Fist things first, I am most defiantly getting one. I think Apple have done an amazing job with this upgrade, adding some great new features. The retina display may seem insignificant, but there is nothing worse than looking at a rubbish display when trying to watch a movie or play doodle jump!

The camera, I have always seen phone camera’s as a less of a camera more of a connivence; however if the images Apple showed are what can really be achieved with the new camera I can see this as a permeant point and shoot replacement, Glenn Wolsey wrote an article on this. Along with the greatly improved camera the video quality has gone HD. When ever you want to record a funny video you tend to do it on your phone, it looks crappy to be kind. That is why you buy a Flip, but not more if you can shoot HD from your phone and edit it in iMovie video blogging will have a whole new dimension.

As much as Apple are excited about FaceTime, I really can’t see people full using it for another 3 or so years. The limitation of having to be on WiFi is just to great even tho when at home most people will be.

My problem is my contract expires in February and last time I checked Vodafone would upgrade me to anything but an iPhone, which is not what I wanted to hear.

I have never understood peoples fascination with lost. It seems to me like it could be a great program and would be amazing to watch, but I feel thew story went on far to long and I never felt the initial pull to watch it. I think it is also one of those programs if you miss an episode then you are screwed a bit like Flashforward.

I also get this feeling with 24, they just want to continue the success and so have dragged out the story line just a bit too long. One thing I do admire from these US dramas is the quality, I think they have really raised the bar on production quality for TV. Shows like Lost, 24, Heroes, Fringe and Flashforward all have a really high standard of production. This really makes the stories so much more believable and immersive. In the UK the best channel for Drama’s like these has to be Sky1 and they show most of the good US dramas like Lost, 24, Bones, Fringe and Lie to Me.

The new series of Doctor Who starts tonight, in the UK on BBC1 at 18:20. I am a big Doctor Who fan and have been avidly watching all the latest trailers and reading all the news from the recently redesigned Doctor Who site. For Matt Smiths introduction as the Eleventh Doctor the BBC have recently revamped the Doctor Who site and Logo.

And I have to say I am quite a fan the new logo, it is rather clever in my opinion. The D and W form the shape of the police box that Doctor Who is well known for. Not only that but the typography is rather nice too, it has a more mechanical appearance to it which I think suits Doctor Who.

The old site was quite image heavy and as you can image was therefore covered in compression artifacts. The new site takes advantage of all the new web standards by having transparencies and some really well though out use of typography. The new site has a very grid like layout and the whole site seems to have a better quality to it.

While mentioning the new site on Twitter Jonathan Davies @ed me saying:

@rmaspero Don’t you find the font size a little large and the lack of continuity between pages odd (on the DW site)?

But I find the larger font size helps focus on the content and tends to offer a better hierarchy system for titles and sub titles. I also feel there is continuity between the pages as similar design elements are used all over the place. The site seems to have been made up of a set of basic bricks which to me makes it feel consistent, but to others I can see how they ever changing arrangement and size of the bricks could make if feel incoherent.

Recently there was an event called Tough Guy, in basic terms 8000 people queue up to do an extreme assault course. The course usually consists of electric fences, ice cold water, underwater tunnels, barbed wire, mud and a long run. My school usually has a few competitors (the guys in orange, black and white kit/face paint), last year one of my teachers won the race and I can tell you it is not easy and in my opinion fun. I took my camera of course and instead of trying to do some of my more arty shots I tried to go for the more photojournalistic shots and I would love to have some feedback. Apple also recently announced Aperture 3 which I bought, and so leads me on to the point of this post. This post is going to be a sort of review of Aperture 3 and instead of going back through all my old photos I am going to use the photos from Tough Guy and apply some of the new tricks in Aperture 3 on them to see how well they perform in real life.

Aperture 3 is said to have 200 new features but really how many of those feature will one use and how many of them are even worth my time? Well I am going to try and help answer that question.

Brushes

This is a feature similar to what Lightroom has had for ages and one I have been waiting for. Apple handle the idea of affecting certain areas very well with out complicating it with layers. In fact all you have to do to affect a select area is click the settings of the adjustment you wish to paint on and click paint in or paint away. You can do paint in almost every adjustment you get plus there are some new adjustments like skin smoothing which is one of my favourites and has huge potential for real life usage.

The skin smoothing has been really effective in this picture in making him look a lot younger.

Here I use brushes to reduce the saturation of the background so she popped out more.

Faces

This is a feature we have already seen in iPhoto and is great to see it in Aperture. Using keywords to tag an image is great but really time consuming and slow however Apertures face recognition is rather good and makes it a load quicker to group photos of the same person. I have used the faces feature to help me when I was making a calendar. We didn’t have any photos of my brother, faces made it much easier and quicker to find them and add them in.

Places

Again we have already seen this in iPhoto. It is a great idea and I am sure will be really useful when more cameras have GPS built in, but very few do and this is a bit of a downside. GPS units cost around £100 at the moment and most people don’t have them and I feel this feature has no practical purpose unless you have shelled out for a GPS unit, which is unlikely.

