I'd started to consider buying an Apple monitor, especially in view of the built in Thunderbolt connectivity and the ability to connect Gigabit Ethernet, USB and FireWire, as well as the built in HD camera and audio.

All accessible from a single Thunderbolt cable.

The thing is, this wouldn't work with my 2008 Mac Pro, even with an updated graphics card. But it would work with my 11" MacBook Air, the only machine I have with a Thunderbolt port. In fact, the 11" MacBook Air would drive the 27" Thunderbolt display at its maximum resolution as well as using it's own display.

That got me thinking...

Single Machine vs Desktop & Laptop

Using a separate desktop and laptop does involve some challenges in keeping data and apps in sync. Dropbox goes along way to sort this out, but my ideal configuration would be to use a single Mac for everything. Ideally, a portable Mac, so when I travel, everything goes with me. No alternate configuration, no making compromises, no realising that an app or data wasn't on my machine when working away from home.

MacBook Air Performance

I'd previously done some benchmarking on the 11" MacBook Air, and have been impressed with it's overall performance.

In normal day to day activities, I really can't tell the difference between the MacBook Air and the Mac Pro. Obviously, with extremely processor intensive tasks such as video encoding, the eight cores of the MacPro are going to beat the MacBook Air every time, but even then, the difference isn't as dramatic as you might expect. Real Life Encoding Blogpost

I've been using the MacBook Air as my primary recording machine since I've had it. All my screencasts have been recorded on the MacBook Air and recently, I've been doing my preliminary editing on the Air as I record. I use ScreenFlow as my recording tool, and for doing the preliminary edit. As ScreenFlow has matured and grown in functionality, I've recently started using ScreenFlow for my full production workflow, including producing the final version of my screencasts.

I'd been wondering for a while if I really needed the power of the Mac Pro for 95% of the time, and if the overhead of trying to use two machines was warranted.

What if I could use my MacBook Air as my main machine?

Formulating A Plan

So, I decided to buy the 27" Thunderbolt Display and try using the 11" MacBook Air as my primary machine for general computing tasks, as well as recording and editing. The Mac Pro would remain as a fallback, as well as being available to offload encoding jobs to, when working in my studio. If it didn't work out, the next desktop machine I get will have Thunderbolt, so I could always use the 27" Thunderbolt display with that.

But what about the other subsystems I use with the Mac Pro, how would I replicate my Mac Pro's capabilities?

I'll post part 2 of the saga over the next few days detailing how I replicated the storage and video capture components of my Mac Pro, and fill you in on how successful the process has been.

1080p on iTunes and Apple TV

Despite my initial disappointment with the new (somewhat superficial) changes to the UI on the Apple TV, I am looking forward to the introduction of 1080p. In advance of the new Apple TV being made available, the latest release of iTunes now supports the downloading of 1080p content, directly to your Mac. Just switch it on as a setting in iTunes preferences.

I had a play last night with some free TV episodes and I have to say, I was impressed. Mind you, I only downloaded some small samples and I have a very fast Internet connection, but even so, the experience was pretty seamless and the quality of the output excellent.

With 1080p and Movies in the Cloud, Apple have the foundation for what could be a very successful service, but I fear it's doomed to never really take off.

The main problem is the price of the content, especially when competing with free.

Matt Gemmell wrote an article a week or two ago which sums up a lot of my feelings about how the movie industry handles pricing - The Piracy Threshold (contains some pretty strong language BTW).

Apple TV and Movies in the Cloud resolves virtually all the issues Matt raises except for one, the pricing.

Before anyone berates me for being part of the "entitlement" brigade or for advocating piracy, I'm not and I don't. It's the right of the movie studios to charge what they want for their movies.

Absolutely!

But now they have the opportunity to reinvent or reboot the movie business, handed to them on a virtual plate by Apple. Apple can provide them with the delivery mechanism, the user experience and the back end ecommerce systems. Hand Apple your movie, and get a big fat cheque at the end of each quarter.

Apple can now push bits down a wire to deliver high quality movies, seamlessly into people's homes, and have them pay for it with a single click. Movies in the Cloud handles the storage and gives people the convenience to access the content they've bought, from any device.

Simple and convenient.

Apple have already demonstrated with the music industry, that a frictionless system with reasonable pricing works. Remove the friction, charge a reasonable, affordable price and people will buy. It's worked for music and I'm sure it would work for movies.

So will I be using Movies in the cloud?

No, I won't.

I can afford to buy 1080p movies from iTunes at the current pricing, but I won't.

My perception of the pricing, my gut feeling, is one of being ripped off.

I may be wrong, and £14.99 may be a fair price to buy a 90 minute movie, but it just feels wrong.

It's not that I feel any sense of entitlement, or that it should be down to me to me to set the pricing of someone else's product, it's not.

It just feels to me that the price is too high, based on my own personal value system.

But as I say, it's the movie industry's choice. Keep the price high and sell fewer units, rather than than drop the price and sells many, many times more. Someone surely must have run the numbers somewhere?

So, rather than buy or rent from iTunes, I'll be taking advantage of the new 1080p streaming service from Netflix, unlimited streaming movies and TV shows straight to my Apple TV in glorious 1080p.

Pity as I'd love to build a movie collection and use Movies in the Cloud.

But not at those prices.