#264 Waxing, Typing on iPad, REI Nikole Backpack, PaperDesk, Auto-Focus

Car waxing with my new orbital polisher – the time lapse video: on youtube.com and look at the outcome: Kyle’s 10 year old car. How I typed 11 pages of notes on an iPad, my new Nikole Day Bag (purse) from REI.com. Paperdesk from mypaperdesk.com for note taking (but I chose Pages from Apple). James Fisher sends in a testimonial on ScreenSteps and how it helped him communicate with Apple, here’s his PDF guide. Gary Rosenzweig of MacMost Now from macmost.com teaches me how to make forms in Numbers. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Bart tells us about a bad security flaw in Flash that you NEED to patch at get.adobe.com/flashplayer – but guess what? The installer is not accessible! Bart answers Robert Brown’s question on where to start as a new SLR user, he takes a more detailed pass through use of the light meter, and closes out our series on moving away from the automatic mode to manual by explaining the auto-focus mechanism.

Listen to the Podcast Once (1hr 11 min)

Today is Sunday June 13th, 2010 and this is show number 264. You’ll never believe what I did in the last two weekends – I waxed cars! Now I know that sounds like what I do every weekend, but this was different. Ever since Steve got me the orbital polisher for Mother’s day, I’m a maniac at it! I waxed my car last Friday. Then on saturday I waxed Steve’s car. And on Sunday I waxed the hood of Kyle’s car. Then this weekend I did the rest of Kyle’s car. Three cars in two weekends is a lot!

If you want a laugh, Steve made a time-lapsed video of me waxing the hood of Kyle’s car. I think it’s hilarious at least. You can watch this video on the blog:

Ok, enough with my obsession, time to get into some technology talk!

Pages on iPad at D8

Last week on the show I mentioned that I took 11 pages of notes on the iPad during D8, and Mark Dalton asked me if I’d elaborate on how that worked out for me. Let’s go backwards first to D7 and all the previous years I’ve gone to All things D.

I have always carried my laptop to the show so I can take notes for the podcast. In fact, shows 2-4 of the NosillaCast were all about D3. But of course the MacBook Pro doesn’t have good battery life, so I had to carry a spare battery. I had to keep the brightness down to one dot, and close it whenever people got boring so I could save battery. And still the computer battery wouldn’t last for the full day. But at least typing on that keyboard was fantastic.

I also like to take photos with my digital SLR. Luckily I have this great Tamarac backpack that has a slot in the side for my laptop, and then a big area down below for the SLR and two extra lenses. Then on top there was room for the spare battery. Of course I had to carry my purse too. Imagine how heavy all of this was! All day long for two days I’m carrying this GIANT backpack, looking like a major dork when I had it on my back.

Now don’t get me wrong, this backpack is fantastic, I’ve carried it hiking, to Italy, on every vacation I’ve ever been on and it’s carried everything I need.

Now let’s take a look at what I carried this year. Oh wait! first I have to tell you about my new purse. Ever since the iPad came out, I’ve been searching for a new purse. I have carried a very traditional girly purse all along, but I don’t carry many girly things in at all. In my purse, every day, i carry an iPhone, a Blackberry, a Mifi, a micro USB cable for the MiFi, an iPad, the two piece camera connector kit for the iPad, and the VGA adapter for the iPad, an iPod Nano and two sets of headphones. I do carry a wallet and glasses, and a random sampling of those odd things you do find in a girl’s purse.

Adding the iPad and accessories for it to the purse made it really uncomfortable to carry, cutting into my shoulder and annoying the heck out of me. I started thinking maybe a tiny backpack would let me distribute the weight on my back, or even a sling back thing would help. I searched the internets for weeks thinking a major ecosystem of bags would have emerged, but all I could find was netbook bags trying to pass themselves off as iPad bags.

Well finally Steve took me to REI, which is a really cool sporting goods store. Steve and the sales guy went through piles and piles of bags until they found the perfect bag for me. It’s the Nikole Day Bag and it was only $50.

First of all, it’s essentially a backpack, but one of the straps is wider and is very natural to throw over one shoulder, allowing the weight to be on your back, not your shoulder. The top of it opens to a big gaping hole so I can drop my wallet straight down into the big area along with my wallet, and a small bag Steve picked out for me to hold the random bits a woman carries.

