After chatting with iPhone developer Cobra about his most recent UICoverFlowLayer example, I decided to simplify UICoverFlowLayer creation. What I found was this: programming cover flow is eerily reminiscent of programming tables. Like tables, you create a data source method in your main application. This data source supplies your coverflow layer with images on demand. And, like tables, you build delegate methods that react to selection changes. When a user taps on an image, you can catch that selection change and do something about it.

The hard part is getting your head around it being a layer. UICoverFlowLayers are layers and not views. Views are first class display objects. Layers are not. To make this work, you slide your layer into some kind of containing view. You customize that view so it can forward user events and the run loop's heartbeat back to the layer. This lets it react to those events. In the following sections, you'll see how to create a really simple UICoverFlowLayer example.

Case in point: the photos of a bouquet of rose below:

Rose Bouquet from Above, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

[Nikon D300, Sigma 50mm f/2.8 macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms), three exposures (1.6 second, 2.5 seconds, and 4 seconds), all at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

This is one of those photos that appears fairly effortless. As indeed it should. But in fact, the image took a great deal of work.

First, I used a sheet of gauze over my natural and incandescent light sources to give a soft lighting effect.

The most difficult problem was caused by an issue of lens focal length. I wanted to be able to see the entire circumference of the bouquet of roses; at the same time I didn't want the photo to capture tripod legs, lighting apparatus, or the edge of the black velvet background. With my tripod fully extended (three legs plus center column), approximately 40mm (60mm in 35mm terms) would have done the trick.

This would seem to have indicated my Nikon 18-200mm VR zoom lens, which I enjoy using as an all-round lens, and certainly includes the desired focal length in its range. Unfortunately, however, when you point this lens straight down, the zoom "slips" out to its longest setting, so I couldn't use the lens for this purpose.

I ended up raising the height of the tripod by putting each foot on a chair and climbing a short ladder myself. With a little cropping in the post-processing, my 50mm Sigma macro lens (75mm in 35mm terms) was now just right.

So that the white roses didn't blow out, and the orange and pink roses on the left remained vivid, I combined three different exposures to get the final result.

From another perspective, I photographed the bouquet of roses using somewhat harsher light on a black velvet background:

Bouquet of Roses, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

[Nikon D300, 18-200mm VR lens at 35mm (52.5mm in 35mm terms) with image stabilization turned off, 1.6 seconds at f/29 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

To get this effect, I used hard sunlight focused using window shades. In this kind of situation, it is important to underexpose relative to an overall meter reading, because you want the background to go completely black, and you want the flowers to appear as saturated as possible.

This whole setup for both flower photos was truly pretty jerry-rigged and rickety, and not at all the kind of slick shooting situation you'd expect of a pro photographer. But neither were as bad as the diaper boxes as a tripod mount I used to photograph this wasp:

Wasp, photo by Harold Davis. View the wasp larger.

[Nikon D70, 105mm f/2.8 macro (157.5mm in 35mm terms), 3/5 of a second at f/32 and ISO 200, tripod mounted.]

The wasp was torpid on our living room ceiling. It took some contortions on my part to get my tripod close enough to take this picture, as you can see in this photo Phyllis took of me in my pajamas photographing the wasp with my tripod raised up using the diaper cartons:

In these cases, the point is that the photos worked, and maybe that I didn't break my keister, not the slickness of the setup. You can truly take professional quality photos with little in the way of gear. It's worth saying one more time: people take photos, not cameras or fancy apparatus.

That's the mean time between someone writing that Macs are either overpriced or under-featured on some mailing list I'm on. The posters usually write that they could get a Linux box or a Windows laptop for a whole lot less than they could get Mac laptop. Once they've dismissed using a Mac as their work machine they then go on to explain why they wouldn't pay extra to buy a Mac for their family either.

Sometimes a high profile guy like James Gosling blogs about leaving the Mac for another platform. He wrote "I no longer carry a Mac laptop. As much as I love the Mac's eye candy, it really hasn't been keeping up as a developer's machine - their attention has clearly been elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Solaris folks have made huge strides in Solaris's usability on a laptop". I thought about the usability of his laptop as more than one hundred of us waited ten minutes for him to reboot (twice I think) and continue to fuss with his laptop to get his slides up on the screen at a recent developer conference.

