Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 9:20AM 
Kev and Nick were kind enough to invite me onto the TechTalk UK podcast yesterday, where we talked about ScreenCastsOnline, Lion and the new MacBook Airs.
The episode has just been released and you can check it out over at:
Thanks for the invite Kev and Nick, it was great fun chatting to you.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 11:02PM Ok, so we've seen lot's of raw processor speeds and "GeekBench" benchmarks for the new 2011 MacBook Air, but how does it stand up in "real-life" usage?
One of the first things people said about the 2010 MacBook Air was that it was a powerful machine, "but you really wouldn't want to use it for video editing".
To be honest, the video editing is fine, it's the video encoding that might give cause for concern.
Video encoding is one of the most processor intensive tasks you can throw at a computer. As well as maxing out the processors (the more cores the better), it also stresses the i/o of a machine.
For maximum video encoding speed, you need multiple processors and speedy disks.
As part of my standard production workflow, I routinely produce huge "master" video files of the ScreenCastsOnline tutorials, then encode them into multiple resolutions for distribution. For fun, I thought I'd take one of my production master files and run it through Handbrake on various machines, to see the relative video encoding performance of each machine.
I chose a 20 minute screencast, with a resolution of 1280x720 encoded with the lossless animation codec at 25 frames per second and millions of colours. The "master" file weighed in at 3.8 GB.
Using Handbrake, I selected the standard Apple TV preset, bumped the resolution up to 1280x720 with a constant quality of 25.
Handbrake is a great encoder, running at 64bit and optimised for multiple cores.
Here is how it played out:
Obviously, the 8 core MacPro with 16GB of RAM and a striped RAID drive crunched though the file pretty speedily, with all 8 cores powering through the encode.
However, I was shocked at the performance of the 2011 MacBook Air 11" with the 1.8 GHz Intel Core i7 - It only took 3.5 minutes longer compared to the Mac Pro.
That's nearly twice as fast as the 2010 MacBook Air.
I don't think you need to worry about video encoding on a 2011 MacBook Air.
Will be interesting to see what a difference using Thunderbolt attached storage would make!
Update: Here is a screenshot of the MBA showing all the processor maxing out. The Intel Core i7 is a dual core chip, but uses Hyper-Threading which makes it appear as a 4 core chip to the OS. Hence the 4 displays.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 1:47PM 
After careful consideration, I ended up replacing my existing 13" second gen MacBook Air with a new third gen 11" MacBook Air. This post really isn't an exercise in justifying the machine upgrade to myself, I don't really need to do that, but more to answer some of the questions on Twitter on why I upgraded.
Previous MacBook Air
The previous MacBook Air has been a dream machine, with very few faults and with an impressive responsiveness and turn of speed. I've been using it as both my primary mobile machine plus as my dedicated ScreenCast recording machine. It has a 256GB SSD drive and is repartitioned into three separate partitions:
Performance has been superb, with the exception of background rendering on Final Cut Pro X. Not that I expected to do any serious work using FCP X on the machine, but I did record both episodes of my FCP X tutorials on the machine. The machine runs FCP X just fine if you are prepared to wait for the rendering to catch up.
Portability has been great, although the 13" MBA is just a tad too big to use on a plane seat tray (economy or coach of course). I've mentioned before my frustration of wanting to do some work on the 13" MBA on a long haul flight to SF but couldn't, whilst across the plane, someone else was working away on an 11" quite happily.
One thing I really missed, which I wasn't really expecting to, was the back lit keyboard. A really strange glaring omission by Apple on the second gen MBA, especially if you'd been used to it on the MacBook Pro.
Connectivity wasn't really an issue with the addition of a second USB port on the second gen MBA, although, the Apple USB ethernet connector was a bit of a poor performer. The number of times I forgot to pack it..... The 13" does include an SD card slot which I've used two, possibly three times.
So on the whole, I was delighted with the 13" MacBook Air, so why change?
New MacBook Air
The spec I went with was the top of the range 11" - 1.8GHz i7 processor, 4GB RAM, 256 GB SSD. As far as I was concerned, this was only available BTO (Build To Order) from the online store, but being in close proximity to my local Apple store on Sunday, I was delighted to find that they had that build in stock!
Reasons for change...
Well new and shiny had a lot to do with it but....
Performance - The boost in processor power means it is a serious contender to be a portable editing machine. In the tests I've seen, it looks like the processor can crunch though some tasks at between 1.5x and 2.5x my current machine. Still need to do some tests, but for my purposes (HD ScreenCasts) editing and rendering should be fine at a pinch. I probably wouldn't want to edit RED footage, but I should be OK.
Portability - The 11" form factor will allow me to use the MBA in places I couldn't before. My carbon footprint over the next 18 months may well be excessive as there is a lot of business (and leisure) travel on the horizon.