Nikole bag has TONS of useful pockets, one outside pocket that has a slot for my iPhone, a tether for my keys, and even a couple of pens. Inside is another cell phone pocket (at least that’s what I use it for) but I did have to cut off an annoying little velcro strap that held it closed. I always find it funny when they put things to keep your devices from flying straight up in the air!

On the side against the back there’s another flat pocket that’s perfect for the Mifi and all the little connectors and cables, and I can’t feel them in there at all. there’s even a nice pocket inside that’s perfect for my Nano and headphones, and two side pockets are perfect for my two pairs of glasses. I know I said perfect about 26 times but I really can’t find much wrong with this bag. It even has a little fleur de lis thingy on the front so it looks like a girl’s bag. You can get it in a light blue and a rather revolting olive green with brown borders, might look good with the original zune. I chose the dark greyish black because that’s how I role.

Well now I’ve got this lovely little bag that carries all my stuff just in time for D8. But what about my giant SLR and all those lenses? I have a smaller camera bag now which I could have carried along with my purse, but I started thinking about whether I really needed all those lenses. Getting good shots of the people on stage is my primary objective so my 55-200mm zoom is critical for the trip, but what about those opportunities to make audience members like Martha Stewart and Stewart Alsop and Stewart Sutton and any other Stewarts I could bother to take a photo with me? I was willing to take the chance that I could talk the hapless bystander into whom’s hands I’d shoved my camera into backing way up before taking my Stewart-filled photo. My nifty fifty always seems like a good idea because of it’s low light performance, but it’s a 35mm equivalent which means the people are really teeny on stage anyway, so I could leave that behind too.

Then I looked at the camera with the big lens on it, and then over at my new magic REI Nikole day bag, and I realized that I could actually slide the camera into the bag too, kind of smashing the small bag of doodads next to the wallet. I hefted it up on my shoulder, and while it was clearly heavier, it wasn’t bad at all! I couldn’t believe I could carry EVERYTHING I wanted in that little bag, and not have my shoulder or my back killing me. This was a breakthrough.

Now FINALLY we get to the note taking on the iPad that Mark asked for originally. I messed around with several options for taking notes before I chose Pages. I started with an app I’m fond of, called PaperDesk from mypaperdesk.com/. This app lets you create notebooks for each subject, color code and name the notebooks. Once you create a notebook, you can type in it on the lined paper, but you can also draw with your finger on the page. you can change the color and thickness of your lines and of course erase them. You can even record audio from within PaperDesk. I love this app for taking notes, and drawing associated diagrams. Haven’t used used the audio recording, though.

PaperDesk has a light version that’s free, but I paid the $2 to upgrade to the pay version so I could make more than three notebooks. Paperdesk even lets you share your notebooks up to mypaperdesk.com where you can view them online from anywhere or download them as PDFs. You can also email the notebooks as PDFs. But why was this not the ideal option for my notes from D8? Because the only way to move these files around is as PDFs. I wanted to be able to easily copy and paste entire sentences into my shownotes but that gets hinky when you’re in PDF. I just figured out that it’s not too bad to cut from the viewable version on mypaperdesk.com but I still wanted “real” text.

I suppose I could have used plain old Notes that comes with the iPad but for some reason that didn’t occur to me! Notes has a pretty nice feature that PaperDesk lacks, you can search for a term and the note in which it resides is immediately shown. PaperDesk doesn’t have any organization beyond the notebooks, I’d like shelves or something to sort them a bit, maybe some tags would be nice and of course search.

I could have used SimpleNote, which now that I think about it might have been a good choice – it has the advantage of it’s continuous syncing to the cloud and to my Mac and into Notational Velocity. Very easy search too. the downside to SimpleNote and Notes is that they don’t have any kind of bulletized formatting. I find that a good way to neaten up my notes so i can follow each new thought in a discussion like D8.

So I settled on Pages, available from Apple for $10 on the iPad. I found it to be a perfectly adequate word processor, giving me easy access to bullets, giving me the ability to make some bold headings as a new speaker came up, centered text, the usual things you’d expect from a word processor. I knew that when I was done, I could mail it to myself and I’d be able to open it in Pages on the Mac and keep working. I messed around with dropping my images into Pages on the iPad but I was very disappointed when I opened the document in Pages on the Mac and the images had completely changed location. That’s something I’d expect from Microsoft Word!

And then down to typing. I found that I could get going at a pretty good clip, probably around 75-80% accuracy. I’m a touch typist, so this is frustratingly inaccurate, but adding up all the good parts about using the iPad over the MacBook Pro I was more than happy with that accuracy. There are two distinct places I have issue.

