A slowly rotating Earth with distortion, colour separation, TV scan lines and glow to give it that sci-fi look and feel. As always, feel free to use it in your own projects – the link is below.
Archive for May, 2010
iPad ‘not charging’ problem fixed
After he read my iPad post yesterday, a friend of mine suggested that I download the on/off charge setup utility from Gigabyte, as this might fix the not charging problem that I’m having. Lars lives and breathes PC components (even when we were both working as tech reviewers back in the UK, I’d always bow to his judgement regarding this kind of thing), so it came as no surprise to find that it worked a treat. The charge rate is still painfully slow (which is to be expected from a 5V connection), so I may still give one of these a try.
Big thanks, mate.
Ten flaws in one day – the iPad magic soon fades
I’ve only had my iPad for a day, but already the magic is fading. Here’s a list of 10 things (because I know that people love lists) that take the polish off of this device for me. And I’m not talking about the obvious stuff like the absence of Flash, camera, etc.
A lot of people are finding that their iPads won't charge when connected.
1. Can’t charge via USB.
This one was a real surprise. I wouldn’t call my computer a cutting-edge machine – I built it earlier this year with an eye on getting the components I could afford at the time – but it is fairly up-to-date. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P which provides a heap of USB 2.0 ports, AM3 support, DDR3, yada yada.
Like a LOT of other people, this means that I get the ‘not charging’ message when I connect my iPad. This is because the iPad requires more power (10W) than standard USB 2.0 ports can provide. It does seems to trickle-charge when the iPad is in sleep mode, with ‘trickle’ being the operative word. So I need to charge using the power adapter, and then sync via USB. Major pain.
I seem to remember seeing external hard drives with a dual-USB power cable (which takes power from two ports simultaneously). Maybe someone will make something similar for the iPad?
2. USB port location
It seems to me that the data port on the iPad would have been better placed on the longer side of the device, rather than following the iPhone/iPod Touch design. Landscape is the natural preference for movie viewing and productivity applications, so having docks that force the iPad into a portrait orientation seems counter-intuitive to me (and surprising, given Apple’s strong reputation for usability/design).
Why here? Why not on the side?
3. 4:3 screen
I wasn’t hugely happy with the half-baked ‘not widescreen/not 4:3′ aspect ratio of the iPhone/iPod Touch when it was released. As I frequently produce videos for mobile devices with small screens, this seemed like a lose/lose solution – you’re going to be wasting screen space whichever video standard you choose for your content.
In retrospect, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a lot better than the iPad’s 4:3 1024×768 format – maybe if I was still shooting with DVX102′s, I’d think differently.
As a result, HD content needs to be downscaled during playback, so 720P widescreen content is taking up more bandwidth and processing power than it needs to. Sure, you can avoid this by creating a 1024×576-pixel video, but then Apple wouldn’t be able to claim HD playback (this is actually the square-pixel value for SD PAL video). And who wants to create yet another device-specific file during export?
Oh, and while I’m on the topic, this also means that the double-up function for using iPhone apps doesn’t fit the screen that comfortably, either.
4. On-screen keyboard
While it has its faults, the good old QWERTY keyboard layout is the one that most of us know and love. I get why Apple created an on-screen keyboard for the iPhone/iPod Touch that changes based on function (.com and @ keys popping up when using URLs and email addresses, for example), but the iPad has more than enough screen space to accommodate more keys – like a row of number/symbol keys, for instance.
This bugs me most when I’m typing in a password – I regularly use a combination of numbers, symbols and alpha characters, so having to switch keyboard mode four or five times gets pretty irritating after a while.
5. Brightness
The auto-adjust sensor for brightness has never really worked. Not on my iPod, nor my Air, and not on the iPad. I’m sure I’m not the only one who likes to read in bed while my wife is trying to get some sleep, and the iPod Touch was great for this, allowing me to continue reading long after the lights went out.
But the iPad has more backlight LEDs to contend with, and even when I manually dial it down to a minimum, there’s still more light leakage than I find comfortable in complete darkness, and I’d really love to see an app that lets me dial the backlight up and down without having to dive into the settings panel to do it. Maybe a soft-option switch for the volume control?
(I know that Stanza lets you adjust the text brightness from inside the app, but it only adjusts the text colour, not the backlight.)
Too bright, even at it's lowest setting.
6. Home button
While we’re on the subject of light leakage, why couldn’t Apple make the Home button partially transparent? They do it with the logo on their notebooks and I’m guessing that there’s more than enough light bouncing around inside of this thing to make it plausible. It would be really useful when you’re using this device in the dark (reading in bed, perhaps) to know where the button was without having to feel around the edge of the screen. But I guess that’s just one of the problems of having an ‘orientation-agnostic’ device.
