"MacTabletNetbookThingy" Musings

Props to Ken Ray of Mac OS Ken for coining the term "MacTabletNetbookThingy" - love it!

There's no point me spending ages creating a carefully crafted blog post about what might (or might not) be included in the fabled device. The only thing we can say is that it exists and will be awesome.

Sorry, that was the fanboy in me getting over excited!

Better men than I have written screeds on what to expect, but one particular blog post has nudged me into some speculation on two specific areas of the device and how it may work. The blog post has just been published by one of the MacRoundtable posse and that's David Sparks over at MacSparky. You can also find links to some other great articles in Davids post.

The two things that struck a chord with me in David's post were:

Microsoft Onenote - I've only used this briefly many moons ago, but it was the secret sauce when using a Tablet PC. One wonders if Apple will take the approach of creating a brand new new single application that has been built from the ground up to take advantage of the new features of the "MacTabletNetbookThingy". Perhaps a new application in iLife or possibly iWork.

The other option is that they make the existing iLIfe and iWork suites fully "MacTabletNetbookThingy" compatible. 

My gut feel is that they will have taken the more difficult yet ultimately more "Apple like" approach and re-written all the applications provided with the "MacTabletNetbookThingy" to be fully compatible.

Second Monitor & Processor - OK, this one's personal! David suggests

"You could also run social networking apps, like Twitter, on the tablet while working on your Mac or even watch a screencast about software on the tablet while operating the software on the Mac."

I get a lot of feedback from people saying they like to follow my ScreenCastsOnline tutorials on screen whilst going through the motions on their Mac. The problem is that unless you have a pretty big display or an existing second monitor, it's pretty distracting to swap between the tutorial and the Mac desktop or App.

Running a ScreenCastsOnline tutorial on the "MacTabletNetbookThingy" would be perfect. To be honest, even though I already do an iPhone/iPod touch version of the show, the screen is just too small to view a screencast. OK it you're travelling and just want a quick peek, but it's very hard to follow and see clearly what's happening on screen.

However, a ScreenCastsOnline tutorial on a 10" screen in HD - wow!

I already produce ScreenCastsOnline shows in both 1280x720 and 960x540 and both should play perfectly on the "MacTabletNetbookThingy". The entire archive of over 230+ shows (OK 99% of them) are already in these resolutions. 

The MacTabletNetbookThingy could be the best thing to happen to ScreenCastsOnline in a while!

Catching Up...

Missed a daily blog post yesterday :-(

Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it and you may not have noticed.

Busy, busy month last month with the ScreenCastsOnline new members promotion that finished on the 30th November. The promotion generated a ton of interest and I'm happy to say, a ton of new members. With that success though comes additional pressures of administering a significant number of members.

The backend tool (aMember) coped admirably as well as the PayPal and eSellerate integration. With Barbara now taking on the bulk of the administration tasks iro the members it's a big help, but invariably, there are always some "funnies" that need to be worked through.

We could not cope without Mail Act-On for keyboard filing of emails, MailTags for email organisation, IMAP for sharing an email account,  and the grand daddy of email productivity - TextExpander! We'd be dead in the water without these amazing tools.

Spent most of yesterday sorting out and setting up a new system for ScreenCastsOnline members to "Gift" a membership to friends. colleagues of family, at a 50% discount. On the face of it a fairly trivial task....

• Setup a special landing page on the Extra Members website
• Install the latest PayLoom plugin in Rapidweaver
• Configure the "Product" in PayLoom
• Test
• Setup an alternate payment method/product in eSellerate
• Add to Extra Members webstore in eSellerate
• Create eSellerate instructions page
• Create multiple purchase link and instructions page
• Test
• Upload changes to the website
• Test
• Create new URL to divert to new store page
• Create and edit introduction video clip
• Generate 4 resolutions for members feeds 
• Upload via FTP
• Update test members feeds
• Download and test
• Update live members feeds

Just realised, I didn't send out an update via the ScreenCastsOnline newsletter - must do that after this blog post.

I'll include a link to the video clip to see how it turned out, although if you're not a member, you won't be able to access the URL as mentioned in the clip. If you can and you're not a member, please let me know!

All unplanned and unscheduled, so instead of recording two shows this week I've only left myself with time for only one.

All good fun though!

Things vs OmniFocus...

As you're probably aware, I've done screencasts on both OmniFocus and Things, the two "front runners" for task management on the Mac.

I started using OmniFocus initially, following on from using the GTD scripts developed for use with OmniOutliner, the original inspiration for OmniFocus. I was aware of Things when it was launched after OmniFocus, but I held off until certain features were made available. Once those features were there, I started using Things and have been more than happy to use it ever since.

So now the two questions I get asked more than anything are, which do I recommend and which do I use.

The answer, I recommend both but I currently use Things!

Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages, but for me, Things has the right combination of power and flexibility and allows me to task manage without getting in the way.

OmniFocus is a GTD powerhouse and in the right hands, with some investment of time and effort, it can become an incredibly powerful  tool.

If your serious about task management and want to get a good feel of the differences between OmniFocus and Things from a users point of view, I'd recommend having a listen to two of my podcasting buddies from the MacRoundtable (David Sparks and Katie Floyd) on the most recent edition of their podcast - Mac Power Users.  