My right pinky simple doesn’t want to play on the iPad. I can force it to go up and hit the P if I really speak to it firmly but as soon as I turn my back it gets lazy and lets my fourth finger reach for it. Unfortunately my fourth finger hasn’t been crossed trained to work the P yet, so it gets as close as O and decides that’s close enough. ok fine says the pinky at this point, I’ll hit the delete and get that P back in there. Unfortunately the pinky having been lazy and not worked out at all lately, misses the delete key and hits the P instead. So let’s figure I got a few characters past the O that wasn’t supposed to be there, so I reach up and hit the delete a bunch of times, which is actually the P key, which means my typing very often said oppp. Over and over I made this same mistake! I never did get the hang of it if I tried to touch type.

Not as bad, but for some reason I also hit the N key instead of the space bar from time to time, guess my right thumb took a nap while I was yelling at the pinky. Note that my left hand was completely well behaved and obedient, making very few typos and none of them repeat offenders! Maybe I’m secretly left handed?

Bottom line time – there’s no question it’s easier to type on a “real” keyboard, but the iPad keyboard was more than adequate if you add in the huge advantages of the battery life and the weight. I wouldn’t bring my MacBook Pro ever again if I still had an iPad.

ScreenSteps

James Fisher wrote in with a cool idea:

Hi Allison, just thought you might be interested in a problem I have had with my iPad and downloading books from the iBook store. Basically, the download function is jammed and the error message does not help. I mailed Apple support and had a very nice personal reply.
They cleared my partly downloaded books and ask me to download again. This didn’t work and I mailed them again.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, they wanted a screen shot and explained how to do it from the iPad and to mail it to them. Anyway I had a better idea and decided to use ….wait for it……
..ScreenSteps!!

I thought I should document the problem using the screen shots with some text which I can update as and when the problem is resolved. Haven’t had a reply yet but feel hopeful that the ScreenSteps PDF will have played its part in helping to communicate the steps leading to the error. Regards, James

I got another email from James a day later where he forwarded Apple’s comments back to him where they started their response with “Thank you for the fantastic PDF guide.” I love this story because it really talks to why ScreenSteps is so powerful. Just about everybody hates documenting stuff, because most people prefer to create, not write about what they created. But when you have ScreenSteps it’s this weird thing – you feel that joy of creation in stead of that dread of documentation. I probably sound like I’ve gone mental on you here but it’s real. I’ve seen it time after time – you don’t have to believe me, you have James to tell you. He even included his ScreenSteps document so I could put it in the shownotes.

If you wish you enjoyed documenting stuff, head on over to ScreenSteps.com and use the coupon code NOSILLA for 25% off the purchase price of ScreenSteps Desktop.

Numbers Forms

A few weeks back someone asked me to talk about what video podcasts I like and after I walked through them I asked if any of you have a favorite tech video podcast I neglected to mention. Drew wrote on the blog at podfeet.com that he likes MacMost Now from macmost.com by Gary Rosenzweig. Drew never lied to me before, so I decided to subscribe. You know how sometimes it takes a while to get into a show, you need to get into the rhythm of the on air person, or to figure out what they’re trying to teach?

Well that’s the opposite of MacMost Now. The MINUTE Gary got on screen and started talking, I knew this was a quality podcast. He does relatively short videos – around 5 minutes each. So far about 90% of his videos have taught me something I didn’t know already. Video screencasts are so powerful and so good at getting you exactly what you need to know. I’m impressed with the speed at which he gets these out too – he comes out with several a week!

I wanted to tell you about MacMost Now because Gary taught me something that makes the purchase of Numbers for the iPad totally worthwhile. In episode 398 of MacMost Now Gary explains how you can create forms in Numbers. I won’t snake his tutorial, (there’s a link in the shownotes of course) but let me tell you how I use Forms in Numbers. I go on a lot of business trips and creating my expense report is usually annoying. Using Forms and the built in template for Expense Reports, I get essentially a little database where I get a super easy interface that recognizes one field is a date, so it only shows me month/date/year to choose from, the next field is for money so it assumes currency format, it’s SOOOO easy to fill in and modify fields for just the way you want them, and then it makes a gorgeous expense report!

