BEAU COLBURN

Daily Reads

A few days ago, my good pal Chandler asked me for some recommended “daily reads.” It seems he may have become bored with obsessively tracking his cycling results, and reading Lance Armstrong conspiracy theory blogs.

Like everyone else, I get a huge amount of my news from Twitter lately. I still do the RSS thing too (NetNewsWire on the desktop, and Reeder on the iPhone/iPad, in case you’re wondering). Below are a handful of sites that I enjoy on a daily basis. I don’t look to them for news as much as for finding interesting things to read. Sometimes timely, sometimes not.

Some, if not all, of these will be familiar to many. Maybe you’ll find something you enjoy going back to. These are all good people.

Kottke.org — Really smart curated list of pop-culture reads, with maybe a liberal arts lean (if that makes any sense).

The Awl — Funny, well-written twists on daily news.

Young Manhattanite — I don’t know how or when I started following YM on Tumblr, but I’ve been fascinated reading the #thisisdivorceblogging posts of late. Heartbreaking in a way, but I can’t stop reading.

Kung Fu Grippe — Merlin is known for a lot of stuff (all of which is excellent), but I really love what he writes about music.

Waxy.org links — Good collection of daily links, with a tech lean.

Coudal’s Fresh Signals — There’s always a few gems in Fresh Signals. Tech, movies, literature, science, culture—touches on a bit of everything.

TwentyFourBit — Always a good source of interesting music news.

Quality Peoples — My friend Ed’s newly relaunched site is a daily playground of visual fun.

All Propped Up and No Place To Go

I’ve never kept my iPad in a case. I used to put a case on everything, but I stopped a while ago. These iPads and iPhones are beautifully designed products, and I prefer them naked. The only time that I’m slightly jealous of the cased-people, is when they have it sitting on a counter with the back propped up, typing and swiping away.

I keep the iPad in a Hard Graft sleeve, which I love. More and more I bring the iPad with me to the coffee shop to do work, and I’ve found that it really wants its back propped up for a proper typing angle. I’ve taken to shoving my wallet or keys under the back to give it the right angle, but that never felt overly secure. I wanted the typing angle a case gives, without a case. I’ve been looking for something small and portable—something that can easily be thrown in a small bag—to act as a solution, and I think the Compass stand by Twelve South is it.

Twelve South products aren’t cheap, but from what I’ve seen in the past, they’re solid and well-built. When I saw the Compass Stand at the Apple Store a few days ago I grabbed it. The stand isn’t much bigger than a candy bar when it’s folded up (it easily fits in my pocket), and it has an impressive weight. It slips into a nice little travel case. The stand can unfolds two ways: as a more traditional easel, or as a flatter stand for typing. All the surfaces that come into contact with the iPad are covered in rubber, so there is no risk of the metal scratching the surface.

After a few days use, I’m really happy with the function, and it’s proved to be exactly what I was looking for. If I want to stumble out to the coffee shop half-asleep on a Sunday morning, I can just grab my iPad, throw the stand in my pocket, and spend an hour sitting there catching up.

British (Reissue) Invasion ’09/’10

With the reissue of Exile On Main Street, it looks like the Stones’ classic album is set to enter the Billboard Top 200 at #2 this week (behind Glee: The Music Vol. 3). Exile had a huge marketing push, and Keith and Mick—especially Mick—were everywhere in the past few weeks promoting it. That other big British band had their own enormous reissue campaign last Fall, so I took a look at SoundScan to see how some of the first week sales numbers compared. (I rounded all of the numbers.)

The Rolling Stones — First Week Sales (2010 reissue)

• Exile On Main Street 75,000 units

The Beatles — First Week Sales (2009 Reissues)

• Revolver 46,000 units
• Rubber Soul 57,000 units
• Abbey Road 88,000 units
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 73,000 units

The rest of the Stones catalog is a bit harder to compare as it’s been reissued piecemeal by different labels. As a point of reference, the May 2009 reissue of Sticky Fingers sold about 1,400 units in its first week.

With a gun to my head I’d say Beatles, but every time I hear that opening “Rocks Off” riff, I reserve the right to change my mind.

Quick Thoughts On The National

Interesting, this new album. Here’s the thing: I have never been able to really get into The National. I’ve listened, and liked/respected what I heard. I’m told they’re really excellent live, but every time I put their music on, it just never quite sunk in with me. I do think it had some to do with his voice. It distracted me a bit, and I didn’t listen close enough, which may be lazy, but is also the truth. I go back and forth between how I feel about music that you have to work at to appreciate. I sorta chalked this band up to ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ As High Violet was coming out, there was quite a bit of buzz. Feeling that The National was not quite my cup of green tea, I was curious, but not dying to listen. I knew I’d get to it eventually.

As soon as it came out, beyond the press, a few people I know keep telling me that I had to listen to it, so I finally picked High Violet up. I grabbed me from the first track and I have basically listened to it non-stop all weekend. I think it’s very very good.

Part of me is excited about it, because I feel—at least in my case—sometimes there is a right time for music to click, for whatever reason. It can be as simple as listening in the right setting to get over some small hurdle. From what I hear, and what I’m told, this album isn’t a huge departure from Boxer, so I’m looking forward to relistening to some of that work with fresh ears.

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.

Flickr App & EXIF data

I was browsing through Flickr earlier and I noticed this photo from Gruber. The tags showed that it was processed with the Best Camera app, but the EXIF data was still there. Hmm. I also noticed that the photo was uploaded with the official Flickr app. I decided to test some things out (I did the same tests with Camera Bag as well, with the same results).

