Suffering On Safari, Didn't Enjoy Opera, Back To The Gecko

Let me start this rant by saying all web browsers are pretty amazing things. However they are all mature enough that they now must differentiate themselves and be remarkable to get my interest. I seem to be forever flitting between Safari, Opera and Firefox. With the beta preview of Safari 4.0 I thought they'd nailed it and (after turning off all the stupid bookmark animations) it became my primary browser (taking over from Firefox which always seems a bit oh-look-I can-see-how-slow-XUL-is-at-redrawing-the-chrome-on-my-dual-core-laptop-with-9400M-graphics-F-F-S). Anyway.

When Safari 4.0 beta was released many fanboys hated the fact that the tabs were moved right to the top of the window, thus saving space and screen real-estate. Important for me on this 13" screen. It still had the dumb feature of forcing you to save passwords you might have forgotten before allowing you to login and stuff, but I figured they might fix that for the final release. Wrong! Not only is the do-you-want-me-to-remember-the-password-you-just-typed feature still dumb, they moved the frickin tabs back to the luddite position! The travesty!

So I tried the Opera 10 prerelease. Close, but no cigar. I know Opera innovates and the others emulate but even with John Hicks' fantabulous new native skin and a pleasing tint of "sea" it's just not ... quite ... right. Maybe it's the wasted pixels in the "Personal Bar" that annoy me and the staccato scrolling. And the fact it tries too hard (it's an email client, a bittorrent client, does widgets, etc etc). Talk about convergence. Markets always - always - diverge. You think the iPhone is a converged device? Think again. It's a new category of device, it's just in the interim no one really knows what it's called. It's a diverged form of computer in an ultra portable form-factor. Smartphone will stick I guess. So like the iPhone is not a phone without the smart, Opera is not a browser without a suite of crap I just don't use. Not that it's bloatware, it's anything but. It's just ... annoying and somehow unsatisfactory.

So I updated my Firefox to 3.5b99 and grabbed Annorax's GrApple Crisp and am thinking, no loss here. And the password-asking-remembery thing allows you to say "okay, remember it!" after you can see a successful login with the correct password.

I guess I'll be fine until Google Chrome is released for end-users. I'm such a Google whore.

Final Cut Pro Driving Me Nuts

So currently I'm on a tight deadline to deliver a fine cut of a "Two Week Film Collective" project (#2wkfilm to you Twitterers) and I'm at a point where I may as well do a final render and call it quits (a feature film shot and edited in two weeks is always going to have production value issues). But, oh no. Apple FCP 6 does not make my life that simple.

1. Rendering out using "current settings" (derived from Panasonic TZ5 acquisition so must be Apple M-JPEG codec doing the honours I guess) I get this ghastly luminance intensity shift across the entire frames where I've dropped subtitles (subtitles being key to the plot). Yes, I've checked gamma and compositing settings, tried rendering YUV and RGB etc etc. I've come to the conclusion this is an inherent calculation bug with the M-JPEG codec and it's not going to be fixed any time soon because M-JPEG is soooooo yesterday's codec.

2. Rendering out using Apple's ProRes 1280x720@30p - result! No luminance intensity shift! W00t! But on further scrutinisation I realise the frickin sync is drifting ... and not in a manner that indicates a mismatched framerate, oh no. Scenes lose sync, and a couple of scenes later it's back in sync. Sounds like a screw-up on the timeline, right? Nope. Timeline plays back perfectly in sync. The sync issue with the ProRes is best described as wow-and-flutter - it's like the audio is playing back from a stretched tape. Very odd. And very very annoying.

So I'm wasting my life and CPU cycles trying out some different codecs, currently running a standard MPEG4 compression through Compressor (since Compressor is going to be annally retentive about picture quality and sound sync, right?)

It's enough to drive me back to trying out Sony Vegas and Windows 7 on a cheap PC.

Animated Gifs And Apple Safari

Just forget it. If I get an animated gif turn up in my RSS Google Reader in Safari 4 on Mac OS X it brings the entire machine to its knees like something important isn't multithreaded. I don't blame Safari 4's beta status, cos it was the same in all previous versions. Rubbish.

Speck CandyShell For iPhone

With its soft centre and hard outer-shell it's easy to see where this case's product name came from. After the iFrogz cracked and I went on iPhone case adventures, this seems to be the case that I'll settle on. But how annoying is it to have first been through four other cases before settling with the fifth (assuming it doesn't break). This has the snug fit of rubber silicone but the smooth pocket-operations of gloss that won't see your pocket change all over the floor every time you pull out your phone. Maybe this will be my last post ever about frickin cases for the iPhone. Maybe it won't.

ZuneHD: Classic Microsoft Vapourware

So, you may have seen the "leaked" marketing material, you may even have seen the somewhat fake photoshopped looking product shot. Why now? Because Microsoft need to distract you from buying a next generation iPhone or iPod later this year so what better way than to sucker you with rumours of an interesting 'PMP' (first time I heard the term PMP but it fits right in with all the other anonymous acronyms). Will Microsoft wipe out that wascally wabbit? I call BS on the ZuneHD but don't expect to be heard.

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Four Months Of iPhone Apps

It's quite possible I may need to ruthlessly clear down the apps installed on my iPhone.



















The google app and Movies app are candidates for deletion but the rest are useful to me no matter how infrequent their usage by me may be. Hmmmm. Annoying butcon management on the iPhone.
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Posting Errors In Facebook For iPhone

I see this a lot in Facebook and it is really annoying depending how much you've just typed and how witty you considered it to be. What was the error? Who knows. Which brings it to the next level of annoyance. Every response post in Facebook for iPhone is a gamble and the house always wins. Or something.
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