Every so often I stumble across a new piece of software that just does its thing exceptionally well. In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don’t, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve. Voicethread is a great example of such an interface.

It’s really exciting to see so many of these well crafted apps starting to appear on the Internet as web apps, sometimes called Rich Internet Applications or RIAs. RIAs, when done well, can give the impression of behaving like a desktop app but with all the added advantages of being in the cloud… advantages such as ubiquitous access, remote storage of data and the ability to collaborate across time and place. Google Docs uses this model and is a fine way to create online documents that can be shared for collaborative purposes.

The problem with Google Docs (at least as far as word processing is concerned) is that from an interface point of view, it’s not the prettiest way to interact with your words. It’s certainly not a true WYSIWYG interface, so that when you add tables and graphics to the document you really have no idea what it will look like when printed. I find Google Docs a hugely convenient way to work with documents that need to be accessed from anywhere or need to be shared with others, but because it is essentially a HTML based writing space, I do sometimes lament the way it handles the niceties of layout and page design.

So I was super excited do discover Adobe’s Buzzword this week. Buzzword is an online word processor written in Flash that does nearly everything Google Docs’ word processor does but has a much nicer, much prettier and much more intuitive interface. You can sign up for a free account and try it out at no cost.

Buzzword comes from Adobe and really starts to show the enormous power of Flash as a development platform for the web. Obviously the combined brainpower and engineering that came about thanks to the merger between Adobe and Macromedia is starting to really show some results of how powerful their combined thinking can be. (You can see evidence of that in the latest Adobe CS3 Suite - some awesome new features in Photoshop for example)

Opening Buzzword gives you a regular pageview layout, with familiar dropdown menus and tools. Using it is a familiar experience if you know anything at all about Word. You get less of course, and you can’t make tables of contents, do mail merges, use document maps or change case options. There are many things that Buzzword won’t do. But most of those features are not used by the vast majority of word processor users, who are happy to be able to set font styles and typefaces, add tables and images, change font colours and make bullet lists. Buzzword has all of these common features (with some nice usability tweaks, making some features, such as bulleting and numbered lists, even easier to manage than in Microsoft Word). Buzzword is nice to use, with funky animations as documents open and close, document listings that get rearranged automatically, and so on. It just feels good to interact with.

Where it really comes into its own is in the way it enables shared collaboration. Just like Google Docs, Buzzword allows you to invite people to either view, review or co-author a document, Viewers can just read them, reviewers can leave comments on them, and co-authors can make changes. Google Docs can be quite laggy however, and there can be delays between when a user makes a change and when the other collaborators see that change… this makes it hard to use in real time. What I really like about the collaborative nature of Buzzword is that it clearly shows who are the collaborators, shows when they are online, when they are editing and it has a clever lockout system that makes it impossible for two co-authors to edit a document at the same exact instant. As soon as a change is saved however, it is instantly reflected on the other users screens. This works amazingly well for multiple people working on the same document at the same time, and ensures that people don’t inadvertently write over the top of other people’s changes, something that is easy to do in, say, a wiki. Buzzword makes you wait your turn until the previous user finishes with their changes.

Buzzwords can import and export text documents from .txt, .rtf, .doc, .docx and .xml. It has no spreadsheet or presentation tools, but as a word processor it’s very nice. It’s not a Word killer but nor is it designed to be.  For someone with basic word processing needs who wants the benefits an in-the-cloud service like this can offer, Buzzwords is worth a serious look.

In summary, I’m really impressed with the WYSIWYG look and feel of Buzzword. Although I have a lot of documents stored on Google Docs I can see myself migrating most of them over to Buzzword, not only for the improved collaborative environment but just because it’s so much darn nicer to use!

The regularity of my blogging has dropped off a bit lately, mainly because I’m in the middle of writing a book about the use of interactive whiteboard technology for teachers. Although I’ve got almost 20,000 words written so far, I am way behind deadline and really need to get the first draft finished so it can be submitted to the publishers in a few weeks. Until I get that done, every time I feel the urge to blog I have to remind myself that there is a (new) deadline looming and direct my writing efforts to the book instead of the blog. I feel bad that my blogging has been suffering lately, but I really need to get this done. So there you have the reason I’ve not been updating lately.

However, I simply had to take a few minutes to share this wonderful new tool I’ve found called Scrivener. It’s an incredible tool for anyone taking on a large writing task and I really can’t believe I’ve never tried it before. I had heard the name mentioned but assumed it was just another word processor. How wrong I was!

