Special Report From Apple TV Event

EmiratesMac User Group arranged our first major event on March 29 2007. A Senior Engineer at Apple Inc. talked about and demonstrated the Apple TV. User Group members got a chance to try out the Apple TV and ask questions of the Engineer.

1. The event took place in the Auditorium at Knowledge Village Dubai.

2. A Senior Engineer at Apple Inc. demonstrated the Apple TV.

3. The attendees were treated to a live demo of the Apple TV from one of the engineers at Apple who designed it.

4. The presentation took the audience through what it’s like working at Apple, what the culture is like, and some of the things that the employees do at Apple to have fun.

5. Magnus Nystedt, President and Ambassador of EmiratesMac User Group gave a brief introduction to the user group and its activities.

About the photographer
Mickeymouse is a creative brewery of sorts. Armed with an arsenal of color swatches and a penchant for harmonizing fonts and images, he has built an extensive portfolio of works in broadcast and print design. He also seeks to collaborate with creative individuals, groups and clients on various communication and design projects. He contributes photos to the Emirates Mac Users Group, and will soon contribute design, illustration and other strange creations as well. Mickeymouse is pretending he didn’t write this. You can reach him at kamil@fluxnewmedia.com.

by Magnus Nystedt

Review: Remote Buddy is your Friend

Do you have a Mac with an Apple Remote? If so, what do you use that remote for? Chances are all you do is control Front Row with it. But it can do so much more, which is where Remote Buddy comes in. Recently I had to give some presentations, using KeyNote of course, and I wanted to be able to walk around a bit, without having to go back to the MacBook to change slides. I downloaded Remote Buddy, installed it, and bada-bing, bada-boom, I was controlling KeyNote with the Apple Remote. One really cool feature of Remote Buddy is the Behavior Construction Kit. A Behavior is really what should happen in a certain application when you press something on the remote. Most common applications already have behaviors set up but you can always make your own. And Remote Buddy is smart enough to pick the appropriate behavior for whatever application is running so you won’t have to manually switch. Remote Buddy actually supports a number of remote controls besides the Apple Remote, including a line of KeySpan remotes, some mobile phones, and even the Nintendo Wii remote. If you want to control your Mac remotely with an Apple Remote or other remote control, an investment in Remote Buddy is a must. It’s easy and straight forward to set up, and you can make it work with pretty much any application.

Price $13
From IOSpirit Gmbh.
Distributor IOSpirit Gmbh.
Web http://www.iospirit.com

by Magnus Nystedt

Review: Uniea Leather U-Suit for MacBook

If you’ve been looking for a hard cover for your MacBook or MacBook Pro, Uniea has introduced an interesting alternative for you in the Leather U-Suit series. The U-Suit covers have a hard ABS plastic core which offers real protection for your notebook from bumps, sharp corners and objects. Around that plastic core is a leather outside with some padding, and a smooth, soft protective inside which promises to not scratch your precious Mac. A few “hooks” around the edges snaps around your Mac and keeps both covers (one for the display and one for the computer part) tightly secured to your Mac. I was pleasantly surprised when I snapped the cover on the first time and it really fit tightly to my MacBook. Around all the necessary optical drives, ports, IR-detector, and the fan outlets, the case is open so to give you easy access. However, the one thing I don’t like about this cover, and for me this is a deal-breaker, is that I cannot fit a Kensington-type lock on the MacBook because the cover is in the way. The U-Suit covers come in Red, White, Blue, Grey for MacBook and White, Grey, Black for MacBook Pro. If you want a hard cover for your Mac notebook but you also always want easy access to ports and drives, the U-Suit may be a good choice. That is if you don’t want to secure it with a lock.

