So there’s been plenty of talk about cloud computing over the years, but that talk has typically focused on corporate and/or siloed use (e.g. music). The utility of cloud computing / storage has always been pretty self-evident to me, especially when the web hit and we first starting seeing successful apps (like salesforce.com) and not so successful experiments (like Groove from now MSFT exec Ray Ozzie who’s had all of his creativity sucked out of him in Redmond).

But what about casual users? Lot’s of talk about the (I think inevitable) transition from “owned” libraries of music (LP’s, then cassettes, then CD’s, then “soft” files on iPods and iTunes) to uber libraries of music in the cloud: basically the transition from licensing discrete assets forever, to “renting” access to universal libraries. Rhapsody first introduced this idea, to moderate but not overwhelming success. Spotify in Europe (and elsewhere) is looking interesting and getting great takeup.

Part and parcel to the slow takeup by consumers in cloud-based products is I’m sure the fundamental concept of “ownership” – this is “my” stuff because it’s right here, I bought it, mine forever.  But along with “ownership” comes the big problem of storage and “maintenance”.  All of a sudden, given Moore’s Law, increasing media resolution (and file size), and lowering prices of consumer electronic devices, storage, backup and security are becoming a real hassle.

Ask your typical consumer about their backup strategies for their music, photos, movies, etc. (their digital assets) and you will more often than not get a blank stare.  For folks with large libraries of assets (I manage currently about 30,000 photos in Aperture alone), the first time a hard drive fails and all of that data goes “poof”, those folks will have faced a tough reality.  What you own you must maintain.

However, what you rent, you don’t necessarily have to worry about.  And that concept is going to trump the fundamental concept of “ownership”  very very soon.  And there are some great new products that are starting move me into rent vs. own in a big way.

A couple of things have happened for me lately that have forced me to change the way I work fairly significantly:

1. I’ve been traveling a lot.
2. I’ll soon be commuting again between an office in the city (SF) and my studio at home and maybe even another satellite office.
3. My iPhone lives with me.
4. My iPad is increasingly becoming my transit computer .
5. The production / design work I do requires much more horsepower than even a MacBook Pro delivers easily.
6. Thus, I’ll probably be moving between two office-based workstations (e.g. iMac i7’s) and dealing constantly with file portability / currency / backup.

The emerging issue for me is how to keep my most important files and work moving with me with the least amount of effort.  Enter the first great cloud-based tools that I have found myself unable to live without.  Here are two that have struck me by how useful they are in practice:

Dropbox – One characteristic of the environments I’m going to talk about here is simplicity.  There are plenty of alternatives to the apps I mention here, but these win out in a big way due to what has been left out vs. what has been put in.  In the case of Dropbox the concept is simple: Dropbox provides a “place in the cloud” to store stuff.  On the desktop of your computer, you simply drag files into the Dropbox folders and files are synced to the cloud automagically.  That’s just the beginning.  If you have an iPhone and/or iPad (as I do), there are client apps for both devices.  Placing a file into Dropbox on any device, allows that file to be accessed by any other device.  No explicit syncing, no weird configuration, no worries.  It just works.  The not immediately self-evident benefit of this is that you are also backing up important files off site – i.e. if your storage crashes on one device, your files are ok and easily recovered  In addition, Dropbox adds a great way to send large files to others – via a simple URL link.

Simplenote – This is a beauty, and I wish I had created it.  Simplenote is a no frills text application.  It excels at random text capture – you literally just start typing in a simple interface, but subtle things happen.  The first line of anything you enter is basically a heading for the “note”.  But, (an important but) every word that is entered, in every note, is indexed.  If you come back to Simplenote and enter a keyword, the indexes kick in and even large databases of notes are instantly filtered by the keyword – as you type.  Big deal?  Yeah, other apps do this, but you have to use it a while to appreciate how right this is.  There are many more complex apps for collecting data – and I’ve tried most – but environments like Evernote and GTD type apps like Omnifocus or Things are just too complicated, and too “location/device-specific”.

