Stray Dog Strut

Couple of reviews first then onto the explanation for the confusing post title-

“WriteRoom” is a fantastic little (shareware) application I found recently. It’s basically what the name suggests, a place to do your writing. Okay, a better description is that it’s a really bare-bones word processor, however that’s it’s main selling point. It dumps the overload of extra features offered by the commercial packages like Word and instead just focuses on the act of writing.

How does it do this? Well in fullscreen mode (the default) it basically fills your whole screen with a colour of your choice, hiding all those distractions like MSN, Skype and the oh so tempting iTunes. You can customise various options such as the background colour and the text colour – it ships with a cool (matrix) green on black style by default;-)

It’s a 30-day trial, $24.95 to buy (about �13), available from hogbaysoftware. Note that WriteRoom is a Mac OS X app, however those nice folks at they.misled.us have cloned the WriteRoom app to create “DarkRoom” for Windows. I believe DarkRoom is free – donations appreciated – so that’s an extra bonus for you Windows users. Me, I use both;-)

Check out either and see if it works for you – I was able to churn out a 1000 word science fiction story in one sitting for tomorrow’s class relatively easily:-)

Screenies (from the websites) – note that the glare on the WriteRoom screenie is not part of the app, it’s just us Mac lovers showing off;-)

WriteRoom-
DarkRoom-

Next up we have another cool little shareware app. “Scribbles“, again the name kinda gives you a hint, is a simple drawing app for the Mac (sorry folks, no Windows version I know of). Like WriteRoom, it’s selling point is its understated approach. It’s a really nice, simple drawing tool for everyone. No obtuse settings to tweak, just simple fun creativity. While it’s hardly going to blow Photoshop out of the water, it’s a nice, user-friendly alternative. (Side note: Hold down the CTRL key when clicking on the Help>About Photoshop menu item to see an alternate splash screen for Photoshop – see this vid (ST) for that and more).

It’s simplicity is done with style – it support layers and these are shown graphically (see the screenies). It has only a few simple brushes for shading, erasing and drawing, but again these are presented in a fun interface only really seen on Mac OS X. There’s also a nice calligraphy brush.

There’s a help manual but the interface is so intuitive (no text!) that you really won’t need it. If you’re lucky enough to have a Mac, I suggest you try it out. It’s free to try but exports images at low quality with a (very unobtrusive) watermark. It’s $19.95 to buy (just over �10) from the website and they also have a user gallery where you can upload your artwork.

Screenies (from the website):

The infinite drawing canvas-

The 3d layers-

The simple brushes-

Publishing-

It’s not all kids stuff-

Incidentally, I discovered Scribbles through the MacFormat podcast. It’s generally quite a fun, informative podcast and good for those times when I can’t afford the MacFormat magazine, poor student that I am. Unforunately, as with most podcasts, there’s no subtitles (which reminds me..) but they do make use of the coverart box in iTunes to show linked images of what they’re talking about, such as the link to the scribbles website.

Yes, subtitles. I did quite a bit of investigating yesterday re the whole subtitles in iTunes deal. I’m growing quite an addiction to checking out the iTunes store, in particular the TV shows (film rentals don’t appear to be available in the uk yet – oh! check out the Macworld 2008 Keynote – very cool stuff!!). Recently Torchwood and Robin Hood are on there (not the first seasons mind) thanks to a deal between Apple and the BBC.

Unfortunately, although iTunes supports subtitling if available, there seems no way to tell if a tv programme has subtitles. So I started reading around about adding subtitles to films and stuff and I came across two applications: “Submerge” and “Jubler”.

Submerge allows you to merge a subtitle file with a movie so that you can watch a subtitled movie on your Mac, iPhone, iPod or AppleTV. I haven’t tried it out yet but it looks like a nice piece of Mac software.

Now you’re probably wondering, where do I get a subtitled file from? I was wondering that too and, although I did find a website or too with files (sorry, I’ve lost the links but I believe there’s a lot of them out there), I was actually more interested in making my own subtitles, such as for home movie’s etc.

I easily came across quite a few software recommendations, most of which were for the PC (not a problem in my case but I prefer to keep related software on the same system), however I did eventually stumble across Jubler. Jubler is a free, open source, subtitle editor written in Java – this means that it’s cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux). Donations welcome.

The installation could have been nicer (Jubler also needs Mplayer to preview the subtitled movie, and ASpell to check spelling) as I had trouble getting ASpell, much less a copy that worked on the Mac, but I eventually found CocoAspell which builds on the ASpell source to create an Mac OS X friendly interface for ASpell.

Mov
ing on, when I did get Jubler up and running, and figured out how to use it thanks to a very low quality video on YouTube (with subtitles!), it seems to do the job. Subtitling is a slow job mind, it took me about half an hour to subtitle three lines of dialogue from “BrickTrek”, a Legomation film.

