BOA in the house...

I spend an inordinate amount of time in what I call "my office/studio".

There's three whacking big monitors on my desk, a couple of Mac Pros under the desk, a MacBook Pro, speakers, mixer, audio outboard gear, USB hubs, microphones and wires, lot's and lot's of wires. Much as I try to keep it tidy, it doesn't take long for it to descend into an untidy mess.

Add in the fact, I want to re-organise the studio to do more live streaming and be able to do spontaneous videos at the drop of a hat, it's time to get serious about sorting the mess out.

Another issue I have is the lack of working space on my desk. It's a big desk, but I built a shelf for the monitors to raise them up slightly, but this reduces the working area significantly.

So what to do!

First action will be to sort out the monitors to remove the shelf and free up some working area. Ideally, I'd like to have all three monitors on articulated arms that would allow me to move and position them. Once the monitors are free from standing on the desk, it would give me oodles of room, and allow me to position the monitors exactly where I want them.

Enter my good friend Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User Podcast. Victor made contact with "Monitors in Motion" at Macworld this year - purveyors of fine articulated arms for the Mac and PC. He managed to snag a couple for review (at a discount) and ended up keeping them.

You can see the results of Victors efforts in a short video here.

Hmm... I thought, I wonder what they could do for a three monitor system. A quick email to Victor and he put me in touch with his contact.

After an exchange of emails, the guys over at Monitors in Motion suggested this beast:

The Triple Boa!

The Triple Boa is machined from Pure aluminium and capable of supporting up to three 30" displays. I currently have a 30" and two 20" Dells so that should be adequate.

The only stipulation I gave was that it may potentially need to support up to three 27" Apple Cinema Displays (if Apple ever release them!) so I'm taking the long term approach to future planning.

As this is a special order, it's taking a while to put together, but the guys seem to be taking a lot of care in making sure everything is just right. In the interests of full disclosure, Monitors in Motion are also allowing me to purchase the mount for review at a discount.

So that's the monitors sorted.

All I need to do is now decide how to tackle the wiring problem but I'll leave that for another post.

The probable scenario is that when I get back from WWDC, I'll do a complete tear down of the studio and rebuild from scratch including lighting. I will be videoing and blogging about the various stages so keep tuned as I start to assemble all the bits I need. Once the Triple Boa arrives I'll do some unboxing and perhaps rig it temporarily

Keeping it current...

One of the reasons I don't (can't?) create my ScreenCastsOnline shows well in advance, is the rate of change in the Mac space.

Case in point this week...

I usually publish my show on a Friday, so that usually entails starting the production cycle on the Wednesday. If all goes to plan, I'm usually ready to publish the show by Friday lunchtime following a couple of long days production. If all doesn't go to plan, then I'm under a bit of pressure to try and get it out on the Friday. This usually means three days solid effort, culminating in the release of the show.

This week, I started on the Tuesday and even though it's a fairly complex show, I managed to get the show edited by close of play Wednesday and all the post production tasks finished today, ready to push the button to release tomorrow.

It's a really strange feeling having a show "in the can" as the process is normally completed in one long action.

This week's show is a Mac Montage in three parts:

• Using the OSX Proxy Icon
• Creating workflow to extract Email attachments into DropBox
• Using the DropBox iPad app and iWork

The second part is quite a complex workflow involving Google mail, Automator, AppleScript and Mail Rules.

The third part includes some live video of my iPad where I demonstrate using the Dropbox app to import files into Pages on the iPad and then send via email to Dropbox from the iPad.

So what happens today...

Apple announce a new Mobile Me beta mail service with server side rules
Apple announce new updated versions of the iWork suite on the iPad

D'oh!

In fairness, the new announcements don't really impact on the show as all the components and processes remain unchanged, although it would have been nice to have shown the server side mail rules. There's also one point where I had to rotate the iPad to get access to the toolbar in Pages and I would not have needed to do that after todays update.

Still, it goes to show just how quickly things move and how it makes it so difficult to build up any sort of buffer of pre-recorded shows.

For info - tomorrows show (14th May - SCO0249 - Mac Montage 14) will be published round about 10 am UK time. It is a members only show but more info on becoming a member here.

Rumours and damned rumours...

Blogosphere full of rumours about Apple updating the MacBook Air yesterday, but more interestingly, preparing to launch a new 27" Cinema Display based on the iMac 27" screen.

Didn't happen!

That's not to say it may happen over the next few days but the rumours were pretty strong.

I'm still scratching my head as to why Apple have not refreshed their 30" Cinema Display for years? It was launched in 2004 for goodness sake!!

The panel technology is pretty old and the styling is also looking pretty dated and certainly doesn't fit in with the current range.  Then there's the price! $1799 for a six year old design and technology.  

And what about the complete lack of ergonomics - you can tilt it in the vertical plane and that's about it.

I really do find this to be a weird anomaly in Apple's usually extremely well thought out range of products. 

YTC031 - WWDC 2010

MacBreak Weekly #193

I was delighted to be invited onto Leo Laporte’s podcast MacBreak Weekly yesterday, along with Justine Ezarik & Chris Breen.

MacBreak Weekly #193 - It’s Made Of People

Leo invited me on to a new show he’s developing involving the iPad - will keep you informed!