It was eleven years ago, almost to the day, I wrote my first back-up CD. The information contained on it is still relevant and fascinating to look through as a time capsule. It’s just that I can’t get the darned stuff off it. That is, I can, just can’t use it. It had to happen and I share the blame 50:50 between myself and Stuffit’s owners, currently Smith Micro.

Back in 1996 when the CD was burned, computers came with on-board RAM that would fill the average low-key graphics card nowadays. Hard disks were smaller than the space occupied by today’s decent first person shoot-em-up and would never be able to accommodate a software suite such as Adobe’s CS. Empty space in 1996 measured in megabytes as today’s is gigabytes, meaning it was possible to back-up an entire computer to one or two CDs.

Publishing then was still at the cutting edge of computer innovation, needing ever more space and power as the boundaries of possibility were stretched. As we already had a collection of external hard disks, removable media and a billion floppy disks, CDs seemed a good solution, able to hold what felt like an enormous amount of information. Little did we suspect that things would go full-circle and hard drives would again become the cheapest form of mass storage and transportation. One of our large-format, full-colour books recently took 6 DVDs to transport, an unbelievable amount of data in 1996.

The 1996 CD in question took about an hour to make and verify at a heady 2x speed. On it are document back-ups and more importantly, 19MB of maps I need for a job in hand. At that time we were using a compression application called Disk Doubler which could compress and decompress files on the fly. It meant we could squeeze more on our hard disks and it was these files copied onto the CD. Disk Doubler remained a feature of our computing until Apple moved to Mac OS X. Stuffit has been around almost as long and for years its free Stuffit Expander could open Disk Doubled files but unbeknown to us, this feature was abandoned a few versions ago.

This year our laptop died, it didn’t have a hard life and could run old System 9 natively unlike our desktop Macs. They, being IBM G5 PPC powered, will still run the old Apple System in the Classic emulated environment but the relevant Stuffit version needs the real McCoy to install into. So we are… er… stuffed and the 19MB of maps might as well be on the moon.

Our real problem is that much of the huge collection of CD back-ups will also contain compressed files. The information is there, we just cannot access it anymore. In many respects this is a good thing. After filling drawer after drawer with CDs, then DVDs before moving onto shoe boxes and lately the spindles the blanks come on, we are just about CD’ed out. Our database will say exactly which CD contains the files we want but it cannot tell us where the darned thing is. One late-night misfiling can take hours to rectify and besides, we’ve run out of names to call the boxes.

It looks like our garden will sprout a whole new crop of bird scarers, the only other use we can put the useless disks to. Not than the pigeons seem to mind, instead of scaring them the CDs act as a physical barrier between brassicas and birds.

How many Windows users have downloaded the Safari 3 beta, took one look and said: “Ugh! The fonts look all messed up.”?
Well, for Mac users the same can be said when looking at Windows applications. And especially those irritating underlined letters that are meant to give a hint to keyboard shortcuts. They have sneaked into some Mac programs too, usually PC or Linux originated ones such as NeoOffice.
The reason for both the fuzzy letters and underlines is simply the different directions Apple and Microsoft take on such matters. Apple have chosen to follow the path of making letters display on screen as true to reality as possible. Microsoft prefer to optimise the letters to the nearest pixel and so distort some of them. For that reason I look at PC screens and say: “Ugh! The fonts look all distorted”.
Bitmaps first
Apple’s choices as far as the fonts go is probably a legacy of their strong showing amongst graphic designers. It has always been possible to lay out a page in a Mac design program and see as near as possible what the finished printed article will look like. In the good old days of the last century this was achieved by having screen fonts of bitmaps at various different sizes for QuickDraw to select depending on the screen’s magnification.
ATM
Then in 1991 Adobe released their Type Manager, a free System Extension that used only one of the bitmapped fonts to render Type 1 PostScript fonts on-screen. This was in response to Apple’s new outline font system called TrueType, which they had also licensed to Microsoft in return for TrueImage, a Postscript compatible printer driver. This was never used as Apple renewed agreements with Adobe for the use of PostScript in its printers following a whinging speech by Adobe’s John Warnock who accused them both of selling snake oil. Apple and Microsoft continued to develop TrueType in competition with PostScript and eventually Adobe joined in so that today Open TrueType, aka OpenType, has support for Adobe’s Type 1 fonts.
Adobe also developed Display PostScript which Next, IBM and SGi adopted for their workstations. When Apple bought Next they chose not to use Display PostScript for licensing reasons, instead using Adobe’s free PDF standard and Apple’s own Quartz technology.
TrueType
TrueType contains many ‘hints’, an Apple patented feature that helps to make fonts display their letter shapes more reliably, along with anti-aliasing which smoothes the edges of fonts on screen, making them slightly blurred. In MacOS X, Apple have abandoned using the hints although Microsoft’s ClearType font rendering mechanism still does. ClearType additionally uses the pixel structure of LCD screens to increase the apparent resolution of text but at the expense of altering the shape of letters to make them fit the pixels.

