Time to visit the Apple Store...

I got a MacBook back in March 2007, one of the plastic white ones. Unusually, I bought it on a lease and have been paying my monthly payments ever since. It reached the end of the lease about three weeks ago and I decided to keep the machine and pay around £100 to buy it outright. The lease also included AppleCare.

The Macbook has been a great laptop, with the only problem being a faulty battery, but Apple swapped that out on the spot for me a year or so ago.

Then just a few days ago, my daughter picked up the Macbook and said there was something wrong with the screen!

Oh noes....

I've just finished paying for it!

On examination, the LCD panel seems to have a great big crack going through it, but not on the glass, actually inside the panel - ouch!

It still works but the screen is obviously faulty in some way. She says she hasn't dropped it or dropped anything onto it and I tend to believe her, as there are no signs of any external damage. The laptop never leaves the house and it's mainly used for surfing the web in front of the TV.

With a heavy heart, I checked out the AppleCare on the Apple online system and to my relief, discovered it was covered for three years not two!

Phew!

Apple offer a service called ProCare in the stores that give you some extra benefits such as rapid repairs and a fast track option for the Genius Bar, along with some other services I'll probably never use. It's £77 per year but covers all your Macs so seeing as I have a few (!) and most of them I use to earn a crust, I thought it was a good investment and took out ProCare a couple of months ago.

Time to try it out, I thought.

I wanted to book a slot on Saturday morning and logged onto my local Apple store page. On the reservations page you can log in as a ProCare member and get "greater availability" of slots. Except, I couldn't logon :-(

Clicking on to the link, just took me to the standard login page with only the option of using my Apple ID. So I logged on and found they only had afternoon appointments left for Saturday. Now I could probably just turn up on Saturday morning and flash my card but I'd prefer to book in advance.

Interestingly, when I try and book through the main ProCare page on the Apple website, I get a 404 - how very un-Apple like.

It looks like a failure of the back end systems rather than the local store but it's still frustrating after paying for a service.

I just hope that they sort out the laptop with the minimum of fuss.

Why did nobody tell me?

As an aside...I've recorded another YouTube video comment and I'm waiting for it to be processed before publishing it. YouTube seems to produce a low resolution version of the clip first, and then a high quality HD version later. I think it's worth waiting until the HD version is available before releasing it into the playlist.

But back to the subject of my daily blog post - Why did nobody tell me?

Just started to edit this weeks LaunchBar 5 show using Final Cut Pro. Thought, I'd try and use the BamBoo pad pen to do some video editing...

Holy moly!

It's fantastic!

OK, so I've only been using it for an hour or so, but I can already feel that it's speeding up my workflow considerably. Being able to scroll the timeline and precisely position the playhead using the pen, and then cut and move clips around with the pen, it just seems faster and more natural.

I've never really used the buttons on the top of the timeline, as you can see by the fact that there are only three default buttons there! However, with the pen, I can see the buttons becoming invaluable. I just need to work out how to assign effects to buttons?

My setup is now the Contour Shuttle Pro 2 on the left, a USB mini keyboard in the center and the BamBoo Touch & Pen Fun Medium on the right.

The Contour Shuttle Pro is programmed with transport controls to play, move backwards and forwards between clips or edit points, set the in point and out points and a macro to do a ripple delete and play around the playhead. I've been using this on the right hand side of the keyboard up until now, next to my mouse. It meant I was forever lifting my hand from the mouse to the shuttle and back again - bonkers! Now it's on the left, I've retrained my left hand to use it. Took a while but I'm nearly there. 

The mini keyboard is fine as I've transferred all of the commands of the Numeric pad and dedicated page keys to the Contour Shuttle. It's also a lot smaller than the full keyboard so fits on the desk just fine with the other devices.

With using the pen on the Bamboo, I've discovered I can keep hold of the pen and type on the keyboard just. I'm no touch typist but more of a fast hunt and peck merchant, so it's nor problem. In fact I typed the whole of this blog post holding the pen!

Another neat feature is that I can use the pen for editing and navigation, but still holding the pen, switch effortlessly into touch mode for faster scrolling - works a treat!

So enough with the blogging about the Bamboo, I'll move on but will keep you informed of my progress over the next few weeks, especially if I discover some major issues or fall out of love with it like I did with the Magic Mouse.

By the way, these blog posts have not been sponsored or endorsed by Wacom. I received no loaner kit and the BamBoo was purchased from Amazon using my own hard earned cash. I know I don't have to say it, but I do like to make sure that everything I do is completely transparent. 

It's just my way!

Initial BamBoo Pen & Touch thoughts...

So I've been using the new BamBoo Pen & Touch Fun Medium trackpad for a couple of days now. Some initial thoughts.

Touch

Pretty seamless experience. I like the way I can just extend my hand and the trackpad is there, no feeling for the mouse.  The surface is very smooth, not as smooth as the glass trackpad on the MacBook Pro but smooth enough. Navigating the pointer across my three screens work fine, and unlike a mouse, it's no effort to swipe, stop and swipe again if you need too. Dragging across large monitors works fine but you sometimes need to reposition your finger before making the drag action.

Most of the most useful gestures are supported so single and double tap, two finger swipe to move forward and back and two finger scroll work just fine. There is also zoom support via pinch, but that only works within an application, not the desktop zoom. There is a rotate gesture as well but I never use that much. 

The three and four finger gestures are not supported as in the latest MacBook trackpads, but the BamBoo does have 4 programmable buttons so it's easy to configure Expose support.

