Category: Uncategorized

(I was strongly tempted to reference the Pussycat Dolls song and give this post the title Don’t You Wish Your Mac Did Screencasts Like the PC?. That damned song seems to have crept into every movie or trailer I’ve seen in the past week.)

You’d think that with its serious “creative cred” that someone would’ve developed a killer screencasting application for the Mac, but I agree with the folks over at 37 Signals: there just isn’t one. The 37 Signals folk are pretty hard-core Mac fans — it’s reflected in both their design aesthetic as well as the preferred platform of Ruby on Rails developers (RoR was developed by 37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson) — so it’s pretty safe to assume that they’ve hunted high and low for a reasonable scrrencasting app that runs on their platform of choice.

The closest candidate is Snapz Pro, written by Ambrosia Software, creator of some really great Mac games and utilities. I use Snapz, which is probably the best screen-grabbing utility I’ve ever used as well as WireTap Pro, which is equally excellent as an audio capture tool.

The pro version of Snapz does a decent job of capturing screen movies, but therein lies the problem: there’s a difference between “capturing movies of the screen” and “producing a screencast”. When it comes to producing a screencast, the editing process tends to take up far more time than the recording prcoess, and that’s where Snapz Pro falls short. To do editing, you’ve got to go to iMovie, and to produce title cards, you’ve got to fire up your favorite image-editing software, and so on. There’s a lot of “legwork” involved. As the 37 Signals people put it:

Here’s what I’d like to see. Basic screen video capture with a few simple compression options, audio recording, caption/graphic overlay support, simple video editing (cut, duplicate, slow down, just the basics), and export to Quicktime or Flash. All wrapped up in a nice UI too, of course. The biggest downfall of the current options is editing — there’s no way to preview the screencast you just created, overlay some captions, intro and outro text, and cut out some of the dead video).

Can I get an amen? Better yet, can I get a product?

I’ll agree that using separate tools is probably the better way to go if you’re producing a film, but if you’re trying to quickly produce a screencast (or several screencasts) demonstrating a UI for your customers with voice-over narration that also lets me do a little editing, make titles and throw in some transitions, I want a tool that’s a little more monolithic, a tool that — dare I say it? — takes a more “Microsoft Office-y” approach like the 37 Signals people suggest. That tool is Camtasia Studio.

Camtasia Studio supports all sorts of output formats, from QuickTime and Windows Media to what seems to be the preferred format these days — Flash video with an integrated player, a la YouTube. Adding titles, transisitons and text captioning is easy, and there’s a pretty decent edit suite in there too. For the videos you output in Flash, there’s the option of adding interactive “call-outs” (highlighted areas of the movie) and “hot spots” which when clicked take the user to a predetermined point in the movie or a web page. I’ve already used it to create a couple of screencasts for use by Tucows’ sales team, and they love the results. I’ve already committed to creating some screencast tutorials for end users for some of our Tucows services. And yes, they’ve got a version that runs under Vista — I run it on “The Taint”, the Acer laptop sent to me as part of a Vista promo. Call me a happy (and completely unsolicited) user of Camtasia Studio.

So c’mon, Mac developers — where’s the Mac equivalent of Camtasia?

In additon to fending off challenges to Office from Google, a lot of people (myself included) think that Microsoft’s facing a challenge to their platform dominance from the internet. If you buy the World of Ends-style idea that “the internet is a platform that nobody owns,” that’s a pretty big, amorphous blob for the guys in Redmond to wrestle.

A lot of startups today are creating software that doesn’t target a specific operating system. They’re developing software to run on the internet; on stacks of free and open software (ie, LAMP), and using browsers’ HTML and JavaScript rendering capabilities to be the client side of their applications. In another era, they might have been developing Windows software, writing to the Windows API, and delivering their apps as Windows binaries. So what’s Microsoft to do to keep developers focused on platforms they control? Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble thinks he’s seeing the patterns in Microsoft’s tea leaves:

Adam Sohn (he was the PR guy in our group when I started at Microsoft) is quoted on Redmond Developer saying that Microsoft is preparing a Live Development Platform. Ahh, an API that’ll do it all? Hmmm. I’m worried about the boil-the-ocean approach.

Scoble’s concern is that web developers like (or are at least used to) their pieces loosely joined; trying to create an all-singing, all-dancing API runs counter to that. Microsoft, on the other hand, has built their fortune around making developers productive, so it would be a mistake to underestimate their ability to understand the needs of mainstream programmers.

One thing’s for sure, it’ll be interesting to hear what Microsoft has to say at Mix this year.

Source: Microsoft trial balloons Web strategy? « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger

For me, one of the lines that really stood out in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash was the narrator’s remark on sexism in computer science. In the novel, the hackers of the exclusive online hangout, The Black Sun, had dismissed a female programmer’s work as relatively unimportant, an act which was summarized this way:

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

If the techie attitude towards women in the early 21st century setting of Snow Crash — a world extrapolated from the technology and social mores of the late 1980s and early 1990s, where it wasn’t unthinkable for a teenage girl to get a high-speed skateboard courier job — was bad, it must have been far worse when this year’s A.M. Turing Award winner, Frances E. Allen, joined IBM back in 1957. Back then, IBM was being rather cutting-edge by encouraging women technologists to join the company with a brochure titled My Fair Ladies (pictured below).