Backlit Keyboard - Welcome back, I really missed you. Working when travelling involves early morning starts to catch up on emails, inevitably in darkness, with Mrs Don still in the land of nod. Surprising easy to work without switching the lights on with the backlit keyboard ;-)
Connectivity - Hello Thunderbolt! This is really investing in the future.
I've never paid the Apple tax on monitors (except for a 20" Cinema Display bought 5 years ago - which is still in perfect working order by the way), deciding instead to go with Dell monitors. These are now 4 years old and starting to show their age. I can well see in another year or so swapping my primary 30" Dell monitor with an Apple Thunderbolt monitor and utilising all the built in Thunderbolt goodness. Also looking forward to the release of Thunderbolt enabled audio gear to create the ultimate portable screencast studio with the MBA.
As far as what to do with the current 13" MacBook Air, well Mrs Don has dabs on that. We have two desktop machines setup in the studio, one for me and production and one for her for email and customer service.
Unfortunately, when I'm recording, she get's evicted!
So the 13" MacBook Air becomes her primary machine so she can work in or out of the studio.
Sorted!
I'll report back on real life performance, battery life and working with an 11" screen once I've had the change to use it for a while.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 11:01AM 
It's been a week since the full version of Lion was released to the general public, so I thought I'd share some thoughts on Lion, plus some information on how I'm tentatively planning to cover Lion with ScreenCastsOnline tutorials.
What I won't do is slavishly describe each feature - at least not in this blog post!
There have been literally hundreds of blog posts describing most of the new features of Lion, so I'd rather pick out a few of the highlights, or features that I think will be the most significant as we move forward.
Reverse Scrolling - OK, so not earth shaking, but I think Apple are correct in that this does seem to be the most "natural" way to scroll when using a trackpad. I've seen lots of comments about it being problematic when using a scroll wheel mouse, but as I haven't used one of those for ages, I can't comment on that.
The main thing is, give it a try. Not for a few hours but a few days, it's amazing how quickly you'll pick it up. If you're constantly switching between Snow Leopard and Lion, try installing Scroll Reverser on your Snow Leopard machine for consistency.
As an aside, you can switch off reverse scrolling (or as Apple like to call it "Natural Scrolling") in System Preferences.
Note - These appear to work in unison so it doesn't look like you can configure individually
I've actually had to switch this new behaviour off on my my main production Mac Pro, but only because I use a Wacom Pen tablet. This already allows me to use "natural" scrolling when using the pen, but the new "natural" scrolling in Lion messes this up.
Mission Control - Not using it as much as I thought I would but liking the new combined approach of Dashboard, Spaces and Exposé in a single mechanism.
Full Screen View - Not so much use on a 30" dual monitor display, but perfect for a 11" or 13" MacBook Air. Just one word about using dual displays, only the primary monitor is utilised for the main full screen window, the secondary display goes blank.
However, if the application uses multiple inspectors or tool palettes, you can drag these onto the secondary display, so it's not completely useless!
Gestures - Not been using gestures much on the main Mac Pro (due to the pen tablet) but starting to train myself on the MacBook Air trackpad. Loving some of the synergy/similarity to the iPad.
Auto Save & Resume - Huge, huge, huge! These will save so many people's bacon it's untrue. You can work on a document in an application that has Auto Save enabled (this has to be done by the app developer) and without saving the document to a file, close the application. When you restart the app, the document re-appears in exactly the same state. This is baked right into the OS. In a couple of years. people will laugh that we used to lose work because we never saved it as we went along. This one feature alone would make me want to switch from a PC. But it gets better...
Versions - Obviously, at some point you'll want to save your file to place it within the file system. Once you have, Lion will then automatically start saving versions of the file for you. Just pause at any time, and a new version is created. Save a version manually using ⌘S or just let the system create them. Want to look at or revert to a previous version, just click on the Proxy Icon in the header and browse all versions. A "Time Machine" like display appears allowing you to peruse previous versions, copy and paste from a previous version to another or even replacing the current version with an older version. All controlled by the OS.
Just a quick tip - if you're distraught at the removal of the "File - Save As..." command. Just do a "File - Duplicate" and Lion will create a copy of your document. Then in the copy document, use "File - Save..." to rename or re-locate the document.
New Process Model - Props to John Siracusa in his awesome Lion review for covering this one, but did you know you don't actually need to quite Applications anymore?
Lion includes a new feature called Automatic Termination. Whereas Sudden Termination lets an application tell the system when it's okay to terminate it with extreme prejudice, Automatic Termination lets an application tell the system that it's okay to politely ask the program to exit.