The only downsides I've found to date are:

• The double tapping to start to select a text string sometimes isn't completely accurate, it sometimes misses the first character in the string, this can be a bit frustrating. It's possibly that this is a technique thing so I'll work on it.
• The second thing is the ergonomics. With a mouse you tend to rest you hand on the mouse. With the trackpad, you tend to hover your hand over the trackpad and whilst it's not caused me any grief as yet, I'm aware that it's different to what I'm used to and have an inkling this may cause fatigue. I need to learn to rest my arm more, but again early days.
• It looks like it won't work if you use Teleport to control a second Mac from the machine to which the tablet is connected. Teleport is a utility to allow you to control multiple macs with a single keyboard and mouse. I tried to access my MacBook Pro using teleport and whilst the tablet does allow you to move across to the second machine, the cursor starts doing all sorts of strange things. No deal breaker for me as I've started to use Screen Sharing now on my Mac Pro to control the MacBook Pro, and that works just fine. 

Pen

I've tried to use a pen based trackpad before on an older and smaller BamBoo, but I never mastered it. The smaller BamBoo didn't map to my screen properly.

The new large BamBoo maps perfectly to all three monitors. I didn't intend to use the pen much based on my previous experiences, but after experiencing the minor problems I was having with selecting text, I had some (well quite a lot) of file renaming to do by copying and pasting entries from a text file, so I gave the pen a second chance.

To my surprise, I quickly got used to it and it proved pretty effective. I may make the effort to use the Pen more often for navigation and editing, it was actually quite pleasant to use.

The technique of hovering above the tablet surface takes a bit of getting used to, along with holding the pen in the correct position to manipulate the pen buttons. The touch and pen technologies do not operate simultaneously. As you move the pen stylus near the trackpad surface, it switches to Pen mode, and then back to Touch mode if you remove the pen. Pretty neat!

There's a ton of functionality built into OSX in the form of the Ink technology, but I've not really had chance to play with this much. It's on my todo list.

Summary 

So despite some minor irritations, I'm still more than happy with the BamBoo Pen & Touch Medium Fun tablet and yes, it has completely replaced my Magic Mouse. It does require some effort to get used to, but if you're an existing MacBook or MacBook Pro user and have used the laptop trackpad, you'll take to it like a duck to water.

I primarily got the device for the touch support, but the fact that the pen support also seems perfectly usable is an added bonus as far as I'm concerned. I'll most definitely spend some more time to practice with the pen and evaluate the situations in which the pen might come into its own. I've not tried the Pen with Final Cut Studio yet, that should be interesting. 

New video blog and a big favour to ask...

So after taking the plunge with YouTube, I've decided to go the whole hog and start producing some new content, specifically for YouTube.

As well as the MinClip screencasts and the trailers for ScreenCastsOnline, I'm going to start producing some video clips of me! 

It was a hard decision as one of the reasons I liked the screencasts format so much in the early days, is that I didn't really feel comfortable appearing on camera (and I've got a great face for radio, yada, yada!!)

But after 200+ screencasts, lots of podcast appearances, several interviews and also getting on the bed with Cali Lewis, I felt now was the right time to perhaps come out from behind the screen and do some real life video stuff.

Never fear, you won't now start finding me pop up in a little window in the bottom of the shows. They will remain as they always have, with just my voice narrating the screencast. No, my appearances will be as video clips on the YouTube channel.

I'll use YouTube to pontificate about the Mac, discuss the latest Mac topics and also share with you any experiences I have with my Macs or any other gadgets and gizmos. So please nip over to YouTube or checkout the introduction video below.

However, I have a big favour to ask from my blog readers, my twitter followers and my ScreenCastsOnline viewers.

Over 200 of you have kindly subscribed to the YouTube channel, for that, I thank you very much!

But I need at least another 400 subscribers to the channel before I can apply for YouTube Partner status. I could really do with this status, so I can get access to some of the special tools and other goodies that YouTube restricts to partners. Things like enhanced pages, access to the video thumbnails and the ability to post videos of over 10 minutes to YouTube.   You'll see what I mean about being able to change the thumbnails from the clips below - the one with my eyes closed - tragic!

If I had Partner status I could change it, so if you can spare 30 seconds to subscribe I'd really appreciate it.

You can find the ScreenCastsOnline channel here or watch my introduction video below:

As well as the introduction, I've also published my first video comment, all about my run in with the Magic Mouse and my first impressions of the BamBoo Pen and Touch Fun:

I'm pretty pleased for a first attempt and received some nice comments over on YouTube.

I need to invest in some proper lighting so I'm calling in some favours from my old mate Israel Hyman from Izzy Video. He's helping me out with some suggestions for some decent lighting rigs so the quality should improve over the next few weeks....

How much for a lighting rig!!!!

Touchy, Feely...

Well, that didn't take long!

Following on from the suggestion from yesterday for the Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch tablet, I did some research and watched the videos on the Wacom site 

The Wacom tablets seem ideal for my needs and the inclusion of the Touch gestures sealed the deal. I've ordered a Wacom Bamboo Fun Medium from Amazon. This has a slightly larger screen to cope with my large monitor setup. 

I realised that I really like the touch aspects of the Magic Mouse but they are very limited. I think I even tweeted that I wished I could use the top of the mouse as a proper trackpad. So the touch based tablet seems to make a lot of sense.

In order to make some room on my desk, I'll probably swap out the large Apple keyboard with the numeric keypad, and replace it with one of the smaller keyboards, the just position the Wacom next to it on the left, with my Contour Shuttle on the right hand side for video editing.

Will report back once and post some pictures once I've given the device a run through its paces. It should arrive later today - Amazon Prime FTW yet again.