Poofy chicks want revenge! on Youtube

Special thanks to Dennis, who did a wonderful job as General Beakless and Jen who gave me the poofy chicks. Who knew they would be such terrors in the house?

Did you notice the salt & pepper shakers? They’re peeps!!! Given my lifelong obsession with peeps, I had to have this adorable tableware by Lenox. My dream vacation would to have a private tour of the Just Born factory. I’ll definitely be scooping up a few extra peeps tomorrow to last me the rest of the year.

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Macworld was tiny this year in comparison to previous years. I was able to see all the booths in about an hour, and that included dawdling longer than needed at many of them. The above statue is Atlas. Despite all the depictions of Atlas carrying the Earth, in Greek mythology, Atlas held up the heavens & separated it from Earth. I’m not exactly sure what the artist is trying to say with this piece — the iPod could be a representation of heaven (which was divine and far from perfect), or this sort of technology weighs us down. There was a time when I wanted to major in classical mythology.

Anyway…

I made a few videos of all the stuff I saw.

Macworld videos on Youtube

By far the best things I saw was the minidv->HDMI cable from Kanex. It’s not sexy or showy, but this connector allows me to use a mac mini as a media center that I can connect to my HD tv. Hot.

The other noteworthy gadget was the universal remote app for the Iphone. It’s very new and I don’t think it’s out yet. The app will require an infrared iphone case. Without getting into the techy dorky details, some media devices use IR to communicate with the remote, so in order for the iphone to become a universal remote it needs an extra accessory. I have a universal remote at home and it’s pretty confusing to use. The demo of the iphone app makes it look super easy.

Where to purchase the toys in the videos:
Bone flash drives
Joby’s Gorillapod – This is a *must have* for anyone who owns a camera. You can wrap this tripod on anything which makes it much much much easier to take self portraits and long exposure night shots.
Trexta – can’t find a place to buy those amazing little man ipod cases! I really want one
iKit kickstand cases – will be available in about a month.

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Oh and she got to go to the reception and TOUCH IT! I went to work. I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these things. I can’t stop thinking about it.

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I was hanging outside the Apple announcement today with Justine. We tried but nobody gave us a press pass. Even though we didn’t get to see anything, I’m esploder over the product. They call it the iPad.

hanging out at the announcement on youtube

I’m absolutely thrilled about the new iPad. The wi-fi model is coming in 60 painful days, but I’d have to wait even longer for the 3g model- 90 days! I’m bathing in the kool-aid. Isn’t it lovely?

The skinny:
1/2 inch thick
1.5 pounds
9.7 inch IPS display (some fancy pants type of LCD)
1GHz Apple “A4″ chip
speaker & microphone
bluetooth
802.11 wifi
accelerometer & compass

Detailed specs at Apple

What I want to know is, why no camera?

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Fantastico! on youtube

I made edited this movie in 10 minutes on the bus on my iphone. I know you’re impressed.

ReelDirector video editing iphone application ($7.99)

Wins:
holy crap, you can string a series of clips together on your freaking phone
good variety of transitions, although you only really need fade and dissolve for most movies
rendering was pretty fast

Room for improvement:
clipping or expanding a clip after the first trimming
overlay audio – either a song or a voice over
include pictures
preview the entire movie before rendering
split a clip – turn one clip into two

Sad panda:
My movie rendered in tallscreen mode. I’m really disappointed the program didn’t correctly detect the orientation of the videos.
Can’t change to high quality option after you start adding clips

Verdict: Not worth $8 yet, but hopefully they’ll have less buggy versions soon.

In depth:
When you open the app, you are presented with a list of your projects. It takes some experimentation to figure out what each field does, but it all makes sense after playing with it.

Be sure to select high quality mode when you start – you can’t select it later. I can’t imagine why you’d want a low quality version, since the iphone camera is pretty low resolution to start with, but the default is off.

Once you’re in the edit screen you’re presented with a mostly intuitive interface. Select the add button and you are presented with the videos from your library. The trimming feature on the clip is well done. Hold down the ends of the timeline and the filmstrip expands to allow you to crop with more precision. You must do your cropping in this screen. Once you chose the clip, you cannot re-crop or expand it (pity).

In the filmstrip screen you can easily reorder your clips and add transitions to the beginning and end. The little ball allows you to scroll through all your clips, but it’s so hard to actually touch and drag it that it might as well not exist.

Back at the project screen, I was ready to export my movie. “Create” is a confusing option – I initially thought it meant I wanted to create a new project from my current project screen. Since the other two available options were “Delete” and “Properties”, I decide to try out “Create”. It actually renders the movie. I assume they chose the term “Create” because most users might not know what “render” or “export” means. You can’t share, play or save until you create. Once you “create” the movie, you could preview the entire thing. “Save” writes it to your photos area. This button seems completely unnecessary. Whenever I create a movie, it should save it to my photos area. I don’t need to save a photo every time I take a picture.

The thumbnails on my clips were all upside down. I hoped it was a preview bug, and my movie would be oriented correctly once I “created” it. No such luck.

Aside from the orientation bugs, which hopefully be smoothed out in the future, this is a darn cool application.

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Urban egg hunt on Youtube. Justine & I decided to hide some little treasures around the city for Easter. They were all gone the next day, so I’m sure they all found happy homes.

In related Easter news, this made me esploder:

The Wizard of Peeps diorama. Given my lifelong obsession with peeps & The Wizard of Oz, I am tempted to ask the creator to marry me. So much peep love.

And here is the first video I put on the internet (lovingly made with Jumpcut in 2006):

Peep experiment on Youtube

Hope everyone has a wonderful Sunday.

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