I think Gosling, like the posters on my various mailing lists is wrong but I don't think I'll be able to change his mind any more than he'll be able to convince people that Java isn't slow. So here's the thing: Java isn't slow. But no amount of facts that Gosling or others present is going to erase the perception that it is. In fact, the research is clear that when you use negative words to make your point, those words disappear. So when you say over and over "Java is not slow" the word "not" fades in people's memories and the perception is actually reinforced instead of defeated.

Gosling doesn't think that the Mac has been keeping up as a developer's machine. I suppose that depends what kind of development you do. I pop open a terminal window and cd over to /usr/bin and see a ton of tools that seem to target me as a developer. I click a button and am running Apache. Screen sharing is presented as eye candy but it allows me to help my mom or muck around with my server no matter where I am. In fact, it allowed an Apple engineer to diagnose a subtle error that I had made from three thousand miles away. We now have Solaris' DTrace on the Mac along with a suite of performance tools (Instruments, Shark, ...) that are included for free on every machine. I could go on - but it wouldn't make a difference.

Developers complained about the one button mouse long after the issue had been resolved. The OS handled a multiple button mouse - just buy one and plug it in. The machines continued to ship with a single button mouse and that seemed to be the right decision. I watched my youngest daughter struggle with the two button mouse while my eldest daughter loved it. So each of them had their own mice for using the iMac downstairs. My mom never got the hang of the two button mouse. She would click the "wrong" button and get unfamiliar options and wonder what the machine had done wrong. For her, the one button mouse was perfect. So I looked and saw a great compromise - build a machine that can handle as many buttons as you throw at it but ship a one button mouse standard.

I once ran a workshop at OOPSLA where we set up a network of Macs in a matter of minutes using Bonjour. I hosted a wiki and a subversion repository off of my laptop and the others began contributing code and working together in deep ways without a lot of time spent configuring.

I could go on and on, but I wouldn't convince you. I probably wouldn't convince myself if I were in your shoes. No amount of telling me that most everything I need is already installed and QA'd would convince me. So here's another story. For this we need to go back longer.

Two years and two months.

That's when I unwrapped the new iMac and set it up for my wife and daughters. I set up logins - one for me and one for each of them. I started to show them something and Maggie, then nine, said "I know already."

She opened up Photo booth and started taking pictures of her and her sister Elena posing. "How could you know about Photo booth", I asked, "you've never seen it before. You've never had a machine with a camera on it before."

"Dad," Maggie rolled her eyes, "it's a Mac. It's just obvious."

And it was. Over those next two months Maggie made movies starring herself, her sister, and their friends. Whenever someone would come over, Maggie would take them in the computer room and have them do something for the camera that she could put into a movie.

And that is the only way that we have movies of Elena's last two months of life. Two years ago today, Elena lost a tooth. Kim and I figured we'd take her picture in the morning. But she woke up with a little fever and so we never got around to it. The tooth fairy had placed a dollar under Elena's pillow - for her it was the most perfect dollar ever.

Later, much later, Kim said "we never even got a picture of her with the missing tooth".

Maggie said, "Oh I did mom." And there in iPhoto was the most perfect picture of Elena wearing a big floppy hat and a big smile with a gap where her tooth had been.

I'm sure when you're an Apple engineer heads down in a room grinding out code you can lose sight of the people you are building these products for. You could. I'm just glad you don't. I'm grateful to every Apple engineer who took the time to make this machine powerful enough or me to use every day and easy enough for my daughters to do everything they can dream of doing.

Why do I use a Mac? I can't imagine that I would have these memories of the last two months of Elena's life if we used anything else. That may not convince you either. But tomorrow is the second anniversary of my little girl's death and I will have movies to watch and pictures to look at. So hard to believe.

Two years.

Well, Sun bought another Open Source company. This time it is the group responsible for the multi-platform Open Source VirtualBox virtualization product:

Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire Innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop

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The two big X Windows windows managers for Linux are Gnome (what I usually use) and KDE. However, if you want to try KDE on top of Mac OS X, you can try out...