There is an assumption that the defining software tool for writers is Microsoft Word. While Word is a very powerful application and has many, many features that most people never even discover, Word can be a frustrating tool for anyone contemplating the writing of a very long piece of work such as a book. I use Word a lot and know it quite well… in fact I hold a Advanced level Microsoft Office Specialist certification in Word, so I feel quite at home in it. I can generally twist Word to my will and make it do pretty much whatever I need, but it’s still a pain in the neck when working on something as large and fragmented as a book.

There’s no doubt that Word is a great tool for certain types of writing. But as they say, when your only tool is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.

Enter Scrivener. Designed expressly for anyone working on long documents that require many edits, such as books and screenplays, Scrivener takes an entirely different approach to writing. Essentially, it treats easch writing task as a project, collecting resources for writing into a single place and then enables you to break long text into short, movable, definable chunks, letting you categorise and synopsise each chunk and assemble them into the final work. You can break text into chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences… whatever you like… and move them around to let your ideas flow far better than Word will ever allow. Unfortunately Scrivener is a Mac only application, but Windows users might like to check out PageFour which apparently does similar things.

Using Scrivener has been somewhat of an eye-opening paradigm shift for me. It has challenged my assumptions about the very nature of the software tools we give our students. It made me realise what a mistake it is to assume that Word - or any “industry standard” software tool - is necessarily the tool for the job as far as student use is concerned. We inflict tools like Word on our students because they are supposed to be “what everybody uses” and we insist that the best tools to teach them to use are the tools used “by industry”. The fact is, schools are not offices, and the writing needs of a business person are not necessarily the writing needs of a student. The best tool for a student is not the one that they will use when they get older, but the one that helps them do what they need to do right now.

There is nothing “wrong” with Word, but having now spent some time with Scrivener it is now painfully obvious just how much more we could offer our students if we stopped assuming the tools of the business world were what they should master in order to create written texts. Real writing is a process of collecting ideas and thoughts together, manipulating them into a cohesive form, and editing and re-editing them until they make sense to other people. I now see how tools such as Scrivener approach the task of writing from a completely different angle and enable it to take place in a far more fluid way.

Now back to work! I have a book to finish…

PS: Here’s a video that gives a great overview of what Scrivener is all about…

Download

Tags: scrivener, word, microsoft, writing, book

Until fairly recently, most of my computing was done locally using “real apps”. By this, I mean they are cllient-side applications installed on the hard drive of my own computer. I guess I’ve always liked the speed and convenience of having my applications - tools like Office, email, calendar, feedreader, etc - right there on my hard drive where I could get to them running at full local speed. Once you’ve been spoilt by the responsiveness of locally-run apps, web apps that run from the Internet just aren’t as snappy.

Of course, many will say that locally installed apps are old skool; that if you really think with a Web 2.0 mindset, then running your key software directly from the Internet makes more sense. The world is certainly trending that way, with a proliferation of Web 2.0 apps that now run directly from “the cloud” and computing devices designed to work this way, such as the Macbook Air. Computing in the cloud started with obvious applications like webmail, but have now extended to office productivity software, photo editing, even video production, all workable with nothing more than a web browser and a broadband connection.

Life is all about compromises and finding the right balance. Although I’ve been resisting cloud computing for a while, my circumstances changed recently and I decided to make a switch to see if I could manage moving my basic tools off the desktop and into the big blue nowhere.

The real trigger for making the move to the cloud was an increase in the number of computers I was working on every day. My main machine has been a Macbook Pro, which I essentially did everything on. I also owned a 20″ iMac on my desktop, but that was used mainly for editing podcasts and storing my media with iPhoto and iTunes. I really didn’t spend that much time on the iMac, although it’s a beautiful machine to use. Since we moved house recently though, I’ve been using the iMac a lot more, even more than the MacBook Pro. Then when I started the new job I was given a Toshiba 12″ Tablet PC as my work machine.  It became awkward to manage all my stuff since it was now spread across three different computers, all using locally installed software applications. Suddenly, locally installed apps were making a whole lot less sense, with important emails and documents never on the machine I happened to be using, my work calendar and my personal calendar getting out of sync on different machines, and I figured it was time to start looking for a better way to consolidate my digital life.

