Better Display Hardware Coming to Entry-level Macs?

The video display chips that drive the displays of Intel-powered Mac minis, MacBooks, and the entry-level iMac are Intel's GMA950 "integrated graphics processor." Video performance of these Macs has proven to be quite poor, particularly doing 3-D graphics-intensive gaming. Some reports suggest that even 2-D video playback performance is affected on these models. I myself would have purchased two of these models by now had their 3-D performance not been so poor.

Peter Cohen of Macworld.com wrote on March 8, 2007 that Intel's GMA965 chip, currently shipping in Windows-based computers, has built-in "transform and lighting" hardware, though it has not yet been enabled for Windows (software drivers are apparently in the works). In a recent demo held by Intel, the GMA965 demonstrated respectable gaming performance with contemporary games.

Apple has made no announcement that they will use GMA965 chips. If they do, Apple's entry-level models will be even better values.

Update August 2007: Alas, the recent new models of MacBooks and Mac minis continue to use the GMA950. On a positive note, I've discovered that the GMA950-powered video of the first-gen Mac mini actually produces reasonable gaming performance for the less-demanding titles.

Add a Caching Clipboard to OS X

If your regular routine involves a lot of cutting and pasting of text,
try the free open-source utility Jumpcut. In the months I've been using it, it's changed my working habits significantly. Particularly if I'm writing email or posting to this blog and including a number of links, I'll just copy all the links I find interesting as I go, then paste them all in one later session.

Software-based Keyboard/Mouse Sharing

If you operate multiple computers concurrently on your desktop, and frequently switch between them, here is a free software-only solution to sharing a single keyboard and mouse between them. And it's really slick.

Synergy is cross-platform (Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, Mac OS X, Unix) software solution for sharing a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers. Unlike traditional hardware KVMs (keyboard/video/mouse switches), this scenario requires that you have a monitor dedicated to each computer, and that the computers are networked together.

The cool part is how Synergy is used: the user simply moves the cursor from monitor to monitor, and the keyboard works for whichever monitor the cursor is currently located. Synergy also automatically merges the clipboards of the systems (text-only for OS X), so users can cut-and-paste between computers transparently. Synergy also synchronizes the screen savers (except OS X) of the connected computers.

Using USB-to-Ethernet Adapters in OS X

If the Ethernet port of your OS X Macintosh has failed (the motherboard-based port in my mother-in-law's iMac was damaged by lightning), or you wish to run multiple wired Ethernet ports (i.e., to use an old Mac as a router), you may have wished to use one of the many USB adapters for wired Ethernet available. Alas, there have been few manufacturers of these adapters who provided drivers for Macintosh - I know of no current products which have OS X support.

Peter Sichel of Sustainable Softworks (developer of networking software products for Macintosh) and Daniel Sumorok have developed open-source drivers for Mac OS 10.3 and 10.4 which allow the use of many, if not most, commonly available "Windows-only" USB-to-Ethernet adapters. Read Peter's article and download the free drivers here.

Setting Up a Webcam in OS X

We began running a webcam many years ago to see how our pets were doing while we were away on vacation. Here are some fundamentals about setting up a webcam on Mac OS X.

CAMERAS

A webcam camera can be a number of possibilities (in no particular order):

Network Camera - This is a relatively recent type of product - wired cameras which plug into Ethernet patch cables which can be hundreds of feet long and wireless (802.11/WiFi) video cameras which (if you already have a wireless network) only require AC power, and can be placed anywhere they can hit your wireless network. Wired cameras area available for under $100 and wireless cameras start at under $200. If you've already got a wireless network, webcam software that *supports* the camera and you don't mind the expense, this is the easiest path to getting a camera. This page at the EvoCam webcam software site (more below) lists compatible network cameras.

USB Camera - Though inexpensive (as little as $30-40), these suffer from a number of drawbacks, chief among them a short (typically under 6 foot) USB cables, meaning that the camera is forced to be near the computer. USB extension cables up to 10 feet or so can get your camera as far as 16 feet away from your computer. You can buy _powered_ USB extensions which amplify the signal - but each 15 feet costs $35-40. These cameras won't perform well in low light, and will generally have a "normal" focal length lens - meaning that covering a wide area means having the camera far back from the subject.

FireWire Camera - Some webcam software (see below) supports DV cameras connected via FireWire, including iSights. Similar cable length issues to USB exist. I've seen 100-foot FireWire cables, but they cost $300 (FireWire specifications limit single cables to 4.5 meters - 15 feet).