KDE on Mac OS X

The stable version is 3.5. The brave among you can try the 4.0 development release. Me? I'll just change my Linux X window manager when I want to use a different interface. The Mac OS X GUI is just fine for me. :-)

iStopMotion works with the built-in iSight camera (for iMacs and various MacBook versions). However, that is a pretty limiting proposition. So, I attached my low-end MiniDV camcorder via Firewire. You can see one of my first stop motion video attempts below.

I spent a bit of time puzzling over some of the initial configuration choices such as the movie resolution and frame rate. After connecting my MiniDV camcorder, iStopMotion displayed a small warning icon for my Pixel Aspect Ratio. It defaulted to 4:3. However, my camera apparently has a 1:1 ratio since setting it to square made the warning go away. Some settings (like Noise Reduction) are not available in the Home edition.

Taking the still images is the simple part. You can choose either an automatic time-lapse or click the red capture button to record a still image anytime you want. iStopMotion provides an overlay display so you can see a ghostly image of the previous still image to help line up objects.

I also tried bringing in a series of digital photos. I took the photos while sitting in the passenger seat of a car. I just opened the window and shot a continuous series of 53 photos. You can see the result below. If you get queasy when watching jumpy handheld video recordings, you might want to avoid watching this video :-)

Some things just work better as a regular video recording :-)

iStopMotion writes out the video directly for you. You don't need to process it through iMovie or any other video editor. However, it does not provide titling. So, if you want to do that, you do need to use a video editor.

The biggest problem with iStopMotion is that it is way too much fun for people like me who don't actually have any serious projects to apply it. I spent way too much time stop-motion-doodling with it over the past three day weekend. And, I suspect, more than a few productive hours will be spent noodling around with iStopMotion in the future.

There are two higher-end editions in addition to the starter Home version I used: The Express Edition is priced at $99 and adds features such as custom project presets, adding a soundtrack (I used iMovie to do that in my sample), rotoscope/lip-syncing, and noise reduction. The Pro edition is priced at $499 and adds Final Cut Pro integration and eliminates the output resolution limit.

To hear a good example of this, listen to the Echoes podcasts. An interviewee will be talking, you'll hear his music bubbling along underneath, and then, just as the narrative hits the important idea, the music will burst forth to emphasize it and pump up the emotion even more.

For my article "The Art of Podcasting," I asked Echoes engineer Jeff Towne to explain the concept.

"It's not like, 'Oh, the voice stopped, so I'll turn up the music,'" he replied. "I always get a little frustrated when I hear that on other radio shows, when there's an opportunity to say something with the music underneath the narration and then make a dramatic statement once the music's in the clear. It actually takes a little time and energy to arrange that. It's not quite as simple as, 'We'll start the track and move it around till it comes up right.' There's often a lot of pushin' and shovin' and clippin' and twistin' and trimmin'. But that's what you should do. At least, that's what we want to do."

That hit home when I compared the two podcast interviews I did with Francis Preve recently. In the first, I started the musical examples at what seemed like the right point, but then immediately faded them out again so they wouldn't fight with Preve's voice. In the second, I simply split the voice file after the important word and slid the remainder off to the right on the timeline, moving it later in time. Then, when the musical statement finished, I brought in the voice again.

It seems obvious in retrospect, but somehow I had to give myself permission to break the flow of the voice so I could bring in the music. When I listen to the final production, it sounds like we simply stopped talking to listen, which was exactly the flow I wanted.

You do need to be careful not to turn the camera off while the firmware is updating, and to follow instructions for the process precisely (a link to detailed instructions appears below). There are two sets of firmware, for the D300, A and B; this upgrade only concerns the A firmware.

As of the date of this story, the most current revision of the firmware is 1.02A. Most people who own D300s will have older versions, and probably should upgrade. You can check your firmware version by choosing Firmware from the camera's Setup menu.

Links: Detailed instructions for the Mac; Download for the Mac; Detailed instructions for Windows; Download for Windows.

Each of the presentations combines the audio from the session with the speaker's presentation slides and live demos into 640x480 QuickTime videos. If you have QuickTime Pro on your machine, you can also download these videos to your computer for offline viewing or for, say, watching them via your AppleTV. (In fact, the audio and video quality of these presentations is so good that you painfully realize just how crappy Flash video really is.)

