Friday, March 11, 2011

iPad, ePad and more





With the $100 price drop on old iPads we ordered the 16gig model from the Apple store for $369 and it arrived this week. The first step was to hool it up to the macbook and download all the useful free apps from the apple store. Our interest is in looking at the device as a publishing model so we downloaded all the ebook reader software such as Stanza, apple ebook reader, kobo, kindle etc. as well as newspaper and magazine apps like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the National Post as well as Wikipedia and some comic book readers. We also grabbed the Dropbox app for our online files and the Google app so we can access our Google docs files and our iGoogle desktop and Teamviewer, an excellent VNC type app that runs on all our machines.

The Teamviewer free app allows you to control your laptop or desktop from the iPad not not the reverse. Will have to investigate if the paid version allows the pc/laptop to control the iPad. It would have to translate mouse clicks on the computer to touches on the iPad so this may not be possible. I looked at the vga cable but it is expensive ($35!) and external video is an app function, not a function of the OS.

Update: Saurik has released a VNC deamon for iphone and others have also gotten VNC to work so you can view ipone/ipad from another computer. Only problem is that it requires jailbreaking your device. I did this on the iphone but may or may not with the ipad. Just installed iOs 4.3 anyway...

We browsed the apple store for free books and downloaded a few classics but most of the books we want are sitting on our server in PDF and CHM and epub and djvu formats.

We read some epubs using the apple ebook reader and they were fine. But how to get our pdf's over? We though of using moving them to dropbox and trying the app but then remembered the Calibre to Stanza method we had used to get books into a first gen iTouch.

Running Calibe on the macbook and pointing it to the ebook network share allowed us to choose PDF books individually to import (and convert to epub) or to batch the process. We grabbed a few books and magazines to test out. Then we clicked the settings icon and choose Preferences, Sharing, Sharing over the net. This allows you to run a OPDS server catalog on localhost at port 8080. Once the server is started we goto the stanza client and click the Get Books icon dor Shared which displays a Book Sources dialog box. I typed in Calibre as the name with a URL of http://192.168.1.105:8080 (for the dhcp addr of the macbook) and it connects to display the books in calibre (on macbook).



You can browse by Newest, Title, Authors or Publishers. Clicking on the cover for a book displays a preview of the book and a Download button which transfer the epub to the Stanza library.

As test we bring in a .cbz comic book and some other types. And we convert the Kick-Ass DVD to an MP4 file to test out the video.

Update

Taking screenshots on the ipad is a breeze, press the home button and the power button together and the screen makes a camera clicking sound and then flashes white. The photos in .png are saved and can be viewed with the Photos app. To transfer them to your computer just plug in the iPad and iPhoto runs automatically and retrieves the photos. Select the ones you want and click Import Selected. You can then drag them out of iPhoto. Sweet. While i have not been a fan of iTunes in the past, it is now the cornerstone of the Apple digital world strategy and the integration of apps is impressive compared with the Windows world.

Tomorrow:

Compare originals on the mac with the epub converted copies on the ipad.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Stop Motion Movies with iLife


Liam wanted to make a stop-motion animation film. He usually just records on the flip cam and uploads direct to youtube. So we built 4 sets out of lego. If i had been smart i would have build the walls in the shape of a + and put it on a lazy susan so that 4 sets could be easily available.

Anyway, I put the camera on the gorilla pod and he shot a series of scenes for his first TV show called Droid Hospital. I fired up iPhoto and hooked up the camera to import the pictures and then launched iMovie to bring them in. It took a bit of fiddling to get the photos i wanted, the quick and and easy solution was to FLAG the photos and then to set IMovie to look for flagged pictures. I also added two google image shots of a real hospital.

It was no problem putting the images on the timeline. But then we got sidetracked as the director decided he didn't want to do the dialog but to have text bubbles with the comments, like an animate comic book. Well, imovie and iPhoto lack the ability to edit photos that way so we fired up Comic Life which is designed to make comic books or comic book movies.

There was no problem importing the photos from iPhoto and adding the comments in text bubbles but getting the pictures out seemed impossible. The Export function exports a whole page not just the image. I could use grab to capture the picture with text but that seemed a lot of effort. The other option was to bring the photos into iWork and add create a blank presentation slide for each picture. Add the text and the export the slides as a series of images. This works in keynote (and powerpoint too). It's a quick way of churning out a web site banner. In fact, in keynote you can add a transparent gif image to your banner as a logo and it will export out a nice png or jpg banner in any shape with gradients and the transparent logo. (powerpoint does not support transparent images but otherwise works the same). Again, this seemed a lot of work.

We decided to go back to imovie and to add the dialog to the scenes. This is fairly easy to do, you select a clip, click the mic icon, select the clip and it countdowns 3,2,1 and record. You do have to time the dialog so that it lasts only for that scene (each pic is a scene). A couple of takes for some and it was done. Then we added sound effects from the limited iLife sound effects library. It would be nice it there were low cost libraries to add sounds like Garageband jam packs.

Anyway, once the sounds and incidental music was added the movie was rendered down and uploaded to liam's account on youtube.

ToDo:

- Find some soap opera sound effects...cheezy organ riffs etc
- Find soap opera-ish theme music for the opening (The Days of The Week?)
- Get some HALO sounds/music samples for the Covenant set and maybe some Star Wars

I have all these so i could extract them myself but if someone has already done it...