So basically, just like iOS, you don't need to quit an application, as under certain circumstances, Lion will do it for you, automatically. Auto-Save will make sure any open documents are safely saved and if the system needs some additional resources and you haven't used an app for a while, Lion will close it. But it doesn't close it completely, it just frees up the resources needed, and if you run the application again, it will start instantly as Lion doesn't kill the apps original process.
Just like on your iPhone or iPad - neato!
These features alone make a Lion upgrade a complete no brainer and, if the message gets out, will be a powerful message to PC users.
These enhancements are so significant, it must eventually lead to a new mindset in how we think about and use our computers.
With the almost "instant on" of the MacBook Airs using SSDs, documents being autosaved, multiple document versions at our fingertips, resume features repopulating our work space and the removal of the worry of juggling applications and resources, the computer is now starting to get out of the way. This can only help to make the overall user experience more hassle free and enable us to concentrate on the task in hand.
We just need to adapt to the new way of working.
As to the future, iCloud will have a big part to play in this, not just as a central repository for your documents and information, but also potentially, your saved states.
How about this for a scenario....
What if you were able to work on your iCloud enabled iMac on your desk and have multiple applications open with various documents.
You have to leave - No saving of documents, no quitting of applications, you just put the iMac into sleep mode with a gesture.
You pick up your MacBook Air, open the lid and there, on your desktop, are all the applications and documents you were just working on, in exactly the same state.
Pick up your iPad, and your documents are there too!
We know some of the capabilities of iCloud around the iPad, but the part iCloud will play OSX has not yet been completely divulged so pure conjecture on my part, but it seems a logical progression of Lions advanced document and state handling.
So that's just some of the new Lion features available, there are lot's more I'll cover in later blog posts or on ScreenCastsOnline.
Just to set expectations, this week's ScreenCastsOnline (29/7/2011) will not be about Lion, I'll be publishing the second part of the Final Cut Pro X tutorial. It's another hour long tutorial!
I want another week to review and analyse the release version of Lion and plan how I'm going to cover it. My initial thoughts are that I want to cover it on at least three levels:
Of course, Lion is not just the OS, there are lots of changes to many of Lion's core applications, so I'd like to look at some of the more important ones in detail, as well as looking at changes to various workflows.
The recent coverage of Lion has included:
SCO0304 - Getting Ready for Lion - This is a members tutorial but you can see some sample chapters on the linked page.
SCO0305a - Lion Installation - This is a completely free tutorial for anyone to take a look at. It covers the basic installation of Lion from the Mac App Store and a brief overview of the Lion Recovery Partition. It also shows you how to intercept the standard installation to create your own bootable Lion Install USH drive or DVD. Please feel free to circulate the link to the free tutorial to anyone you feel may benefit.
So no Lion tutorial this week, but expect to see plenty over the coming months. Most of the Lion tutorials will be members only content, so if you's like more information about becoming a member, see the footnote to this page. I fully realise that not everyone will want wall to wall Lion coverage for the next few months, so as usual, I'll endeavour to mix and match the Lion coverage with my usual coverage of the best third party software, project based tutorials and hints and tips.
It's going to be a busy ride for the next few months!
If you'd like more information about becoming a ScreenCastsOnline member to get a new Mac related video tutorial each week, plus immediate access to over 300+ tutorials in the ScreenCastsOnline archive please visit the page - Become a ScreenCastsOnline Member
Lion Sunday, July 24, 2011 at 2:46PM I have to say I'm getting lot's of positive response to this week's ScreenCastsOnline free tutorial - SCO0305a - Installing Lion - Excellent, especially as this week it's a free episode (feel free to circulate the link!). The tutorial takes you through the full install process as well as demonstrating who to create a bootable USB or DVD version of Lion, so that you can install Lion on multiple machines but download it only once, as well as using it as a backup.
However, I've received a lot of emails from people who installed Lion before watching the tutorial, and are now unable to create the USB installer drive so they have a backup, or to use on other Macs. The issue is that the standard install deletes the Installer file as part of the process so if you don't copy it, it's gone.
Even worse is that once Lion is installed, it doesn't seem to allow you to re-download the installer, perhaps forcing you to buy the official USB drive when available next month - for a cool $60.
Well the good news is that you can re-download the installer, even if you have Lion installed.
Here's how:
You're welcome!
Update: Macworld have also posted some alternative methods incase this scenario doesn't work:
If you've already installed Lion—so it's too late to move the installer—you've probably discovered that the Mac App Store claims that Lion is already installed and prevents you from downloading it again. As I explained in our main Lion-installation article, you should be able to force a re-download using one of the following three tricks: First, Option+click the Buy App button in the Mac App Store. If that doesn't work, switch to the Mac App Store's main page and then Option+click the Purchases button in the toolbar. If that doesn't work, quit the Mac App Store app and then hold down the Option key while launching the Mac App Store again. One of these three procedures should get rid of the "Installed" status for Lion and let you download it.