Mike’s Blog

As I am sure, everybody is well aware that Apple opened a new Store in London on Saturday. And It is an impressive store. One of the biggest Apple stores in the world.
Chris Pinnock and myself went there on Saturday morning to have a look around and take some pictures and Videos. I also took the opportunity to play around with an improvised Steadycam for the iPhone4.
The first video shows the result of a walk through the store with the iPhone4, and the second Video shows the actual Steadycam setup used to created the walkthrough.

Chris and myself had a bit of fun putting the four generations of the iPhone side by side and compare them.
You can see the result below. Filmed with a Sony SR12 and edited using FinalCut Pro.
Music: “Superfluous Umbrella” by the brilliant Tyler Walker.

Below is really just a very quick test of the iPhone4 Video and picture quality. The short clip has been edited on the actual phone using iMovie for iOS4.

iPhone 4 – Sunny Day in London from Mike Hellers on Vimeo.

Two completely different ads, released more or less on the same day. I wonder which one will actually help selling phones to a large audience? While at a technical level the DroidX is certainly very well done, it seems to target a very small group of people. The first iPhone4 ad clearly tries to target a much larger user base.

Every year, a large crowd of people join the Naked Bike Ride through London.

Naked Bike Ride – London 2010 from Mike Hellers on Vimeo.

On of the Apps which I use on a regular basis on the iPad is Omnigraffle. Although it is by far the most expensive App I have bought so far, it is well worth the money.

But there is one major feature missing at the moment: You can not (yet) import Visio drawings directly on the iPad. Until this feature is added, I have decided to create myself a little work-around using Omnigraffle on my Mac at home and Dropbox, combined with a bit of AppleScript magic.

Here is how my workflow works at the moment: I have a Folder setup within my Dropbox which is monitored by an short little AppleScript. Once a new document appears in that folder, and it is a Visio file, the script is launching Omnigraffle, opens the Visio drawing and saves it as an Omnigraffle file back into the folder.

This means that within a minute or so, I can access the converted file from Dropbox on the iPad and open it directly with Omnigraffle on the iPad.

This works fine when I have the Visio drawing on a machine where I can save it to that Dropbox folder. Unfortunatly, this is something you can’t do on the iPad, meaning I still need a solution to access/convert Visio drawings when on the road, and only having the iPad with me.

Well, once again, AppleScript comes to the rescue. I keep the Mail App running on my Mac at home, monitoring incoming Emails for attachments using a bit of Applescript. If the attachment contains a Visio document it saves the document into the above mentionned folder on my Dropbox, and from there it continues as above. Meaning it will get converted into an OmniGraffle document and saved back into teh folder.

With this setup, I can basically open any Visio drawing within a couple of minutes from the iPad. If I received it by Email, it will get converted anyway. If I receive it from any other place, i.e download from a website, I can simply download the Visio drawing and Email it to my monitored Email account, and access the converted file within minutes through my Dropbox.

If there is interest, I will publish the necessary AppleScript code here.

Everybody who imported an iPad from the US to the UK certainly noticed that the BBC has decided to not yet support the iPad on the iPlayer, which is rather disappointing. We can assume (or hope) that this will change quickly once the iPad is officially released in the UK, but that will only be on May 28th.

Well, luckily there is a workaround available now to make it work in the meantime. Chris at CMGResearch has created the necessary sample code, which creates an iPad app basically launching a UIWebView window with a modified User-Agent header, pretending it is an iPhone.
In addition he added code to change the embed tag with a proper HTML5 video tag.

You will need the iPhone SDK and know how to build applications (i.e. build it as an Ad Hoc app) for your iPad, since clearly, this app won’t be available in the App store any day soon.

Well, I have done it, and can only confirm that it works perfectly fine! Loving it!

Update: WIth the launch of the official launch of the iPad in the UK at the end of May, the BBC has enabled an iPad version of the iPlayer, and as such this workaround is no longer required.

The Camera Connection Kit is currently the most useful accessory for the iPad. It opens a number of additional possibilities, far beyond the initial description.
A lot of these features have been described at many other places..i.e use it to connect USB keyboards and headsets.
But there is one more feature, which I use on a regular basis.
I tend to shoot a lot of HD video using Canon DSLRs. I currently own a Canon 550D and also a Canon 7D. Both cameras allow you to shoot video in 1080p. The format used by both camera is h.264, which is also one of the few formats which the iPad can play back without any issues. But according to the specification, only up to 720p. iTunes does not allow you to import higher definition clips. And in any case, if you are on a photo shoot outside your house, you do not always have computer running iTunes at hand, but I tend to have an iPad with me most of the time.

iPad Photo import showing imported Video

This is where the Camera connection kit enters the game.
When connecting the SD memory card straight from the camera into the Camera connection kit, you can view and import the pictures directly to your iPad for viewing and verification where ever you are. The same is true for the video clips, but unfortunately they are stored also in the Photo application on the iPad and can not be played back, as shown on the picture below.

This is where the fun begins. You will need to Jailbreak you iPad to proceed. There are plenty of guides explaining how to do this out there, and it is very easy. But of course, I do not take any responsibility if you screw up you iPad. Proceed at your own risk.
Once you have completed the jailbreak, and have Cydia installed, you have several options. My preferred option is to install iFile, which is a very nice Filemanager for the iPhone and iPad. It runs as root user, and as such has access to the whole filesystem, which is why Apple would never allow it in the Appstore.
Once you have installed iFile, navigate to “/var/mobile/Media/DCIM”. This is the folder used by the Photo application to store the imported pictures and any other data selected during the import, which means also the Video clips, as you can see below. Each import process will create a separate folder, containing the imported files.

iFile - /var/mobile/Media/DCIM/

As you can see above, I imported a single movie clip. Click on the .MOV file to launch the video viewer, and you will see the video in excellent quality. There might be some issues during playback for the first few seconds, but after that the video plays fine without any problems at all.

iPad showing 1080p directly from Canon DSLR

This is a perfect way to preview and verify your HD videos out in the field on a nice big screen without any need for conversion. Perfect for anybody with a Canon DSLR shooting Video.

The above works perfectly fine for 1080p videos created with the 550D (Rebel T2i) and also the Canon 7D. Since the 550D uses SD cards, you can directly stick them into the SD card adapter which is part of the Camera Connection kit. Since the 7D uses Compact Flash cards, you can simply connect a USB card reader to the USB adapter to import the Videos.

David Ippolito debuts his new facebook song at The Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater in New York City in 2010. (Subtitled “What the Fuck is Farmville!?”)

Visit Davids Website: thatguitarman.com

TimeLapse London from mikehellers on Vimeo.

The above Video is a collection of timelapse videos done over the last few months in London.
I have used a number of different cameras to take the pictures: Canon G9 with CHDK, Canon 500D and Canon 7D with external intervalometer. After converting the individual images into timelapse Videos using Quicktime 7 Pro, some further work has been done in Final Cut Pro. The scenes at Trafalgar Square have been treated using the Long Time Exposure Plugin from CHV to create a blending effect. Some of the other clips include some panning done in Final Cut, while other have just been scaled down to HD resolution.
The soundtrack is a composition of Denny Schneidemesser called ‘Savanna Speedrun’ released under a creative commons licence.