Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Presentation Fail

We've all seen them, sometimes even done it ourselves.  Horrible presenters, horrible presentations. Doing the things you are not supposed to do. Habitudes for Communicators has put together a video for a glimpse of the dark side of presenting, highlighting many of the snafus we are encountering whenever we present or get presented to.

Does it have to be this way? No. But as long as we don't put the proper preparation and care in our presentations, the title continues to ring true: Every Presentation Ever.

Monday, February 20, 2012

vlc - Even better in Version 2

vlc creative video playerHere at Digital Dazzle, the free vlc media player has long been our major work-horse for video playback. QuicktimeX is way too limited and Quicktime 7, while pretty good, is still no match for vlc.

With the release of version 2, vlc has even gotten better. Most importantly to us, we can now use Apple's Magic Trackpad as a secondary input device for vlc (we've long used a wired mouse as the main pointing device to the right of the keyboard and the trackpad as a secondary device to the left of the keypad.)  It requires a change deep down in vlc's preference settings (Preferences -> Show All -> Interface -> Hotkey Settings -> Hotkeys, then set Mouse Wheel to "Position Control"), but once it is set, you can use the vertical two-finger swipe to scrub through a video.  Even better, it is touch-sensitive - the faster you swipe, the faster you scrub through the video. Awesome!

The only downside so far - when starting a new video, it resizes the interface to the native video size without taking anamorphic settings into account.  A quick press of cmd-1 fixes this, but it would be great, if that wouldn't be required, like it wasn't in version 1.  I'm sure there's some settings buried deep down in the preferences to turn off this behavior, so if you know what the setting is, we'd appreciate a quick note.

Overall, though - a great program has gotten better.  We're happy!

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Mountain Lion is coming - do you care?

Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion UpgradeApple just revealed in private briefings to select journalists and bloggers that it is updating OSX from Lion to Mountain Lion in the summer and that going forward, it will support an annual upgrade cycle similar to what they do on iOS.

So what?

We're still on Snow Leopard and, according to our own published software upgrade policies, will start evaluating the Lion upgrade in the spring.  A summer release of Mountain Lion does not make a difference, except that we might wait until the end of the year and go straight to Mountain Lion.  We'll see how Mountain Lion will handle legacy software in our production environment before we decide when we will upgrade.

To us, the upcoming Adobe Creative Suite 6 upgrade is much more important than Lion vs. Mountain Lion.

p.s.

I'm sure, Corporate IT managers were less than thrilled when they heard the news given that these guys are typically on 3-year upgrade cycles.