BEAU COLBURN

Steve Jobs

I was in line at Shake Shack. “You ok?,” asked the text from a friend. “Yeah… About what?” I figured it was serious when he called a few seconds later. Dazed, I opened Twitter and saw a flood of links to apple.com. I told my wife we needed to go home.

I’ve spent the past few days thinking about how someone I’ve never met, and didn’t know, could affect me so deeply. I keep going back to one of my first experiences with the iPhone.

So many years in, it’s hard to remember just how exciting it was to hold an iPhone that first time. One of the first things I did  was open the camera app. I took a few snaps, holding the phone vertically, like most people do. Then I turned the phone ninety degrees to the side to take a landscape photo. When I did, the camera icon on the shutter button gently floated ninety degrees to the side as well, so that it was properly oriented. Not too fast, not too slow. I remember gasping, and my eyes watered for a moment. I was caught completely off guard, and looked away. It was the perfect little detail.

When I think about Steve Jobs and Apple, and the emotional connection that millions of people have with him, I often think of that moment. A connection that’s not easy to explain, yet is somehow deeper than “I’m happy because now I can listen to all mymusic on the subway.”

I rode home in a blur, and when I got there, I started looking at Twitter again. Maybe an hour passed, and suddenly the most beautiful thing happened: one after one, people started posting nothing but the Apple logo, . It was this cascading effect where, for a few minutes, every time the stream refreshed, that was almost all I saw. It was sad magic.

When I joined Twitter, I thought of it as an extension of the Apple/tech community, and while I still think of it that way, I realized that I now follow a much wider group of people: baseball beat writers, old friends, coffee shop owners, politicians. Everyone was suddenly united, and it was overwhelming. I’m not sure I could have drawn a common line though that group before that moment and, in an instant, there it was.

Outside of my family, there are two people without whom I can say, unequivocally, that my life would not be the same: Jerry Garcia and Steve Jobs. Their losses shifted the bedrock under my feet. The evenings that both passed, so many years apart, ended the same way: my head on my wife’s shoulder, eyes damp.

I’ll never know if Steve Jobs had anything to do directly with the way the camera icon rotates on the iPhone camera app. It doesn’t matter. As the memories pour in from those that worked around him, one comment comes up repeatedly — “What would Steve think of this?” was never far from anyone’s mind. That never has to change.

In a product that literally changed the world, I’m sure he thought that little detail was really great.

iPad TV

lonelysandwich:

You see, despite Apple clearly signalling, by orienting its logo in portrait mode, that the iPad is for holding like a book or a piece of paper, it’s meant the most to me turned to landscape mode, where its dimensions replicate the video screen I’ve known my whole life. Turned to landscape, the iPad offers me the most comfort, the most passive participation, the feeling of Home.

Excellent essay on the iPad, where it fits in, and where we may see video going across Apple platforms. The whole thing is very much worth a read.

The point raised above is one I have thought of many times myself. I use the iPad in landscape mode 95% of the time, yet the logo (which can only face one direction¹), is in portrait mode. I’ve been trying out some of the magazine apps (Vanity Fair, Wired), and while using them in portrait mode does sometimes feel closer to the experience of holding a print magazine in your hand (because of the size and orientation), I don’t think that matters. These are new experiences with media, and the goal isn’t—and shouldn’t be—to simply recreate the print experience.

And while we’re at it, can iPad apps stop with only running in one orientation? I’m looking at you Words With Friends HD, and to a lesser extent you MLB At Bat (sorry pal).



¹ One of my all-time favorite little UI features on Apple products is the way that the camera on the iPhone’s shutter release button rotates when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape mode. It’s absolutely perfect. It’s one of the things that struck me the first time I ever picked up an iPhone. It still brings a smile to my face every time I see it. Sure, it’s probably not possible technically (or should I say very hard), but imagine how kick-ass it would be if the logo on the back of the iPad could somehow rotate like that. I can dream.

Also, one of these days I’ll figure out how to make proper, clickable footnotes that can return to where you left off. Sorry about that.