Price 255Dhs
From Uniea Corp.
Distributor 4th Dimension
Web http://www.uniea.com

by Magnus Nystedt

Review: Relo Knox iPod nano case

Without trying to be funny, the Relo Knox is like the Fort Knox of iPod nano cases. Made for the 2G iPod nano, it’s a brushed aluminum hard cover, with some rubber details, which totally encloses the iPod and protects it. And it’s really two cases in one plus a wallet. With the Knows comes a clear plastic case that you put the nano in, then that case slides in to one side of the aluminum enclosure. It’s really rather clever. Then on the other side of the enclosure you have a clip which can hold your money, credit cards, or important papers. On the bottom of the enclosure is a cut out where the ear phones attach. One interesting design feature is that the case keeps shut by magnets, like Apple’s latest notebooks. I was a bit worried about this at first but after carrying my nano around in the Knox for about a week I can say there’s no need to worry. I’ve carried the Knox in my hand, thrown it in my bag, even dropped it on the floor, and it never opened up. The downside of the Knox is that if course it adds a lot to the size of a nano and it’s not a case that you choose for its sleekness. But consider it may be able to also replace your wallet, the size may not be so much of an issue. Some will be disappointed that it’s not waterproof, but that’s not what it was meant to be. Basically, if you want the ultimate in protection, the Knox will keep your nano as safe as it can be.

Price $45
From Mophie
Distributor Mophie
Web http://mophie.com/products/relo-knox/?pod=nano2

by Magnus Nystedt

Review: OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle is one of those apps that I just can’t see myself being without. I use it for all kinds of things, from drawing wireframes and mockups of web site designs, presentations, seating arrangements for events, to posters and banners. It’s a swiss army-knife type of application that can do almost anything you would want it to do. So what’s so great about OmniGraffle? Without showing you at the same time, it’s hard to explain. It just makes it so easy to create amazing looking documents. You will find the most common drawing tools, layers, master canvases, and libraries of stencils. OmniGraffle has the same type of floating palettes for tools and settings that you’ve come accustomed to from other applications. This means pretty much everything you need is quickly and easily available. You will also find the sort of live guides you’ve seen in KeyNote, showing you how an object aligns and compares to others. The live guides in OmniGraffle are more helpful though, Apple could really learn something here. One thing I use a lot is the features with layers and master canvases. Each page you create can be based on a master canvas. So by changing a master canvas page you can quickly change all pages that are based on it. You can also organize pages into layers, and hide and lock layers as you work on your creation. You can get OmniGraffle in a standard and a professional version. Whether the extra money is worth it depends on your particular circumstances. To me, just the Visio import and export makes it well worth it. If you need an all-purpose drawing application, I don’t think you will be disappointed with OmniGraffle.

Price $79.95/$149.95
From OmniGroup
Distributor OmniGroup
Web http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/

by Magnus Nystedt

Review: All in one server with iTools 8

iTools from Tenon Intersystems is an all in one server package for Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server. Tenon says it’s “web hosting control panel software”. In iTools you find everything from Apache web server, PHP, Perl, MySQL 5, PHP5, Tomcat, WordPress, and more, all accessible through a control panel like interface. There is so much I can’t list it all, but rest assured, that pretty much anything you would need for a web server is in iTools. We installed iTools 8 on a G4 Mac mini with 1GB RAM and it installed without problems. Since there is so much software and options, we focused on setting up some basic MySQL and PHP functionality. Getting that up and running was really easy, and configuration is a breeze too with everything available in a nice interface. You can download iTools and try it for free for 14 days which should be enough to find out if it’s a solution that fits you. The different system and applications in iTools are open source and freely available. Then you may ask “why should I pay money to Tenon?” I think the simple answer is to save you time and effort, and thereby money. What Tenon has done is put this selection of various applications together, made an interface for it all, and made it accessible. I could download all these applications individually and configure them individually. Undoubtedly that would give me more control but it would also take more time. I think there’s a definite niche for iTools, and in the price of iTools is included help and support from Tenon to get you up and going, but for some potential customers, the price is going to be too high. Tenon provided a temporary license for iTools for this review.

