Status-Q

Wordpress have, as is the mode du jour, released an iPhone/iTouch app which makes it easier to blog on the move. Or on the loo. If you can read this, it works. (The app, not the loo. No, don't worry, I'm not really there!)

It's a little flaky at the moment, but the concept is quite neat, except for the fact that you have to type on the little keyboard. Too bad it won't rotate into landscape mode...

One of the most useful components of Quicksilver is the Clipboard History feature. If you have the Clipboard plugin enabled, you can bring it up with your normal Quicksilver keystroke followed by Cmd-L, and it will show all the recent entries in your clipboard. You can choose how many entries you'd like it to store.

There are various things you can do with this: double-clicking or hitting return on one of the items will insert that entry at the current point, for example. I'm filling in some US tax forms for several past years and being able to have things like our fullnames, tax references, and our full home address just a couple of keystrokes away makes the repitition a lot less painful!

For a different way of using the Clipboard History facilities, have a look at Nick Santilli's handy screencast.

Axel Springer, the German publishing group, has announced that it is switching all of its 10,000 employees to Macs over the next five years.

More rejoicing in the Apple marketing department, one imagines...

I must be just the sort of customer Apple love, I think. Having had fun playing with iMovie, I long ago upgraded to Final Cut Express, and I'm a big fan of Aperture, their offering for those who need more than iPhoto.

This week I decided to splash out on Logic Studio, which is a substantial upgrade from GarageBand, and I'm looking forward to getting to grips with it. A key part of the decision was that it includes Soundtrack Pro which is an exceedingly powerful audio editor/mixer and has good facilities for creating video soundtracks. The package isn't cheap, but some of the individual components used to cost substantially more on their own in the not-too-distant past. And hey, who knows when I might have to mix a 5.1-surround soundtrack to my home movies! One thing was clear, though, I really needed to replace my miscellaneous cheap mic pre-amps, phantom power units etc with a better audio interface if I were to make the most of Logic.

The default manufacturer of such kit for amateurs like me is usually M-Audio - I have some other bits from them, and their Fasttrack Pro USB interface was recommended on Gear Media Tech.

But USB is almost always an inferior technology to Firewire, especially if you're concerned about latencies or the number of channels. It's something PC owners often have to live with, but Macs all have Firewire, so I thought about the M-Audio Firewire 410, which you can buy from the Apple Store or, at nearly half the price, from StudioSpares. However, as I read up on this, people seemed divided on whether M-Audio are good value for money, or just cheap, and in addition, they had taken a very long time coming up with Leopard drivers for the 410.

So in the end, I went for the Edirol FA-66, also available from Studiospares. (It doesn't need any drivers for Mac OS X.)

On my first quick experiments, I'm very pleased. It does everything I wanted and more. All I need now is some talent to go with it!

I've always had very little luck with speech recognition systems. I don't think my voice is that strange, but I've spent too much time on the phone trying to book flights and getting "I'm sorry I didn't understand that. Please say yes or no" repeatedly as I try everything to make the blasted machine understand one simple word. Ah well.

Still, people tell me that Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows is getting really quite usable now, but there hasn't been an equivalent package for the Mac. Until now, apparently.

MacSpeech Dictate (formerly iListen) has been rewritten to use the Dragon recognition engine, which is generally said to be the best on the market.

It's not too cheap at $200 (though the price does include a microphone), and there's no try-before-you-buy option, but if you want or need this, it might well be worth it.

The reviews on Amazon seem to suggest that people love it or hate it - if it works, the recognition quality is exceedingly good - some say even better than the Windows product - but if you want complex features, unusual vocabularies, or customer support from the company, it sounds as if it might be worth waiting. More here.

I think my iPod has ideas above its station.

I got a new car today. It's rather nice. And it has an iPod adaptor cable.

When I plugged the iPod into this gleaming tonne-and-a-half of throbbing sports-tuned German engineering, it said, "Accessory attached".

About a year ago I wrote about my experiments with getting a Sony PRS500 Reader talking to my Mac.

Quietly, over that time, it's been getting easier, as Kovid Goyal has turned his rather unexcitingly-named libprs500 from a basic command-line utility to a full-featured GUI application, which can do things like capture RSS feeds and format them for the Sony. It still has some quirks, but is well-worth checking out, and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

One of the most interesting technology developments of the last couple of weeks has, it seems to me, attracted very little attention. The BBC's iPlayer, which lets you watch most of the last week of BBC TV if you're in the UK, and a subset of it if you're elsewhere, received early criticism because it didn't work on anything but Windows.

Now at least some of it works on other platforms, but the latest one is the most interesting. It now works on the iPod Touch and iPhone. I now carry around in my shirt pocket something which gives me an eminently watchable archive of the last week's TV, as long as I'm in range of a wifi network. The iPod Touch is a great video player and now, for free, there's a huge amount of stuff available in a rather high-quality format.

Only a very few years ago, the idea of having any access to an archive like this would have seemed amazing. But having it on a beautiful slab a few millimetres thick is almost sci-fi. I just wish I had the time to watch any of it! But we do live in most interesting times...

For Apple laptop users, Patrick Stein's SmartSleep looks like a useful little gizmo...

If you use Aperture and you like to organise your keywords hierarchically using the Keywords HUD, then you may find this page at Bagelturf useful, especially the section about moving keywords to the top level. I couldn't work out how to get keywords which were in folders back to the top level - it turned out to be because I had too many keywords visible. This hint gives you a workaround, and it's generally useful to remember that search box at the top.

My list of keywords was getting quite long, and I often had duplicates at various places in the hierarchy - 'Seattle' came under 'USA > Washington State', for example, but it also came under 'iPhoto' because many of my photos were originally tagged there. Typing the first few letters of 'Seattle' into the search box allowed me to see both and merge them easily.

This is the solution to another problem, by the way - that of getting the same keyword twice at the same level with different capitalisation. Drag the one you want to change into a different level of the hierarchy - for example into a temporary folder. Then rename it to the right capitalisation, and drag it back to where you want it, using the search box to make life easier if necessary. Aperture will ask if you want to merge the two keywords.

You don't even need to create a temporary folder, in fact, you can drag the one you want to change inside the correct one - if that doesn't confuse you - rename the inner one to match, and then drag it to the level above to merge with its parent.

Hope that's useful for someone!