My personal favorites so far:

Living with data
by Merlin Mann

Although was held at a Mac show, Mann's talk was hardly about technology, but all about technique. Being confronted with ever more "Attention Sinks & Time Bandits" (the sub-title of this presentation) in our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly harder to manage our personal resources of time, attention, and mindshare, and Mann shows us some novel ways for tackling this.

Don't let Mann's entertaining and relaxed presentation style fool you, though: what you'll learn in this presentation is deep, and if you're going to watch just one presentation from the Macworld Encore site, I humbly suggest you make it this one, because what Merlin has to say applies to so many more aspects of our lives than just using a computer.

If this presentation clicks with you, have a look at Mann's Web site 43folders.com, which is chock full of similar advice. For a selection of links related to the "Living with data" talk, check out this post.

Keeping safe on the Internet
by Marshall Clow and Alan Oppenheimer

Us Mac users have had it pretty good so far when it comes to the intrinsic "internet safety" of our computer platform of choice. Then again, for some people, peace of mind and carelessness are two sides of the same coin. Hence, it makes sense to, every now and then, review the steps we take to keep our machine secure, and to remain aware of potential security threats.

Clow and Oppenheimer have compiled an expansive, yet concise top ten of these threats plus related protective measures you should take. Despite the name of the presentation, it also addresses aspects like physical security (theft, fire, ...), backing up your data, etc. Whether you're new to the Mac or a seasoned Mac-head, don't miss this so that coin mentioned above won't show "carelessness up" for you.

Using Automator to Reduce Repetitive Tasks - Best Practices for Using Automator
by Charles Heizer

Judging from what you'll hear from "the" average Mac user, AppleScript and Automator still are among the most under-valued and under-utilized features of OS X.

Using Automator in a system administration setting, Charles Heizer gives a great overview over just how powerful and useful that little tool really is. If you're somewhat familiar with using the command line, you should have a look at this presentation. I'd be surprised if you would not want to delegate the repetitive computing tasks you encounter in your daily computing routine to Automator afterwards.

Disagree with my selection and prefer other presentations from the site? Share your suggestions in the comments!

But when a new version of EyeTV was release at Macworld Expo last month I realized that it might be time to revisit the technology. The promise of free, over-the-air digital TV in my office was very tempting, especially without having to add another piece of equipment to my already crowded desk. Eventually, I couldn't resist the temptation and I bought an EyeTV Hybrid .

The EyeTV Hybrid is very portable; it's not much bigger than a typical USB "thumb drive." It's not as portable if you need an antenna, of course, but you might not need one. I live in the city, and can literally see the broadcast towers on nearby skyscrapers, so I was able to receive 10 digital and 12 analog channels just by plugging the unit into a free USB port.

El Gato's software has certainly gotten a lot fancier, and prettier, over the years that I haven't been paying attention. The most welcome change I've found is that the channel schedule information, provided by TitanTV, is presented in familiar grid-format for easy perusing. The Setup Assistant has improved too, although it was quite good in the older version. I haven't had a chance to exercise the recording capabilities, my TiVo is plenty busy with that task, but I plan to give it a whirl soon.

My box came with EyeTV 2, so I can't comment on the new EyeTV 3, since I haven't been able to figure out how to obtain it from El Gato. Their website says to wait for an email that will be sent, someday, to registered owners. If you've received the update already, please let the rest of us know what you think of it by leaving a comment.

Performance with digital channels has been superb. I'm using a Mac mini that barely meets the minimum system requirements, so it's refreshing to find that the product works great under those conditions. (Granted, most of the time there's not a lot of other programs running at the same time as EyeTV.) Alas, analog channels still suffer from some of the old problems I had, such as stuttering, but almost every channel that I want to watch has a digital equivalent so it doesn't bother me much. And the quality of the digital picture on an Apple LCD monitor is breathtaking, particularly with the HD stations.

If you're about to buy an EyeTV Hybrid, you'll want to be sure to get the very latest version of the hardware. The newest one comes with EyeTV 3 and supports Clear QAM broadcasts. The only way to tell the difference, according to El Gato, is to carefully examine the packaging. The new one was only released in January, so there are plenty of old versions on store shelves, as I can attest to. Alas, I ended up with an older model and the retailer won't accept a return. But all in all, so far the upgrade has been worthwhile.