Category: technology

AUReMIX07 Silverlight Video

frankheadgeek

Watch the video here of Frank Arrigo and Monique Eagles here. Yes, you will need to install Silverlight.

This is my first experiment with Silverlight and the Microsoft Expression set of tools. Using the inbuilt players in Media Encoder saved many days/hours of hand coding; yet I am sure there is more in there that will tickle out over coming weeks.

NOTE: Silverlight 1.1 is alpha-release!

Workflow (all on Vista Ultimate):

  • Edited footage in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
  • Export Sequence from Premiere Pro using Adobe Media Encoder 960×720 WMV9/WMA9, very light compression.
  • Import into Microsoft Expression Media Encoder (May preview)
  • Export footage as VC-1 Web Server High Speed (using a normal web server). This setting is 640×480. Obviously, I could compress this more.
  • Edit the Default.html to correctly reference EmePlayer.js (note: this got me for an hour. Linux web servers are case-sensitive, and the Default.html points to emeplayer.js. 404! Bug reported)
  • FTP files to directory onto nickhodge.com (could have used Expression Web, but I was debugging the problem with upper/lower case file naming above)

Thoughts? Comments?  I only have Silverlight 1.1 alpha installed. I’ve tested in Windows IE/FireFox and MacOS X 10.4 Safari/Firefox. The Mac’s audio might be out-of-sync. Again, this is reported.

 

Churchill, 14th April 1941

Winston Churchill, 1941

Any further information on this picture we have in our possession would be great.

From what I can tell, it was taken on the 14th April 1941 (coding 14441).

It is also the first picture I’ve seen of Churchill with his wife; the fellow in the bowler hat is a mayor or similar. You can see that Churchill has a gas mask over his shoulder, and is raising his hat with a cane (badly framed photo misses this)

On Butterflies, Aliens and Mountains

nz July 119

InDesign CS3 has a pretty neat Easter Egg: a good friend and InDesign Evangelist, Tim Cole, details the inner details of this easter egg.

The allusion to InDesign 1.0 through CS2 “Butterfly” motif, and the mountains to InDesign’s previous code names themes (K2, Annapurna, Caribiner).

The alien is related to QuarkXpress’ alien that appeared when a certain key combination is used to delete items on the page.

Thanks Adobe InDesign engineers for teaching us that humour is OK in the workplace; and reminding us being funny is subversive.

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PC with 512Mb of RAM? Install Vista Home Basic

Ed Bott, from ZDNet in the US recently tested Windows Vista Home Basic on a 2002-vintage PC with 512Mb of RAM – and found the operating system responsive and usable.

Surprisingly, even the visuals on this system were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this system was capable of running Vista’s Aero graphics. But because Aero doesn’t run on Home Basic, I was stuck with the Vista Standard display. It lacks the transparent window borders and whizzy live previews on taskbar buttons, but otherwise the look is indistinguishable from a system running Windows Vista Ultimate.

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MMOIE is the new Desktop

3D worlds such as Garry’s Mod and SecondLife have taken some the Hodge bandwidth and electrons over the last 6 weeks or so.  The recent posting from Yoick with their call-out to the general community has lead me to thinking…

The desktop is a metaphor for babyboomers. Going to work, sitting at a desk. Moving files and folders around in a desktoppy sort of way. Manila folders, filing cabinets, printers. How 1950’s is this vision?

I’ve always been pro-desktop as the metaphor for comptuers, and always looked for cool tools that extended the desktop rather than looking at the browser as interface end in and of itself. Dragging from a desktop icon to another to get cool things done (like a file onto the icon of a printer, or file onto a business card) made me giggle with glee.

So, in a rush of caffeine to the brain today, I realised that the MMOIE (massively multi-user online immersive experiences. meh) are may be the replacement for the desktop metaphor. Or maybe the real-world writ large is the new metaphor, expressed in 3D worlds.

Here, I am thinking Snow Crash / True Names / Neuromancer style interfaces not wired into your cells – more what the average consumer sees online

In your 3D world, your flickrs, twitters, blogs, emails, voicemails will appear in a different fashion on semi-transparent screens. With Dashboard,  Sidebar widgets, pop-ups, RSS feeds and the like cramming into my 1280×1024 is starting to overlap too much.

Tech Trader daily talks about the future of Enterprise looking like consumer sites such as MySpace. Maybe in the future our “virtual environment” will be 3D so we can manage the volume of information and interactions we have with customers?

Microsoft has another SecondLife thing going: a blimp!

Ryan Stewart recently blogged about Adobe’s Flex in a 3D world. It’s more than just seeing a 3D graph and rotating it. You really need to have an immersive world. Walk through your data, have information pop up in perspective to the attention it requires. 

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