MTV launches personalized video application
If you’ve been following me for a long time you know that I absolutely love personalized video applications. The one that MTV just launched is just one of the best I’ve ever seen. After you’ve picked your favorite music style you can upload or take a photo of yourself. After a few easy steps the application will map your photo on to a 3D character… You know what… You just have to see it for yourself! Here’s me having a party ;-)
Hat tip Rob Ford @FWA
What was your first computer? Here’s my computer history.
Isn’t it strange how the human mind works? I’m sure it’s not just me but I can really spiral in to reminiscing mode just by seeing or reading something. Just yesterday I had one of those moments when I saw this tweet from our friends at BlackBerry:
My first computer was an Atari 600XL. At least that’s what I thought until I started reading about it. The Atari 600XL apparently didn’t have a composite out and I definitely remember just being able to plug it into just about any TV set so it must have been the Atari 800XL. The 800XL did have a composite out, had a whopping 64KB of memory and a CPU that ran at 1.8MHz.
Photo from Wikipedia
I remember that my hometown used to have a Tandy store. I was a regular visitor after school because they had all the coolest stuff including a wide variety of computers. Our local supermarket also had a bunch of computers set up including the ZX Spectrum.
Photo from Wikipedia
I remember playing with that one a lot in the supermarket while my parents were shopping. I remember loving the soft touch buttons. It took a while to persuade my parents to get a computer and I don’t quite remember why I eventually got the Atari. I think a friend at school also had one and thought it was convenient to be able to swap cartridges. I don’t remember all the games I used to play on it but I do remember Decathlon being my one of my favorites. Remember that? Having to move the joystick from left to right as fast as you could?
After the Atari I was bitten by the computer bug and always wanted more. Next in line was the Commodore 64 with Datasette cassette player. The C64 was immensely popular back then. Everyone seemed to have one ;-) It was also on this computer that I started “programming”.
Next in line was the Amiga 500. I loved that machine! 512K memory, floppy disk drive (single sided) and a 7.09MHz processor. The Amiga Workbench OS was a revelation. Man I was spoiled.
Photo from Commodore Museum
I used that Amiga for a long long time until I got in touch with PCs and Macs in school. I studied “Graphic Design Techniques” and also got lessons in Quark Express, Corel Draw and yes… Photoshop. I remember drooling on the Apple devices but they were just too damn expensive. My hometown had an Apple dealer and I remember visiting them a lot ;-) At one time they had a Newton on display and I thought that was just amazing. A Mac was way out of my completely non-existant budget and after quite a long time I finally went for a PC. A 486 running at 66MHz running on Windows.
A bit later I discovered bulletin board systems. Krrrsssss…beeeep…beeeeeep…krrrrssssss… Aah… The beautiful sound of a modem… :D
After the BBSs came the Internet… and the ridiculously high phone bills. I stuck with PCs for a really long time and then at one time (now about 7 years ago, I think) I got sick and tired of having to spend more time keeping my system up and running than actually being creative. I was freelancing back then and did a lot of video work. One of my major problems with Premiere was that I couldn’t do anything with my computer when I was capturing video from a DV tape. I used to have two identical PCs so I could keep working on other stuff while I was capturing video… I didn’t think that was right. One of my friends worked at the local Apple office and I asked him if I could borrow a Power Mac G5 for a while to see if I could improve my workflow. And yes it did! Apple’s Final Cut Pro allowed me to capture video from tape while I was doing email or even while I was working in Photoshop. I also immediately fell in love with Mac OS and ended up buying a Power Mac G5 and even bought the (incredibly overpriced) 23″ Cinema Display. I rapidly became a Mac Head. Bought a PowerBook, iMac and later a Mac Mini as my first Intel based Mac.
Today I am still on a Mac but my addiction has worn off a bit. While I stood in line for iPhone, iPhone 3G and 3Gs I didn’t buy an iPhone 4 and also didn’t stand in line for an iPad. I actually did end up getting an iPad just a few weeks ago to do some research though. I found it important to know what everyone was raving about. I currently use a MacBook Pro on the road and a Mac Pro in my home office.
