Mike Baldwin

A friend of mine recently purchased an iPhone and was asking for application recommendations. I’ve had the iPhone 3G since day one so by now I’ve accumulated quite a collection (5 pages! That amounts to about 1 GB!!) As I was writing my recommendations I realized others might find it useful so here they are (no particular order, I was thumbing through the pages)..

 [also, assume that all the apps are free unless I say the price]

Say Who – Voice dialing at it’s finest. Press the button, say the name, wait a few seconds and it’s dialing. Great tool when you’re driving or multitasking.

Twitterific – An obvious one, it’s free with minimal ads and has a clean interface and plenty of functions. Especially great because of its integration with twitpic

Facebook – Very easy way to access Facebook, upload pictures, change your status. Great time killer app!

Sportacular – Easy way to check the up to the minute sports scores and standings.

Datacase (pay app) – turns your iPhone into a thumbdrive! Instead of using docking cable it uses a WiFi connection. You can also setup an adhoc network on your computer if there isn’t a nearby router.

iTalk – great voice/sound recording application. Incredible quality and easy to use.

Wikipanion – Need to look something up in wikipedia very fast? Look no further!

Pandora – Streaming radio on the go! Sounds great with 3G, iPod like interface, great app if you want to listen to music that isn’t on your iPhone.

WunderRadio (pay app) – Mad that the iPhone doesn’t have a FM tuner? Well turn that frown upside down because with WunderRadio you can listen to thousands of online streaming radio stations as well as police/fire/EMT scanners!

The Weather Channel (TWC) – A little bit more accurate than Weather.app also gives video forecast updated daily based on your geographical location.

RotaryDialer – Ok, this app isn’t that useful but it is cool looking. Allows you to make phone calls with a rotary dial.

Fring – Skype and other chat services on the go. For skype it’s chat only on 3G/EDGE but WiFi allows phone calls. Great for when WiFi reception > cell phone reception or calling long distance.

Light – Very simple app, turns the screen white. Very useful when it’s dark.

TouchMines – Mobile version of the windows classic Minesweeper.

Backgrounds – Tired of the same background? Download tons of stock images to spice your background up. Sol Free – Mobile Solitare! Another great time killer.

PAC -MAN lite – Pac man on the go! w00t!

Tiltsnake -anyone who owned a Nokia phone back in the day can appreciate this updated version of Snake

Google Earth – Just like the google app but on the go!

Shazam – Ever heard a song and wondered what it was or who it was by? Wonder no more. Simply let Shazam record 10 seconds of music, allow it to process, and you should have an answer shortly. Great for settling bets on who sang that song.

Remote – Remotely control an iTunes library, great for changing the songs if the computer is in the other room.

SnapTell – Ever wanted to get more info about a CD, DVD, or piece of software but didn’t want to type in the information? SnapTell allows you to take a picture of the item and it will give links to amazon as well other retailers to get comparison prices and description. Also a great app for making a wishlist as it will save the last items you snapped.

AroundMe – Great app for finding points of interest in a city. Maybe you’re travelling and want to know the nearest sushi restaurant. AroundMe takes your GPS location and compares it to their database and gives you the information you need.

PhotoSwap – Bored? Want to see what life is like for other iPhone users? With this app you can literally swap pictures! Take a photo and submit it, after you have submitted it you will get a photo in return, you can choose to reply to the photographer or keep taking pictures. Very cool app for seeing what it’s like around the world.

Lightsaber – turns your iPhone into a motion sensitive lightsaber, nerdtastic!

Last.fm – like Pandora but also scrobbles (check out last.fm’s site to find out more about scrobbling) your streaming station. Disadvantage: longer buffering times.

MochaVNC – VNC client to control computers while away from the desk. Not particularly fast but works if you’re in a pinch.

TouchTerm – SSH client for the iPhone, great for checking stats or running commands while away from the servers. 

Echochops (pay app) – Takes your ambient sound and allows you to put a delay and effect the distortion of it, very interesting experiment in sound.

Units – Great app to convert units of measurement, area, currency, speed, etc.

More Cowbell – because everyone needs more cowbell in their life!

Flixster – check on movie listings and the latest DVD titles

Brain Tuner – Bored again? Want to sharpen your brain a little bit? This app is a lot like the math portion of Brain Age. See how fast you can complete the problems.

iSlots – Want to play some slots but don’t want to lose all your money? Look no further!