Simplenote, like Dropbox, is first and foremost a hosted environment: i.e. your stuff is in the cloud.  But, also like Dropbox, there are very simple clients for all of my most important devices: Simplenote apps for iPhone and iPad, and a great partner app for my desktop machines – Notational Velocity – that syncs seamlessly with the Simplenote host.  The beauty of this environment is that whenever you need to jot something down – an idea, a to-do, a shopping list item, a date, a name, anything – you grab the “nearest” device (iPhone, iPad, website, or desktop), enter the item and within moments (if the respective device is connected to the web via IP or radio (3-4G)) all other “clients” are updated too.  So moving between your locations / devices is seamless – your data follows you around, with little to no latency, and the added benefit of being securely stored elsewhere.

The more I learn to use and love these “virtual” storage environments the more I realize that this is the future.  As cloud access increases (IP, Wifi, 3-4G, etc.), devices become more portable and powerful (iOS, Android, etc.), file formats become more standard and portable (.pdf, .rtf, .xml, etc.), and compression algorithms improve (H.264, .png, .jpeg, .mp3, etc.) and as consumers realize the hidden benefits of cloud storage (persistent access, backup, etc.) the game is going to be about ease of use, capacity, accessibility, latency, and price.  (I’m starting to watch stocks in this space.)

So here is a summary of the products mentioned above, and a few other application / data tools that I’m either using or watching closely:

• Spotify – Cloud-based music libary.  Not in U.S. yet, but expected.
• Dropbox – Brilliant file sharing environment.
• Simplenote – Brilliant cloud-based text / note repository.
• Notational Velocity – Desktop client that syncs with Simplenote repository.

Other spaces to watch

• iTunes – Of course.  But iTunes doesn’t get really cool until they migrate to your media library in the cloud.  This is a very tough transition for a large user base, but it is inevitable.
• MobileMe – Apple’s evolving attempt at moving many consumer data points to the cloud.  The newly updated service (I’m using the beta) is pretty impressive.  They also have a DropBox-like concept in their longtime iDisk.  It’s just not as simple as DropBox right now.
• Basecamp – I’ve been a loyal user for years.  Simple (a trademark of these apps) and works.  The only big drawback is offline use – they need a strong device-side client that works consistently across major devices – like Simplenote.  (A tall order.)
• Flickr – Picasa, and all the rest of the cloud media services.  Bringing secure remote storage and use to consumers for a while now.  (People comfortable with their photo libraries online will be the first to adopt and move to storing richer and more “important” data online.)

What am I missing?  Please chime in if you have any favorite cloud-based tools that you think are as simple and powerful as the ones I’m using.

This short is one of those tests.  Shot with a Canon 7D using an EFS 17-55 zoom, Manfrotto tripod with fluid head mount. (I’ll put that to use later …;-)

(Update: Wow, lot’s of iPad users out there already … thanks for pointing this out. If you’re here on an iPad, Vimeo has not released the embed code for iPad video playback. Until their new HTML5 version is out – soon they say – click on the Fountain link below. The HTML5 version plays fine from their website on the iPad. Sorry for the inconvenience tablet crowd.)

(Update II: This post is now using the new iPad-friendly HTML5 embed from Vimeo so it works great on the iPad. Problem is it looks for Flash on the desktop – which I’m allergic to. So, trying now to figure out how to default to native HTML5 presentation on the desktop …. gah.)

Fountain from Applied Design on Vimeo.

We’re still here.  Just buried on a project.  We’re within a couple of weeks of launching our first designed-from-scratch iPad app and it’s a pretty much 24×7 effort (including the India team).  App will remain a mystery for now, but we are looking for beta testers prior to launch.  If you have an iPad, watch television on a regular basis, live in the U.S. and are willing to give us some feedback let me know.

We’ll make an announcement here (among other places) once we hit the app store.

Burn a candle for us!

Went with the Canon EOS 7d – body only – with the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM zoom lens.

Looks like a great, portable, flexible setup.  If anyone has any comments (the photo / video crowd is easily one of the most opinionated I’ve seen, outside of the politicos) fire away.  And yes, I know it’s not full-frame…

Click View Detail for more photos.

iPhone OS 4 Folders

Back in January I predicted that the upcoming Apple announcement then would include a method for managing application complexity.  I missed the date by a couple of months, but the new iPhone OS 4 announcement included Folders as “Tentpole # 2″ or the second most important improvement behind multitasking.

Here’s my original post.

For those of you out there that are camera gearheads, you may or may not be aware of what many would consider to be a quiet milestone in the film production story.

On May 17 evidently the season finale of House will air on television.  Not big news except for this: while House has – like many major television productions – been shot on 35 mm film, this season finale was shot in HD digital.  But that’s still not the most interesting part: the episode was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II – a DSLR.