Aperture 3 — Places And iPhone GPS

I’ve never really paid much attention to geo-tagging my photos, mostly because I didn’t have an easy way to do so. One of Aperture 3’s new features—one that was a very pleasant surprise—is the way that it can pull in GPS data from existing iPhone photos. It’s really brilliant in its simplicity.

I would guess that a very high percentage of Aperture users are also iPhone owners. This means that all you need to do is snap a single iPhone photo at your shooting location, and you can then use the GPS data from that photo to tag other SLR photos from the same location in Aperture. You don’t even need to import the photos from your phone into Aperture. You simply pull up a mini-browser that shows you the images on your iPhone (which has to be connected at the time). From there you select the image, creating a spot on the map. You can then assign as many other photos in your Aperture library as you’d like to this spot.

I’ve been hoping for years that to find an iPhone app that takes your location from the iPhone’s GPS, saves it, and then allows you to sync it back to your photos. (There may actually be something like this now.) This is much better. Viewing the photos on the iPhone’s camera roll is a quick and easy way to find the exact location, visually, that you are looking for.

I recently visited Los Angeles, and we went for a hike to the Griffith Observatory. I took a bunch of photos with my SLR on the way up, and from the observatory at the top. I also took a few along the way with my iPhone, but that’s all I needed. With those few iPhone photos, Aperture can pull the GPS info, and I can tag all the rest in a few clicks. Simple.

Ultimately, most of my favorite photos get sent to Flickr. As a bonus to all of this, when using Fraser Speirs’ excellent Flickr Export for Aperture uploading tool, all the GPS data is passed along from Aperture on export, and automatically added to Flickr.

In typical Apple fashion, Aperture 3 now takes something that I was interested in, but hesitant to jump into because there wasn’t a simple path to entry, and makes it even more user friendly than I could have imagined. It’s also interesting to watch how Apple has taken what is arguably the most consumer-friendly device ever, and leveraged its ubiquity to make an impact on one of their Pro apps. Geo-location data is something that I’ll always be happy to have connected to my photos, and now with this update, I don’t imagine ever not including it.

Quick Thoughts On Droid

I had a chance to play with a Droid phone earlier today for a couple of minutes. A few random, quick thoughts:

• The onscreen keyboard actually seems over-sensitive. Every other letter I typed seemed to show up twice. The iPhone keyboard letters enlarge and pop-up when you move your finger over them, giving you a bit of visual feedback. The Droid keyboard seemed to duplicate inputs unexpectedly.

• The screen itself was great. Super clear and crisp. I was not, however, a fan of the overall look of the interface. Google gets knocks for their design, and I felt the same way here. The polish wasn’t there. The top menu bar was a disaster, filled with crammed icons that seemed unnecessary and unclear. It reminded me of the top menu bar on a 1999 Nokia candybar phone than a modern smartphone.

• The phone felt solid, yet clunky, both physically and design-wise. The slide out keyboard was usable, but the physical markings on the outside of the phone are made for portait use. When you slide the keyboard and rotate to landscape, the screen rotates, but the four physical home buttons on the bottom, of course, do not. That means that they’re sideways when you hit them. Obviously this is something you can get used to, but it’s also something that other companies would never allow.

I want the Droid to succeed. I want the Pre to succeed. The competition is good. Other than people that are having so many problems with AT&T that they need a new provider, I can’t see many people that are iPhone users going in that direction. You’re too used to how it works, and the little refinements.

Everyone’s heard countless stories of people going into an Apple Store, playing with an iPhone for a few minutes, and saying “I have to have this.” There’s a wow factor, and it’s immediate. I just don’t think that’s there with the Droid. It’s got a lot of great features that can match the iPhone point for point in many cases, but the overall impact wasn’t there for me. Like Lebowski’s rug, there’s something about the iPhone that ties all the pieces together—it’s greater than the sum of its parts. The Droid feels like just parts.

iPhones and iPhoto and Aperture—Oh My!

I haven’t been happy with using Aperture and iPhoto simultaneously for a long time. I’ve wanted to get all my needed photos into one app to make everything (iPhone/Apple TV syncing) more simple, but never really got around to it. It was one of those “I’ll get to it at some point”-type projects.