Scribble – Paint for iPhone. ’nuff said…

iBowl – Bowling for the iPhone, similar to Wii Sport’s implementation, just make sure to hang onto your iPhone!

Drinks Free – Want to look up a drink recipe quickly? Drinks Free has thousands of drinks so you can look up the ingredients you need while at a store shopping for cocktail ingredients.

Hope this helps! If you have any apps to recommend, send me a link to them: mike (at) mikebaldwin (dot) org

I said I’d review the iPhone and I’m going to do that…sorta…I will say I absolutely love everything about it. I’ve drained the battery daily. Which I guess is a testament to the weak battery and draining aspects of 3G but it’s all good.

Speed: 5/5

3G is damn fast. Now that it’s rolled out in Lafayette I can surf in the fast lane. I’ve loaded all my favorite sites in a matter of seconds, way better than EDGE. WiFi works well too, have only used it a couple times..Bought a song on the iTunes music store. Very easy to navigate, quick download…

Usability: 5/5

Apple really hit a homerun with their UI. It’s slick, fast, and sexy. I can call, e-mail, chat, surf, play music, record voicenotes, etc all within one package. That’s amazing. Name me one other company who has put a product that can do so much at once. With the SDK came a myriad of great apps. I personally use Twitterific, Facebook, AIM, Pandora, PhoneSaber, and Band a lot. They were all free except for Band (which was only $10, totally worth it)

Affordability: 3/5

Although it has come down a lot in price, you still won’t see this in everyone’s hands anytime soon. I’d like to see the iPhone nano but I doubt that will be coming out anytime soon.

Overall: 5/5

It’s great, it does everything I need it to do, the only features I wish it had was Flash/Java support, a clipboard (is it really that hard?!) some sort of word processing app, video recording/chat capability, and skype. Some of these will be forthcoming, some won’t but I’m okay with that. Like I said, I drain the battery daily, I use the heck out of it, and it was worth every penny!

So I just got my iPhone and I’m STILL waiting for it to activate. I downloaded the latest version of iTunes just like Apple told me to and yet I’m waiting on this thing to become useful…

Aggravating…Oh well, guess I’ll just twiddle my thumbs. Updates to come…

I think a lot of graphic/web designers strive for good design. But what is good design? To me it means something that is sleek, functional, and lightweight. If it’s a website, it should load just the same in IE6 to FF3. This can be a challenge but with the right skillset it’s totally achievable.

If it’s graphic design, I think it should be just as meaningful to the average consumer all the way up to the corporate executive. Good design applies to everything if you think about it. This blog, your car, the computer you own, the coffee shop you frequent, design is everywhere. Good and bad. As an editor, I strive for a good workflow and a polished product at the end. This means I don’t cut corners, I don’t take shortcuts, and with this day and age I can edit anywhere. That freedom alone is worth a lot to me.

So what is good design? You could say it’s in the eye of the beholder. What I consider good design, someone might consider crap. So in some ways it is subjective. I think the more something is adopted and simulated into culture speaks to good design. But in the end, it’s whatever you make of it.

So I know it has been awhile since I’ve blogged, apologies, just haven’t had anything to blog about..until now…

It all started with a concert video. Yeah you’ve seen it a billion times at any major concert, every digital camera toting teen that HAS to record the song for youtube. Well I happened to have a better audio source than the wimpy mono 33.1khz audio so I thought I would sync the better audio with the poor video.

And that is where trouble began…

The original resolution was poor (320×240,) and the framerate appeared to be a weird 22.69. My intial thought was to use MPEGStreamclip and transcode to DV SD 720×480 29.97 MOV file (yes ignore the upscaling, sometimes you gotta work with what you got.) But it didn’t quite work like that. What ended up coming out was a 12 fps file which upon ingestion in FCP was shortened from 4 minutes and 38 seconds to 4 minutes and 17 seconds. So how do you edit 12 fps in a typically 24 – 60 fps FCP environment? You don’t.

Even if you were to convert the 12 fps to 29.97 in Quicktime, FCP will shorten the clip. This made the sync impossible. Although the audio would sync with no problems, the video just wouldn’t cooperate. 

Then I watched the video again. Turns out it was playing back at 24 fps. So it was as simple as converting the original AVI to a QT 24p file. The result? A perfect sync.

So the moral of the story is, don’t use a terrible AVI to edit with. But if you do, check the real playback fps, it could hold the key to success.

hellooooo