marco f dot net

Well, it looks like my post "Lack of smooth playback with blu-ray " has spurred up quite a bit of discussion in the comments. Thanks to those who took the time to check out what I thought was an issue with blu-ray itself. It definately seems to be related to a TV problem of not showing true 24p.

With the excellent actor Lee Byung-hun (check out Joint Security Area)

Watch it while you can (bound to get removed by youtube):

 Source: http://slashfilm.com

"Remember in Jurassic Park, when there would be the distant thud of the stalking T-Rex, and the water glass in the jeep would tremor? Or in Saving Private Ryan, when they felt the earth shake well before they saw the tank?

That’s kind of the way I feel about the D3X. It’s out there. You can hear the distant rumble. A monster of a camera."

Source: Joe McNally's Blog

iWork '09 (and then mainly Pages) for the last couple of days. Sharing documents with others through iWork.com. I'm pretty pleased with the possibilities of this service, since it also seems to perform very well on the receiver side (web).

It's nice to discuss a document online with others, however I can see that the service isn't finished yet. Actually, I dare to say that the whole iWorks'09+iWork.com package is not ready for full collaborative working.

It starts with the uploading of the Pages document. Does it need to go through a cloud? Why not just implement a Peer-to-Peer collaboration like Coding Monkey's SubEthaEdit?
But I can see that there's revenue in a cloud service for Apple, and of course the documents are available when the author isn't (which is not the case for peer-to-peer sharing). So, I can overcome the extra cloud option.

The downloading options are of course very nice, I do not need to keep a word or pdf document next to my Pages document anymore. It's converted along the way (although I fail to understand why a Pages document is so much bigger than a doc or pdf even).

The commenting and "chatting" in the iWork shared document area is great, however there is no way for the author to directly edit the document. Also here, I can see that this is not needed (or even desired!) for the shared online document. But additionally there is currently NO way to "sync" comments back into the original Pages document.

Say for instance I send a document to my manager for review. He has some comments and we discuss these online. All fine, but in the end, there are a few items that need changing, and those comments should be available in the "offline" version as well! At least iWork '09 should retrieve the comments when I load the Pages document and highlight the areas, showing the active comment in a sidebar or HUD of some sort.

Now, I need to keep Safari open, and flip back and forth between original and shared document to check for comments and change accordingly.

Annoying, especially when you have a large document with lots of comments.

So, please Apple add the above functionality in iWork '09 and I'm a very happy puppy :-)

Additionally, some way of user management would be nice. Maybe I want my manager to be able to edit the document, but someone else only viewing/commenting. Those changes can then be synced back and marked into the original document by iWork '09. 

By the way, did you know iWork.com also has an iPhone optimized site? Unfortunately it is then only possible to view the shared document, you cannot add any comments to it. Still, it's okay for quickly reviewing smaller documents while on the road, I guess.

yikes!

I guess that's what happens when you order too many iTunes songs..
 
But alas I won't do this with quite a few albums, which I bought and only rarely listen. I may just run requiem on them to make them DRM free. The 256Kb higher quality items I'll get for my most listened albums, whenever the iTunes store is fully updated.. since I have 2759 "protected AAC" items in my library.. the above is just half of it..

On a lighter note than previous posts.. Everyone seems to be doing it, and I'm going to have a go at it too.

 - lots of crap talk about iTunes, Appstore successes and other sales
- 17" "unibody" MBP is a 99% cert
- New Mac Mini w/new intel CPU and no more Firefire (which would suck)
- no iMac update, these will "silently" be updated after MWSF09 I think,
unless they're going to pitch this as a "first quad core consumer
all-in-one desktop"
- updated iLife and iWork suites and
- improvements on MobileMe (again) for functionality in above suits
- no iPhone Nano (but possibly an iPod Touch Nano!)
- demo of Snow Leopard with a few bigshots in the industry and it'll be
available right after the WWDC09 possibly

 I don't think there'll be much iPod/iPhone related stuff, it'll probably
be mostly Mac related. I expect a "special event" by the end of
February, March with more iPhone/iPod announcements.

 There, now I am among those geeks that consider themselves important
enough that their predictions actually matter... (no, really)