Over the past 5 years OS X, iOS and the cloud have become parts of my daily life. It’s weird how I feel like I have a relationship with the devices that run this software, while I never felt that way with the Windows devices that I used for the first twenty or some odd years of my life. The “Cult of Apple” is a real thing, and its interesting to examine how Steve Jobs has created a community filled with such fervor around what is really just simple lines of code.

The craze around Apple is at such a fever pitch this time of year - leading up to WWDC - that anything out of the ordinary is fodder for comment and controversy. This year it was Apple releasing a press release last week announcing that 1) Steve Jobs would be at the keynote despite his health problems and that 2) He would be talking about OS X Lion, iOS 5 and something new called iCloud. Apple usually keeps mum leading up into any of their Special Events so many thought that the keynote itself was actually spoiled by the press release.

I couldn’t disagree more. Apple really went into depth, focusing on so many features for iOS and OSX that I had to take a couple hours to digest what I had read/watched and decide what I thought. What did I decide? That I loved it of course.

What I loved the most is how Apple had so much content to go over that they seemingly buried some of the biggest announcements of the day. WiFi Syncing, AirPlay Mirroring and Custom Tones - still don’t see any mention of SMS tones though - were just listed on the wrap-up screen. That’s how big the other announcements were. It’s true that a lot of the event was spent by Steve explaining iCloud, but I think that was more for the press than technophiles.

Also, it’s true that a lot of the event was trying to play catchup to Android, and even in some cases WebOS, but they needed to play catchup, and it looks to me like they caught up, and in some cases surpassed my expectations. I honestly didn’t expect for them to make as many changes to the home screen as they did. MobileNotifier and LockInfo were the two reasons that I first jailbroke my device, now they’re basically built into the OS. Apple owes a lot to the homebrew/jailbreak community on a lot of the features they finally instituted yesterday.

I also didn’t expect things like the creation of reminders, or the changes to the Camera app, but it’s obvious that Apple isn’t above cannibalizing their own developer’s sales to build the features they created, and were sometimes scolded for, into their own OS for the masses. TapTapTap had Camera+ removed from the app store because it allowed users to unlock a special feature that would let you use the “+” volume button to take photos. Now it’s baked right into the OS.

I see my wife and I taking advantage of the iCloud services quite a bit, but it’s yet to be seen how it will affect the way we use our phones. Right now we share one account for buying apps/music. If everything syncs wirelessly will she find my app data on her device, or is there a way to drill down and control that type of settings. I hope so.

The only thing I’m surprised that we didn’t see was a deeper turn-by-turn maps solution. Apple has been hiring on navigation and maps people for about a year now and I really expected to see something there to compete with what Google is doing on Android.

I’d give the entire announcement a solid A.

My job on a day-to-day basis is amazing. One of the best perks of the job is that it gives me ample time for sick and vacation leave. The problem is that I’m almost always afraid to take it. My department - if you can call it that - has a total population of one. Me. That’s it. When I want to take time off it means that I have to prepare all the work I would be doing during my vacation ahead of time and then deal with the problems that arose during my time off when I get back. So I have more work to do before I leave, and more work to do when I get back.

Because of this I might take two vacations a year, mostly around Christmas and the summer. This past weekend Rachael and some friends and I went to the Ocala National Forest to camp over the Memorial Day weekend. We had a great time - even when it was raining - and it was great to get away from computers and technology for a while. There’s absolutely no AT&T cell coverage for the forest, so I was out of touch for three days. Before I left I did everything I needed to prepare for my time off.

You see, during that time at work, we were making the final transition push to our new digital format. We had techs on site prepping the transition, managers on scene in case anything should happen and I had done everything that I was asked to do and more in able to be able to take that time off. Of course, that meant that something would go wrong. I received an email during the time off letting me know that there was a problem with the advertising. One of the slides was incorrect and I needed to correct it when I came into work on Tuesday. Easy enough. Sometimes, in my haste to get a show done, the wrong version of an ad, or an ad for another location gets uploaded. It sucks, but it happens. This is what I assumed happened. You know what happens when you make assumptions.