Price $349
From Tenon Intersystems
Distributor Tenon Intersystems
Web http://www.tenon.com/products/itools-osx

by Magnus Nystedt

Review: Airport Extreme Base Station 802.11n

Arguably the most important news about the updated Airport Extreme Base Station is that it now supports 802.11n, making its top speed a lot faster than on the previous model. According to Apple, it boasts about five times the speed and double the range of the previous model. To get the better speed you obviously have to have an all-802.11n network. Even though it is 802.11n, it’s backward compatible with earlier Airport (802.11b) and Airport Extreme (802.11g). The look of the Airport Extreme has changed, and it’s now reminiscent of the Mac mini and Apple TV but with an all white plastic case. On the back we find the connection for the networking connection, and three 10/100MBPS Ethernet ports to which you can attach additional computers. There’s also a USB port which can be used to share an external hard drive or a printer, over a local network. The hard drive sharing is the easiest way yet from any manufacturer to share storage over a network, but it’s an all-or-nothing sharing. You cannot control the access to and sharing of individual folders. When it comes to security the new Airport Extreme supports WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and WPA2 encryption methods, as well as older WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). We recommend you stay away from WEP when at all possible. The 802.11n upgrade of the Airport Extreme Base Station is a very solid upgrade to what was already one of the best wifi access points on the market. With faster networking, disk sharing, and more, this is a highly recommended product. Yes, there are cheaper 802.11 base stations from other manufacturers, but Apple has the most stylish one, and arguably the easiest to set up and administer.

Price 899Dhs
From Apple Inc.
Distributor Apple IMC ME
Web http://www.appleme.ae

by Magnus Nystedt

Truly High Definition Video

As an Emirates Diving Association (EDA) member, I was asked by long-time friend Ibrahim al Zu’bi , EDA’s Director of Environment & Research, to go on a trip to Malaysia with 19 other EDA members and produce a documentary about the mission. The biggest challenge was time. According to the schedule, the documentary had to be ready a week after our return to Dubai. As the documentary would have to be transferred to 35mm at a later stage, the temptation to go to High Definition Video (HDV) was irresistible. And as the deadline was so close, we had to come up with solutions to minimize the post-production time. Here is how we did it.

Unconventional crew
Having to plan and produce the documentary in such a short amount of time, I could not direct it myself so I called in Natascia Radice, a London-based director, who I knew from previous projects. We started designing our production strategy via email 10 days before the actual departure to Malaysia. Apart from Natascia and I, there was nobody else involved directly in the production. And as it was a non-profit project, there was no budget to hire cameramen or other crew members so we had to rely completely on ourselves and on the other divers. Fortunately, we had experienced underwater videographers on board. This meant that we could focus on out-of-water shooting while leaving underwater footage to them. Living in a truly digital age, we also knew that pretty much everybody nowadays owns a DV camcorder or a digital camera. So we asked all the participating divers to bring their own technology to Malaysia. We thought that if two eyes are better than one, then 15 cameras are definitely better than two.

Lots and lots of pre-production
Pre-production planning was the key to the success of the documentary. We had no other choice but to carry with us a mobile editing station so that we could physically edit each day’s material overnight. As Natascia and I are two truly devoted Apple fans, and as the documentary was to be shot in HDV, the choice of editing software was natural: Final Cut Studio. Apart from being HDV, native Final Cut Studio comes with very handy applications such as LiveType and Motion, which we used intensely for the opening and end sequences and for the subtitling. Also, as we both edit with this application, if one of us falls asleep in front of the monitor, the other can keep on editing. The main editing station was a PowerBook 17-inch equipped with 2GB of RAM and an external 300GB FireWire hard drive. The whole mini-studio was really light to carry and it took us literally two minutes to set it up in all the various hotel rooms and locations we travelled to during the 10 days of the trip. To optimize the timings, I had the opening sequence already created in Motion. The only thing we had to do was replace the dummy stills and clips with the ones recorded on site.

