When Marketing People Go Amok By Esther Schindler Honest, we understand. It's a marketing person's job to make a presentation sound exciting and relevant as well as informational. But the TechEd presentation titles are, quite literally, beyond audience comprehension. ...Read More »

Beginners Guide to NAB By Ko Maruyama If you're planning to attend the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in a couple of weeks, you've probably already signed up and are beginning to receive emails and notices daily. The emails probably have all kinds of information regarding the various conferences that will be held, some on satellite technology, others on HD delivery specifications. But you probably haven't received any notices from NAB to wear comfortable shoes. ...Read More »

What’s Hush-Hush Marketing? By Naseem Javed There are millions of very expensive, well-designed websites all over the globe. Most have a lot of information to offer with great graphic illustrations, supportive explanations about their relevant experiences and capabilities with upfront personalities. But in a very large majority of cases, what is missing is the proof about who really are the people behind the site: the owners, the management, the staff and their true particulars. ...Read More »

Rumblings Underfoot By Kevin Schmitt Well, WWDC 2004 has come and gone, and with it, another chance for the faithful to fill up on the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid. And while our respective tummies are sloshingly full of Aluminum Displays and Tiger goodness, the real news that came out of the conference may just be what wasn't explicitly shown rather than what made it into the Stevenote. And since reading the Apple tea leaves is always good wholesome fun, I definitely feel some of the ol' rampant speculation coming on. ...Read More »

Help! It's A Flash Killer! By Kevin Schmitt The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of news and rumors about Flash, with the funny thing being that surprisingly little of it actually had anything to actually do with the Macromedia product itself. The long and short of this recent Flash flurry is that a lot of it points, either directly or indirectly, to the emergence of yet another "Flash Killer," this time with our fine friends in Redmond driving the bus. ...Read More »

There and Back Once More By Dave Nagel Well, as far as I can tell, I've made it back from the 2003 NAB convention with at least half of my mental and physical faculties still in tact. While I may have left a large quantity of my ankle skin, brain cells, bodily unguents and money behind in Las Vegas, I have nevertheless returned to Southern California enriched with buffet-style nutrients, cheap memorabilia and profound optimism for the future of the Macintosh creative production industry. ...Read More »

Apple Brings Out the Big Guns at NAB By Dave Nagel Macintosh creative professionals have clearly been anxious about Apple's presence at the 2003 convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, hoping for at least some inkling of movement in Apple's professional lineup. With announcements of full-version updates and significant enhancements to the company's full range of professional-level offerings--Shake, Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, not to mention the previous weeks' announcements of updates to Logic Audio--the company did not disappoint. ...Read More »

Performance Preferred By Dave Nagel Let's face it: Software development, for the most part, isn't all that it can be. Recently Adobe inadvertently underscored this problem when it posted an article on its site (using data taken from benchmark studies conducted by DMN's own Charlie White), showing how a single-processor 3.06 GHz Dell Precision Workstation dramatically outperformed a similarly equipped dual-processor 1.25 GHz Macintosh G4 at rendering compositions in After Effects 5.5. So what's the problem? Software that isn't written to take advantage of the hardware. That's a big problem. ...Read More »

The Accidental Switcher By Kevin Schmitt Man, I sure do love my Flash MX. I find myself using it to some extent in each and every interactive project I do, and it's even creeping its way into my motion graphics workflow on video projects as the straight-up QuickTime-friendly animation tool it certainly is capable of being. There's only one little, nagging problem. I'm finding that the more time I spend in Flash MX, the less time I'm spending on a Mac. ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: All Rights Reserved By Dave Nagel When I was young, I wanted more than anything to become some kind of artist when I grew up. Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, writer, musician: It didn't matter, as long as I could be involved somehow with the creative process. But there was a problem with this dream, in that it conflicted with another one of my ambitions: to become a wealthy and powerful tyrant capable of destroying lives and stifling the creativity of others, while somehow also acting as a shill for corporations and government. But how could I mesh these seemingly conflicting goals? ...Read More »