When I came in this morning there was a note for our sales manager, noting that a client had come in and was upset that their ad - as well as everyone else’s - wasn’t showing. That’s the first moment I put two and two together and realized how big the problem might be. While the techs were setting up the server they asked me to do a test version of the advertising. I was already working on a version of the advertising for our Lincoln, RI location so I handed that over to them. It wasn’t until I saw this note that I realized they had used the wrong advertising for one of our busiest weekends of the year.

I had left them with a new, updated version of the show for our Melbourne location, that was uploaded and ready to use, but somehow the wrong advertising got uploaded. The techs had moved on to another location so the only people here were the general manager and me. We quickly called the techs and figured out the needlessly complex system to fix the problem as quickly as I could. It meant that a couple shows in the morning still had the wrong advertising, but as soon as I knew the breadth of the situation it was fixed as quickly as it could be.

The problem was the sales manager. He’s the one who might get hit in the pocket if an advertiser isn’t happy and he’s the one that’s going to hear the complaints. I sent him an email letting him know what had happened so he couple be prepared to talk to any client that might have a complaint. When he came in - about an hour and a half after the problem had been fixed - I was in the hall, so I mentioned to him what had happened, and I was immediately blamed for the “royal f***up” and he walked past me quickly to talk to the general manager.

Now, there’s not much that really pisses me off, but being blamed for something that rests solely on someone else’s shoulders is up there. I understand why he was mad, and I understand why he blamed me, but I did everything I could have short of cutting my vacation short for one wrong ad being onscreen. I think what he was really upset by was being left out of the chain of communication. He didn’t get an email when there was something wrong with the show - not that he could have done anything - and so he lashed out at being struck by all the complications at once on Tuesday morning.

My choice was to take his passing, misplaced blame and go to my office, where I continued to do my job. Sure, there were a couple minutes there where I had to sit in my chair and take deep breaths, as anyone would who had just spent an hour feverishly fixing a problem, but there’s nothing I could have done differently to fix the problem any quicker, and I was happy with my part in the resolution. I was the first person to identify the problem and I fixed it as soon as it was identified. I couldn’t do much more. The only people who could have, were in town and did nothing, so I did my job and that’s all I can do. I have to be happy with that.

After CNN and NYTimes ran stories on it, the dad decided to pull it from YouTube, and that’s where it seemingly ended. Every reference to the show links back to that single YouTube video, now forever lost to the internets. I assumed there would be tons to sites that cached or downloaded and reuploaded the video, but in 3 days of searching I haven’t found a single one.

Do you have a white whale like this? Something that you know exists on the internet somewhere, you have proof of it, but you just can’t find it. How frustrating is that?! Now excuse me while I continue looking for “The Yippity Yo Cooking Show” while tearing out my hair.

PS - I haven’t found the video, but I have found the dad’s phone #, address and e-mail and am tempted to contact him to ask for a copy.

I’m beginning to think I might have a little too much on my plate. At least, on a Monday, it feels that way. Even though KidFest and Cult Classic advertising is finished I’ve yet to tackle the Summer Movie Pass or the new HD Advertising materials we need for the upgraded show. There’s also tons of smaller projects that aren’t huge or time sensitive, but are getting pushed further and further down the line.

Part of the problem is the time that it takes to produce our onscreen advertising shows now. The reason I needed Vader¹ was to handle the processing load of creating 1080p advertising and then translating it into the Digital Cinema Packages (DCP’s) that the projectors use as a native format. This allows mind-numbing possibilities on my end, but also means mind-numbingly long renders, even on a great machine like Vader.

Furthermore, the program that we’re using to render the uncompressed AVI’s that then get turned into Digital Cinema Packages isn’t being perfect. It’ll take 20 minutes to render the show and then crash at 19:59 for an unknown reason. Right now I’m thinking that using a WMA file as audio was causing the crash, but the only way to figure that out is to do a 20 minute render².

On top of that, Rachael’s school really needs to get started on Advertising, and Famous Faces & Funnies needs some help, but both are being pushed back further until I can get my actual work done. I don’t like being this busy, but it sure helps the day go by a little quicker. Oh, there’s the error noise coming from Vader. Looks like ProShow crashed again. Time to fire up Premiere and do this like it’s 1999.

