I’ve been listening to all the whiners saying that iMovie ’08 is a backward step compared to iMovie HD and I can’t believe how myopic they are being!

When I got a Mac I was really looking forward to simple and quick movie editing, I have TONS of old footage from my PC days that I ended up moving to MPEG2 before selling the mini-DV camera. Could iMovie HD use it? No, not even after shelling out for the Quicktime MPEG2 component and Quicktime Pro. Using MPEG Streamclip I was able to get going without any further picture quality degradation, but I now had TWO copies of each video clip.

Did iMovie HD work with my newer JVC Everio? No. Again, MPEG Streamclip comes to the rescue, and I have TWO copies of each of those clips too. By now, I’ve shelled out on an external HDD just for video.

Now, we come to editing with iMovie HD. Can I browse all my footage? No. I had to import the clips I wanted for each specific project into iMovie HD. This import was real SLOW and if I used the same clip in two projects, I had to do the import twice AND iMovie HD created yet another copy each time I did this (within the project) and that copy used a HUGE amount of disk space. I could see myself buying yet another external HDD just to backup iMovie HD projects to. So, now I had THREE copies of each clip that I used in a project, on occassion more.

So, I just put off doing video projects – too much hassle.

Now comes ‘Movie 08 to the rescue.

• It can read all my Everio stuff directly
• It moves all my footage into it’s own library, but in the original format which I can get back. So, no longer multiple copies.
• Projects reference the library, so there isn’t a third HUGE copy within the project.
• It has a neat media browser built in, supporting events, keywords, date ranges, live previews, filtering.
• It’s FAST

OK, we’ve lost a few special effects, themes, transitions and precision editing – but we’ve gained a much more efficient design. I do hope Apple do address the “missing” features, but I am not going to be going back to iMovie HD because iMovie ’08 does what I need quickly and efficiently making video editing pleasant again.

I have been using the sneaky peak preview releases for a few weeks now, and WOW. Although you can quite quickly feel the pre-beta status with certain types of glitches, the program has been stable enough (for me) to use to organise my work and home actions. I have also been diligently reporting any issues to the “support ninjas” who have been very helpful in their replies.

I know that I have found my GTD support software now, the rocky road of discovery has finally come to the end. Along the way, I have tried ThinkingRock, iGTD, GTDGMail (now GTDInbox), Tracks, NextAction and MLO. Quite a list. But, nothing else was in quite the same league.

The closest, and best second place was iGTD. iGTD does have the advantages of being free, available now, and being production quality (nowadays, anyway). The author used the “release quickly and frequently” approach, whereas Omni are trying to get an established and robust feature set together before the first public release. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but most established companies tend to go with Omni’s way. The bad thing about the “release when ready” approach is when a reasonably competent competitor is out there soaking up your potential customer – which I feel is happening with iGTD.

So how does OmniFocus beat iGTD in my world? I have been wrestling with this question for a couple of weeks, holding off writing this entry since there are few concrete points.

The main issue is the cleanliness of the user interface. OmniFocus is very free flowing, entering and editing data are not too dissimilar to just editing a text document with outdent and indent functionality. You don’t have to open a form to edit details, or double click fields to put them in edit mode, you can type in multiple tasks just by rattling them in and pressing enter after each line, simple, quick and intuitive.

A second point is that it uses a database to store the tasks, so the scalability and stability seems (to me) to be inherently more assured than an XML document that continually grows and needs writing out in its entirety every time anything is edited.

And another, critical point, is the handling of sub-projects. OmniFocus handles them much more intuitively where the next action with a project ripples down to sub-projects as they come up, so a project with sub-projects becomes a continuous task flow of its own. iGTD treats sub-projects as projects in their own right, so you can end up with multiple next-actions within one project.

A final point, though, is that with iGTD is releasing so frequently, any of these issues could have been dealt with in the last few weeks, and I may by woefully out of date – but I’m not going back – I’m happy where I am now.