So here’s the problem… I had three machines grabbing email from 5 different accounts, two calendars that needed to be kept separate but I also needed to cross reference them against each other, a writing project which required collaboration with another writer in a remote location, and a group of RSS feeds that were being picked up on three different machines. My digital life was a mess…

It was finally time to submit to the cloud computing model and take all of these disparate bits and move them to cyberspace, where I could access them from any computer. There are many tools to enable this, but I decided to go with Google’s tools since they seem to work really well together and one login would give me access to everything… Gmail for my email, Google Reader for my RSS aggregator, Google Calendar for my appointments, and GoogleDocs for my documents. I won’t labour the point about these tools since I assume most people are already pretty familiar with them, and using web apps is hardly a revolution, but I did want to mention a few tweaks and tips that really made the move to the cloud so much more workable for me.

First, Gmail. For a long time, I’ve been a heavy user of Entourage, and more recently Apple’s Mail, and really liked them.  Although I’ve had a Gmail account for ages, I mainly used it just as my secondary mail account. My real mail comes in on chris[@]betcher.org and I didn’t really want to switch that. Thankfully, Gmail has the ability to hook into my ISP’s account and pull my regular mail into the Gmail service. This means that I can now stick to my long term email address via my regular ISP but get to it with the convenience of Gmail’s web-based anywhere-access. I added another POP account I had and I can now send and receive mail from any of these addresses via Gmail, from any machine, with the added advantage of a powerful spam filtering service freely supplied by Google.

Second, my feed reader. I tossed up whether to use Google Reader, Pageflakes, NetVibes or Bloglines. The new Bloglines beta looked good, but had a few annoying behaviours. After testing each system for a few days, I decided on Google Reader. Once it’s set up, it works very smoothly with Flock - my browser of choice - to add RSS feeds. The way it displays feeds is really intuitive and each to understand, and it was able to import the OPML file from my desktop feedreader, Vienna. So far, I’m impressed with Reader and I can now check my feeds from any machine, and keep them all in sync.

Google Docs are wonderful. Although I’ve got a Microsoft Office Specialist certificate and am a pretty capable “power user” of MS Word, like most people I mostly use it to type up fairly simple documents. Google Docs may lack many of the features of Microsoft Office, but they are mostly features I don’t use anyway, and the ability to collaborate on documents with other people more than makes up for the missing features. Working across several machines, the ability to have all my documents accessible from one place - the Internet - is an incredibly useful concept. But I was really won over with Google Docs when I saw the Firefox plug-in called GDocs Bar. This plug-in gives one-click access to Google Docs for both accessing your online files as well as uploading new ones. GDocs Bar makes Google Docs so much more functional.

Finally, the other big problem was that my personal calendar was being managed by iCal on my MacBook Pro, and my work calendar was being managed by Outlook on the school’s Exchange server. This made it hard to look at both my work and personal events together, as both were kept in separate places although they had overlapping events. The killer link in making the move to the cloud came with the ability to sync both the iCal and Outlook calendars into a single Google calendar. To achieve this, I used a $25 app called Spanning Sync to synchronise iCal to my Google calendar.  It works fantastically with perfect two way syncing. I then used the free Google Calendar Sync tool to do a two way sync of my work Outlook calendar into my Google calendar. The end result is that my online Google calendar now pulls data from my two separate calendars and displays it in real time, in one place, easily accessible from any browser.  This is way cool…

The bottom line is that I now feel I have a really workable cloud computing experience, with all my key information stored in one place - the web - that I can get to from any of my machines. I know there is still plenty of life left in the locally installed software model, especially for the more computationally intensive multimedia applications, but so far I’m pretty impressed at just how easy and effective it has been to move my most commonly used productivity apps to the cloud.

I just hope we can trust Google.

Tags: cloud, google, network, internet, webapp, web2.0

A few posts ago I mentioned that both Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom had been nominated for Eddies, or Edublog Awards.

As the voting processes started for the awards, there was apparently quite a bit of blog-love being shown for certain nominees in the form of multiple votes, automated voting, group voting, etc. It got to the point where the organisers had to first of all manually delete suspicious voting activity such as in the form of huge numbers of votes all coming from the same network address in a short period of time, and eventually had to completely limit the voting system to a single vote per IP address. No doubt this was the result of some very enthusiastic voting by students in class (”OK kids, your teacher has been nominated for an award so go to this url and click the button for me”). Finally, the opportunity to see the progress of the results was shut off completely as well. It’s a shame the voting had to be nobbled in this way as it really ruins whatever meaning may have been derived from the award process in the first place. At the end of the day, I think these awards are a bit of a lucky dip anyway and it was just nice to be nominated regardless of the notion of “winning”.