It also doesn’t seem to recognise iTunes files in the .mpeg4 format (ie, the downloaded tv shows) and i’m not sure if I can convert these to .mov or something, but for my home videos it’s quite good. The interface is not the nicest and I found just importing a video cumbersome thanks to the awkward browse feature – unlike a standard Finder window, you have to navigate to your movies from either the Applications folder or the (name)’s Computer directory. So if your looking for the Movies folder, the path is- “(name)’s Computer/Users/(name)/Movies”. For iTunes tv shows and movies it’s “(name)’s Computer/Users/(name)/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/TV Shows” or “/Movies”. I may have previously created iTunes Music folder myself, i’m not sure, but it’s still a long path and you have to navigate it EVERYTIME you want to load a new movie to work with.

I think once you have a subtitled file (formats like .srt and .sub etc) then you can use the likes of submerge to merge this with the movie file. I’m not sure if you can open/import subtitle files alone into iTunes though. Another way I found is Text tracks in QuickTime Pro. Basically you type your text up in a text editor and import this into Quicktime. The text is automatically divided into one paragraph of text per frame of the movie. This sounds alot simpler than using a combination of programs but you still have to buy Quicktime Pro (�20) and i’m not sure how easy it is to align the subtitles to the voice (the website implies manual alteration of the timecodes, in Jubler you simply drag and drop). Still it’s an alternative and probably works in Windows too.

Back on course again – the title of this post has two meanings. “The Colour of Magic” being, of course, a fantastic novel by Terry Pratchett and soon to be brought to our tv screens on Sky One as part of a two-part broadcast together with “The Light Fantastic”. This follows the adaptation of “HogFather” in 2006, and again sees “Only Fools and Horses” actor David Jason on screen, this time as the hapless wizard Rincewind. The tourist Twoflower is to be played by Sean Austin, aka Samwise Gamgee from Lord of The Rings, and Christopher Lee will this time take on the (voice) role of Death, previously voiced by Ian Richardson. Surprisingly, HogFather was quite good, although I haven’t read the book, so here’s hoping The Colour of Magic isn’t a let down.

The second reason for this post’s title is the multiple shades of green i’ve spent all weekend immersed in. Suffice it to say the green is attempting to be grass, as part of a game i’m building for this semester’s coursework. It’s painstakingly slow going but I had a eureka moment last night that has left me quite invigorated so here’s hoping it lives up to my expectations. Once i’ve submitted the coursework in May i’ll be sure to post screenies and maybe a link to the finished game for y’all;-) Incidentally, i’ve discovered that there is no hash key (#) on my Apple keyboard – Americans call it the pound sign. # is a symbol that’s pretty useful for programming so here’s a tip: under Mac OS X you can get a # by pressing the Option key and the number 3 -

It’s late and I have the dentist early tomorrow but I simply must tell you about this FANTASTIC little application I just found!!

Library Books is a little app created by Harold Chu that sits in your Mac’s Status Bar. It’s function is really simple but astounding: it tells you what books you have outstanding from your library. I didn’t hold much hope for this app as alot of the useful regional apps and widgets for Mac are US based, but Library Books supports a frighteningly large selection of worldwide libraries.

Still, my university’s library wasn’t there but they do use the Talisprism network which is one of the generic options in this app. It took a little bit of fiddling about as the help guide is very bare bones, but all you have to supply is your login id, pin (in my case I only need a pin for borrowing, not for checking my account), catalogue host and date format used by your library’s website.

I got stuck at the library host as the web address didn’t have an obvious one similar to that suggested in the help box, but I found by using the “http://” and IP address at the start of the TalisPrism address it works perfectly! I can now see that I have 3 books (titles and authors shown) outstanding and when they’re due back.

Even better, the app syncs with a calendar in iCal to remind you when books are due and overdue items are shown with a red icon in Library Books itself. This will save me all that mucking about in Safari…brilliant!!

Harold’s website.

While i’m pleased to see he’s interacting with the world using the awesome power of the world wide web, i’m saddened to hear it involves Facebook. It seems every man (and woman) and his dog (and cat) is using Facebook these days. It’s one bandwagon I’m glad to have missed.

I don’t really see the appeal. I like a nice clean, accessible, logical layout like my blog here on Blogger. Facebook just seems so messy to me. Perched on my girlfriend’s shoulder I’m confronted with streams of comments on a thing called The Wall that seems disjointed since the responses are on another user’s profile (I may be wrong). Facebook also does all that silly stuff of giving people gifts and poking them – maybe I’m just old but didn’t that die out ages ago?

If you’ve read this far you’ve probably realised this is just a poorly worded rant so my apologies for not being more persuasive. I just felt like saying how much I fucking hate sites like Facebook and MySpace, and now, what with my Student Union on it, music groups on it, and various political campaigns on it, it seems it’s becoming a necessity in recent times.

I recently read an argument from Tod Hodgkinson for the Guardian newspaper about why he hates Facebook. While his rants about it leading to some virtual totalitarian regime are quite farfetched, it’s hard to ignore the temptation for corruption so evident in, an essentially data-mining, website like Facebook. All that targeted advertising stuff is everywhere these days and I’m so glad future employers won’t be able to find a silly Facebook profile all about me!

No, I have to say i’m happy living far away from planet Facebook. I’m sure Blogger and all the rest are hardly whiter than white but I personally don’t want complexity in a simple blog and I certainly don’t want to share details of myself, family, friends and preferences with the world and corporations at large. All that stuff about the Digital Divide and splintering from my Media Studies class is all true..