A camera that to most lay-people looks just like any other pro-sumer Canon or Nikon digital single lens reflex camera.   And, well, is.

A brief exchange with the director of the show can be read here (on Phillip Bloom’s site – an HD DSLR pro who recently visited a neighbor of mine George Lucas at Skywalker ranch – that link is here).

To reprise: a major television show shot with a handheld DSLR, using mostly Canon lenses, by hand or with tripods, for broadcast.

I’ll let that just sit with you a little bit …

I’ve been working on a project for weeks now involving a high-def (H.264) video of an iPad application (for a pitch) and the problem has been how to build something believable from something you’ve never even seen (in real life).

As an example, part of the video involves using the iBooks application.  The only source materials available before Saturday to work with were low-res screen shots from Apple, and their Guided Tours videos (which is why I was obsessed by knees the other day).

Specifically, in order to seem at least believable (or rather in order to not distract from the story we’re building by not completely rendering the actual interface) I needed to create the weird “secret library” spinning bookshelf effect that happens when you touch the Store button in iBooks to toggle to the online bookstore.

There are always those that will brute force through a problem like this – 50+ frames of skewing graphics in either Photoshop or Illustrator and laying off one frame at a time.  But I was looking for something a little more elegant, something that could be repeated in a render-modify-render work cycle.

The first attempt was in Cinema 4D using a modeled “shelf” object, UV unwrapped and texture mapped with a front-side-back graphic created in Photoshop (you can see this UV map in the gallery above).  The problem was twofold: it was very difficult to match the luminance of the 2D before screen, with the animation frames, and the resolving 2D after screen.  And secondly, the texture map – while it looked great in Photoshop – lost resolution in the modeling environment.  I’m sure it’s me – I’m not the greatest modeler – but I couldn’t figure out how to get the resolution back and since the target output was H.264 it needed to be there.  And the old motion-blur trick is a cop-out.

I have never used the Extended part of Photoshop Extended, but – on a whim – I gave it a shot and was pleasantly surprised.  The 3D tools in Photoshop can’t hold a candle to a package like C4D, but if you’re only modeling a simple box, it’s actually pretty great.  I set up a 50mm camera (not to exaggerate the spin of the object in the frame), a single front light (which seems to be how the object is “lit” on the iPad), and mapped the high-res front, side, and back graphics to the box.  The animation couldn’t have been simpler: just a 180 degree rotation in 1.5 seconds for around 45 frames (at 30 fps). (See the gallery above for a shot of the Photshop 3D environment.)

The best part about doing everything in Photoshop seemed to be matching the 2D before and after screens to the animation frames – they were much closer than what I got using C4D.

Bringing the frames into After Effects as a JPEG sequence made it easy to drop into the project, scale and match to the rest of the piece.

I’ll be posting the finished project at some point here, but suffice to say that the final animation looks pretty damned close to the real thing.

As best I can tell.  I haven’t seen the real thing yet …

If I’m a “bits” guy – ones and zeros – my Dad is an “atoms” guy.  We both spend pretty much every waking hour making stuff, the only difference is I’m digital and he’s analog.

This is the invite to a recent show he curated at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina.  I can’t keep track of where he is anymore – he teaches all over the country; handmade papermaking and book making.  Which is an interesting occupation this day and age.

Artist, Educator, Mentor and (especially) Rascal all define my father.  He’s hard to keep up with, a brilliant thinker, a brilliant maker, and seems to be very popular with other paper and book types.  He’s also, obviously, a huge inspiration to me.  We’re even collaborating on a pitch at the moment.

If you’re in the area, try to drop by the show.  It runs from March 23 to May 9 at the Penland Gallery.

If you’re interested in seeing some of the work, from afar, try this link.

Do I have a knee fetish?

But they’re everywhere.  As I watched one video after another (there are about a dozen) it was like “ok, here comes the knee shot …”.  By the fourth video I couldn’t even follow the story it got so self-conscious.

When the “laptop” came out it was pretty cool.  You could kick back on the couch and set the thing in your lap and we all thought how cool we were.  But you could also just as easily set it on a flat surface, tilt the screen just right, and work just as easily: keyboard flat, screen up.

But with the iPad – and the whole tablet thing in general – we’re entering new territory from a usability perspective.  There’s been lots of discussion about how the iPad should/will be used, whether it needs a “kickstand”, how to type.  Ad nauseum.