The launch of the Windows version of the Safari web browser has prompted quite a lively debate on the manner in which Apple renders fonts vs the Microsoft way. It isn’t a subtle difference either. Both of the images below were taken off of a Windows PC.

This is the Microsoft rendering, using a screenshot from FireFox 2.0 showing typical plain text from the WordPress dashboard:

And, this is the Apple rendering using a screenshot from Safari 3 Beta showing the same text:

To my eyes, the Apple version looks much better, although I can see why some people complain that it is blurred.

Typography on computer screens has always been a difficult area. When the first desktop publishing systems started to compete with professional optical typesetting equipment there was much lamenting about the loss of the beauty of classic fonts. Early systems treated kerning and litagures with disdain, different size spaces for different contexts disappeared, font scaling lacked hints and fonts looked abysmal as different sizes and WYSIWYG was a joke as on-screen font representation was miles away from the printed output.

Gradually, we have seen computers taking on these points and getting closer and closer to print typography – which has decades of research regarding readability. On screen readability still is a difficult area though, as screen resolutions are still far short of print resolutions. Microsoft font rendering is optimised extremely toward clarity with a focus on aligning features to pixel boundaries. But is clarity the same as readability? I don’t think so. I find the Apple rendering much more natural and more comfortable to read, but am ready to admit the individual characters lack sharpness.

When screens are 300dpi this will become a non-issue, until then it is really a style choice, and I choose Apple.

The Mac is really spoilt for quality GTD apps.

I was going to write a review of Thinking Rock versus iGTD, but a couple of things have put me off the idea. First, they are both really good applications. Second, the non-native aspects of ThinkingRock would totally skew the review against it, even though it was that very same cross-platform capability that allowed me to use it on Windows and to benefit from it’s functionality for nearly a year.

I was using ThinkingRock on Windows, it is a really excellent fit to the GTD methodology, and helped me tackle complex projects and balance work, fitness goals and home projects well. When I moved to the Mac, I had a nose around and fell over iGTD nearly straight away.

iGTD is a really cool native Cocoa application that looks like it belongs on a Mac. A lot of thought has been put into interoperability with other Mac tools. You want an action based on the email you are reading – one keypress and it is in your GTD inbox; follow up on a web page you are reading, again one keypress. Have a random though you need to capture, one keypress and type it in – no hunting for the application. These aspects alone make it a antural part of your daily activity. Syncing to iCal, .mac and my phone is just icing on the cake.

And then there is OmniFocus. Oh, how sweet you look with your simple and uncluttered UI, the smooth screencasts showing how everything flows so neatly. You make iGTD look clumsy. A pity I can’t get my hands on you though, being in a closed beta.

I am going to be torn when OmniFocus is available, since iGTD does most of what I need. But, nested contexts and nested projects are not really how I want them, the nesting doesn’t have any obvious functionality apart from navigation. Actions don’t propogate up the tree, so I end up having to open projects to check there is nothing within them that is pending. And the screencasts of OmniFocus show it working just the way I want – BUT, the interopability aspects are going to be lacking in the early releases, and I am suspicious that Omni don’t have anything like the release turnaround that Bartek demonstrates, which is phenomenal. Another point is that iGTD is going to have a pro version (chargable) whereas OmniFocus will cost from day one. How will this influence development?

Interesting times are promised as these packages fight for dominance.

The Email app goes “whoosh” whenever you send an email.

In moving to the Mac, some of my software has had to change since the publishers of the Windows software have not seen the light and seen fit to release Mac versions (shame on them). So, over the next few days I will be doing some mini-reviews comparing:

1. ThinkingRock vs iGTD for GTD empowered to-do list tracking (TR is Mac enabled, but being Java, I needed to look for alternatives)
2. MS Money vs MoneyDance (what was that about Java?)
3. QuickSilver vs AutoHotkey’s 320mph script.