What did intrigue me though was the notice I received to say that the awards ceremony would be held on Jokaydia Island. “Cool!” I thought, I get to fly off to some tropical resort on some exotic island somewhere to attend the ceremony. Well, it’s true, I did fly off, and it was an exotic island, but it existed only in the virtual world of Second Life. Yes, the Edublog Award ceremony was to be held in a virtual 3D space - a space existing only as a collection of bits, bytes and packets inside my computer, arranged into an amazing 3D environment by the creativity of the people who build these virtual spaces.

While I have dabbled on and off with Second Life over the past year or so, I never spent long enough in there to really get my head around it. Holding the awards ceremony in SL was a great way to encourage me, and probably others, to spend a little more time in-world. So while I was dabbling again the other night I noticed Sue Waters was online in Skype. Sue, or Ruby Imako as she is known in-world, is well known for her Second Life skills so I buzzed her to ask for a quick tour of the facility. This turned out to be a really useful lesson, and I learned lots of things I’d not yet discovered, including how to get free stuff, how to make my audio work, how to interact with the in-world objects, and most important of all, how to photocopy my butt using the amazing Copybot. Thanks to Ruby (Sue) and and also Slammed Aabye (Dean) for showing me around. It was enlightening, and made me realise just how much I have to learn.

The actual awards were held on Sunday morning at 8:30am Sydney time so my SL alter-ego, Outback Outlander, turned up with a handsome new look (thanks to some last minute shopping on Freebie Island) and took my seat at the awards auditorium with a whole lot of other very good looking avatars. The event was hosted by Jeff Lebow, James Farmer and Dave Cormier who did a great job of keeping it all moving along despite a couple of minor hassles with the audio streams. Considering it was being broadcast out to Second Life, UStream and Skype, it was a pretty impressive undertaking. Here are a few happy snaps taken during the event, and these are the final winners. Also interesting to read is James Farmer’s insights into the “Awards Curve” and some suggestions for growing the event next year. Jo Kay, who is largely responsible for the creation of Jokaydia Island did an awesome job of building these spaces, and I’m absolutely gobsmacked at the world she has created in SL. Her attention to detail, sense of design, creativity and inventiveness just blows me away.

I’m still getting me head around Second Life. There are times when I see glimpses of amazing possibilities and others where I just shake my head and wonder what all the fuss is about. While it’s obviously got plenty of wow factor, I do still wonder just how effective the actual learning could be in a place like this. I still find it amazing that a virtual space can be used to hold an “event” like this, that people turn up, with their avatars all dressed up, some with virtual clothes that they paid for with real money, to socialise and mingle as though it were the real world. I still get blown away when I read that over half a million dollars of real money change hands in Second Life every day!

When I told other people I know (who mostly don’t “get” this whole online world thing) that my blogs had been nominated for an award they congratulated me. When I told them the awards ceremony was going to held in a place that existed only inside a computer, populated by people who were represented only by virtual 3D characters, they looked at me as though I was nuts. When I heard people in-world saying that there was an awards after-party on the beach where there would be dancing and drinks, I started to wonder if I was nuts. Dancing and drinks?! C’mon! I mean, in my First Life I’m sitting in my study in front of my computer in my pyjamas on a Sunday morning and in my Second Life I’m heading to a virtual beach to drink virtual cocktails and dance under a virtual mirror ball? … I’m pretty geeky, but that is seriously bizarre stuff!

So what did I do? I wandered down to the beach afterward and hit the dance floor with the others of course. Like most of this new technology world, if you ever want to understand it and find whatever value it might have, you just have to get in and give it a go. So pass me that virtual pina colada and let’s boogie on down, baby!

For a bit of voyeuristic fun, you might like to take a peek at one, or all, of these sites… Twittervision, Flickrvision and Wikipediavision. There is a strange fascination watching them do their thing.

All of these sites tap into the Google Maps API. I mentioned in a previous post about Twitter how an API (Application Programming Interface) can be used to give programmers backdoor access to a particular web app, enabling them to connect into them with another service or application that may or may not have ever been deigned to do so. Think of apps which have open APIs as Lego blocks that can be easily joined together, where the output of one app can be seamlessly plugged into the input of another, so that they talk to each and share data very nicely.