7. Dude, where’s my calculator?
One of the things that surprised me most when I saw the Home screen for the first time was how sparsely populated it was. I was impressed that pre-existing apps had been given a screen of their own, but where was my Weather? Where was my Calculator? Sure I can download free iPad-specific apps that fulfill the same function, but why the heck did Apple ditch these staples in the first place? It’s like Windows 7 not having Solitaire (which it does, by the way).
8. Icon spacing
So I’ve got this relatively enormous screen – why can I only fit 20 application icons on it? There seems to be an inordinate amount of space between each one. You could probably fit up to 40 of them on this screen. Or make them bigger. Or something.
Why the long space? Geddit? Never mind.
9. Sub-folder image syncing
I’ve never really bothered copying images from my PC to my iPod Touch – the screen is too small to make it worthwhile. But now I’ve got the iPad, it’s one of the first things I did – the photo frame option positively encourages it. I have a crapload of photos on my computer, with crap being the operative word for most of them, so why does iTunes make it so hard for me to get them onto this device?
I can drag and drop music and video files into their relevant categories, so why not images? Instead, I find myself having to select the main folder where I keep my images, and pick sub-folders from that. Trouble is, the photos I want to use are actually in another folder inside these (it’s where I keep the versions that I’m happy with). I can’t go further than one folder in, so it looks like I’ll have to create a single folder for all the images I want to transfer and copy the images to this so I don’t upset iTunes. Blerg. Is this because it prefers to work with iPhoto?
10. iBooks
What a disappointment. Bruce Springsteen once sang “57 channels and there’s nothin’ on”. I know how he feels. Looking beyond the cutesy (and slow) bookshelf animation (why do Apple’s own apps have to be so damn cheesey?) and you’ll find thousands of free titles at your beck and call. Do a search for your favourite author and you’ll find bugger all (unless you favourite author is dead and his/her works no longer under copyright).
I was expecting better things from Apple, but I guess Amazon got there first (and probably wrote exclusivity clauses into their publisher contracts).
That said, the Kindle app for the iPad is excellent. As long as you’re in a territory that isn’t hamstrung by geographic publishing restrictions. Like Australia. Dammit.
I work with digital video, and many of my clients are looking at the iPad with interest, so I bought one because I needed it for the business (at least that’s what I told my wife). There’s a lot to like about it, but I reckon if I’d just got one for personal use, then I’d be feeling a little bit disappointed right now.
Using Adobe Media Encoder to create iPad video
Having just bought my own iPad, I can say that video really does look good played back on this larger screen. However, despite the fact that Apple (and everyone else, for that matter) seems to be focusing on its ability to play back high-definition video, it seems as though we’ve overlooked the fact that it’s a 4:3 screen.
I see that there are a number of sites offering advice on how to encode video for use on an iPad, but all of these seem to be using 1280×720 as their baseline – which will playback letterboxed and downscaled. If you want to create video that will actually fill the iPad’s XGA (1024×768 pixels) screen without rescaling, then you need to step back to a 4:3 aspect ratio. It’s a bit old-school, but this may prove really useful for software tutorials, or even digitising older footage.
Sadly, Adobe Media Encoder doesn’t have any presets for creating videos that natively fit the iPad screen, so I’ve put a together a couple for you. They both use h.264 and AAC codecs and use the iPad’s native resolution. They use 3.1 profile, with a VBR between 2-3Mbps. The only difference between the two is the frame rate. As a PAL user, all of my footage is captured and output to 25fps so that’s the one I’ll be using – if you’re in the US, then you’ll be better off with the 30fps version.
To set these up, download the ZIP file and unpack it onto your computer, then open up Adobe Media Encoder and select the import preset function to copy them to your presets list.
I’ve tested the 25fps version with some fairly tricky scenes for compression (vignetting, monochrome, high-motion), but you can always increase the bit rate if you find your results need a bit of extra bandwidth to help them on their way. A six-minute video turned out around 90MB, so it’s a pretty conservative bit rate that won’t suck up all your storage space like the typical 720P HD presets will.
Hope it’s of some use!
After Effects Tutorial – Jazzing up a boring pack shot
If you’ve ever been handed a box shot by a client and wished you could do something to jazz it up a bit, maybe this tutorial will help. Using Photoshop’s vanishing point filter, you can create a pseudo-3D object that can be positioned and manipulated in After Effects to create something a lot more engaging.
