My Tablet

With 2 weeks missing for Apple Tablet presentation, speculation is ramping up.
As smart commentators point out, there is a major problem with such a device:
How would you use it, from bare usability stand point?

Either it’s on resting on a flat surface, and you have unacceptable ergonomics, with your hands hiding the screen and your neck bent at an angle that your EHS department won’t permit.
Or you’re holding it in your hands on front of you. But how do you use the touch screen if your fingers are behind the tablet?

Apple will for sure come with the solution, that will feel so natural and simple that all speculations like mine will look a bit stupid two week from now.

My take on the Tablet:
Why not make the back side of the tablet a touch sensitive surface and show the fingers as an overlay of the user interface?

Fingers that are merely resting on the surface would show a small, transparent “finger print” while the active finger would be more visible, for example with a black circle representing the pressure applied.
This would enable multi finger gestures, and give natural feedback, both visual and tactile.

Such a device with a screen on the front side and a tactile surface on the back side would work well in the two natural positions:
- Held with both hands, mid-air
- Held with both hands, but with hands resting on a table. This one provides a nice 45 degrees angle, and it’s comfortable for long sessions (like watching a movie).

I am not excluding that the screen would also be tactile.

What about the keyboard?
It’s hard to imagine interacting with a software keyboard operated from behind the screen, but why not? With the appropriate visual feedback, it seems plausible.

Such a device layout has another advantage: the touch surface doesn’t need to be exactly as big as the screen, it can be dimensioned to work well with standard hands size.

If ever it comes true, remember that you’ve read it here first!

RIP CubeMovie

Today I have decided to pull the plug from CubeMovie HD, the small “rotating-cube” slideshow application that debuted in 2004.
On Snow Leopard, CubeMovie is completely broken and fixing it would require a complete overhaul, maybe even a rewrite.

Customers that have purchased the program in the last 6 months (June 1st onwards) are entitled to get a refund. Just email to supportcw@mac.com asking for it.

As the father of the creature, let me do the obituary:
CubeMovie is my first relevant program. With over 400 copies sold and $5000 in sales, I cannot call it a success but it still in the median of what a piece of shareware sells. (Fortunately, my more recent products were designed with more ambition and experience, and are doing better…)

CubeMovie is the first program I ever sold. This encouraged me to continue and write more programs. SimpleMovieX was born six months after CubeMovie, and showed enough potential to grow a business upon: I remember paying a fairly expensive PowerBook G4 in 2004 with CubeMovie and SimpleMovieX sales.

Finally, what sets CubeMovie apart is a little known fact: Under the hood, CubeMovie is a ClockWorks application. The whole program is made of around 400 interconnected “vignettes”, that define the flow of events. CubeMovie was first and foremost written as a “demo” of ClockWorks, a programming environment. But ClockWorks was a failure and CubeMovie was the unexpected debris of the shipwreck.

The picture below is the code that manages the texturing of the 6 faces of the cube: from top to bottom, the 6 picture views of the User Interface that link to 6 parameters objects that link to 6 OpenGL display lists.

The whole source of CubeMovie can be seen here (it’s a pre 1.0 version, the final 4.0.2 version graph was far more complex with over 400 vignettes, but I don’t have a picture in my archives, sorry).

Recover videos in damaged disks and cards

For Mac users, I have already covered this topic a few months ago, but now I have a better tool in development that will be ready before Xmas. I will unveil it very soon.

For Windows users, I have recently found a good technique to create a disk image from the damaged disk or card, which is the first step towards recovery of footage.
Note that this can also be useful to Mac users if the disk is not visible in the Finder, but is visible on a Windows PC.

In a nutshell, we use a small utility called dd for Windows that is able to read the raw data of a disk. (From now on, I will just use the word disk, and it can refer to a hard disk, a memory card or a USB drive)

Under the premise that the disk is readable, ie Windows detects it when you plug the disk or insert the card in the reader, “dd for Windows” should be able to create a file with about the size of the disk.