Which is best?
It’s down to personal preference. See above. On the left is the page displayed on a PC, centre is Firefox Mac and right Safari Mac. (Thanks to Crosby! for PC screenshots). As the image demonstrates quite clearly, Safari’s screen is much easier to read. I find the Windows screen almost illegible and Firefox a sort of halfway house.
To my eyes, Microsoft fonts look ‘wrong’ and I find them slightly irritating as a result. I think Apple’s fonts are easier to read and choose to use Safari as my default browser because it gives the best overall display compared with Firefox, et al.
In any case, the matter is moot as screen resolutions increase, the amount that both font rendering technologies alter the display of fonts will decrease.

Steve Job’s keynote speech at the WWDC yesterday opened more, err… , windows into the domain of the Leopard. The complete speech can be viewed here. Full details of Leopard here.

Much of the ‘new’ features have been around for some time as add-ons for Mac OS X but Apple have pulled them into the operating system. Some, such as the new Downloads stack, was such an obvious idea I immediately renamed and moved my own ‘Just in’ folder from its usual place on the Desktop and into the Documents folder. Then dragged its icon into the Dock. Voila!  Not a stack but almost and hovering over the Dock’s icon opens the folder.

The new Finder Steve announced has been needed for years. Until now the OSX Finder has stayed almost as clunky as in OS9 with a few new twists. Try copying or deleting a huge library of typefaces, for example, and the Finder rapidly bogs down. If connected servers close, the Finder stops until it has determined the drive has actually disappeared. In such cases it’s usually quicker to quit the Finder and re-start it.

One thing I can never understand is why it is considered easier to navigate via icons rather than a list of file names. Perhaps a folder containing only a few files is okay but as a book designer, a job involves hundreds of images, text files and so on. They reside inside sub-folders and often across different hard disks with only an alias or symbolic link connecting them with the main job folder. Using icons in such cases would make it virtually impossible to find specific files. In the same way, the new iTunes-style album cover navigation facility will be of limited use on large folders as it is it is to select iTunes tracks by flipping through the cover art from a well stuffed music library.

Apple’s new ‘Back to my Mac’ facility seems an answer to many problems for people who work at multiple locations. Any Mac user with a .Mac account will be able to access their main Mac from another Mac anywhere else in the world. This is because their Mac stores its IP address at .Mac. They will be able to search and retrieve anything from their home Mac via a secure tunnel. Nothing new, perhaps, but a lot easier than SSH or a VPN.

My partner, for example, often has to work away from our office and usually has to remember to take files with her, upload them to her .Mac account or our FTP space. Steve didn’t give details about how the .Mac account would know about internal IP addresses and DHCP routers but presumably Apple have that covered, perhaps by using fixed internal IP addresses.

Recent changes to the .Mac service has given it a much-needed turn of speed although it can still get the Finder into a tizzy so  I prefer to use a webDAV application such as Transmit or Goliath to access my iDisk. On the other hand, Mac using clients think it’s really helpful to be able to drop large files into my iDisk’s Public Folder. Once they have done it for the first time, the server stays in their ‘Recent Items’ list so they have almost instant access to my iDisk. This is far better for many than firing up an FTP program or using a browser-based and javascripted upload tool.

Time Machine, the new archive application will bring into the OS a lot of the third party programs we use such as Silverkeeper and SuperDuper. According to Steve Jobs, the overwhelming majority of users do not back-up their Macs. This is probably because they have nothing to back-up to other than CDs or DVDs. Time Machine will not help this. As demonstrated it still needs a second drive to save files to. It will, however, back-up System files and this is extremely welcome. Anyone who has searched through Preferences and other Library items trying to solve an problem application will know what a painful process this can be. Time Machine will solve this by keeping earlier versions of those files that have since become corrupted.

The new facilities in Mail look tasty. As designers we are often called on to make HTML newsletter emails and the best solution we have found so far is to use Netscape’s built-in HTML editor which can save in email format. Mail’s editable template-based solution looks to be a better method and opens the door to a new industry in the same way RapidWeaver did for website creation. On the other hand, the worst thing about Mail is that it will encourage people to send us HTML newsletter emails.

As Steve would say, one last thing – the price. For the extra facilities, new applications and features, 64-bit computing, multicore support and free developer tools as well, $129 or about £75 (usually) is incredibly cheap. He joked about all the versions of Windows but it is an important point if Apple is to gain market share. As a new owner of a Mac capable of running Windows I was put off the idea simply by the price of the various versions available. For little more I could buy another computer with Vista ready-loaded.

Leopard looks like the cat’s whiskers, I can’t wait.