FireWire Converter - This is an expensive solution, but if you already have one around, an analog-to-digital FireWire converter (such as the ADVC-50 from Canopus) allows you to connect an analog camera at the end of a very long conventional video cable. This is kind of overkill, but if it's something you already have or want...

USB Video Digitizer - For all the reasons I've already mentioned, I use this somewhat obscure solution - an "InterView Lite" USB video digitizer and USBVision for Mac OS X driver software. This is a hardware product from a now defunct company, sold now by EchoFX who wrote their own software to support it. Actually, I use their software to connect to an InterView Lite (purchased from someone else, I think) *and* an older Belkin USB video capture device (USBVision can drive many USB video devices, including USB cameras).

The two digitizers are plugged into one computer (our server, a 450MHz G4), and 50-foot video cables cross our house (through a wall, in one case) where they are connected to small low-light, high-resolution monochrome video cameras. These cameras have really come down in price in recent years - here's a typical example which advertises for $35 mail order (we've paid over twice as much for both of our non-illuminated cameras), and features built-in infrared illumination (which means you'll be able to see things relatively close to the camera without visible light).

If you have an old VHS camcorder or camera lying around and it has composite or S-video output, this can serve as a camera as well (we had an old full-sized video camera as our CatCam for almost a year), though it'll use far more power and be generally hard to discreetly position in your house.

SOFTWARE

I've used two pieces of webcam software, and reviewed perhaps a half-dozen over the years when seeking replacements. For many years I used Oculus, which had really nice features, but was never stable. On a ridiculous number of occasions I had to ask our cat-sitting friend to restart our server because Oculus had locked up.

Today I run EvoCam. I miss a few cool features of Oculus (automatic thumbnails, NOAA weather data overlays), but EvoCam also has a few tricks that Oculus didn't - especially live video, where it allows you to view live full-motion video (at very low frame rates - even over ADSL, it delivers 2fps at best). This is pretty exciting, to be able to see your webcam right now from anywhere in the world. This live video is viewable by any modern browser via Java technology, and doesn't require that the viewing computer have any special software installed. EvoCam has proven to be tremendously stable - running now for 10 months or so with no noticeable problems.

I've considered the kind of big project of having multiple X-10 (remote control over AC power lines) controlled cameras, switched remotely over the Internet via web page, feeding the live EvoCam stream. That means we could switch around our house to our cats' favorite six places and see who is where at any time. Geeky, fer sure.

As mentioned earlier, EvoCam supports all kinds of cameras (see their site), even supporting multiple cameras (we run two cameras all the time).

"Motion sensing" features in EvoCam and Oculus store images based on how much has changed in the frame. The webcams can also take periodic stills. But with motion sensing set up, we see only when our pets actually spent time in a particular location - which is exactly what we want to know.

WEB PAGE

There are a lot of variations possible here. I try to "tune" the motion-sensing so that in the 30 "recent" images on our CatCam page allow us to see something like most of a full day of activity at a glance. Oculus and EvoCam provide a way to retain recent images (actually renaming all the old images every time a new one is added). Super-simple pages included as examples with webcam software often only display one recent image.

EvoCam and Oculus also support archiving QuickTime movies of every image taken when motion is sensed.

COMPUTER

In order to host a webcam, you'll need a computer. I'm assuming you'll want that to be a Mac. This could be all kinds of things, but you want something that can run OS X. If you want a dedicated server, any old iMac would be just fine, though you can't turn off the CRT - a bit of power use you don't need. An old blue-and-white G3 or newer (I don't recommend trying to run OS X on a beige G3) would be a good web server. Of course, you can use any existing Mac you might have, as long as you're willing to let it run whenever you want the webcam to work.

There are actually computerless solutions to webcams - network cameras that upload to Internet ftp locations - but they don't allow you a lot of flexibility about how the site looks and works.

INTERNET SERVING

In order to view your webcam's images, you have basically two alternatives: 1) have the webcam upload images to a remote FTP space hosted by a private or public server (such as your ISP); or 2) serve the images directly from your home computer.

Sending images to a remote FTP server is less difficult than serving the files yourself. However, depending upon the amount of activity your webcam sees, this means your webcam may create a large amount of outbound traffic over your Internet connection. Not only does the image file need to be uploaded whenever the camera takes an image, but if you (like us) have a page with multiple previous webcam images, there will be a lot of traffic while the software renames all the previous files on the remote server. I did this years ago, but we've run our own server with our own domain name (see below) for years.