Shooting
Regarding the soundtrack, we researched and chose the songs and music beds we wanted to use prior to departure as we wanted to use our iPods in a new and experimental way. Music editing and sound design are stages typical of the post-production process. Wanting to minimize time spent in post-production, we decided to equip whoever was shooting with an iPod playing the track that would be used on that particular scene; it was kind of like shooting a live event somehow. Natascia and I knew in advance what kind of feeling we wanted to add to the footage so having the music playing in our headphones helped us synergise our camera movements. Of course, until Apple comes out with a waterproof version of the iPod, we will have to limit its usage to dry land.

The digital hut
The majority of the scenes were shot in Mabul and Sipadan, two deep-water oceanic islands known worldwide for their underwater wonders. Other scenes took place in Kuala Lumpur during a Christmas Open House event hosted by The King and Queen of Malaysia together with the deputy Prime Minister. Mabul island played host to our Smart Resort headquarters. Here, we stayed in very comfortable, basic wooden huts that were well-equipped with electrical sockets. To Natascia and I, that was even more important than having hot running water. One hut was reserved for the mobile editing station and immediately was labeled “the digital hut“. Here, we had all the computers and an incredible amount of chargers for all the batteries and adaptors and so on. At the end of each day, we digitized all the tapes to hard disk and transferred the hundreds of digital photographs to the iBook for photo retouching. To gain time, we decided not to log and capture each tape but to download the whole content and do the logging at a later stage. The Sony HDR camera works perfectly in tune with Final Cut, as each time you paused the recording on the camera, an individual clip appears in your bin in Final Cut. After the downloading, we made time for dinner before immediately getting started on logging and editing the footage. We used headphones, of course, so as not to disturb the well-deserved rest of our fellow divers.

Post-production
Once back in Dubai, we had a few days to finalize the documentary as it had to be shown to the public in a week’s time. We recorded some links with Ibrahim in his EDA office in order to enhance the continuity of the documentary and to better explain the connections between the scenes of the various locations. Most of the editing was already done on site. What was left was some color correction, which was performed using a Dual G5 with Final Cut Pro; we could have used the G4 PowerBook also for color correction but we needed extra processing power to cut down the rendering time. As we wanted to integrate some very interesting clips shot in DV, we used the same G5 to convert the foot-age into HDV format, which we imported into the timeline of our main Final Cut Studio project. The very last stage was the recording of the voice over, performed by Siobhan Leyden, and the final mix and sound design on a Pro tools HD station. An HD DVD was burnt using DVD studio Pro. As the projection was due to shown on an amazing Sony KDE50 plasma screen, I personally tested some samples of the final renders on the monitor to check the colour matches. The result was really impressive.

Conclusions
Final Cut Pro has been the perfect platform because it never crashes the host computer, even when it is a G4 processor handling a huge amount of HD material. In addition, its HDV native feature saved us a lot of time as we could play the clips in real time immediately after importing them on our timeline. On the next project, I would like to install Pro Tools LE on the traveling laptop so that I will literally be able to finalize the product before catching the flight back home to Dubai. Truly amazing.

SIDEBAR
Emirates Diving Association teams up with Tourism Malaysia on an environmental mission on the paradise island of Sipadan. Georgio Ungania and Natascia Radice discover Malaysia through High-Definition Video (HDV) and Final Cut Studio editing software.

by Giorgio Ungania

MySQL on Mac Part 3

We’re continuing the MySQL series on how to operate a MySQL installation on your Mac. In the first part (see the March issue of shuffle), we looked at logging into a MySQL database server running on a Mac, as well as how to see what databases are available, and how to create a database. In the second part (see the April issue of shuffle) we covered how to create tables and fields. Now, in the third and final part we will look at how to get data out of a database.