Aaah man… The memories this post brought up… Am I getting old? :D
I’d love to hear about your computer history! And now that I’m wrapping this up I think I should also do a post on my device history… If I can actually remember all of them ;-)
Lapse It – time-lapse video app made with AIR for Android
I just came across this very nicely made time-lapse video application in the Android Market. Lapse It is built with Flex 4.5 and runs on the AIR runtime. You can set the capture interval to anything from 1 second to as long as you like. You can also limit the length of your capture by limiting the amount of frames, by setting a time or you can stop it manually. Lapse It will capture frames with a resolution up to 720p (It’s actually not 720p but 720×480) (the free version is limited to 240×160) and the final result can be either a JPEG sequence or an FLV video. The app also has a built-in video player so you can immediately see the result and will even allow you to directly upload it to YouTube.
I was going to record the sunrise this morning… But then I remembered that I actually live in Belgium and that we are in the middle of the winter… ;-) The chances for sun are very slim and this morning it was too cloudy to record anything useful. I love time-lapse video so you can bet on the fact that I will be using this app whenever I can!
Go check it out!
UPDATE: I just did a quick little test with Lapse It and I absolutely love the result!
Stealing content was never easier than with HTML5
HTML5 makes adding video and audio content to your site very easy but there is currently no way to protect that content. If we’re all completely honest we know that content protection is still a big deal for record companies, movie studios, and TV channels, yet HTML5 puts their content just up for grabs. Let me give you a few examples.
Unnamed video site
Video site X just rolled out a brand new HTML5 video player. Like I said, HTML5 makes it really easy to add video content to your site but it makes it equally easy to download that content. It only takes a “view source” to find the URL to the video file. Some video sites have also noticed that and are now building custom JavaScript based players in an attempt to make it more difficult to get to the video file. On this one site I counted almost 3000 lines of JavaScript code for a rather basic video player with sharing functionality. 3000 lines of code and it still only took me three clicks to download the video file! I already hear some of you saying that you can also easily get the video file from a Flash based video player. If you use progressive download that is completely true. I’ll get back to that later in this post.
Unnamed new music discovery site
The release of the beta version of this new music discovery site is actually what sparked the idea to write this post. As per usual the tech blogs were buzzing about it as a new music discovery site that didn’t use Flash because Flash is dead. So I checked it out… This particular site gives you unrestricted access to the entire music library. I was able to look up any artist and play back any song in high quality… I can also buy the song on the site for the industry standard $0.99. But with just two clicks I was able to download any song from any artist straight to my desktop without actually buying it. No need for torrents or the risk of downloading viruses. It’s all right there on this official music discovery site in high quality AAC audio (in an M4A file).
Flash
I already mentioned that it’s also pretty easy to download a file used in a Flash based media player if the site uses progressive download. The difference between HTML5 and Flash in this case is that you CAN protect your content when using Flash. As there still is no standard audio/video codec in the HTML5 spec there also is no way to stream video and audio content using HTML5 across different browsers. Companies (including Apple) have been experimenting with streaming technologies but I’m sure you remember that that only worked in a specific version of Safari on a specific version of iOS. The HTML5 spec also has no guidelines for any sort of content protection.
Flash does work cross browser and cross platform (as I’m sure all of you know). With the use of Flash Media Server you can also completely protect that content and get the added benefits of features such as adaptive streaming (to adapt to changing connection speeds), reduced bandwidth usage, DRM, multicasting, peer to peer delivery, and more. Bottom line: Flash is still the best platform to stream (premium) video and audio content.
Game developer: “Why I’m Moving From HTML5 To Flash”
No… That’s not a typo. Yes… You read that correctly. This game developer is dropping HTML5 in favor of Flash!
These guys are working on a game that recently got a lot of attention on Reddit and Twitter. The prototype is written in HTML5/JS but they are now abandoning HTML5 and are moving to Flash!
Their main concerns are the “spotty” browser support, slow performance and the fact that there is no ecosystem for selling HTML5 games.
Is html5 the future? I sure hope so! Unfortunately, it isn’t the present.
Full story on http://blog.tametick.com/2011/01/why-im-moving-from-html5-to-flash.html
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