1. Uploading a photo from the desktop via the Safari does not maintain the EXIF.
2. Uploading a photo via email from within Best Camera does not maintain the EXIF.
3. Uploading a photo from the iPhone camera roll—that has been processed in Best Camera—via the Flickr app does maintain the EXIF.

What’s very interesting is that the EXIF data doesn’t appear when you check for it in Preview, yet the Flickr app keeps it. It does not appear to keep geolocation data, but the Flickr app allows you to “Tag Current Location” so if you’re uploading on the spot taken, it’s accurate (however, I tested it with a photo taken in NYC, and it tagged it as my home in Boston).

I’m not clear on exactly how this is happening, but until 3rd party apps are able to maintain the EXIF data, this is a great workaround.

I threw all my test photos into a Flickr set

Thoughts from last night

Last Fall I unexpectedly found myself standing directly across from Senator John McCain. This was at the height of the Presidential campaign, and this was a full on PR moment. Secret Service, PR people, shaking hands, and fake smiles. I didn’t want to be rude, but I wanted nothing to do with this show, so I stepped back and let him pass.

Thinking back on that moment tonight, after hearing of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, I realize how different that moment would have been if it were he, instead of McCain. Of course, Kennedy wouldn’t have been a Presidential candidate at that point, so there would have been a lot less pomp and circumstance.

Still, if I had had the opportunity to say hello to, and shake the hand of, Ted Kennedy, it would be a moment that I would hold dear, and always remember.

Politics are strange.

What is going on with Twitter spam?

In the past 24 hours, I’ve probably gotten 40 new followers that were all a variation of the same type of spam. They all had an almost identical avatar, and all had one update with a spammy email address.

I woke up this morning, and this is what I saw:

I know that spam is a fact of life, but the thing is bothersome is the amount of people that are following these spammers back. This one account is following 1,300+ people, and has 81 people following back. Who are these people? There is no reason that anyone for any reason would choose to follow this account. They’re just all other spammers and people that are auto-following anyone that followers them. I guess if these people figure they can get a 5% return follow rate, it’s worth it. The problem is, the others clearly don’t read a word that they say. It’s nothing more than a spam echo-chamber, and it’s annoying.

I wish Twitter would figure out a way to block auto-following, and it would get rid of a lot—if not most—of this. I’d guess that if there was no auto-following these spammers would have almost no return followers.

I could just ignore this, but for some reason this is so clear and obvious that it annoys the hell out of me.

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.

iPhone Home Screen Organization

One of the little things about the iPhone that continues to annoy me is that there’s no easy way to organize your apps and bookmarks on the home screen. I had held out hope that something would be introduced in the 3.0 OS but, at least as far as I have seen and heard (without running 3.0 myself), this has not happened.

Apple has introduced Spotlight searching into 3.0. This will be really helpful, but still won’t do what I’m looking for. Spotlight on the iPhone looks to work much like it does on the desktop, and it should be a great way to quickly launch apps. I use Spotlight all the time to launch apps on the desktop. Still, I use the Dock for my primary apps and I like to keep it just how I like it. The same goes for the iPhone screens.

As I add more and more apps to the iPhone, I like to—in a general sense—keep them organized. The first two pages are dedicated to core apps and go-to bookmarks, page 3 may have all the photo apps, page 4 for games, etc. As anyone that’s tried to manage a bunch of apps knows, moving something from page 4 to page 1 is a pain. You have to drag it screen to screen, and the icons on the screens that you’re passing through get jumbled up as you move through them. Some people keep an empty row at the bottom of each page to avoid this, but I never liked this solution.

Recently I’ve been keeping the last screen open and using it as a sort-of holding area. Apps that I just downloaded and wanted to try out, things I may be testing, etc. all live on this page. If I like them and want to keep them around, they’ll get moved to a more organized page, and if not, they’ll be deleted. As a result, there’s usually not more than 4-5 apps on that last page.

Using The iPhone’s Dock As A Clipboard

It wasn’t until I started keeping this “test” page that I realized I could use the space here, in combination with the Dock slots, to allow the dock to act as a clipboard. This allows apps to be dropped down to the dock, and neatly moved from screen to screen without messing up the order of any of the other pages.

Here’s how I do it: Say I want to swap an app from the main screen with one on the 3rd page. What I will do is scroll to the very last page that has tons of space and then press and hold an icon until it’s ready to be moved. I’ll then move 2+ icons out of the dock and drop them on the last page. I know I can easily go back and get them afterwards.

I then go to the front page and select the app that I want to move. In this case, it’s November 2009 (the Red Sox won the World Series) and I want to move the MLB At-Bat app to the 3rd page for the off-season. I drag the MLB App to dock, and then swipe to page 3. I’ll need to move something from here to make room for MLB, so I decide to put my Flickr bookmark on page 1. I drag the Flickr bookmark to the dock, and then drag MLB At-Bat up to take it’s spot.

From there, I simply hit the home button to get back to the home screen, click and hold the Flckr bookmark until it’s ready to be moved, and then drag it up to the slot that’s been left open by MLB At-Bat.

At this point all the apps are on the screens that I want them to be on, and nothing has gotten out of order. All that’s left to do is go back to the last page and drag my primary dock apps back to where they belong. I hit the home button to lock them all in, and everything is set.

This isn’t the cleanest solution in the world, but until Apple creates a way to manually manage the app organization (via iTunes would be nice), this is pretty simple and saves a lot of headaches.

Take a look at the video below for a basic rundown of what I’m talking about. There’s a chance this is the most obvious tip in the world, but I haven’t seen anyone else mention it, so maybe it’ll be a help to some.