Archive for June, 2010

WordCamp Vancouver 2010

/ June 21, 2010 / Uncategorized / 1 Comment

Earlier this month, over a hundred WordPress enthusiasts headed down to the Museum of Vancouver on one of the first summer days of the season to spend the day learning about WordPress. I was one of the organizers and we were all amazed at how smoothly everything went.

@digitalkvan talking about socializing your blog

I gave a talk about using MAMP/WAMP for offline WordPress development. My slide deck was pretty short due to the live demo nature of the topic but you can view the PDF if you’re so inclined.

Justin Carlson recorded the sessions for us (head over to his site for the rest of them – some of them may even appear on WordPress.tv soon) so if you want to watch me get nerdy for about 1/2 an hour, hit play:

One of my tasks as a WordCamp organizer was to sort out internet access for the attendees. Thanks to Miranda & Melanie at Rogers Communications, I was able to borrow a few of their Rocket Internet Hubs which Dale Mugford & I setup in the various rooms at the MOV.

Some extra Internet access for WordCampYVR this weekend

I’m still surprised how well these units performed considering the number of users sharing them (some of whom were streaming World Cup games). Dale connected them to a couple Airport Extremes along with some Airport Express extenders so that we could have one big wifi net and I didn’t hear anyone have issues with the internet so I’m grateful for Roger’s helping us out in a big way….having solid internet is a common issue at many conferences that we didn’t have.

As with all the previous WordCamps I’ve attended, I had a great time and met a bunch of new people that seemed to enjoy our little conference. Next year when talk starts up again, I’ll remember those folks I met and not think about all the effort that goes into pulling off a conference like this which usually seems too daunting.

Thanks to all our sponsors that helped make the event affordable and the speakers that volunteered their time to make it the success that it was.

Here's @uncleweed closing out #wcyvr10

Special thanks to my pal, Dave Olson, who not only brought down the house at the end of WordCamp, also put me up the night before and made sure I got back from our speakers dinner, um, safely. It seems that whenever we get together, we have some amazing adventures.

See you next year!

Third time the charm?

/ June 8, 2010 / Mobile, Technology / 11 Comments

Yesterday, at the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple unveiled the latest version of the iPhone:

You should watch the design video if you haven’t already seen it…it’s quite the update that I of course am looking forward to getting.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, we still don’t know when the new model will be available for Canadians.

It comes out in the US (and a few other countries) on June 24 with 18 more countries by the end of July and to everyone by the end of September. Most people are expecting this means Canada will get it in July…but there hasn’t been anything specific that says or implies this.(Canada will get it in July – thanks Allen!) All the Canadian carriers have updated their websites with few details other than ‘coming soon’ or promises of more information in the ‘coming weeks’.

Considering this is the third model available in Canada, third year in a row, which is now supported and sold by at least 3 major cellular carriers, I’m left wondering if it’s going to be an upgrade nightmare like it has been in the past.

I know Apple controls the marketing and distribution very tightly so my belief is that the carriers really don’t know (or can’t say) anything until the last moment. AT&T has already begun notifying it’s customers via a text message that lets them know how much it will cost to upgrade to the newest model.

This is smart. It lets each customer know exactly, in advance, if they are eligible to upgrade and how much it will cost – including any additional fees. This isn’t a randomly received text that looks like a marketing pitch, the customer can request a confirmation via SMS by dialing a number and they’ll get a response immediately.

I just hope the Canadian carriers are paying attention and don’t let us down a third time.

My 3GS upgrade process was very frustrating thanks to conflicting account information (Rogers’ system said I was eligible for an upgrade when I called in but the dealer computer system said I wasn’t when I tried to pick up the device) that took many hours of wasted time to resolve followed by a similar process when my wife wanted to upgrade – both situations required intervention at a higher level with help from Rogers social media team whom I engaged via Twitter to get resolution. They were very helpful but it shouldn’t have had to get to that point…and I know I’m not the only one as many friends encountered the same situation and had to spend time wading through the system.

