#165 New Media Expo, I was on TWIT Live!, Animated Interview

I regale you with tales of the New Media expo with photos on Facebook, I was on TWIT Live! thanks to The MacMommy of themacmommy.blogspot.com and Rob Hanson of switchmacdotcom.blogspot.com. Adium suggested as a better chat client than iChat, in Dumb Question Corner Eddie explains a better podcast playlist method, and Al asks a question about headphones. Get 25% off of Screensteps at screensteps.com with coupon code NOSILLA. Jane continues her Canon Story, I get interviewed by an animated podcaster at viddler.com. In Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart discusses his attempt to find replacements for MobileMe functionality – dropbox from http://getdropbox.com/home beats iDisk but what can he use to replace iCal syncing (and he hopes to keep using iCal).

Listen to the Podcast Once (1hr 4 min)

Today is Sunday August 17th, 2008, and this is show number 165.

New Media Expo
– New Media Expo – used to be PME, then PNME – identity crisis
– Moved to Las Vegas from Ontario, CA didn’t get bigger which was odd
– Best thing is the people you meet. Had such a great time with all the Mac Podcasters – some of whom I’ve never met but I SHOULD have met before like Chuck Joiner of Mac Notables and Dave Hamilton of The Mac Observer. I enjoyed hanging out with John Chambers and Andy McCaskey and Ken Ray and Don McAllister and Victor Cajiao and Chris Christiansen – I could go on and on!

I put a link in the shownotes to a Facebook photo album of all my pics from the show – it was so much fun!

One of the keynote speakers was the Marketing director for BlendTec – the guys that do willitblend.com. See the pic of the guy grinding up a rake – tell the story of the CEO.

The peak moment for me though was when I got to be on TWIT Live with Leo LaPorte and Amber MacArthur! First I have to give the setup of how it happened, because it took a worldwide effort using many technologies! So Leo was doing TWIT Live from the exhibit hall for pretty much two days straight, inviting podcasters to come up on stage with him. I was upstairs in a conference session, when The MacMommy of themacmommy.blogspot.com, was in the chat session on TWIT Live. She’s chatting away to Leo, and he’s talking to her. He said “we love the Mac Mommy!” so she writes, “get Allison on the show!” to which he says something like, “Allison’s Here? We need to get her up here!” So now comes the tricky part – Leo is downstairs in the convention center, Melissa is in Arizona, she contacts Rob Hanson of switchmacdotcom.blogspot.com in England, who sends a Tweet to me telling me Leo’s looking for me, which I read UPSTAIRS in the convention center! I dashed downstairs, and Leo let me go up! I had SOOOO much fun up there – and luckily I brought my Zoom H2 up on stage and Amber graciously volunteered to hold it between us, and I got a GREAT recording! Let’s listen now:

===============INSERT AL ON TWITLIVE===================

So I’ve pretty much died and gone to heaven! Great thanks and a huge shoutout to The MacMommy and Rob Hanson for an international effort. that’s probably enough about the Expo for now, back towork!

Podcasting on Podcasting Epiphany
Explain how Podcasting on Podcasting will soon be a standalone podcast along with being in line with the NosillaCast. All because I did the Feeder tutorial.

Adium
Jesse from Dubuque sent in this note:
In your latest podcast you mentioned how you set the Schwartzs up with iChat. Another IM application that you might want to recommend instead is Adium, which is what my brother and I use instead of iChat. The main reason is because it supports a much wider range of accounts than iChat does. iChat only supports AIM/MobileMe, MSN, Yahoo! and Google Talk. Adium supports all of these account types
and he included a nice screenshot I put in the shownotes. I had no idea Adium did so many types – I mean, seriously, it supports Novell GroupWise? LiveJournal? My SpaceIM? I didn’t even know these protocols existed! Jesse went on to say:
Plus they have a beta version out that supports Facebook chat, but I don’t use the chat features on Facebook that much, so I’ll just wait until the full version is released. And finally the price of Adium – free – can’t be beat.

Thanks for the tip Jesse – I have used Adium on and off over the years, introduced it to my kids and they both use it. I think it’s a fabulous solution for a lot of people. In the case of the Schwartz’s, I still think iChat was a better choice though, the main thing the they wanted was video chat for when their son moves to Michigan for college. In my opinion Skype is better for video, but I thought iChat would scare them less!

