New Accessibility Feature for ScreenCastsOnline

Huge, huge week for ScreenCastsOnline.

OK, perhaps that may be overstating it, but I’m so pleased to announce the launch of full English subtitles included with all future shows, starting with SCO0311 - Using Mail in Lion

Primarily included as an accessibility feature, subtitles should assist our hard of hearing viewers and obviously our deaf viewers, but I’m also hoping they may help non-english speaking viewers too.

If I’m honest, I’m also hoping it may widen the potential ScreenCastsOnline audience to a new group of people that may not have otherwise been able to access the content, so I’m not being solely altruistic. Even so, I feel really pleased that I’ve been able to introduce the subtitles and hope as many people benefit from them as possible.

I've used an external transcription service to create the plain text file and then various applications to apply the timecode and create the captions. Quicktime supports "Soft Subtitles" so I can embed the subtitle track within the Quicktime file itself, as well as the existing Chapter track. The subtitles work great using iTunes and QuickTime 7 player but it looks like support using QuickTime X player is not fully functional. I hope Apple get around to fixing that soon!

Of course, the logical extension of this is the inclusion of foreign language subtitles, but on the weekly production cycle (and the humongous expense), I don’t think that would be feasible on a regular basis... we’ll see!

Although this week's show is a member's only show, seeing as you're reading this on my blog, I'll include a link to a sample version of this week's show, so you can download and have a play - just right click on this Sample Version with Subtitles and download the linked file.

Once you've downloaded the file, open it in iTunes and use Controls > Audio & Subtitles to switch on the English Subtitles. As the first section explains, it's actually better to play in QuickTime 7 as you can slow down playback, as well as adjusting the pitch and volume of the audio track. Just in case you find it difficult to follow the subtitles - I really need to learn to speak more slowly!

Please feel free to circulate the link to anyone who may be interested or who may find it useful.

Would love any feedback, either here on the blog or via email to screencastsonline@gmail.com

HP - Really?

Everyone has probably heard about HP abandoning the HP TouchPad and Pre hardware line, as well as looking to divest itself of WebOS and it's entire PC business.

Wow!

I'm both surprised and saddened by the news.

Surprised, because I thought that they would eventually come up with a worthy competitor to the iPad, even if the first generation HP TouchPad plainly wasn't it.

Saddened because I really believe Apple needs some competition in this space. They certainly haven't any at the moment.

Rather than spend my time writing a detailed blog post, Patrick Rhone over at Minimal Mac has done a great piece and I'd recommend it as a good read, echoing my thoughts exactly (well almost, exactly - I just thought the Google para was funny!).

"It is time to stop looking and, like HP, face a simple truth – you can’t win playing the iPad game. Because it is not the tablet game. It is the iPad game. And you can’t make those. You can’t even manage to make something as good as those, at least not at that price. Apple has the channel locked up price wise. Tim Cook saw to that. You will never be able to build at the same cost they do and produce anything even close. And let’s just skip the whole integrated end-to-end platform discussion because you guys are just not built that way.

Oh, Google, sit down and shut the eff up because I’m talking to you too. You are the company that names your beta builds after candy, ice cream, and sugared cereals. Apple names their betas after things that will eat your things along with the tasty human wrapper that eats that crap. Do you honestly think anyone can take you seriously?"

(Via Minimal Mac.)

MacMania 15 - November 2012

If you're a regular follower of my blog and of ScreenCastsOnline, you'll know I've been really fortunate to travel the world as a presenter on several of the MacMania cruises.

I've been round the Mediterranean, to China, South Korea & Japan, and this year Argentina, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands and Chile.

As well as seeing these glorious places, it's been a blast meeting up with fellow MacManiacs, many of whom have become friends for life, as well as meeting up with fellow presenters such as Leo Laporte and Andy Ihnatko, to name but two.

I have to give a huge shout out to Captain Neil and Teresa of Insight Cruises for extending the invites out to me, I really am delighted and surprised each time to get the call!