There is now only one piece of software that I use regularly that I haven’t a Mac version of, and that is not enough for me to invest in Windows emulation or dual-booting the Mac. Unfortunately that is my old favourite DietPower.

One of the purchases that I could have made when getting the Mac was Microsoft Office. I decided that I would not splash the extra cash, but would see how I got on without it.

My choices were iWork, consisting of Pages and Keynote and OpenOffice 2.2. iWork does not include a spreadsheet, so that ended up being on the backburner as the element of Microsoft Office that I use the most is Excel.

So, I downloaded and installed OpenOffice 2.2, which runs under the Mac OS X X11 server. Functionally it is great, and opens all my old spreadheets and wordprocessor documents like a dream. The spreadsheet even looks visually very close to Excel, and everything that I need is there.

The downside is that it doesn’t look or behave like a Mac application, all the keyboard shortcuts use ctrl instead of cmd and even then, not all of them work. I’m sure if I fiddle (Linux style) again then I’ll be able to get it feeling much nicer – but why bother. For the amount of time that I use Office apps then I think OpenOffice will be just the ticket. I must point out though, if the developers want mass-market appeal then these sorts of issues are probably the things that count. (Of course, last time I said anything like this a developer pointed out that the software is open source and I can pitch in and help if I wanted to).

Recent posts may have made it seem that to me the Mac is all wonderful, and Windows is all nasty. That hasn’t been quite the case. In order to balance things up, I thought I ought to list a few Mac niggles too.

My most major issues are to do with older peripherals. I have an old HP Scanjet 2100C, which OS X failed to configure for Image Capture. Hunting around revealed SANE, which I managed to get up and running, but it was fiddly, still didn’t work with Image Capture (but does with Photoshop Elements), and has an issue where it takes ages to start to scan (debug mode shows that the driver repeatedly resets the scanner before it starts). Very much like the Linux world, and part of that which I wished to avoid.

The Epson R300 printer is the other niggle. Out of the box, it works, but Mac OS X uses a beta gimp-print (more Linux cast-offs) and the print quality for word processor documents is quite disappointing (with no settings that I can find to change, anywhere). So, I download the Epson driver from Epson, and although it works nicely when the printer is plugged into the Mac, I can’t find a way of configuring it to run over the network.

Firefox has crashed unexpectedly a couple of times, when it doesn’t seem to on Windows and once when recovering from “Safe Sleep” the keyboard was locked and I had to reboot.

The contrast between the normal Mac world, and when things don’t work is very stark – the typical Mac user must be so comfortable wrapped in Mac OS X cotton wool, these issues must be very difficult to cope with.

Of course, overall I am very happy.

This mornings potential annoyance was realising that after tidying up my 100’s of addresses that my phone was out of date, MacBook was closed, I was in a rush to leave but needed to ensure that my phones contacts were correct. Sweet! The MacBook proved itself again.

Open the lid, it was on, instantly. “Cmd-Space-i-s-Enter” and QuickSilver had iSync running, Sync button, a couple of seconds later BEEP from my Nokia, slam down the lid and off I went – total time, less than 10 seconds.

My old D800 would have taken a minimum of a couple of minutes, plus the sync probably wouldn’t have worked until I power-cycled the phone.

Being new to the world of Mac, and newly migrated from Windows I naively went searching for an application or a set of drivers for the Nokia phone. I found quite a few pages pointing out that Nokia hadn’t released any Mac compatible software. It was looking grim.

Then, I noticed a thread talking about iSync. Still, I thought I would need to find a driver for iSync, but I started it up and within a minute had a connection via Bluetooth to my mobile phone, lots of spinning graphics, the phone went beep and all was over – and I had over 100 new contacts appear in my Address Book. Not only was it quick and painless, I have never seen such a good mapping between the phone address book fields and the computers contacts fields.

Since then I have found that to-do items also auto sync between iGTD, iCal and the phone.

Again the promise of being able to just do things without drivers comes true. Still happily dazed.