The new Elgato Turbo.264 is a £51 dedicated video compression device in a tiny, 85 x 30 x 10mm black box. Running under Mac OS X it plugs into any USB 2 port, or via the short USB extension cable supplied. Also supplied in the packaging is the software on CD.

How was it tested?
Compressing videos is a time consuming task, even with the Turbo.264. It has been tested over a period of a week on two systems, a G5 and MacBook, both with dual 2GHz CPU’s.
As well as full feature films and TV programs recorded in EyeTV, a short 10 minute segment of a recording was made as a reference movie  and saved in DV format totalling 1.9GB. This was from the recent Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam concert on BBC, recorded in EyeTV and chosen because it is a particularly well lit and quality program, with excellent stereo sound, lots of close-ups and plenty of movement.
In addition, short, home-made MPEG2 videos from a Sony Cybershot camera were also compressed, as were avi’s, wmv’s and other formats of videos QuickTime can read. A final test was made by compressing all the films using VisualHub, a software-only compression system based around ffmpeg that uses different codecs - x264 instead of QuickTime’s H264.
What is it like to use?
The software for the Turbo.264 is in true plug and play tradition and like Elgato’s other offerings, well designed and easy to use. It ran trouble-free for all the testing. The software has one window where videos for compressing are dragged and dropped, batches can be queued. Each can be set to one of four compression levels: iPod high, iPod standard, Sony PSP and Apple TV. Output is to PAL or NTSC formats. A small window shows the video stepping through as it is compressed, with conversion speed and time remaining, which was accurate. Another small window can be opened to see the original movie’s format, size and fps.

Currently, output is restricted to 800×600 for this version of the Turbo.264 due to the limits of its chip. According to Lars Farber, Elgato’s product marketing manager, future versions of the hardware will be able to produce HD content and anyway, as Lars explained, there isn’t a great deal of HD content in Europe yet. In reality Turbo.264 produces high-quality viewing at 800×600.
The Turbo.264 is automatically detected by any application using QuickTime such as iMovie and Final Cut Pro. New export options appear in their menus. When the Turbo.264 is active, the export progress bar changes colour and little red blobs appear under it to indicate the Turbo.264 is working.
The results
The Turbo.264 certainly speeds up video conversion with movies recorded at 25 fps being compressed at up to 80 fps on the MacBook. Strange things did result however. When compressing the reference movie the G5 ran at a maximum of 16 fps and used 40% of the G5’s CPU’s whereas compressing the same movie on the MacBook saw 22fps and only 30% of the CPU’s being used. This was even when loading and saving the movie over a 802.11g wireless network from its storage on the G5. An increase in speed that was completely unexpected as the Turbo.264 is supposed to run independent of the main CPU.
Normally when compressing video, the fans on the G5 and MacBook spin up and the machines get hot. With the Turbo.264 running this did not happen and it even allowed the Macs to compress videos using VisualHub at the same time as the Turbo.264. By accident, one time this was the same videos, muxed Mpeg2’s from a Sony Cybershot. The Turbo easily out-performed VisualHub, knocking several minutes off the compression time.
The output options from Turbo.264 are set with no opportunity to make changes. The reference movie compressed to Apple TV standard in 15 minutes, from 1.9GB to only 223MB, with no obvious deterioration in sound or video quality. By contrast, Visualhub compressed the same video in 21 minutes but did make a far smaller 95mb file. Sound and visual quality were identical to Turbo.264’s.
It appears that a feature of all QuickTime-based conversions is for the exported films to become slightly darker than the originals and as Turbo.264 uses QuickTime codecs, the same darkening resulted. Visualhub did not do this and its output movies were the same lightness as the original. QuickTime playback does have controls to adjust colour balance, brightness and contrast if the movie is a little too dark for personal taste.
Compressing full length feature films still take a long time, even with the Turbo.264 on the MacBook. Visualhub takes up to several hours to compress a 90 minute film, with Turbo.264 it was actually possible to do the conversions in less time than the film to to run. A wide-screen avi recorded at 25 fps compressed using Turbo.264 at 60 fps and as a result was twice as quick as it took the movie to run. A 4.95Gb Mpeg1 muxed, 25fps format film compressed at 74fps in 65 minutes.
Conclusion
The Turbo.264 is a great little gadget for anyone doing a lot of video compression and especially Apple TV owners who want to export EyeTV recordings to iTunes. Owners of older Macs, G5’s as well as G4’s, will see much faster compression times so considering its relatively cheap price the Turbo.264 would make an excellent purchase. For Intel Macs, the speed increases are not so dramatic but still enough to make it worth considering the Turbo.264 for its ease of use alone.
During testing the Turbo.264 and its software worked faultlessly and released the host Mac for other tasks, including other software-based video conversions. Elgato have a great track record for providing support and regular upgrades to their products. I know from personal experience that questions emailed  to them gets almost instant responses depending on time-zone differences.