Here is the process, step by step:

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip

This program is free and distributed under GPL license. For more information, refer to the product page.

dd --list

And you will get a list of the devices connected to your computer.
Here is what I get for example:

rawwrite dd for windows version 0.5.
Written by John Newbigin
This program is covered by the GPL. See copying.txt for details
Win32 Available Volume Information
\\.\Volume{aef46cf9-3e3d-11de-b8c6-806d6172696f}\
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume3
fixed media
Mounted on \\.\c:

\\.\Volume{aef46cf8-3e3d-11de-b8c6-806d6172696f}\
link to \\?\Device\CdRom0
CD-ROM
Mounted on \\.\d:

\\.\Volume{6f41f4b2-d11a-11de-b318-001d4f88486c}\
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DP(1)0-0+5
removeable media
Mounted on \\.\f:

Don’t be afraid, it’s just a list of the devices connected to your computer.
Here the interesting device is the F:\ volume described as removeable media: this is the card that I want to recover. Take note of the corresponding volume name:
\\.\Volume{6f41f4b2-d11a-11de-b318-001d4f88486c}

This volume name starting with \\.\Volume{ and ending with } will be used in step #6.

dd if=\\.\Volume{6f41f4b2-d11a-11de-b318-001d4f88486c} of=c:\usb.img bs=1M

This command creates a file called c:\usb.img that is a carbon-copy of the damaged disk.
The operation can take a long time. For 1GB, it can take one minute or more. For 120GB, it will take several hours.

Note that you can monitor the size of the c:\usb.img file as it grows from 0 to the size of the disk: It will give you an idea of the progress.

What do I do with the .img file?
Now if everything went fine, you should have a .img with a size similar to the disk capacity.
If the disk still contains footage, the footage must now be inside this file also, and we can do a diagnostic of the file and hopefully, repair it.

For Mac users, Diagnostic and Repair have already been covered in a previous post.
For Windows users, the .img file can now be used to create an extract that will be uploaded to Aero Quartet. This is explained in the Movie Repair Guide in the Windows page.

SimpleMovieX and Snow Leopard (update)

Update 9 October: SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 is out!

Version 3.9.2 that runs on Snow Leopard is just a few hours away!

I will have missed the end-of-month deadline by a couple of days, because I had underestimated the changes that Snow Leopard is bringing. Let’s review the main points:

64 bit:
SimpleMovieX cannot compile in 64 bit because legacy QuickTime APIs are not available (only Cocoa QTKit).
For 64-bit apps using legacy QuickTime, a 32-bit process is automatically generated by the OS. Could be what happens in the next major release of SimpleMovieX.
The bottom line is that SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 will ship as a 32-bit Universal binary. Not a big deal.

Intel versus PowerPC:
Snow Leopard only runs on Intel Macs. Older PowerPC models can still run SimpleMovieX from Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard).
A small problem arises for Snow Leopard users: Some components of SimpleMovieX are still PowerPC binaries, and they will probably not migrate to Intel anytime soon. In Leopard, Rosetta, the PowerPC emulation tool, would transparently take care of this. But Rosetta is not installed by default in Snow Leopard.
Therefore, Snow Leopard users that haven’t installed Rosetta will be invited by SimpleMovieX to do so, otherwise MPEG functionality will not work. I’m referring to MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 here. MPEG4 WILL work.

Supported Operating Systems:
SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 will continue supporting Mac OS X 10.4.11 and higher. There is no intention to drop 10.4 support soon, at least until new major version 4.0 comes out.

Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL:
SimpleMovieX will take advantage of those technologies passively: GCD and OpenCL will not make SimpleMovieX perform better per se, but the OS and QuickTime can be faster and SimpleMovieX will benefit.
SimpleMovieX will require a major rewrite before it can use them directly. I believe that version 4, a paid upgrade due next year, should really take advantage of the new “state of art”.

QuickTime X:
Here Apple has done a good job confusing everybody. QuickTime X refers to a new player/editor application and also to a new framework.
The application is very limited in editing functionality. If you need anything beyond basic trimming, you will need to install QuickTime 7 application or better, use SimpleMovieX.
Framework-wise, Snow Leopard comes by default with both QuickTime X and QuickTime 7.
SimpleMovieX does not take advantage of the new framework, because of very strong limitations as of 10.6 release. QuickTime X is a work in progress that will need, I predict, 5 years or more to supplant good’ol QuickTime 7.
The bottom line for SimpleMovieX users: It is not necessary to install QuickTime 7 app in Snow Leopard (or to have a QTPro key) to make SimpleMovieX work.

Conclusion: SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 will be equivalent to earlier versions in features and performance. Snow Leopard lays the foundation for the next ten years on the Mac platform, but profound changes are needed in SimpleMovieX to take advantage of it. Version 4.0, a major release due next year, will bring the promise of those amazing new technologies.