I did find one bug that I hope Apple fixes, must remember to ask Gary if he finds this one. One of the field formats is for stars, like 1-5 stars to rate something. I created a form so i could track trouble tickets and I wanted a rating system for how well I thought the tech performed. I put in the stars, but then changed my mind and I’ll be darned if I can change it back now. Kind of frustrating, but fixes are coming out to iPad apps right and left right now so I can be patient.

I tested out exporting my expense report to Excel and it was a little weird but understandably so. Numbers (for iPad and Mac) lets you create multiple spreadsheets on each page, and Excel doesn’t really understand that whole concept. The export from Numbers does an interesting thing though – it creates multiple sheets, one for each spreadsheet in your single page in Numbers, and then it creates a master sheet that has links to each page and an explanation of what each separate sheet is all about.

In my case I just exported my expense report to a PDF and emailed it to my administrative assistant and we were off to the races. So Numbers now has a real use in my life, and Gary Rosenzweig’s video podcast tips MacMost Now at macmost.com has a permanent place in my podcast viewing rotation.

Honda Bob

This week one of my friends on Twitter, who goes by the nickname “@not_ratched” (she’s a nurse) sent out a Twitter message about how cool it was that she had someone coming to her house to replace her windshield. I put this service on the top 100 list of coolest things about the 21st century, had my windshield replaced in my driveway myself. Of course my response to her though was that it was almost as cool as if a mechanic would drive to your house to work on your car. Wow. That would be crazy cool, wouldn’t it? Can you imagine it? Close your eyes and picture you sitting in your living room with a group of friends watching the soccer World Cup on your big screen TV while someone ELSE got their hands dirty and knuckles scraped replacing your transmission – all from your driveway! I know it’s a crazy dream, but you can actually live this dream if you live in the LA or Orange County areas, and you drive a Honda or an Acura. Give Honda Bob a call at (562)531-2321 or send 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

Security Light

• Patch Tuesday has been and gone, at this stage you should have let your Windows machines update, andawakenedyour VMs to update them –http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-jun.mspx
• Patch Tuesday was not just for Windows people this time, updates to Office 2004 and Office 2008 for Mac too –http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-038.mspx
• MAJOR patch from Adobe, this one broke late last week and we missed it here, but there is a major flaw in Flash, Acrobat and Reader that IS BEING EXPLOITED – Adobe patched flash to 10.1 (http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/) on the 10th to address the problem, BUT NO PATCH FOR ACROBAT AND READER – so really time to seriously consider un-installing that junk – no patch coming till late June! –http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa10-01.html

• try (free) Foxit on Windows: http://download.cnet.com/Foxit-Reader/3000-10743_4-10313206.html?tag=mncol

Safari 5 patches a record 48 security issues –http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/index.cfm?olo=rss&NewsID=3226292

Another Google Chrome security update – should be on 5.0.375.70 –http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2010/06/stable-channel-update.html

Mailbag

Allison!!!!!!!

My wife bought me a Nikon D5000 18-55 VR kit for our anniversary!! I’ve got a lot of learning to do. Where should I start?

Robert N. Brown III

Good resources for beginners:

• Nothing beats getting together with other photographers in the real world, join a photo club, go on a photo walk, or just get out there with friends or family.
• Good to join flickr and particularly to take part in groups – there are groups for all intersets and all levels. If you don’t like the attitude in one, just leave and go somewhere else. I’ve learned so much from taking part in Flickr groups.
• Always good to listen to podcasts. Typical Shutterbug is a great one to listen to, not the most frequent, but always good (except maybe when I’m on), and had a really friendly and helpful Flickr community. For keeping up with latest news and getting to hear some great interviews it’s hard to beat TWiP, and for good photo QA and tips the PhotoFocus blog and podcast are very good.
• Above all – just get out there and shoot. Expect to fail, try to fail in as many different ways as you can, and you’ll soon start to fail at failing. Don’t leave weeks between shooting, try to get out as close to every day as you can. Like with everything else, to be great all it takes is 10,000 hours of practice!