OS X has a built-in web server, the famous Unix-based Apache. So you don't need any other software to host web pages from an OS X Mac.

DOMAIN NAME

We've used two free services to maintain domain names with a dynamic IP ("dynamic IP" means that your broadband ISP might reassign your home's Internet address at any time - allowing them to have a smaller number of IP addresses than users). For years I've used a free service from DynDNS. This service uses a piece of software running on your Mac which informs the DynDNS servers what your current IP is. The software checks every few minutes and updates the DynDNS servers - this Domain Name Server (DNS) begins to propagate throughout the Internet. We've almost never had to wait to connect to our server because our IP had not been updated at the time we were making the connection attempt. And the process is transparent - ours has been running for several years without maintenance.

There's a bit more complication here (like there hasn't been enough already) - if you don't already have a "router" between your home LAN and your broadband connection (DSL/cable "modem"), you'll definitely want one to act as a firewall (you shouldn't be connected to the Internet without the protections of a router anyway). Then you'll need to set up the router to "forward" HTTP requests (by web browsers) to your home's domain name/IP to the right computer on your LAN.

A substantial collateral benefit of having a domain name is being able to communicate with your home computer(s) from anywhere in the world. Not only can you make HTTP connections with one computer's web server, but you can make AFP (Apple File-sharing Protocol), FTP, SSH, and a host of other kinds of connections to any of the computers on your home LAN (though each service can only be associated with *one* of the computers, you can have all the services on one, or a different service on each computer). So you can access files on a Mac at home from anywhere in the world. With Apple Remote Desktop, Netopia Timbuktu, or even *free* VNC software you can even remotely control your Mac from anywhere in the world.

EPILOGUE

With a small amount of effort, an old Mac can become a 24/7 webcam server so you can easily see the activities your family, pets, home or whatever is important to you.

Mac OS X Hints for an OS 9 User

Congrats on both the OS X Macs. As I've said many times, you won't regret it. We've pretty much never looked back since moving to OS X - and I waited a good 2 years before making the jump.

As I've also said, OS X reliability is fantastic. That's not to say that you won't have crashes, and it's still possible to have conflicts between, say, a piece of hardware and something in the OS. But if you are conservative about what bells and whistles you run (I'm definitely NOT), you probably won't encounter many issues. It's really incredible how different the computing experience *is* after OS 9 (and Windows 95, 98 and XP). I've probably said this before, but I manage 70 eMacs running OS X at [my wife's college lab], and I do literally *nothing* to maintain them. I only spend time when we're changing installed software or operating systems - I do NO troubleshooting or ongoing software maintenance - NONE. (Macs running OS 9 progressively degraded over time, even with users locked out of writing to the boot drives - users of Windows 95/98 will be familiar with this kind of fragility.)

You now have the option to be running Windows on your Intel mini, should you be so inclined - using either Apple's free Boot Camp solution or a commercial solution such as Parallels (unlike Boot Camp, which requires restarting the computer in either OS X or WinXP, Parallels allows the user to launch Windows applications while still running OS X). You'll still have to worry about viruses, worms, spyware and adware on the Windows partition, though. (NOTE: Installing Boot Camp requires formatting the hard drive for two logical partitions.)

I should also mention that now that you have two FireWire Macintoshes, you should absolutely know about "Target Disk Mode." By starting up either of your Macs while holding down the "T" key, that Macintosh will effectively become a FireWire hard drive for that session. The screen will display a solid blue background with a floating yellow FireWire logo, and you'll be able to read/write to/from a connected Mac. OS X also supports networking over FireWire - providing a faster-than-Gigabit Ethernet connection between two Macintoshes. Because either of those Macs can also "share" its Internet connection (which it has established via wired Ethernet, WiFi, or even modem), it's possible in an emergency for two FireWire Macs to share an available Internet connection as well.

This ability to use a Mac as a FireWire hard drive is also extremely useful in that it is very simple to "clone" one Mac to another. You can also clone a Mac to a FireWire hard drive, and boot from the FireWire hard drive - a fantastic utilitarian infrastructure. It means you can have your own "Mac" on a portable hard drive, and boot it on any other (compatible) Mac hardware. This is also an excellent technique for upgrading to a larger hard drive. (I recommend either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone bootable Macintosh volumes.)

