Some quickies for you today.

Nowhereland vs. “the evil spammers”

The comments are still frozen. I will go the Movabletype 3 way, it’s just easier that way. I have a test prototype up and running but I still have to figure out which plugins to add and the anti-spam strategy I’ll use (by the way, thanks to Pedro for pointing out this excellent piece of advice, and just in time too!). Then I’ll have to deal with the templates to get the look that I already have for my site and I’ll be done.

There are some upsides to this process, not the least of one being that the guys over at PT geekBlogs have been asking me for an ATOM feed from my blog to integrate there for some time now and I haven’t had time to do that yet. Now with MT3’s template for ATOM feeds I’ll get it for free. Real soon now guys, thanks for being patient! ;-)

iLife

Take pictures.

Process them the way you want to.

Import them into iPhoto.

Make a slide show of them in iMovie. Make it interesting with some animation, some nice captions, and so on.

Get some great music from iTunes and stick it in the movie.

Open up iDVD and master a DVD with one or more of these movies.

Burn the DVD.

And now for the fun part: even though you know right from the start that this is going to work, there’s something quite magical about the moment when you take your first ever DVD, load it into your dumb living-room DVD player and voilá —just like every other DVD you’ve ever bought. There is animation in the menus, there are menus. The movies are flawless. It just works! And the effort spent in it was mainly directed at choosing the pictures, ordering them, choosing the music… In other words, the time was mainly spent with the content, not with the technology. This just rocks my world!

Podcast mania

I’ve been listening to some podcasts lately to get a feel for the whole thing.

I know I’m a latecomer to this trend but I just couldn’t be bothered with it until NetNewsWire started sending the casts directly into my iTunes. What can I say, I’m lazy…

My reaction to it is rather curious in fact: while I tend to like to read more personal blogs and less “formal” ones, in the podcast universe I feel quite diferently. I find the IT Conversations podcast to be a very good listening experience but things like the Loft405 or the Evil Genius Chronicles are best read than listened to. I really don’t know why that is. Funny, heh?

The keynote

Well, everyone is talking about it so why not join the crowd?

I’m watching the keynote now and I am at about a quarter of it (just about to go into the iLife bit which, quite frankly is the part I’m most interested in) and because real life took over yesterday (condo meeting the whole evening… sheesh!) I really am not aware of what went down. Apart from some major highlights which Melo couldn’t help himself calling me about, that is.

So until now this is basically what I think of it:

• The Mac mini is a good entry level Mac… But it is awfully limited. Still it will most surely be a big seller;
• Spotlight rocks and may fundamentally change the way I use the computer. Not the app by itself but the way it is integrated with the OS and the way it is present in every app. A very good one there;
• The iPod shuffle will probably sell lots and lots of units but apart from it being magically integrated with iTunes it is really nothing that special; ;-)
• Dashboard sucks. It sure is nice eyecandy but not much more than that. Maybe when more plugins start to appear it will get more interesting but for now I just can’t see it fly with me;
• HD spreading is a “good think“(tm);
• Many-way video conferencing is technically very well achieved by iChat (at least judging from the demo) but I still believe the concept is not good. At this demo people knew they were there to be part of a demo and should make it look good but still what little they talked, they did it all over each other. It is just hard to do an efficient multi-way video-conf, i guess…
• Oh and Mail.app’s new found love of pictures if cute.

This weekend I was just this close to finally buying iView Media Pro, because iPhoto just doesn’t cut it for me, but then I decided to test it out some more (I still want to try out some things). Now I find out that this decision might have been a lucky break because I’m told I will be amazed with iPhoto.

Well, let’s see, back to the show then.