Dr Who in two inches

I love these 2” Galactic Heroes-esque Dr Who figures, particularly the Doctor and ‘Other Dave’.

Tags: doctorwho, figures, toys

Popcorn Hour, WD TV or Apple TV?

So, with my scrapbooking system sorted, my thoughts now turn once more to my unsolved Media Centre thingy.

To catch up: I’ve given up on the Mac Mini solution after it delivered nothing but a black screen for the umpteenth time. I’ve had various problems with it, all software related and fixable, but I was getting a bit fed up with the amount of administration it required. I spent more time in screen sharing keeping it ticking over than I did using the remote. EyeTV in particular threw up problems, from bizarre errors to app updates that caused it to crash at launch. Others may have had better experiences with their Minis, but I’ve had enough.

Giving up on the PVR side (I’ll probably end up with a Sky+ box) I’d decided to go the Apple TV route, and I’ve been saving my Amazon Vouchers to get a 160gb version. What I particularly liked about the ATV was the AirTunes function, and that it’s easily hackable with a patchstick. Now that I’m ready to buy, it’s out of stock on Amazon (and seemingly everywhere else too, including the Apple Store). It’s also 2 years since it’s come out, and all this leads me to wonder – will there will be a revision announced at Macworld next week? It’s possible, but so far the rumours have been surrounding iMacs, Mac Mini’s and the supposed iPhone Nano.

It’s also given me an opportunity to look at what alternatives are out there, and there are 2 in particular that are interesting to me:

Western Digital HD TV Media Player

Rather than a networked machine, the WD TV is a simpler (and substantially cheaper!) affair. You just plug in up to two USB drives with media (such as a WD passport drive and memory stick), and it finds it all and provides a TV interface to play it. It can play just about any format you want to throw at it (with the exception of iTunes DRM’d media of course). It can output HDMI and optical audio. It’s small, cheap (£80 on Amazon.co.uk), and gets the job done.

The main downside seems to be the interface, which while it isn’t offensive, is rather ‘Vista’:

Popcorn Hour

This ‘Networked Media Tank’ looks like another good option, and has a rave review on CNet. It comes Hard Drive-less, and you add whatever size drive to it takes your fancy. So rather than be stuck with Apple’s 160gb drive, 1TB is possible. Looks wise, its quite industrial, but I rather like it (and certainly prefer it to the plasticy looking-like-an-alien trend). Again, it takes every format you can throw it at it, and also integrates extras like a bittorrent client, and content from Flickr and YouTube to name but two. It doesn’t have WiFi, but this can easily be added with a USB dongle. In short, it’s expandable and flexible.

Again, if there is a downside, it’s the interface, and in Popcorn’s case it comes off a little worse than the WD TV. As this blog review shows, some of its screens are better than others. Apparently the menus are constructed from HTML (and CSS?), and can be hacked, but I’m not sure I want to be going down that route!

Neither of these are particularly aimed at OS X users, but as far as I’ve gathered, both will work (or can be made to work without too much hassle). I have a nagging feeling that I will end up with the Apple TV, as that best suits my iTunes centric and UI design fussy world.

So, if you have either of these devices, have successfully hacked the Popcorn Hour UI, I’d like to know your thoughts! Likewise, if there is a similar device I should be considering (that doesn’t involve another games console or XMBC), please let me know too!

Dropbox & Leap sitting in a tree

I’ve waffled a lot this year about Evernote, Littlesnapper and their ilk, but I now feel I’ve found the best scrapbooking solution for me.

In the comments to my Littlesnapper post, Jo mentioned Leap.app, the file browser alternative to the Finder, as a way improving the approach of using the Finder to browse scrapbook images:

Your comment about tagging in Finder reminded me of a program I stumbled across, ages ago, that is a pretty cool alternative/replacement to Finder: Leap. It provides preview thumbnails of just about everything (you can pick the size and zoom in at will), tagging (I believe it covers tag completion, as well; it at least auto-tags based on folders you’ve stored things in); all sorts of neat features, and more ways to search and index your files than you can shake a stick at. If you ever want to ditch Finder for something more interesting that might be more helpful in your collecting endeavors than Finder was, I’d highly suggest taking a peek at Leap.

I’d tried Leap a while back when it first came out and didn’t play with it for long, but now having sat down and got used to it’s way of working (These videos help), I’m converted!

DropBox + Leap.app = Heaven

I’ve been a DropBox evangelist since day one, and John and I have pimped it a lot on the podcast. However, my vision on how I could use it was somewhat narrow, until I read a post about Killer Scrapbooking by Colly. I’d never realised that DropBox had an online gallery interface, or that it had an easily browsable iPhone interface.