¹My new, evil Windows 7 machine
²I’ve got 00:02:48 left

Our other theatres finally received a full DLP installation in the weeks leading up to the summer, and while this means that they’ll have unparalleled picture quality during the summer movie season, it also means that the corporate guys were busy dealing with that - rightfully so - and not with supplying me the schedules that I needed to prepare the marketing materials for our annual summer programs¹. This also meant that once they were given to me, I had less time to work on them than I normally would.

These programs are some of my favorites, mostly because they’re given to me without any mandates or suggestions. I’m generally allowed to go hog-wild on them and I generally do. The Cult Classics especially are a favorite of mine, doing weird/fun designs that in the past have included images popping out of a severed head, notebook sketches brought to life and other interesting ideas that float around in my brain.

I had originally intended to do some cartooning for this year’s marketing of the Cult Classics, and even tried to rush out a version of what I had in mind, but it wasn’t working, so I retreated back to an idea I had come up with earlier in the year, that looks pretty good. It’s nice when a second plans works out. So often I’m upset when something doesn’t look like I had originally thought up. Something about the work not really matching your original intent, but this time I think it worked out.

KidFest is a little easier, because we’ve come up with a format that I can just switch out the movies/characters for. It’s strong branding that I just updated a bit this year, adding some “EXTRUDE” to the logo. Even this one I tried to switch up even more by moving around the logo a bit, but the original branding was so good I went back to the look that we’ve had the past couple of years.

I’m generally happy with this year’s summer marketing look², even though it was rushed. I take a lot of pride in my work, and I wouldn’t be willing to put something out there if it didn’t meet my standards, and I think over the years my standards have grown decently high. There’s something to be said about the pressure of needing to perform.

¹ Cult Classics, KidFest, Summer Movie Pass, Explorer’s Club, et al.
² Although I haven’t even started on the Summer Movie Pass Marketing

I was raised with a Windows PC in the house - and a Tandy TRS 180 before that. The last PC that I bought¹ ran Windows XP and was Windows Vista ready, a tumultuous time period for any PC owner. I never had to experience the “upgrade” from XP to Vista, or from Vista to 7, but the DVD/CD Burner was dead from the moment I got it, and while DELL was happy to send out a tech to fix/remove/replace it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Then, work was more of the same. As much as I love the work that I do and the benefits it entails, the higher ups are penny-pinchers, to the point that when I started working here they couldn’t/wouldn’t supply me with the computer that I needed to do my job. They pawned off a 5 year old DELL to me, that probably had close to the same specs as the computer I started college with in 2000, or at least felt that way. Most people would probably stop right there to think about whether or not they really wanted to be involved with this company², but I instead went out - on my own - and bought a MacBook Pro.

Best decision I ever made.

I had bought an iPod, and then and iPhone. Apple’s marketing geniuses were slowly working me up the hardware ladder. I had used a Mac Pro as well as a PC at my last job, but never used the Mac on a personal level, meaning enough to really feel comfortable with it. Now, two years after buying the MacBook Pro, I can understand why people who use Macs are accused of being part of a cult. There’s a certain undescribable ease to Apple products that more and more people are discovering with the rise of the iPod, then iPhone and now iPad, especially for people in the design field.

There’s a definite reason that traditional Mac sales are staying strong as laptop and desktop sales for most other manufacturers are dropping drastically. My MacBook Pro was a beast with 8 gigs of RAM and ran smoother than anything I’d ever experienced. There was definitely a learning curve though. Figuring out what to do with a DMG file was probably the first, but after that things came naturally.

Now, I’m having to go back, and relearn the PC structure. Everything old is new again, and I hate it. So, why am I using it? The computer is a beast. Thanks to new responsibilities, and changes in the way I’ll do my job the bosses finally decided to get me the computer I wanted. Mind you, not the computer that I want now, but the computer that I wanted when I started here almost three years ago. 8 cores, 32 GB RAM. Something that anyone would be happy to have to design on, so why am I so unhappy?

It’s not right. Nothing feels the way it should. Have I been brainwashed by Steve Jobs?