Fast forward to iPhone 3.0 software. All of the sudden my backups were taking much longer than they used to. Not the eight-hour horror stories I’ve heard some people talk about, but probably 5x as long as they had previously. I poked around a bit to see what people were saying about this. Some pointed to specific apps that may be the problem; some recommended deleting and re-installing all 3rd party apps. Somewhere else I saw a reference to backups in 3.0 handling photos on the iPhone’s camera roll differently than it did before (I’m not even sure if this is actually true; actually the more I think about it it doesn’t seem true—but it got me thinking). It suggested syncing all photos from the camera roll to iPhoto or Aperture (or whatever), deleting all photos from the camera roll, and then re-syncing from the album in iPhoto or Aperture.

Up until then I had been doing all of my photo work in Aperture, but syncing the iPhone to iPhoto. I had a few old albums of wedding and family photos I would sync to the phone from iPhoto, and I would sync all the camera roll photos there as well. Since I started using Aperture full time a few years ago the only new photos that were ever added to iPhoto were from the iPhone.

I also chose to never delete the photos from the camera roll on the phone after import, so I had somewhere in the 1,300+ picture/screenshot range on the camera roll. (Side note: with most process related things in this area I usually have a general idea how people handle things, but I realize that I really don’t with this. Is it unusual to keep all your photos on the camera roll? Is it common? How do people sync them? I’m curious to hear).

Anyway, I’d been meaning to migrate everything to Aperture for a while like I said (for the Vault especially), so I decided to sync the phone with Aperture, create a new project just for iPhone photos and try to move to this new system.

Everything seemed good initially, but I quickly noticed a few problems. The first was that iPhoto seemed to sync all photos automatically by date, and maintain this structure when synced with the phone. When I sorted all the photos in Aperture, they would show up by date within the app, but when they synced with the phone they would be sorted by filename. Almost all of the photos are in sequential order, but there are a few batches that are not, and they would throw everything off when it synced. Not having the iPhone photos sorted by date on the phone was almost useless, as that’s really the only means you have of finding anything. Still, I figured I could fix this by doing some bulk re-names sorted by date and file name, and eventually be okay.

The second problem I noticed was a bigger concern: all the screenshots (.PNGs) I had taken were now blurry when I viewed them on the phone and in Aperture—which had never happened when syncing with iPhoto. iPhone screenshots are important to me (I used them for app reviews, and a bunch of other stuff), so this was an issue. I figured (and it was suggested to me via Twitter) that it likely had something to do with how Aperture was handling the image previews (as well as the fact that iTunes does its own optimization when it syncs to the phone). I forced Aperture to re-create the previews and they were much better (though still not great). I then deleted them all from the phone and re-synced to see if this fixed it. It did not. They were still just as blurry when viewed on the phone. Back I went to taking a closer look at preview settings (as some friends suggested on Twitter).

I have Aperture set to limit my previews to half size, and keep the quality at 8 of 12. Working primarily with large RAW files the library size can get out of hand quickly if the previews are set too high. So I started looking around for solutions. Permanently changing the preview settings was not an option. I realized that I could change the preview preferences, force new previews on just the iPhone photos and that would probably do it. But then I’d need to go and change the settings back. And then repeat the process the next time, etc., etc. This was quickly becoming a path I didn’t want to go down.

So what did I do? I re-organized all the imported photos and screenshots in iPhoto and synced them back to the phone. At least now I had a freshly cleared camera roll, and the photos would be organized and displayed properly.

And remember how I started this whole song and dance because I thought it might help my backup times? Yeah, it didn’t. Not at all.

However, there was a pretty big silver lining to this whole excercise. At one point when I was finally moving everything back to iPhoto I started thinking about the 3GS and video. I’m on a 3G now, so video is not a concern. Still, I know eventually I’ll make my way over to a 3GS and when I do, I’ll need to deal with video on the camera roll as well as photos. Since iPhoto can handle imported video alongside photos, and Aperture can’t, at the end of the day I’ll be better keeping everything that comes off of the iPhone in iPhoto moving forward.

Just like it was to in the first place.