Allen was given the award to honor her for her work at IBM on compiler optimization techniques. The work for which she is noted in described in this IBM article:

Widely recognized for her fundamental work on the theory of program optimization and of leading PTRAN (Parallel Translations) project, she is regarded as a pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, which she explains as “translating the language a program is written in into language appropriate for the hardware…to best exploit the performance potential of that hardware.” Allen’s personal contribution has been developing underlying algorithms that are effective across many types of hardware and in diverse situations.

In addition to her work on compilers, Allen is also noted as being a mentor to many during her 45-year career at IBM, considering it part of her day-to-day work. Her work in mentoring is so notable that IBM established the Frances E. Allen Women in Technology Mentoring Award, of which she was first recipient in 2000.

This isn’t Allen’s “first woman to win this honor” moment, either; in 1989, she was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow. Other awards she has earned include Grace Hopper’s Celebration of Women in Computing Award (as one of the most successful women in the computing field) and Ada Lovelace award for her “outstanding scientific and technical achievements and extraordinary service to the computing community through her accomplishments and contributions on behalf of women in computing.”

We at Global Nerdy salute you, Ms. Frances Allen, with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!

Links

• Associated Press story on Frances Allen winning the Turing Award. Includes a cringe-worthy description of compilers as “the programs that translate one computer language into another. This process is required to turn programming code into the binary zeros and ones actually read by a computer’s colossal array of minuscule switches.”
• Fran Allen: from “Fair Lady” to Fellow. An IBM Research page documenting Frances Allen’s achievements over her career at IBM.
• The ACM’s page of Turing Award recipients. Here’s Frances Allen’s page.
• Wikipedia’s page on the Turing Award.

The Google Apps for Your Domain (GAYD) brand may be no more, but its successor, Google Apps, has taken on a much higher profile today: Google’s announced the for-pay Google Apps Premium targeted at large organizations.

The premium package bundles:

• Gmail (10GB storage, ad-free, with BlackBerry support)
• Google Calendar
• Google Talk
• Google Start Page
• Google Pages Creator
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets

For $50 per user/year.

Premium users get access to a set of APIs (such as single sign on through parter services from Sxip), which should allow enterprise customers to integrate their Google Apps suite with other applications.

The New York Times is just one of the many pubs covering this announcement to note that this is Google’s most direct threat to Microsoft yet:

By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange, the Microsoft server software typically used for corporate e-mail systems, in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.

Google said initial customers of Google Apps would include a unit of Procter & Gamble and SalesForce.com, a pioneer in the business of delivering software as an Internet service.

“We are in the process of phasing out Microsoft Office and Exchange from our company,” said Marc Benioff, the chief executive of SalesForce.com and a frequent Microsoft critic.

GE, incidentally, is another enterprise charter customer for Google Apps.

Despite the coverage, this is by no means a battle of equals. Yet. Microsoft’s Office suite is more complete (it includes a local database and presentation program, and is tightly integrated with Microsoft’s business graphics and project management tools), more powerful, works offline, and is more entrenched (a scary amount of people’s work involves Visual Basic for Applications scripts). Those strengths, however, are also Google’s opening.

Microsoft claims nearly a half-billion Office users out there, about 7.5% of the world’s population (that number seems crazy, but I bet that official estimate doesn’t even account for people using pirated copies!). You can be sure that a huge chunk of that user base barely scratches the surface of what Office can do. They use Excel to make lists and perform simple arithmetic. They use Word as a glorified text processor. They never touch the journaling features in Outlook. If big companies can serve those users’ needs with Google Apps tomorrow as well as they do with Office today, I’m sure they’ll at least take the time to crunch some numbers and ask some questions.

Their business cases will, no doubt, be created in Word and Excel, and presented in PowerPoint.

Source: Google Press Center: Press Release

Well, that’s one lawsuit down: Cisco and Apple have not only agreed to share the “iPhone” trademark, but it also seems as if there’s even going to be a little cooperation between the two companies. Apple’s press statement is so terse that I can actually quote it in its entirety below:

SAN JOSE and CUPERTINO, California—February 21, 2007—Cisco and Apple® today announced that they have resolved their dispute involving the “iPhone” trademark. Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world. Both companies acknowledge the trademark ownership rights that have been granted, and each side will dismiss any pending actions regarding the trademark. In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications. Other terms of the agreement are confidential.

I’m just a coder who likes to schmooze (or a schmoozer who likes to code, take your pick), so I’m going to leave it to suitier minds than mind to think about any of the business implications of the deal. I suppose that there’s a business analogue to wrestling fans who would’ve loved to have seen an epic WWE-style corporate smackdown; these people will be sorely disappointed.

PC World’s Techlog had the same thought I did: What were Apple’s “Plan B” names for the phone in case Cisco was able to prevent them from using the iPhone name? My money would’ve been on “Apple Phone”, which as others have said, has a certain symmetry with another product name of theirs, Apple TV.

There still remains a possible trademark dispute in Canada, where Comwave, a telecom company, have been using the iPhone brand for its VOIP services. I’d like to see them come to an agreement with Apple like the one with Cisco, even if only so that I could use an iPhone to call someone on their iPhone connected to iPhone.

We here at Global Nerdy would like to congratulate Canada’s own Global Nerd, Java creator James Gosling, on his being named to the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor. Here’s a CBC News article covering Gosling’s award, and for you non-Canadians out there, here’s a quick explanation of the Order of Canada.