Analysis: After the Keynote By Dave Nagel With Steve Jobs's annual keynote address out of the way, it's pretty safe to say that the major announcements coming out of the Macworld SF 2003 conference have now been made. Not that I can take the rest of the week off or anything, but you know what I mean. The "big news"--the stuff we've been waiting to hear for the last few months--has been made. And it's now time to compare Apple's offerings against expectations. ...Read More »

Tool of the Trade By Paul Li A couple of decades ago, the architect’s “tool of the trade” involved the use of T-squares and triangles. When architects began using a “parallel ruler” or a “drafting machine”, he was then considered as a “high tech” architect. In addition, the pencil was the only tool that allowed the Architect to communicate his design ideas onto paper for construction. ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: The Viable Notebook, Phase 2 By Dave Nagel In the long-ago, far-away epoch before the advent of DV and FireWire, notebook computers were good for one thing: showing your friends and colleagues that you had enough money to afford one. Those of us wizened enough to remember all the way back to, say, the 1990s recall (as best we can in our senility) machines that could run little more than word processing programs, though many of us certainly did try to integrate them into our professional work. (Believe it or not, I was an editor putting out a weekly print magazine on a PowerBook Duo 210. It didn't last long ... the Duo, that is.) ...Read More »

Prodigal Mac: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times By Kevin Schmitt Folks, I'm tanned, I'm rested, and I'm ready. (Translation: my usually butt-white Irish skin is a lovely late-summer pink, I've been lazy, and Dave Nagel was about to hand me my rear end on a shiny silver platter garnished with a lovely sprig of parsley if I didn't get him something to publish soon.) I hope everyone out there in Mac-land is doing about the same, because if this summer has been any indication, the next year or so should be a very interesting one for the professional end of the Mac market. ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: Obsolete My Eye By Dave Nagel There's a fallacious line of reasoning that says that the faster a machine is, the better. We've been witness, of late, to new benchmark studies showing that current-generation AMD and Intel chips are faster than the current-generation chips found in Macintosh computers in real-world software tests running After Effects and Photoshop, not just clock speed. And this has led some to conclude that Windows-based PCs are, therefore, better machines and that the Mac is now obsolete. Wrong. ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: Wait for It.... By Dave Nagel So did you hear the big news? Me neither. As far as I could tell, just about everything Steve Jobs talked about at this morning's keynote address at Macworld started with a lowercase "i"--from the new iMac and iPod to iTunes 3, iSync and iCal--and that's bad news for professional users. But I'm not going to come down hard on Apple this time around. Why? ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: Acquire and Conquer By Dave Nagel If you were in any doubt about Apple's direction in the past, you can now be pretty certain now where things are heading. With the acquisition of Emagic yesterday, Apple made its plans completely clear for the Macintosh platform: total domination of the creative market. ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: Copyrighting the Future By Dave Nagel For most, the issue of intellectual property rights is just a distant abstraction, and probably a dry subject to boot. But for our industry, the issue is at the core of everything we do. It drives our value as content creators--whether in print, on the radio, in film and video or on the Web--and it affects the financial value of our work well after the work is created. ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: Copy That By Dave Nagel You may be aware that CDs encoded with Sony's key2audio copy protection scheme are designed not to work on computers and may even prevent you from ejecting the disc once it's inserted into your Mac. You might have also read of late that this super-duper CD copy protection scheme has been cracked by somebody using nothing more than a felt-tip pen to overwrite the copy protection data. What does this go to show? ...Read More »

Talkin' Smack: Dead & Buried By Dave Nagel Is Mac OS 9 dead? According to Steve Jobs, it is. At the Worldwide Developers Conference May 6, Jobs showed keynote attendees a Mac OS 9 box inside a coffin and proclaimed "the passing of OS 9." Feeling sad about it? I'm not. ...Read More »