Well I'm super excited to announce that the call has gone out again, and I've been invited to present on MacMania 15 in November 2012.

This is another awesome trip, this time heading for a place I've never been to before - Australia!

But it get's better.

As well as being able to visit Australia, the trip also combines visits to New Caledonia and is slap bang in the middle of a Solar Eclipse.

So Sun, Sea, Mac stuff and a Solar Eclipse.

Seriously, the trip of a lifetime!

This one is also special, in that I'm being joined by one of my cohorts from the Mac Roundtable podcast - Allison Sheridan of the Nosillicast Podcast. It's Allison's first time on a MacMania cruise and she is also super excited as you might imagine.

We are both delivering 8 x 90 minute sessions on the cruise, so there's a ton of preparation to do before the cruise, and it's quite a punishing schedule but we've got over a year to prepare (and get in shape!). The sessions are pretty wide ranging and hopefully interesting to most Mac users - newbies or old hands. There's also another six sessions yet to be announced together with an additional presenter (or two or three...).

The pages have just gone live over on the Insight Cruises website so go ahead and checkout the sessions and the itinerary.

I appreciate that the trip is out of reach for a lot of people but it you can stretch to it, it's going to be a fantastic trip (and it is 14 months away!).

If you can make it, I'd love to share the experience with you!

Mac mini for Video Editing?

My previous blog post Real Life MacBook Air 11" Benchmark - Video Encoding showed some spectacular results whilst video encoding when comparing the 1.8Ghz i7 MacBook Air with a 2008 MacPro with 8 cores and 16GB RAM.

I can only assume that the new 2.7GHz i7 Mac mini would actually be comparable to my ageing Mac Pro especially if upgraded to the full 8GB RAM (or even 16GB using third party kits)

A ScreenCastsOnline viewer (and Video Professional) Allan Tépper, sent me a link to a recent blog post on using a Mac mini as the core of a professional video editing rig.

It makes for interesting reading!

Mac Mini w/Thunderbolt: preferred platform for many new editing systems

There are still some missing pieces (especially the Thunderbolt enabled professional interfaces from AJA, Blackmagic and Matrox) but hopefully they will be with us soon, along with a wider selection of Thunderbolt enabled drives.

It really makes it interesting to see if Apple actually do come out with a replacement for the Mac Pro, or if this is the future of Pro level machines.

My gut feeling is that they will produce a monster Mac Pro, but with a Mac mini configuration like this, how many people will actually need one?

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

Update - I've updated this post following on some further information provided by Apple

Apple yesterday released a new utility to assist in helping you if your hard disk goes completely AWOL. As part of the standard installation process, when you install Lion, a separate "invisible" Recovery Partition is created on your hard drive. This is intended to allow you to re-install Lion for whatever reason, but only on the machine it's installed on.

This won't help if your complete hard disk fails and you can't access the Recovery partition. Newer Macs are OK (the latest Mac minis and MacBook Airs) as they can boot into recovery mode and restore from Apple's servers.

However, it is possible to create a copy of the Lion installer on a USB drive, but only if you know what to do during the install and deviate slightly from the standard path. If you don't, the installer will get deleted by default, once Lion is installed. As well as having a physical copy of Lion to re-install, having a USB installer does allow you to install on multiple machines from the USB.

A lot of people didn't know about this technique and consequently don't have a physical copy of Lion to re-install.

Enter the "Lion Recovery Disk Assistant"

It looks like that this tool just allows you to create an external Recovery partition on a USB drive or external hard drive. So if your hard drive fails and you can't access the installed Recovery partition, you can boot from your Lion Recovery Disk Drive.

Some caveats though…

• The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant software will only work on a machine with an existing Recovery Partition
• If you create the external recovery drive with a computer that shipped with Lion, it will only work on that computer
• If create the external recovery drive with a computer that was upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, the external recovery drive will work on other systems that were upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion

So it's a step in the right direction and will allow you some piece of mind to have a fallback position if your hard drive fails, but it's not a full blown installer.

Pity!