Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

I’m constantly having a look at everything coming out that helps in the field of research. Microsoft OneNote is one of my favorites in the market.

Quigga is a new software that let´s you organize your research and collect it online and make it accessible to any number of client computers. I think this looks really interesting. You register an account and you get 200MB storage with a limit of 10MB per file. If you research is text based/web based that should be enough. It’s on the limited side of your research involves a lot of video (like mine do). It looks like they are going to offer more storage in the near future (that would be the business model).

Quigga has PDF management, library syncing, imports Mendeley projects, powerful search, tags, a watch folder (great), read access from iPhones/iPad/Android and powerful support for Microsoft Word.

Have a look at Qiqqa

I will also be test driving this…

http://susestudio.com

Novell openSuse derivative. Create your own build online. Add repositories. Since I love customization and hate code this may be it!

https://www.mesh.com/welcome/default.aspx

I will be test driving this for a while.

Back in the days of early internet people where talking about the benefits of using nothing but plain HTML code on websites. Everything else would create a slow internet and slow machines. Thank god developers didn’t listen and today the web is a sort of magic place filled with podcasts, live video streams, high def video, interactive RIA’s like World Wide Telescope, RSS feeds, Ted.com, chat and social networking that would have never been possible just using nothing but plain old HTML.

The exact same argument is now active again. Only this time it’s all about HTML5. And how using code other than plain HTML5 will slow down Apples mobile device line up.

It’s all very fascinating.

This is Mc Donald’s website from 1996. Clean. Fast. Apple friendly.

Have a look at the new 3D sculpt tool Sculptris from a swedish programmer called Dr Petter. I love the concept and the GUI since I’m a big fan of everything that has it’s roots in the few years Kai Krauze and MetaCreations was active (I’ll write a post on that some day soon).

I haven’t managed to find out under what license Dr Petter is publishing his work.

Some where deep in me I’ve always wanted to be able to draw in X Y Z. I have a highly developed sense of 3D space (dyslectics like me usually have) and with the right tool and technical solution this would be a dream come true. This clip is NOT that magical solution – but is non the less interesting.

“Open”

I’ve been playing around with the Ubuntu 10 Beta. I’ve made a habit of playing around with Linux once in a while. I want to keep myself updated on Linux stuff since I some times have to pass workflows through Linux machines. And I’ve had hopes for Linux in the last fifteen years to become an alternative platform for creative artists. I still think Linux is not there yet. For every release of KDE and Gnome it kind of more and more looks like Windows – but it still has such a long way to be something to consider for a regular film production pipeline (apart from the high end tools available).

There is still nothing to make a basic edit with. There is a poor mans Photoshop available and a few poor mans versions of Illustrator. You can run some of the commercial compositing packages on it but there is nothing like After Effects that can do compositing and be a powerful motion graphics and design tool. And everything feels like it’s in beta and ten years ago. At least.

I doubt Google is going to turn Linux into anything more than an optimized gadget OS. Chrome OS and Android (running on Linux core) are both efforts in the iPhone iPad direction.

A Windows 7 machine – even at it’s basic level – is simply just a so much more powerful alternative. The suite of Live apps on Windows 7 beats most of what Linux users consider “pro” stuff.

Both Apple and Microsoft hosts solutions that are simple and extremely powerful. Add to that a real pro package like the Adobe production suite and you are a hundred times faster than if you would try to achieve it on Linux. I always have the feeling that I have to spend a hundred days in stead of just one on most basic things if I where to choose the Linux route.

I love the concept of Linux. The thought that a lot of people can bring something to the table and the thought that a community can really empower each other. But unfortunately that can only be achieved if there is an architect behind it all. In Apples case it’s Steve Jobs. In Microsofts case it’s Ray Ozzie and also MS Research’s head Rick Rashid. They point the vision. Make the vision potent and powerful. And they fund the vision.

If you haven’t already discovered Microsofts great (and completely free) compression tool Expression Encoder – try it.

Expression Encoder let’s you capture super clean screen recordings, encode QuickTime/AVI/MPEG and other formats to the VC-1 codec and it let’s you automatically embed the video into a Silverlight app for publishing. In my experience this free alternative is far better than many of the commercial solutions out there right now. Expression Encoder is a free component of the commercial package Microsoft Expression – a software suite for web site authoring.

In case you’re wondering about the specifications for authoring stereoscopic video supported by Nvidia (and other) hardware there’s a great resource over at 3dtv.at.

I use their Stereoscopic Player and Stereoscopic Multiplexer all the time. Great tools for streaming left/right video files in and out of you machine.

Here’s Microsofts technical overview of the VC-1 codec that is used for streaming stereoscopic video.