Another random thought: you can remotely control one Mac from the other using free software. Download the open-source project Chicken of the VNC and put it on the controlling machine. On the machine to be controlled, in System Preferences:Sharing:Services turn "Apple Remote Desktop" ON, and in "Access Privileges," check "VNC viewers may control screen with password" and give it a good password. Make a note of that computer's "IP address" (in System Preferences:Network) and enter it and the password in Chicken of the VNC at the remote viewing computer.

I manage our mothers' Macs from 2700 miles away using this and similar technology - it's quite sluggish over consumer broadband connections, but much easier than flying round-trip.

Presentation Alternatives on OS X

A friend who used to work with me in live television production is a one-year Macintosh (a Mac mini G4) user. She has edited some ambitious projects in iMovie and created DVDs with iDVD. She emailed me this question:

This past weekend, my brother came over and I am going to try to help him with a work project. It might end up being like a power point presentation/ slide show, with music and we may record him reading the script for [announcer voice over].

So the unique part of their project was that it is essentially a slide show with continuous narration. The following was edited from my response:

WHAT KIND OF PRESENTATION, LIVE OR KIOSK?
Is the presentation NOT accompanying a live presenter (i.e., your brother)? Will it play unattended, like video? Will it play on a computer, or do you intend to play back on tape or DVD?

Assuming there's a live presenter, you'll need some kind of interactive control of the playback. This is what presentation software is made to do, and those solutions (following) would be more appropriate. It can be tricky to synchronize a voice track with pictures in presentation software, although they do have support to "time" presentations for a live speaker.

If it's really more like a "kiosk"-style unattended presentation, to be viewed as a "movie," and contained more complex elements than pages of text, I'd lean toward doing this as a video production. Presentation software (PowerPoint and Keynote, for example) can typically generate movies as an optional feature. But again, timing the transitions to the voice track might be tricky.

I just tried recording a narration within PowerPoint while watching an existing presentation. I narrated, and changed slides while I narrated. When I played back the slide show, PowerPoint truncated my narration at every slide transition, as though it were "rounding off" times to whole seconds. If i'd made a transition while talking, it just cut me off to start the next slide's narration. STUPID! Over the years, both Word and PowerPoint have gotten so rife with "helpful" features that it's nearly impossible to get what *I* want the programs to do. They just "automatically" make decisions like this one. Apple's Keynote (at least, not the somewhat earlier version I have) doesn't support recording narrations within the program, but allows you to drop audio files on each slide. This is also an awkward process for a fully narrated, self-contained presentation. So if you want something like a movie, make it with a video editor, but probably NOT iMovie (more below).

Does Mac have a power point program? And if so, what is it called? And would it already be on my mac?

PRESENTATION SOFTWARE
First of all, Microsoft PowerPoint is available for Macintosh (PowerPoint debuted as a Macintosh-only program in 1987 - the Windows version appeared in 1990). It's currently part of Microsoft Office for Mac 2004. You can buy it from Apple, but it's cheaper at Amazon. As the name implies, it's been a while since Microsoft updated this suite - but a "Universal Binary" version which will run on both PowerPC Macs (like yours) and the new Intel-powered Macs is due soon - I'd guess early 2007. You'll probably qualify for a free or inexpensive upgrade when it releases if you buy Office now. I've stopped using most of Microsoft Office, with the exception of Excel. I've never been a PowerPoint user and Word's just gotten stupid over the years. But (my wife) uses PowerPoint (one key feature keeps us from transitioning to Apple's Keynote - "drawing" over the presentation live while presenting) and has to work with and submit Word files with co-workers, so we keep current versions of Office. Her school district has some licensing arrangement (a clever part of Microsoft's Plan of Domination in which everyone eventually *has* to use Office - but see "OpenOffice.org" below for a solution to that) which allows us to buy Office for a token amount, so at least I don't have to gripe about paying for it.

Apple's presentation software is called Keynote, and it is sold as part of Apple's iWork software suite - along with Pages, a page-layout program. iWork costs $79 retail, but you could but it as a staff member of GDS at the educational price of $49. Both Keynote and Pages are very slick - you'll recognize interface elements from iMovie and iDVD, including a Media Browser that lets you peruse your iPhoto and iTunes libraries for images and sounds to include in your document. Keynote can import and export PowerPoint-compatible files, and it can save files it's own file format (with non-PowerPoint features).