Presets

Most presets tend to be alright but never actually come in handy. However when using Aperture 3 I have found it really useful to use them to help you get an idea of what you can do to an image. I use them as a base and then adjust to suit the image itself. They offer some great effects and are super easy to use with their little pop out preview. Have you ever shot a load of photos then realised that the white balance is off on all of them or they are all too dark and need lightening up, this is where the presets really come into their own. Upon import you can apply presets to all the images fixing them and saving you hours of going through and adjusting all of them.

Here I used the punch preset as a base and worked off it.

Curves

Curves are powerful stuff and have been missing from Aperture. (As a little side note we actually had a little lesson on curves in Physics recently which was quite funny as most people struggle with the way they work.) As you would expect they offer you great control over your image.

Web Publishing

The web publishing links to Flickr and Facebook are a great idea but I doubt most people buying Aperture are going to be uploading to Facebook. Flickr on the other hand I personally prefer to use Photonic for uploading my images as it makes it super easy to add the pictures to multiple groups, but not everyone has Photonic and so I guess it could a be a useful feature.

UI

There are a couple subtle tweaks to the UI, that make it just that much nicer to use. The grey is slightly lighter and the icons bigger and brighter, this gives Aperture a much more friendly feel.

The Problems

As much as I like Aperture 3 it has some faults, and some major ones at that. It is painfully slow, much slower than its predecessor. It is also a complete memory hog when you first use it. When you first open it and import all your photos it will spend hours looking for faces and processing all the thumbnails. This is painfully slow and means you can’t do anything on your machine. When I had the trial version installed it was prone to crashes, especially if my computer went to sleep while it was open, however I have found this to disappear after installing the boxed version. I mention this sleep thing because lots of people seem to be having the same problem and from what I can work out it is due to a feature in newer macs that basically hibernates your computer if there is a power loss and so saves what you were doing in the RAM on to the hard drive; for me this has resulted in almost 20GB sleep image files that fill up my hard drive. Don’t fret they disappear after you have been up and running for a bit. This problem has again disappeared for me once I installed the boxed copy of Aperture 3, but I can’t speak for others. Something worth noting if you have lots of Aperture plugins, if they have not been updated to work with 64 bit then you will have to relaunch Aperture 3 just to use them.

Conclusion

Aperture 3 has some great features that are well worth the upgrade and make a huge difference in how you edit your photos, but as with any release it is not without its faults. Most of the major problems I experienced simply resolved themselves after I installed the boxed copy I bought, it may have just been a problem with the trial version of Aperture Apple were offering. Loads of the new features are actually useable instead of being just there for show. I have attached a gallery with some of my favourite images from Tough Guy.

Initial Opinion

I was initially very disappointed in Apple for announcing what I was myself calling a “large iPhone that can’t even phone”. I saw no market for the iPad, I just could not see anyone buying it. You really can’t use an iPad unless you already have a computer (you need to be able to sync it) and so I thought why in the hell are people calling it a tablet computer, when it most clearly is not one.

The Good

However since then I have come round to the iPad a bit more. It has a great UI and from what I have seen and heard it works wonderfully in your hand. When I started to think about the kind of people at would use an iPad. I really could only see one possible answer, and that was the kind of people that use Netbooks. When Netbooks first came out I did a review of the Asus EEE PC and one of the major problems it had was the input devices i.e. a keyboards and trackpad, they were just not practical on such a small device. When Netbooks first came out most ran their own version of Linux, but nowadays we see most of them running Windows. The main reason for this is the lack of functionality and applications for the linux based versions. This is not a problem with the iPad as it already has thousands of apps ready to run sitting in the App store. The more I Think about it, it really is what Netbooks should have been. Finally the biggest surprise of all was the pricing; the top of the line only costing $829 (£530 roughly), putting it in perfect contention with other Netbooks.

The Bad

Sorry if this bit sounds like a rant but Apple left out some major stuff. First off why is there no camera? Considering most Netbooks are used for Skyping (and other AIM clients that support video), you would have thought a camera was an obvious one. Next on my list is the lack of Flash, Apple claim this is the best web surfing experience out there, but I ask how can it be if you can’t see anything done in flash? John Gruber of Daring fireball wrote a very interesting piece about this subject, which I suggest you check out. What really gets my goat is that people are calling it a tablet computer when it is clearly not a computer at all; even Steve Jobs calls it an iPod (29:40).

And that is a little bit of an overview of the
iPods hardware

It has no multi tasking and no standard interfaces such as USB ports, so if your friends shows up with a keynote on a memory stick and you want to put it on to your iPad you’ll need a computer; in fact if you want to put anything on your iPad you will need a computer. Apple also seem to be keenly advertising the iBooks function, but what they forget to mention is that at the moment it is US only.

The Ugly

In this case I think the beautiful might be more appropriate. There is no doubt that Jonathan Ive and his team have done a great job designing the iPad. Physically the iPad is slim and familiar. The UI is out standing and brings some of the nicest physical aspect of having a address book and a book in ones hand in to the digital realm. The contextual menus are well integrated and work seamlessly with the larger screen.

Final Opinion

My final thoughts after a bit of contemplation are that of contentment. I think it is a great start but as with any first generation device things are missing. Also I feel the hype didn’t help, people were expecting a fully fledged tablet computer and what they really got was a tablet iPod. I feel the iPad is for people who have a main computer, but might occasionally need a Netbook.