To get data out of database we use the Select-statement. It’s called putting a together a query which is an appropriate name because you’re essentially asking a question of the database and seeing what the answer will be. With a Select-statement you basically ask for some information from one or more tables in a database and you give some criteria for what information should be returned. For example, if we have a table called customer and we want all records from it, we type:

SELECT * FROM customer;

The star (“*”) means we want all fields (columns) returned. If the table has ten fields, we get all ten fields returned. Instead if we want just one field returned, let’s say the name-field, we type:

SELECT name FROM customer;

And we can also ask for a specific number of fields, like name and email, like this:

SELECT name, email FROM customer;

That’s how we choose which fields to return. Next, let’s look at how to select which records to return. Let’s say we want to find the customer with the id 5. Then we type:

SELECT * FROM customer WHERE id=5;

Or if we want to find any customer in Dubai that is of type hotel, then the query is:

SELECT * FROM customer WHERE city=”Dubai” AND type=”hotel”;

That’s a very quick introduction to Select-statements. There’s certainly much more to learn but all we wanted to accomplish is to give you a start. From here, if you want to learn more, there are plenty of good books, and many helpful web sites. You can of course also post on www.emiratesmac.com and ask for help.

Wrapping Up
That concludes our brief series on how to use MySQL on your Mac. We hope you can now go on and work with MySQL or some other SQL-variant on your Mac, and perhaps create databases for your own personal use. It may even be that with this as a basis you can create some dynamic web sites. Look out for a new series on PHP in future issues of shuffle. PHP paired with MySQL is arguably the most popular technology for developing dynamic web sites used on the internet today.

by Magnus Nystedt

Adobe Tutorial: Car Branding

If you’d like to groom your car in any photo from your image collection, you should create a visual on the computer first before spending heaps on printed sticky vinyl. Actually it is rather nice to try wrap any photos on your airplane picture, car, Burj Al-Arab perhaps just for the sake of experimenting. We shall use a Photoshop filter called Displace that needs some preparations such as a source grey and blurred image before applying it on our destination image. Also the filter need an exaggerated highlight and shadowy areas for distortion while neutral grey will not distort.

STEP ONE: Open beetle.psd document (www.emiratesmac.com/newsletter/resources/may2007/beetle.psd). From Image menu, choose Duplicate to duplicate current image. Convert new copied image into Grey color mode, Image > Mode > Grayscale then click on Discard button when prompted.

STEP TWO: From Image menu choose Adjustments > Levels, drag Highlight, Shadow, and midtone slider inward to exaggerate details or enter amount numbers as shown in the figure.

STEP THREE: Apply some blur, under Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, apply 2 pixels blur. then save the image under the name “Source Beetle” and make sure the Format is Photoshop, then close this blurry image.

STEP FOUR: Display back our original document Grey_Beetle, then open flowers.psd (www.emiratesmac.com/newsletter/resources/may2007/flowers.psd), use the move tool to drag flowers layer into the Beetle document while holding the Shift key as this will insure the flowers image is centered over the car, if it didn’t work, just visually move the flowers layer to cover the car completely.

STEP FIVE: Highlight the Flowers layer by clicking on it once, then from Filter menu, choose Distort > Displace. Change Horizontal and Vertical Scaling to 5, select Wrap Around under Undefined Areas within Displace filter dialogue window then click OK to prompt the Open window, locate the blurry image we named “Source Beetle” and hit Open button. You should see the flowers image has distortions already.

STEP SIX: Make sure the Flowers layer is targeted, choose Overlay from the Blending drop down list in the Layers Palette, and reduce opacity to 60%. You are able to see now how the flowers are following the contour lines of the Beetle.

STEP SEVEN: Duplicate Flowers layer by dragging it to the New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers Palette or from the Layer Menu select Duplicate Layer. Apply Hard Light from the blending modes list, and adjust opacity of this copied Flowers layer to be 85%.

STEP EIGHT: In order to clean up unwanted flowers from the windows, lights and tyers, I have saved a selection for you to use. Target each of the Flowers layers individually, and from the menu Select > Load Selection, and choose Channel: Beetle, then click OK. Once you see moving dots that looks like marching ants hit the backspace/delete button on your keyboard. Don’t forget to repeat this step for both Flowers layers. If you didn’t like the result because of too much distortion, you could always repeat Apply the Displace filter and play with the amount in each Horizontal and Vertical boxes.

by Zaid Al-Hilali

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