I’m also left wondering what will happen to the data plans in Canada. AT&T has been changing around their offerings (lowering the included allotment for minimal decrease in price). Will the Canadian providers do the same now that we could start chewing through those 6gb plans now that our phones can record bandwidth chomping HD video with a one click button to uploads to YouTube?

I guess we’ll see in the ‘coming weeks’.

Update (June 15, 2010): Looks like something I was hoping for (2nd last paragraph) has happened…Today, Apple updated the Canadian Online iPhone Store (and presumably other countries) to indicate that they will be selling fully unlocked iPhones if you order them from Apple directly:

Of course, these unlocked phones will come at a premium but for those that are contract adverse, travel internationally frequently or just want freedom to move between carriers this is very welcome news. No longer will the cat and mouse game for unlockers matter to people that buy their iPhones this way.

iPad Camera Kit + CameraBag

/ June 5, 2010 / Photography, Reviews / 6 Comments

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been playing with the extremely hard to find iPad Camera Connection Kit and photos taken with my various cameras.

iPad SD card reader

It’s a simple set of two dock connecting devices, one for SD cards and the other for USB, not unlike a USB SD card reader I have (in the middle):
iPad Camera Kit

When you first connect one of the adapters to the iPad, it automatically launches the Photos app and displays a new tab called ‘Camera’ and begins to load image thumbnail previews:
iPad Camera Kit

You’ll also notice that it there is also a ‘Places’ tab – I didn’t have this tab before connecting the camera kit and it plots all the geotagged photos on the iPad on a map:
iPad Camera Kit

Once the previews are loaded, you can select which photos to import or import all of them:
iPad Camera Kit

Once the import is done, you can then choose to keep or delete the photos:
iPad Camera Kit

The photos are now available in your camera roll in the ‘All imported’ album with the most recently imported batch in a ‘last import’ album. Any videos in your imports will also now be playable, as long as they are in the correct codec/format that the iPad can understand. I found that videos shot with my cameras varied but the files, while not playable, would be playable when I synced the iPad back to a computer, on the computer.

A side benefit of the video support, especially when travelling, is that you can load up a huge SD card with iPad playable movies and just import the ones you want. Once you watch them, delete and load more. It saves the steps of loading them into iTunes (assuming you made/ripped them yourself – DRM’d/rented movies won’t work this way) and having to allocate space for them during syncing. This also means you may not really need that 64GB iPad since you can literally just save a gig or two for movies and add/remove as necessary. This would have been handy during my trip to Hawaii but I didn’t have the camera kit yet.

From here, you can simply view and email your photos like normal. That’s pretty much all there is to it. But I’d like to be able to apply some post processing to some of the photos and have found that CameraBag for iPad is the most interesting app currently out. I first wrote about CameraBag for iPhone two years ago and have been very impressed with the new version for the iPad.

Once CameraBag is launched, you can select your camera roll to import photos via the top left icon:
CameraBag iPad

CameraBag iPad

Using the options on the bottom right, you can process the original photo in any of the preset modes:
CameraBag iPad

as well, you can mix and match the borders and crops as you’d like or choose ‘Vary’ for a random effect combination:
CameraBag iPad

The settings popup lets you choose the size of the saved image as well as modify the list of filter options:
CameraBag iPad

I’m pretty happy with the results of this super portable combination:

Hawaii 2010

Forensic Tweetup

Forensic Tweetup

Forensic Tweetup

Hawaii 2010

Hawaii 2010 (processed)

If you’re into photography and have an iPad, you’ll definitely want to pick up a camera kit…it even supports RAW files. Too bad it doesn’t work with the current iPhone 3GS – it would be pretty awesome to be able to upload straight off the camera to the internet via just the iPhone.

Maybe the next OS update (or hardware revision expected to be announced next week) will allow this.