AN OPEN-SOURCE OFFICE SUITE
You should also know about the open-source project OpenOffice.org. This elaborate and ongoing project maintains a cross-platform suite of programs that emulates the functionality of Microsoft Office. Users of just about every operating system in use today can download a free set of programs that are transparently compatible with Microsoft Office, both reading and writing Office files. It's not the easiest thing to install on a Mac, as it may require you to install the "X11 environment." This is actually a Unix GUI (Graphical User Interface - a way of representing files and directories with pretty icons - like the Mac OS or Windows). You may already have X11 installed if your computer came with OS 10.4 and not 10.3. Otherwise you'd have to install it from the OS 10.4 installer DVD. (If "X11" or "X11.app" is in your /Applications/Utilities folder, then you already have X11 installed.) OpenOffice can open and write PowerPoint presentations, so you can pass along a presentation you've made to a person with Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. (NOTE: even though files are compatible, there are always potential issues with fonts that you may have installed that others do NOT. Here's a web page with some links to lists of fonts common to different operating systems for use in PowerPoint presentations.)

Truly, just getting a real presentation program might be the easiest path, if the presentation is typical of a "PowerPoint" project: "slides" with intermittent graphics and mostly bulleted text. Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote or OpenOffice's "Impress" module will all do this.

I was thinking if we had the graphics or pictures, then I could just put them on the time line and cross dissolve between them in iMovie.

That's a legitimate solution, depending upon what the presentation needs to do. If you want to do that *without* real presentation software, and use video-editing tools, you'd probably want something other than iMovie (which has really poor text editing tools). (See next entry)

Postscript: She did end up doing the project in iMovie. It was the application with which she was most familiar, and (I didn't yet know) the projects was in fact a running narration to which still images with captions needed to be synchronized. This would be very awkward in presentation software, and (especially for both of us, who have been video editors) an appropriate strategy for a video editing application.

Question 2. OK, if I were going to build a graphic at the TV station. I would have a background. Then I would use the [$750K digital effects device] to shrink the video and place it in the lower left corner. Then I would add [text from a $150K character generator] in the upper right hand corner.

Is there a way to do this on my mac? Sorry, this is probably not a simple question.

MOVING UP FROM IMOVIE
Even though there are third-party add-on software tools that would allow you to do this kind of thing in iMovie, it probably doesn't make sense to spend money in this way. You can buy Apple's Final Cut Express HD for $149 educational ($299 retail). This is a subset of their Final Cut Pro HD video editing application (FCP is now only available as part of Final Cut Studio), designed for users who have production needs that exceed iMovie, and pretty much exactly what you'd want.

You already have models for what you'd like to do from working in a real television production environment - with Final Cut Express you'd be able to realize pretty much anything you'd have done at [our old TV station], and some things that were just impossible (like compositing dozens of layers of elements with no generational loss). It's probably not as *easy* to do things as at [the TV station], but it's more important that you know what you're trying to achieve - at least you'll know what you're looking for.

(Don't let the "HD" part scare you - iMovie, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro now all support the consumer HDV high-definition format, as well as its 16:9 aspect ratio, but they still work with the same DV format digital video and 4:3 aspect ratio in which you've already produced projects.)

Final Cut Studio is probably more than you'll want to tackle. It's more expensive ($699 educational, $1,299 retail), and its DVD Studio Pro and Motion applications have spectacularly steep learning curves. Motion won't even run on your Mac - we had to buy a meaner video card for our fastest Macintosh just to install it.

Final Cut Express does have a text tool, allowing you to create, position and manipulate text over time (using a keyframe paradigm). It's not perfect, but it's usable.


RASTER IMAGE EDITING
To *really* exercise control of the appearance of text with still images, one needs some kind of raster-image editor. The ubiquitous image-editing tool is Adobe Photoshop - but here again, this is an expensive application - typically around $600 retail. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a "light" version of Photoshop, and Amazon sells it for $72. A current $20 rebate knocks that down to $52.

OPEN SOURCE AGAIN
The open-source community has also provided a Photoshop replacement called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). Again, it requires the X11 app to run the Macintosh version of GIMP. GIMP (like Photoshop) is a very deep program, and the learning curve is steep. Also, GIMP has a rather un-Mac like interface, so that's another learning hurdle. But it's free, and very powerful.


CONCLUSIONS
If someone will be speaking live, and manually advancing through a presentation, you need either Microsoft Office or Apple Keynote (part of iWork).

If the project is self-contained and can run as a movie from a computer, VCR or DVD, I think the one thing you should do is buy Final Cut Express HD. You're probably wanting several other features this brings you (how about bluescreen/greenscreen?) that iMovie has not been able to do. There's a lot to learn, and it's not similar to iMovie, but I think you'll appreciate having better production tools.