Main Topic – Taking Control of Your Camera – Continued

Taking control of your camera’s Light Meter

• We talked a lot about how the camera uses a light meter to calculate the correct exposure of a scene. When you use Aperture priority it’s the meter that tells the camera what the matching exposure for your chosen Aperture should be etc..
• What does it mean to be properly exposed? For a picture to look right, generally the average brightness of the image should be so-called Neutral Grey (about 18% grey). When working this out, colour is ignored, all that matters is how much light there is in the shot, not what colour that light has. Light meters measure light and then set the exposure to get the average to neutral grey.
• You can control two things, firstly, over what area the light meter should average, and secondly, you can vary what the light meter should consider “right” to either darker or brighter values
• There are generally three areas that light meters can work over:
• 1 – matrix mode – the default – average over the entire scene.
• 2 – spot metering – a single spot reading is taken, usually at the very centre of the field of view – only useful if you’re using a grey card or something like that
• 3 – centre weighted metering – a half-way house. Does not use a spot, but a larger region in the centre of the frame. Priority is given to getting the central area properly exposed, perfect for dealing with very variable scenes, you choose where to meter, and that will be properly exposed.
• Exposure Bias/Exposure Compensation – this is when you tell the light meter that you want the shot to average to a darker or brighter value. Perfect for scenes that are not average – e.g. in show you WANT the average to be brighter or it won’t look right. The inverse if often true at sunsets, you WANT it to look darker or it won’t look right.
• If you camera uses ‘blinkies’ to highlight over-exposed areas, you can use exposure compensation to force the exposure down till nothing is blown out.

Taking Control of the Auto Focus mechanism

• This is REALLY complicated area, where different manufacturers have different advanced modes – we’ll be keeping to the basics here.
• Cameras have a number of auto-focus points. The older and cheaper the camera, the less points. The Nikon D40 has 3, modern cameras often have close to 50!
• Not all points are born equal. Some will look like minus signs, some like plus signs. The ones like plus signs are better, they meter both horizontally AND vertically.
• You can generally tell what focus point is used because when focus is obtained, the point(s) that is/are in focus will flash.
• There are two things you can control – firstly, how the camera should hunt for focus, and secondly, how it should decide what focus point(s) to use.
• First, lets look at the focus modes. The names will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer
• The default is single shot focus, AF-S on Nikon. This won’t allow the shutter fire till the camera is in focus. Great for static and fairly slow moving subjects, bad for fast as there is a delay between lock and the camera firing.
• Continuous servo focus tries to understand the motion and predicts what will be focus in the future. Called AF-C on Nikon and AI-Servo on Canon
• On Nikon there is also an AF-A mode where the camera guesses which mode to use.
• When it comes to telling the camera which mode to use to decide what’s in focus, the default is usually “nearest object”
• Nearest Object often breaks down though. When you have a shallow depth of field on your portrait, it would focus on the tip of the nose, NOT the eyes like you want. When you’re trying to shoot a butterfly and there is some grass poking into the frame between you and the butterfly, it will keep focusing on the bloody grass! Etc.
• You can get around this by taking control of what focus point to use by using the single focus point mode, and choosing the focus point your want yourself.
• How to see what point is in focus and how to change the point in focus will vary from camera to camera, so RTFM
• MY advice is to use the point focusing mode, this way you choose the autofocus point to use, and you put that over your subject. I almost always use the central focus point, and the focus and recompose technique. With difficult targets I don’t recompose, I just shoot wide enough that I can crop in post to get a nice composition where the subject is not always centred.
• Cameras will generally have more modes than what we’ve mentioned, you’ll have to RTFM to see what your camera can and can’t do.

Closing

After Bart and I got off the horn he found out that the Adobe Acrobat security update will be available at the end of June, not the end of July. I guess that’s better but still way too dang late. But it gets worse. I heard from Dan Eckmeier that the critical Adobe Flash update that Bart told us about is INACCESSIBLE to the blind! Can you believe that? These people at Adobe must have their heads stuck in the sand well beyond anything I could have imagined. Maybe they think that if you’re blind you wouldn’t use Flash? They haven’t noticed that Flash plays audio too? I’m also fighting with All Things D as the videos they’ve posted (in Flash) on their website aren’t in an accessible player. I’ve written to Walt, Kara, the webmaster, and the videographer who’s a buddy of mine but I haven’t heard back from any of them. Sigh. It’s so dang easy to do this right, why would anyone choose to limit their audience?

Ok, enough ranting, time to close out the show. If you’d like to respond to my rants, ask a Dumb Question that you think everyone else already knows the answer to, send compliments or suggestions, send them on to [email protected]. If you’d like to follow my incredibly insiteful commentary all week long, follow me on Twitter at follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/podfeet. And be sure to check out the live show on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time at podfeet.com/live. The chat room will welcome you with open arms, it’s a family friendly, lovely bunch of people who once in a while actually comment on what I’m talking about. Not often, but sometimes. Until then, thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.