No. Once I have everything setup and ready to go I’m sure it’ll be a fine machine. A work machine. A pickup truck that does what it does very well. But, I’ll never buy another Windows PC. I’ll make sure my wife doesn’t have to either. Going back to this PC has ensured and cemented into my mind the things that I just don’t like about PC’s. I’m not telling you to buy a Mac, far from it. I am however telling you that I will be.

¹ Somewhere around 2007
² One of many such though processes I skipped right over

That’s where I come in, I guess. I’m the stupid guy who’s willing to drop 99¢ on an app just to see what its like, and then have no problem deleting it right afterwards. So, I’ve compiled a list, organized into rough categories, of the three apps in each category that I use the most on a daily basis, or that do one particular task better than any other. These are specifically iPhone apps - although some of them do have iPad counterparts - and I’ll probably make an iPad entry in the future.

camera

Camera+​ - tap tap tap Cam+ is without a doubt the best of the best when it comes to Camera and Filter apps on the iPhone. You can shoot right in the app with selective white balance, exposure and focus, or import photos from your library and then once you’ve shot you can edit, filter, border and more right in the app. You can also post directly to Facebook and Twitter from the app. It’s simple to use and I use it one a daily basis because of that fact.
Pano - Debacle Software Pano is a spectacular Panorama shooting app. There are other apps that are simpler to use, or free, but this is simple enough to use and creates the highest quality images. Of course, after I’ve used this the images usually go into Cam+, but that’s a given.
Pro HDR - eyeApps LLC ProHDR is the best at what it does, which is HDR. Honestly, the Clarity feature of Cam+ has almost rendered this useless, but there are still reasons to use it. HDR takes multiple photos at different exposures and combines them into one photo, with everything exposed perfectly.

social

Facebook - Facebook, Inc. The Facebook app is synonymous with the iPhone and if you have an iPhone and Facebook then you probably already have this app. There are some annoying bugs that are still being worked out, but it’s still the best way to access your Facebook feed IMO.
Twitter - Twitter, Inc. I’ve downloaded almost every Twitter client out there and finally settled on Tweetie as the best. Twitter must have done the same thing, because they bought Tweetie and turned it into the official Twitter iPhone client. It’s had its ups and downs - #QUICKBAR - but it’s better than ever right now, with push notifications for mentions and autocomplete of usernames. If you have an iPhone and Twitter, this is it.
Gowalla - Alamofire Location Based Check-Ins are all the rage right now, and in my opinion Gowalla does them best. First of all, Gowalla supports FourSquare, Facebook AND Gowalla check-ins. Furthermore, Gowalla’s item, trips and badge formatting makes you experience things you normally wouldn’t, and that’s what I really want when I’m checking in at places.

audio

Instacast - Vemedio This is how iTunes on the iPhone’s podcasts should work. Instacast can stream or cache podcasts and does it seamlessly over WiFi or 3G. It’s a great app, and for someone who prefers to listen to talk over music while driving its a lifesaver.
iheartradio - Clear Channel Management Services, LP I’ll be honestly, this should probably be labeled the WTKS app for me. I use it to listen to RealRadio almost exclusively. The bonus is they have a Phillips Phile channel that plays nothing but Phillips Phile 24/7. I would have killed to have this app or something like it in college, when I was out of radio reach.
Brain Wave - 25 Advanced Binaural Programs - Banzai Labs Rachael and I use this app every night to go to sleep. If you like pink/grey noise or binaural audio, then this app is for you. Simple as that.

productivity

Wunderlist - 6 Wunderkinder Wunderlist has literally changed the way that I work. It’s a To-Do list that cloud-syncs to any other Wunderlist out there. So I have a up-to-date To-Do list on my iPhone, iPad, Desktop or the web. They also have Windows and Android version out there. Best of all? You can share To-Do lists with team members so when you update a list the list updates on their side as well. Seamless.
Due — super fast reminders, reusable egg timers - Phocus LLP Due is another app that has changed the way I work. It’s a reminder/egg timer app, but it’s so simple that its perfect. You can set recurring reminders and then can snooze them by 1 minute, 10 minute or 1 hour intervals. You really have to use it to know why it’s so great.
Dropbox - Dropbox Again, if you don’t use Dropbox, then this isn’t for you, but if you do then it’s an indispensable app. It takes all your Dropbox folders and makes them accessible on the go. As more and more apps are using Dropbox’s open standard as a way of syncing their products this is going to become a more and more important app.