Google Maps in particular have had plenty of interesting uses made of their very open API, and these three examples show you that in action. By using the data coming out of Twitter (the Tweets being made by people), or Flickr (the photos being uploaded by people) or Wikipedia (the edits being made by people) and then feeding that data into the Google mapping API, those events can be made to appear on the map, in near real time. Neat huh? And quite compelling to sit and watch. And just in case you were wondering if it really is “near real time”, I’ve had Twittervision running on one machine while I Twittered on another, and yes, it does appear within a few seconds. Mind you, each event shown on the map is taken as a random selection from all the events that happened in the last few seconds, shown as the number (I assume) indicated at the top of the map…

One of the scarier uses of the Google mapping service is the Florida Sexual Predator service. I’m having trouble getting it to load right now so maybe they’ve pulled it, or maybe it’s just under load, but it’s a pretty controversial use of the API. Apparently someone has managed to plug the Google Mapping API into a database of known sexual predators from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The result is a map of the Florida area which clearly marks the exact location where all these sex predators live. Clicking on each marker reveals a full bio of these scary looking dudes. It’s quite chilling, and is a great conversation starter with kids when you begin to talk about how data can be used and where the lines might be between ethical and unethical uses of data. I’d certainly hope the database is kept up to date though, because I’m not sure how I’d feel if I moved into an apartment where the previous inhabitant was one of these guys and the database was not yet updated…  no wonder the neighbours are looking at me strangely!

It’s an interesting world we live in…

Tags: data, mashup, googlemapping, api

During the second plenary session at the AIS conference today, I was looking forward to hearing Pia Waugh speak. Pia is co-owner of Waugh Partners, vice-president of Linux Australia, and a huge advocate for both Linux and the Open Source Software movement generally. I met Pia last month at the CSTA meeting where we were both speaking, and I had a great chat to her over dinner about all sorts of things that any normal person would probably consider geeky in the extreme. Pia is a super smart lady and very passionate about the whole Open Source movement, so I really enjoyed talking with her that night.

When I saw her in the auditorium today before her session I went to say hi, and was pretty surprised to see her holding a little green and white plastic device in her hands… after the initial g’days were exchanged, I said “Is that what I think it is?” She gave me a big grin, and said “yep!”

Pia had managed to get herself one of the “$100 laptops” that MIT has been working on. For those that don’t know, the “$100 laptop”, or more correctly known as the One Laptop Per Child project, is an initiative started a few years ago by Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT’s Media Lab, with an aim to get computers into the hands of Third World children. By employing clever, simple design and open technologies Negroponte’s dream is starting to come true, with the first shipments of OLPC laptops being delivered this year. They are not quite down to $100 each yet, but are getting closer… Pia said they are being produced for about $170 at the moment.

I was fascinated to be able to have a look at this little device. It’s got a very “Fischer Price” feel to it, with shiny green and white plastic, funny little wireless antennas that stick up, and a cute little keyboard and screen. But underlying the toyish look is some sophisticated - and open - technology. It runs Redhat Linux as the operating system, and comes with an innovative user interface called Sugar. Sugar does not try to model itself on the more traditional WIMP-style UI such as that found in Windows-style interfaces, but instead was designed to answer the question “What would a user interface look like for a child who has never seen a computer before?” It’s cute, very different, and very intuitive. I had a little play, but had to hand it back all too soon so Pia could deliver her presentation.

During lunch however, I spotted Pia again and she let me take the OLPC for an extended play. I wandered over to Bryn Jones’ table and the two of us had a chance to check it out a bit further. I was pretty impressed to be able to get so much hands-on with it, as these things are still very hard to come by unless you are a child in one of the targeted countries. Pretty much the entire production run is going to the kids, and the only reason Pia had one was because she helped do some development work for it. I felt pretty lucky to be able to see and use one, as I don’t imagine too many other people have had the chance.

With built in wifi, mesh networking, longlife battery, tablet or laptop mode, built-in speakers and microphone, USB ports, SD slot, flash-based storage drive, wireless web access, music composition software, notetaking software, and a bunch of other built in apps, it really is a very interesting piece of hardware! Thanks for sharing Pia!

PS. Look forward to hearing Pia as a special guest on the Virtual Staffroom very soon.