But really.  Click through the pictures above: they’re all pulled from the videos.  The “ok, now I have to find something to prop my feet on” awkwardness pops up in all but two of the videos by my reckoning (and even then you have the “what do I prop this thing against on the table” awkwardness, mixed in with the “ok, now I have to lay it down to type then prop it back up” awkwardness).

Look, let’s be clear.  I’m obviously going to buy one of these things like everyone else (although I usually wait for v2, which was a good idea with the iPhone), but it’s going to be interesting to see – starting this Saturday – how we all “lean back” together.

It’s the lean back revolution.

(Maybe this allegorically speaks to our standing as the great American aggressive inventive lean-forward busy society: are we “retiring”?)

Who makes ottoman’s and coffee tables?  I’m buying stock.

Velcro pants?

My bad knees are a testament to lots of hard biking over the years – road and mountain. But I’ve never been a great commuter. I’ve been watching electric and electric-assist bikes for years now and never been really impressed by anything. The examples have either been bulky mo-ped like “scooters” or completely underpowered kits for regular bikes.

About a year ago I first heard that Trek was considering a “bespoke” electric-assiste bike. In other words, they wanted to take a great commuter bike and custom design an electric solution. They went to one of (if not the) electric motor sources out there (Bionx) and ended up collaborating on a great new form factor.

I managed to ride one of these things in Europe last year (where they’ve really taken off) and was really impressed by how well thought out the Trek design was: a classic great commuter, subtly but substantially redesigned to accommodate a really intelligent and powerful electric-assist system.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, electric-assist refers to vehicles (mostly bikes) that are not powered exclusively by the electric motor, but rather assist whatever effort the rider contributes.  I.e. you still have to work, which is attractive to me.  You don’t just sit there and tool around like one of those carts at Wal-Mart.

The computer on this thing is actually amazing.  The motor guages – in real-time – the pressure you put on the pedals and, depending on the setting on the “dashboard”, then boosts your own energy.  The net result is a ride like you’ve never experienced.  Without any exception, anyone I have let try the bike invariably lets out a “whoop” when they first feel it.  It’s weird, and pleasantly surprising. You feel like a strong wind just came up behind you and pushed.  Or that you just turned into Lance Armstrong.

To be honest (really) I only use the assist – which you can turn on and off at will – in heavy head-winds and, of course, bad hills.  (I happen to live at the top of a 600+, 1 mile climb.)  What this technology does do is make pretty much any commute something you can do daily instead of occasionally – I haven’t driven a car in weeks.

The battery is custom built into the back rack on the bike.  It locks on but can be removed.  You plug the charger in daily or whenever and in 3 hours or so you’re fully charged.  I’ve gotten over 50 miles on a single charge rough estimate.  Who knows how many MPG that is?

The dashboard, right at your right thumb, controls everything.  There are 4 settings “up” – meaning various levels of assist, from light to get-me-up-this-giant-hill – and 4 settings “down” – which put the bike into regenerative mode, i.e. the motor starts charging the battery, just like a Prius.

If you watch the dashboard when riding you notice that every time you brake (rear) you enter regenerative mode.

The lighting system – front and back – is of course tied in (beautifully) to the electronics.  Even if the battery is shot, the motor generates enough juice to keep the lights on.  No extra charging or batteries.  There is even an “alarm” mode where you can park the bike, set a code, and if someone moves a wheel more than a quarter turn the motor “locks up” and an alarm sounds.

The dashboard also maintains the usual other data points: odometer, trip odometer, speed, “assist / regenerate” level, lights (the dash is lit at night), time, date, etc.

All in all this is a pretty amazing package and so far I’ve enjoyed the hell out of it.  Really superb design and although some of the hard-core Marin bike freaks I know sniff at it a little, I’ve avoided a lot of driving the past two months (one less car Stein …).  The commute to San Francisco, via ferry (this is just a bike to those guys), is fantastic.   Errands locally are as fast as in a car.  I keep losing weight …

As far as I know this is the first Trek Ride+ series bike in Marin.  I had to sweet-talk my favorite local bike shop into signing up for the whole program before they could sell me one.

If you’re interested in one and in this area, go see Martin at  Sunshine Bikes and tell him Tim sent you.

Here is the site for the bike: Trek Ride+ Valencia