news

Reeder - Silvio Rizzi Reeder has changed the way that I read news online. Every feed I want to see comes though Reeder and every article goes across my eyes. No browsing sites, no mess, just simple, well formatted news that’s easy to read. There are other, free RSS Readers out there, but this is one that’s really worth the money.
IMDb Movies & TV - IMDb For a long time IMDB was behind the times, without even a mobile formatted website. Then they released the IMDb app and hit it out of the park. If there’s any info you want, from showtimes, to actors’ names or anything entertainment related, IMDb does it and does it quickly and easily.
ESPN ScoreCenter - ESPN If you want sports scores there are lots of options out there, this is one and I like it a lot, mainly because you can personalize your experience. I get Orlando Magic and FSU news on the front page and then have the other sports that I care about later on. It’s not the fastest or glossiest, but it’s the most complete and works for me.

But, my biggest recommendation is to read the reviews in the App Store. Most of the time if there aren’t many, or if they’re bad then the app probably isn’t worth the money or time. But, those are the apps that I like. If you download any of them and like them, let me know. I’d love to know that I sent someone in the right direction.

work

While my job is primarily designing for print and web advertising, there’s always the sparse but very important HTML/CSS projects hovering around, especially for a family-owned business like ours with no devoted webmaster. Between the boss and I, we know just enough to figure out how to fix something without actually knowing anything about how to fix it. Meaning there’s a lot of Google searches, reading through help articles and, of course, copying and pasting of others’ work onto our website.

Now that we’re transferring the website over to a new P.O.S. system that’s being used in building, this is quickly becoming a daily occurrence. Something goes wrong with the site and either the boss or I try to fix it. If it’s code, I lean on him and if its design, he leans on me. It’s not the best way to get something done, but it does get done. Probably not very elegant, but what can you do? Sometimes a band-aid does what a band-aid is supposed to do.

I’m very grateful to my previous job for giving me the strong core of UI design and CSS that’s gotten me this far, but true object-based coding, what I’d be doing to really fix the problems that we’re having, I’m completely lost on. That’s why I had Rocky at the last place. You want me to design you what your website should look like and how it should run from scratch? Easy. It’s the actual building of it that I just can’t do. Anything beyond static sites just aren’t my thing yet. I know I should learn it, and I really need to, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Hopefully I’ll have the time to fix that this year.

running

I don’t know how long ago Rachael and I met Christey, but she’s quickly become one of our favorite people in the world. Why? I honestly don’t have time to go over it, but we became fast friends. Earlier this year Christey mentioned that she wanted to run the Disney Wine and Dine Half Marathon. I wouldn’t have given this mention a passing thought, except for the fact that my younger brother and his wife have been posting updates to their half-marathon training on Facebook as well. I don’t know if it was the combination of the two or the fact that I knew Christey would be supportive or some other reason¹, but I’ve started training for the Disney Half-Marathon as well.

I’m only a week in, but it feels good to have a personal goal to aim for. I’ve had someone analyze my gait and bought a pair of good running shoes - which do make a huge difference when compared to the no-padding Kustom shoes or flip flops I’m usually wearing. I also bought a beginner’s half marathon training app for my iPhone that has, what seems like, a do-able 14-Week program. It’s more exercise than I’m used to² but it gives me something to aim towards and look forward to, even if it means some hard work. Most weeks involve two days of timed running with days of cross training in between to rest your legs. Finally you have a distance run on the weekend to build up your endurance.

I’ve started running a couple times before, but with no real end-goal and no program to follow it just kinda dissolved into nothing as soon as I got tired of it or had a bad day. Hopefully this program, and having someone to be semi-accountable to will actually work for me. I’d love to be one of those people who can really enjoy just going for a run, but I don’t think I will be, so I load up my iPhone with podcasts and audiobooks and run while the training app barks out orders. We’ll see.

So, there you go. A quick update on a couple corners of my life. I’ll probably try to bang out one of these every day for a week or so before actually writing about daily stuff like I used to.

¹ Mostly the fact that I’m so fat
² But what isn’t?