Tags: linux, olpc, mit, opensource, piawaugh

For a while now, ever since I’ve been producing The Virtual Staffroom podcast, I’ve been meaning to blog about the workflow I’ve developed for producing it. After a lot of trial and error, and making plenty of mistakes, I’d started getting a system happening on the best way to put the podcast together.

Then along comes the new GarageBand as part of iLife ‘08 and all that changed. Normally I don’t like it when my systems get disrupted, but in this case I am thrilled about the changes as it reduces the steps needed to make a podcast considerably. Added to that are some configuration changes I made to the way I capture the audio, and I reckon I can now do better quality recordings at much smaller filesizes with far less effort, so it’s win-win all round.

For anyone that might be interested, here are the tools and the workflow I plan on using from now on to create podcasts. I’ve got another podcast interview lined up for tomorrow night so I’m excited about these new workflows.

Firstly, I record my interviews using Skype. I use a decent USB headset microphone, a Logitech 250… I had a 350 but it broke, and the 250 was cheaper with the same audio specs. With Skype I can call to another computer anywhere in the world, but I can also call to a telephone line as well, so either works fine. Skype also let me do multiparty calls, so it can be several people online in the chat at once.

To record the call I use Audio Hijack Pro. I used to use Call Recorder which is one-button easy, but it can be a bit flaky and drop out at times. It’s mostly reliable, but for podcast interview mostly reliable is not acceptable of course… I once did an hour long interview with Luc Zwartjes from Belgium only find that Call recorder crapped out and dropped the whole recording. Not happy, and I felt very embarrased to have to let Luc know about it, although he was gracious enough to record it again with me. From then on I have always used both Call Recorder and Audio Hijack together, but have since decided that Audio Hijack is good enough just on it’s own.

What I like about Audio Hijack is the way you can capture the audio of the call to AIFF format. I never realised this for a long time and was capturing to MP3 and using Quicktime Pro to convert it to AIFF, but I’ve since discovered that I can go directly to AIFF which simplifies things a lot. The other advantage is that I can choose the bitrate and mono/stereo setting, which can bring the file size down a lot. I currently record using AIIF format, 16 bit, Auto Sample rate, Mono and it seems to work really well. Recording in mono halves the filesize of stereo.

Once I record, I drag the AIFF file to The Levelator. This simple and easy to use tool runs a very complex analysis of the file and applies compression and normalisation filters to the audio. This fixes any overly quiet or loud bits and makes it sound much better. If I wasn’t fussy, I could leave this step out, but I think it’s worth doing for the better audio quality.

Once I get the adjusted AIFF file out of Levelator I drag it into a new podcast episode in GarageBand. I really like Garageband as an editor and find it simple to use and easy to shuffle audio tracks around, make edit points, add multitracks, etc. I also add the tops and tails to the interview directly in GarageBand, and well as any music, sound effects, etc.

The big news in GarageBand ‘08 is that you can now export directly out in MP3 format. This is great… prior to this I had to export out as an M4A file and then use Quicktime Pro again to convert it to an MP3… it was an extra step and made it hard to work in mono. The new export dialog in GarageBand has all the features that a podcaster could want… I set mine to MP3, 64kbps, Medium High VBR and Mono. The sound quality in the tests I’ve done is really good, and the filesizes are way down on the older episodes.

Finally, I use Podcast Maker to add my metadata, shownotes, XML data and album artwork, and in one click upload it to the Virtual Staffroom server. Podcast Maker generates all the required XML and RSS feeds very nicely. It’s a wonderful tool.

So there you have it… it might sound complicated but it’s not really, and this new workflow is way more simplified than the previous method I used to use. Apple has really listened to podcasters and added just the right features into the new GarageBand. Combined with the extra tools like Skype, Audio Hijack, Levelator and Podcast Maker, making podcasts has never been easier!

Tags: podcasting, virtual staffroom, tools

I’ve been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately… not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It’s a pretty cool site and it’s easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff.

I was really interested to find that Apple’s totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too… as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the ‘Tube. It’s very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it.

As a test, I edited together this little production last night using some Mac vs PC ads I just happened to have laying about on my hard drive. The process is easy, they imported into iMovie very simply, the new workflow is interesting and newbie video editors will probably love it, and the whole thing was put together in a very short timeframe.

I thought it was fascinating to realise how many of these Mac vs PC ads have been made, and to see just how diverse they are.

Tags: youtube, imovie, nlve, web2.0