Above: The normal and iPhone optimised DropBox website

So now, inside my DropBox’s Photo folder, I have a ‘Design Scrapbook’ folder. All I need is an alias to the scrapbook folder on my desktop and I can just drag anything I want to keep to it. There isn’t an interface that pops up when I do this – it all stays in the background until I want to look at it.

This solves the big problems I had with other solutions: Files are easily accessible, and shareable, from anywhere, in their original state. They’re not renamed like in Evernote, or hidden away from view in a database file. The new Evernote Premium version allows you add files to a note without changing their name, but the problem is right there: you have to add them to a note! You still can’t just keep your files on they’re own in their original state.

What’s more I can not only store and browse images, but also PDFs (I have quite a few typeface samples as PDFs), Movies, Presentations, anything. These don’t show up in DropBox’s web gallery interface of course, but they’re still synced.

Tagging any file, and viewing by tag, is quick and easy, and it has the resizable thumbnail interface that I like so much in LittleSnapper and iPhoto.

Above: Using the Loupe tool to quickly enlarge portions of images – Leap also supports QuickLook.

This does mean that I still use separate apps: Skitch for screenshots and Paparazzi/Web Archives to capture complete web pages, but that’s fine. Skitch in particular blends in seamlessly with this system – for all intents and purposes, it could be a feature of the same app.

Of course, I’m using Leap for more than just browsing my scrapbook – now that I’m in the mindset I prefer using that to find files. Unlike my other software reviews this year, there are no downsides to Leap – it’s all full of WIN. I haven’t felt so excited about apps since, well, since Coda.

A Merry Christmas from Hicksdesign! (08)

LittleSnapper

I’ve talked a lot about OS X apps recently, and I’m slightly nervous of doing it again so soon. Let me make it clear though, that I only blog about those that interest me, and for no other reason!

I’ve mentioned before about creative spongery, and how I collect images, screenshots and type samples from the internets and shove them into iPhoto. I loved the idea of being able to use one app to do multiple jobs. After 3 years of doing this, I became bothered by having my photographs and family snaps in particular, mixed up with ‘work stuff’. iPhoto is an excellent app for storing though, so I decided to create a new iPhoto library and switch between the two. If you’ve not come across this trick before, hold down the alt key while launching iPhoto – it gives you the option to create a new library and choose a different one!

This worked for a while. but became a pain to remember to switch, especially when importing images off a camera. I clearly needed to start using a dedicated app for all this stuff. So, over the course of about 6 weeks some of the apps I tried and rejected were:

Yojimbo – No thumbnail previews of images at all, so no way to quickly scan through the collection. Does have tag support though, so the catalogue could be categorised easily

Evernote – This does have thumbnails, and what’s more, they’re resizable like iPhoto. However, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, it embeds the images into a note. This makes the thumbnails less useful, and harder to export. I also prefer a dark background to view my thumbnails against – just a personal thing!

Together – works really well. It keeps images in a clearly marked folder in the Finder (rather than hidden inside a database), and there are multiple ways to drop images in. It loses points on the thumbnail viewing though – there are 3 set sizes to view at, and they can only be displayed as a list, rather than a grid of thumbnails. Does do tagging though.

Finder – This is almost ideal, but as there is no tagging solution, images that you want to be in more than one category have to be copied.

This is where the whippersnapper LittleSnapper comes in, and just in time! It takes the elements of iPhoto that work well – the thumbnail browsing style, keywords (tagging in LS), and adds features that make it more suitable for design collections. An in-built browser with DOM-snapping, remembering URLs and providing a variety of tools to capture information.

Suffice to say, I love it. I didn’t love it until quite late on in the development process, when it became possible to drag an image to the dock icon to import it. This is how I do most of collecting, rather than full-page screenshots with Paparazzi. Once that feature was added, LS suddenly started becoming useful to me.

I won’t repeat the full feature list here, this is a blog post, not a press release, and there are too many to cover. It has ambitions to replace Paparazzi and Skitch, and while it does the former, it doesn’t quite do the latter. Namely you can’t resize images.

It also isn’t the cheapest app you can buy – so is it better than just using iPhoto? It certainly is, but iPhoto still does one thing better: thumbnails. Quickly scroll down thumbnails in iPhoto, and there is no lag, the thumbnails are there. Do the same in LittleSnapper, and you’ll reach a point where it takes a second to draw the thumbnail. Not a long time, but it means you can’t quickly browse – you have to scroll, wait, scroll, wait, etc. One final whinge – no tag completion, so you need to make sure that you type it the same each time.

With the communication I’ve had with the lovely Nik at RealMac, I’m confident that all these outstanding features are planned, and that’s enough for it to become my ‘trusted system’. I’m excited to have finally found a decent solution!