Martian Landscapes - The Big Picture

REVIEW: MacHeist nanoBundle

Now on AppleMatters.

Say what you will about MacHeist’s ethics, but you can’t deny they provide huge exposure to independent Mac developers who elect to participate in the program. Through ARG-style online puzzles and slick videos and websites, they turn the relatively mundane act of purchasing software into an event that commands attention (both good and bad) throughout the Apple community. Now, for one week only, MacHeist is giving away six for-pay apps in what they’re calling a “nanoBundle” - for absolutely free. One might be asking around now how good these apps could possibly be if they’re giving them away, and that’s a perfectly valid line of inquiry. The truth is, the bundle’s a mixed bag… but let’s go through this bundle, app by app.

DROID vs. iPhone: It’s In The Advertising

Now on AppleMatters.

Someday, there will be a time when our way of life causes our destruction. There could be a physical attack on the fiber-optic and phone lines that provide us with Internet service, and America’s infrastructure will be hopelessly crippled - or terrorists could successfully destroy one of the many data centers which store hundreds of terabytes of financially sensitive information in the nebulous space often referred to as the “cloud”. Our machines could even become sentient and rise against us, and as we huddle around the transistor radios in our basements, surrounded by canned goods and yellowing issues of inTouch Magazine, listening for updates from the resistance as the robots salvage bits of metal and plastic from the wreckage that was once our homes, we will wonder why we kept buying excessive amounts of electronics until it was too late. We will cower in the darkness and marvel at just how irrelevant it all really was.

Until then, there’s the Motorola DROID.

Wow, this photo is pretty difficult to look at. Did they throw a party afterwards? What kind of refreshments do you serve at a “successful deprivation of civil rights” party?

There’s a certain point in the process of what, for the lack of a better word, I’ll call “filmmaking” (even though that sounds much too pretentious for the stream of hastily written jokes we shot with a $500 HD camera) where the story becomes meaningless and the act of completing the work becomes an essentially technical endeavor, with any creative decisions along the way based on your memories of the past. When you add it all up, I have probably watched this episode of Condominance, this thing that I am working on, maybe two, three hundred times. I’ve been color correcting and sound mixing for the past week, and for each process it takes around six hours of work to finish ten minutes of footage, manually going shot by shot (there are around 400 shots, give or take). I watch the whole thing over and over again and the jokes are no longer funny, I’m not particularly moved in any way. I show it to others and they enjoy it, but to me it feels like a dead object. All I have to rely on as an indication of quality is the script I wrote and loved back in July and the laughter I hear during takes while I’m editing.

It seems to me that this kind of disengagement from the creative process in the midst of a work’s completion is perhaps something unique to only a few mediums: filmmaking has it, and from what I’ve heard, serious cartooning probably has it as well: wasting your life away on a drafting table, pencilling then inking then coloring away until the lines you drew no longer have any meaning. An author’s tenth revision of their novel might feel this way too, if it’s demanded by the publisher and the author’s heart is no longer in it. Regardless, I’m here with my HSL sliders and 400 shots to get through. I hope you will enjoy it when I put it online, and I also hope that I will someday come back to it, years later, watch it, and be able to enjoy the product of my younger self again.

De Daily Whatever is a free independent newspaper in the Netherlands which runs during Dutch Design Week, intended to stimulate discussion around design. Look at that logo!

[via Manystuff]

Minimalist Mac Freeware: Six Great Apps

I’m writing twice a week for AppleMatters, so I’ll be linking to those posts here, as well as trying to push more non-Apple stuff onto this blog.

Sometimes the best software has the fewest features. Personally, I love choosing the bare-bones program that does one or two things extremely well over the more popular, bloated memory-intensive version. Often, these apps are freeware: passion projects by one developer who had a problem, used their spare time to solve it in excellent fashion, and posted their work online for all to enjoy. Here are a few of my favorites — all of them free to download.

The Signal Fire - Sam Weber

[via Kitsune Noir]

Did you know that the second episode of Condominance is 21 minutes long? This is true - and this time, we had a real budget (~$50). The script has received such critical raves as “hilarious” and “much less horrible than the first episode”, and rough cuts screened to the public have been similarly hailed as “containing content of a humorous nature”. Perhaps while you’re waiting for its imminent release, you can watch the first episode on Vimeo or YouTube.

P.W. ELVERUM & SUN, ltd.

I think there’s a lot to admire in the backwoods-recluse, slightly insane way that Phil Elverum (of Mount Eerie and The Microphones) chooses to engage with the business of selling music. Kind of the life I aspire to have as an artist.