In Episode MPU 013 - Task Management Smackdown - they compare notes on both applications. 

Just one caveat though, David is a GTD ninja and has lovingly melded OmniFocus to integrate fully with business and personal needs. He's obviously an OmniFocus power user and you really need to listen to the podcast in the context of his vast experience of OmniFocus, it will certainly give you some things to think about but don't expect to reach Davids level of expertise overnght. Katie is probably more like the rest of us (no offence David!) and uses Things on a daily basis to manage tasks. 

The level to which David has been able to use OmniFocus probably says a lot about its depth and power, but you do need to put the effort and discipline in to get the most out of it. Things is much simpler and easier to get a rapid return on your efforts. That's not to say Things is not powerful. I use it for organising my daily tasks, my scheduled tasks and my projects. I also use it to capture tasks directly from my email system. 

One correction in the podcast is that there is a way of grouping tasks and projects together in Things to give you the 10,000 foot view, and thats "Areas of Responsibility". Check out my screencasts for more information.

I should say though that you need to read the comments on the show notes too, there is some useful info contained within the notes too.

Social media maven...

..or at least I'd like to be!

I've been told many times that I should make more use of FaceBook and YouTube. 

I've been on FaceBook for ages but it's not been a smooth ride. I think I've fallen into a bit of a trap of mixing business and pleasure in my personal FaceBook account. I did start a "ScreenCastsOnline Group" a while ago, but I've not really kept up with it.

FaceBook have introduced "Pages" to address some of the issues for companies and businesses to promote and communicate on FaceBook. This seems to be the logical way of both promoting and communicating about ScreenCastsOnline within FaceBook.

So this evening, I put together a "ScreenCastsOnline FaceBook Fan Page" and sent a call out via Twitter to see what could be done with it. At the time of writing, I've had 115 people sign up - all within the space of a couple of hours - amazing!

In that time I've linked the page to my ScreenCastsOnline Twitter account and added a "Fan Page" panel to the sidebar bar of this blog.

So I'll try and start to use the page for any ScreenCastsOnline related news and keep my personal Twitter account for… well just the daily stuff that I incessantly tweet about. We'll have to see how it goes but feel free to go over and sign up if you're a FaceBook user.

As far as the YouTube account is concerned, I was a bit perturbed that someone had already setup a ScreenCastsOnline channel. Oh dear.

The good news was that it was unused and hadn't been updated for months and had zero content. I quick email to YouTube would get me control back! Well, if I could find away to contact YouTube that is. No way could I find a contact address or a form to fill in.

Following some Twitter advice, I sent a message to the person who had setup the account. 

Within 30 minutes I received a tweet from the guy who was more than willing to hand over the account to me. 60 minutes later and I had the username and password (since changed as he was gracious enough to remind me) and I started to look at how the YouTube channels worked. There's nothing up there for now but I have some plans and I'll let you know when (if?) it's worth subscribing.

This Social Media lark is a full time job!

Compressor woes...

Well, I will have to keep it short today!

I can't believe I've been doing video and screencasts for over 4 years and I'm still fighting Compressor most weeks. Compressor is the application within Final Cut Studio that encodes video as the final stage before distribution. It "compresses" the huge master video files I create in FCS, usually many gigabytes in size, down to a manageable hundred megabytes or so. 

Encoding is one of the most CPU intensive computing tasks and benefits from as much horsepower as you can throw at it. As an application, Compressor has lots of whistles and bells and even has distributed processing built in. This allows you to use additional machines on your network to share the encoding tasks, speeding up the process significantly.

At least, in theory that is what it's supposed to do. 

It can work for a couple of weeks and then just stop working properly.  The worst part is that there doesn't seem to be a known set of actions you can go through to make it start working again. I'm afraid it tends to be "waving the rubber chicken time" to get things working again.

The problem has been exacerbated recently by some really strange quirks I've been trying to work around, due to the final encoded videos being handled differently by QuickTime X and QuickTime 7. The exact same file in displayed slightly differently in each application, with the version in Quicktime X (and iTunes) being cropped by a few pixels, loosing part of the menu bar. The same file viewed in Quicktime 7 is perfect - Noooo!!!

So here I am on a Friday morning, publication day, having to try and coax six videos through the encoding process. I started early Thursday afternoon not expecting any major issues, but still haven't cracked it.

It may well be my fault in that I use the production Mac Pro as a standard desktop machine. I should really "ring fence" the machine and just use it as an editing and encoding machine. 

Perhaps that's what I'll do, rebuild the Mac Pro from scratch and just install Final Cut Studio on that machine, using my MacBook Pro as my day to day machine. Perhaps I should apply some rigorous change management on the Mac Pro and keep it one build behind the latest and greatest patches and updates, backing up before an install and testing before acceptance. After all, I was a fully qualified ITIL Service Manager in my previous life!

Anyhow, I'll have to do something as this is bonkers! 

Update on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 1:57PM by Don McAllister

Following this post, @themacdaddy sent me a link on Twitter to "Compressor Repair" - A free utility that checks out a few settings on Compressor and attempts to repair them if necessary. Thanks Phillip