Dumb Question Corner

Eddie on managing podcasts
Last week on Dumb Question Corner we had a question about how to manage podcasts – Eddie wrote in with a really interesting technique:
Hey Allison: I enjoyed your latest podcast and thought I would drop you a tip on how I manage my podcasts. What I do is setup a smart playlist in iTunes of podcasts with a play count of zero and set my iPod to sync with that playlist. So everytime I sync my iPod iTunes changes the play count on the podcasts I listened to and removes them from the playlist and adds the new podcasts that I have downloaded. I plug my iPod into my computer every night and my old shows are removed and the new ones are added.

This is a great idea! I had never thought of that. I played around with it, and realized I could do some more customization to make it work for me. I listen to Leo’s Techguy show on a different iPod (I call it my car iPod), so I added a constraint to say title does not include The Tech Guy, and I also told not to include video podcasts. This is a great tip Eddie!

Allison’s dumb question on headphones
It’s MY turn for a dumb question now! Headphones always have an L and R on them for left and right, and on the iPod headphones putting the R in your right ear leaves the microphone on your right side. But I’ve noticed people wearing them with the mic on the left! I asked the first person about it and they said, “why does it matter?” To which I wittily replied, “um, cuz there must be a reason why they put the R and L on there?” I was hoping to say that they were shaped differently to fit right, but I think they’re actually identical. So my dumb question is, does it matter?

ScreenSteps
I continue to be very excited about having ScreenSteps as a sponsor for the show. You know if you’ve been listening for ANY length of time that I won’t say nice things about something if i don’t really mean it, so it’s been hard for me to agree to advertising deals! Luckily I found ScreenSteps because I can 100% throw in my support for this tool. ScreenSteps is interesting to me because I find that I keep trying to make it harder than it is. The ScreenSteps workflow is so natural, but only if you haven’t ever been forced into trying to document using screen shots using some dreadful tool like Microsoft Office! Old habits die hard and you really have to shake off the tendency to overcomplicate things – ScreenSteps is SIMPLE!

When you create a ScreenSteps tutorial, you can create just one little step for someone. Your dad wants to know where his iDisk is, create one step in ScreenSteps where you screenshot the iDisk, put some annotation on the image, throw in some text at the bottom telling him what to do with it, take another screenshot with it open, maybe put an arrow pointing out his Public folder, maybe even do a screenshot of a pulldown showing him how to view public folders using Go–iDisk. that’s called a Step.

But what if you have a series of steps? you’ve got something just a bit more complicated and you want to break up the steps into separate lessons? That’s easy too – you can create a bunch of steps and have them organized into lessons. Maybe you don’t want to teach too much at one time, so you want to give dad a lesson at a time on a bunch of subjects. Screensteps makes it all so easy!

another feature i just discovered and really like is that you can tag your lessons. I’m only lately starting to “get” tagging, and in ScreenSteps I really get it. If you create a ton of lessons, you can tag them to make them easier to search. In my case I’ve done a ton of lessons for Podcasting on Podcasting, so I tagged all of them with PoP, but I also talk about Feeder a lot, so I tagged the Feeder tutorial with PoP AND Feeder. now six months from now when I need to find that one step that I can’t remember the name of but I know it was something to do with Feeder.

I should mention that ScreenSteps also has a search field that searches EVERYTHING you’ve typed in – works great! I showed ScreenSteps off to Andy McCaskey of the Slashdot Review Podcast and I was only about 2 minutes into the demo when he whipped out his notebook and wrote down the url so he could run back and buy it right away. I’m not making that up!

If you find yourself answering questions on how to do things on your Mac or PC, or you’re a software developer and need to create documentation, and you’d like a delightfully easy way to make BEAUTIFUL docs, click the link to screensteps.com in the sidebar and enter the coupon code NOSILLA for 25% off, and make yourself happy!

Jane continues her Canon Story
Jane has sent in the third installment of her Canon SLR story, hope you enjoy it!

===================insert jane=====================

Thanks for the story Jane, I love how you describe things. Now when you Barted your photos from 300 down to half that size, I’m not sure that’s the correct use of the term. I think when you Bart your photos, you have to go from 300 down to maybe 5 or 10! I’m glad to see so many new phrases coming out of his name, btw, this weekend I was trying to tell Steve about my new laptop specs and I said, “it’s got 2 gigabarts of RAM in it.”

You mentioned how using the long 250mm lens gave you a nice shallow depth of field – I also didn’t know about that technique until I just got lucky with it once! I had the long lens on while shooting a cross country meet (they can be MILES away when running a course), but at the end of the day I wanted to take a portrait of Kyle and his girlfriend, but I knew they wouldn’t wait while i swtiched lenses, so I just ran back and zoomed up on them. I got a FABULOUS photo of them that way, the lighting was just turning golden, they’re crisply in focus, but all is blurred behind them! I put the pic in the shownotes so you can see for yourself how cool this technique can be.

