Month: March 2008

Final Cut Studio is big. This afternoon I lugged two boxes of it back from the centre of Glasgow, having bought a second-hand copy of Studio v1 and an upgrade to v2 from the Apple Store. It’s damned heavy.

Then you realise that it ships on eight DVDs.

And then this:

Three hours of frenzied tidying-up, and:

• My office is an unholy mess.
• My desk is covered in multiple piles of paper, each effectively marked ‘urgent’. I can just about reach my keyboard, but not my mouse.
• I have a large number of cardboard boxes that need taking to the recycling centre. Of course, that’s a car journey away… and I don’t have a car. Hmm.
• Under the boxes I’ve unearthed another two substantial piles of Stuff That Needs Filing.

Bother.

The only good news is that I did find the hotel receipt from January, so I can finally do that particular expenses claim.

Flossie’s taking pictures. Good ones, too – though sadly she’s only got her mobile phone, so they don’t look as crisp as one would like when you zoom in. Bah!

(I haven’t mentioned Flossie much of late. Not because anything’s amiss; more that whatever I wrote would tend to be so stomach-turningly saccharine I’d decimate whatever already-paltry readership this blog has.)

Interesting post on Slashdot this morning – yes, I know, I was surprised too – about refactoring source code using a technique borrowed from PG Wodehouse, as related by Douglas Adams. It’s less contrived than it sounds.

I love things like this. When writing (video) scripts, I usually print them out two-up, and arrange them in a big long line. With my standard script template and writing style a page is pretty reliably a minute of television, so even for the Christmas Lectures it’s not a huge stretch of paper. The resulting stretch of paper, then, isn’t just a script – it’s a timeline of the programme.

I’ll often put the paper on the floor, and grab a big thick marker pen. Standing up I can see the shape of the whole show – see how the big story moments fall, and the relative lengths of sections – but also things like how long a passage of speech is. Too big a grey blur over on the right = too much talk without a stage direction. I’d mark up my notes, and head off for the next revision.

One of the joys of making video for the web is that one can focus on crafting a few short minutes. But sometimes I miss the brain-wrenching struggle of wrestling with longer-form structures.

Sometimes, you have to wonder if the security services deliberately aim to say things that are outrageous in an attempt to provoke a response from the public. Trouble is, I’m not sure it’s working.

We were getting into this sort of territory with some of our filming at the Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday, trying to see what the public thinks about the authorities prying into their guilty hidden secrets (ie. their genetic susceptibilities). My own view remains: it’s the job of the people to watch the government, not the other way around.

Yes, there’s a price to be paid for that, but it’s better than the alternatives.

The nominees for the Planet SciCast Awards 2008 have been announced!

The front cover of today’s Guardian carries two lead stories. The first concerns Tony Blair leading a new international team to tackle the political challenges of global warming; the second, the row over the redrawing of the boundaries of a wine-growing area in the North-East of France.

Champagne socialism?

It’s 9:30, and I’ve just sat down at my desk with a mug of tea and some toast. Time to check the various connections… OK, email… nope, nothing interesting. Blogs… oh hell, NetNewsWire is showing me 9,000 unread again, I really must prune the list, or maybe Mark All As ‘Don’t Care’ (is that ⌘⌥K? I forget). Humph. Later, maybe.

Ooh! Ooh! I know! This Twitter thing everyone else has been doing for a year or more, but I’ve only just started. Let’s check that!

…

Oh.

So, everyone I’m following seems to have been up for hours already, making erudite comments about Lord Goldsmith and the citizenship ceremonies story, discussing the prospects of scrapping homework, offering pithy critiques of a new social networking site, and generally being offensively awake.

Bastards.

I didn’t realise Twitter was going to be a whole new way to feel inadequate.

You know, if I was a successful Flash game designer, I’d be learning Core Animation as fast as I could right now.

One of the curious aspects of Leopard has been the relative dearth of funky application updates following its release. It’s still quite early days, but I’m starting to wonder if OS X is now sufficiently large – in API terms – that the tiny indy developer teams who’ve served us so well these last eight years are now simply too small.

This is, perhaps, one of the attractions of the iPhone SDK. To long-term OS X hacks it’s an entirely familiar environment, but there’s less of it to wrangle with. Also, Apple is taking payment processing and distribution off their hands. And there are an awful lot of iPhones: a nice, stable, homogenous platform to code against, with tools and APIs the Mac devs know better than anyone else. Dream situation, right?

Sure. But what of the little OS X application companies? Are there enough Cocoa hackers to go around?

I worry that the iPhone application goldrush might lead to stagnation in Mac software development.

[update: as evidence, I cite Daniel Jalkut. Ironically enough, the author of the software I’m using to write this blog post. QED.]