I put a link to galacticstrings.com/ in the shownotes so people can check out your flickr photos.

Windows2Apples Podcast
Good friend of the show Sam Caldwell of the Windows2Apples podcast is always coming up with something new and different. He has created a podcast with an ANIMATED host! I’m not sure what software he uses to run his animations but it’s really fascinating to watch. He took that inventiveness up a notch this week when he actually had his animated host interview me! He used ooVoo to create the video telecon between the animated guy and I and using the PC version of the software he was able to record the conversation. The hard part was that this had to be a scripted conversation so I was using canned answers he and I developed to questions the animated guy would be asking me. This is a first step in what could prove to be a fascinating medium and I think you’ll be intrigued by watching it.

The animated host explains how ooVoo fits into the world of video teleconferencing first, so the interview with me is about halfway through the show. One of the cool things about Viddler is that you can as an observer insert comments on the timeline of the video, so I inserted one right when he starts talking to me so you can find it easily. One disclaimer, the audio breaks up in ooVoo for my side of the interview – I didn’t really stutter that much! I put a link in the shownotes to the video over at viddler.com so you can watch it for yourself.

hdabob
I can PROVE that I’m genuine when I tell you how great Honda Bob is. this week at the expo I hung out with some really fun guys at a bar called Quarks and I recorded about a half hour discussion where we talked about shoes, what we eat, quantum mechanics, and in the middle of all that I did a spontaneous testimonial about Honda Bob. I’m not sure how it fit into that particular conversation, but I think you’ll enjoy the story I tell and the very true comments that my friend says at the very end.

================INSERT HDABOB=================
For this kind of care for YOUR Honda or Acura if you’re living in Los Angeles or Orange county, give him a call at (562)531-2321 or shoot him an email at [email protected]. HDA Bob’s Mobile Service is not affiliated with Honda, Acura or Honda Worldwide.

Chit Chat Across the Pond
This week Bart and I discuss his quest to eliminate MobileMe from his life before the next bill comes due. We discuss why he wants to ditch it (unless that’s not already obvious) and the pieces that are important to him:

Bart:
– What I was hoping ot talk about was my quest for replacing Mobile Me.
– I think I’ve found a replacement for iDisk in DropBox.
Initial impressions were very very poor. It installed Growl behind my back!!! Suddendly I was being bombarded with crap at an impressive rate of knots! I wrote a very snotty post expressing my feelings on their forum and got a very prompt reply saying they were going to stop doing that in their next release. GOOD!
– When it comes to replacing iDisk it is working very well for me. Syncing could be faster, but it’s not as slow as iDisk. For some reason really hogged my CPU during initial sync. No real noticable effect on system after that initial sync.
– Does WAY more but I’m not interested in that, Willie’s review a few weeks ago had all the juicy details.

Al:
– Willie DID do a great review
– remain confused on folders
– show pic I sent to Bart – folder i created to share to Bart vs. folder Willie created to share to me – they look the same to me
– DropBox is FAST!
– other person has to have dropbox for it to work tho – hassle factor unless it’s someone you need to collaborate with constantly
– are you looking to use thsi for more than collaboration, more to have items available to you everywhere?
– and I WONDERED where growl came from all of a sudden – I actually like it but I didn’t remember turning it on again!

Bart:
Next step is to replace calendar syncing. Looking for some suggestions here. My requirements:
1) Want to keep using iCal if at all possible, defintiely on my MBP and ideally from work too.
2) needs to work well with iPod Touch syncing (not push).
3) Will need to play nice with our firewall in work
Help!

Al:
– MobileMe calendar doesn’t work very well anyway – can’t edit entries on web interface that were created on desktop (but you CAN on the iPhone), can’t add invitees or urls or attachments in the web interface, also had duplicate issues
– so subscribing to the calendar wouldn’t give you what you want?

Bart:
Totally unrelated – today I crossed the half-year mark with my weekly photo blog with Photo of the Week 26.

Looks like that will wrap it up for another fun filled week on the NosillaCast, keep all your great letters and audio reviews coming – send them along to [email protected]. Next week we’ll have a solo entry from Bart as I will be traveling to my dear friend Melissa’s house where she has satellite broadband, which causes a dreadful delay according to Bart, totally unusable for a Skype call. Nonetheless I’m sure he’ll come through with something grand for us! Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.