serious about camo

Publishing to YouTube from the iPhone 3GS = WIN.

I got my new iPhone on Friday. I have been smitten with my gen1 iPhone since forever, and I skipped the 3G upgrade because I was content ... adding 3G + GPS just wasn't enough to make me shift. But with the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade  & the full set of newness coming down with the 3GS, I knew it was time.

I'll save the commentary on the majority of the awesomeness at this time, but suffice it to say I am very impressed. One thing I would like to take time to note, however, is something I think is going to be transformative: the ability to create, edit and upload video directly to YouTube.

Shoot a video

From the camera, you now have the ability to swap between stills and video. Switch the toggle and you can get down to bidness.

Trim it to make it just right

Holding down on the filmstrip at the top of the playback screen allows you to zoom in on particular frames and crop the video down to what you'd actually like to deploy.

Send it

When you are looking at the video, you can share it just like you would a picture. It's a bit of an overused icon, but the thing that looks like the "Forward" is what you use to send it to YouTube.

Give it metadata & upload it

Add a title, description, tags, etc. That's it. Then with one more click your video gets compressed and pushed up to YouTube!

Wow

I have never seen video authoring as something likely to go totally mainstream. Even services like Seesmic and 12seconds, which make it bonehead-easy to author video content and spread it to people that care are too complicated, and the publishing mechanism is so often tethered to the computer. 

With this update, Apple's made it as easy as I've ever seen to create video and send it out to the universe. The video below is not particularly interesting; I saw the JD NASCAR sitting in the parking lot of a local store, and went over and grabbed a little video of what it looks like up close. Not being a big NASCAR fan, this is not my idea of pr0n. But the simple act of shooting, editing and publishing to YouTube in seconds blows my mind.  

Pimping out your Facebook Page

This is a really great video with Caitlin O'Farrell (Facebook's consumer marketing manager). There are some great tips here for brands to focus on. One of the tips in it directs you to Facebook for Influencers. This is the de facto "resource for how to build your presence on Facebook and engage your audience."

A superhot tip: 200px x 600px is the most optimized size for a brand's profile picture. It creates a vertical profile image that stretches down the left column.

On top of that, I highly recommend About Face: A free whitepaper on Facebook Pages by The Advance Guard. The Advance Guard does an excellent job of going section by section through the new Facebook Pages and giving you really clear actionable ways to get your Page on, with illustrative examples of best practices in the wild.

Scoble interviewing Fred Wilson, talking the 2010 web

This is a great informal chat between Fred Wilson and Robert Scoble.

It's an inspiring set of thoughts on where we are going.

Awesome App Store Hyperwall

I wish I'd been there, because this visualization of the App Store is pretty friggin' cool. What you see below is just a subset of the actual spectacle: twenty 30" cinema displays with a chromatic array of App Store icons. As apps are purchased on the App Store, the icon pulsates on these displays. It's a pretty fantastic effect, but it also is a fairly profound affect, as the number of purchases is at a pretty awesome tempo!

 

iPhone app Brushes used to create the New Yorker cover

Artist Jorgé Colombo used the iPhone app Brushes to create the June 1, 2009 cover of the New Yorker.

Per the New York Times:

Mr. Colombo bought his iPhone in February, and the $4.99 Brushes application soon after, and said the portability and accessibility of the medium appealed to him. He began the scene by beginning with the buildings’ structure, then layering on the taxis, neon lights, hot-dog stand and people. (A video of the process is available at newyorker.com beginning on Monday.)

 

Here's one of the incredible things: Steve Sprang, developer of the Brushes app, has built a companion app for the OSX desktop, Brushes Viewer. Brushes Viewer allows you to import images that you've created in Brushes on the iPhone and turn them into videos! 

It's pretty amazing to watch Jorgé as he paints.

Starbucks Window

Here are a couple of videos of drawings I made. They aren't particularly good drawings, but now that I've started using Brushes Viewer, I feel really inspired to get into working on them.

Fade

Skullage

Übergeekin with the Google Тетрис logo

Google commemorates the 25th birthday of Tetris with this awesome logo! 

From Wikipedia:

Tetris (Russian: Тетрис) is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. It was created on June 6, 1984,^[1] while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow.^[2] He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix "tetra-"—as all of the game's pieces (known as Tetrominoes) contain four segments—and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.^[3][4]

Working on a project in WPF, started this little Stencil

Here's a little Omnigraffle stencil project I started. My idea is to build out a nice little library of common controls that won't require custom development when using any of the standard WPF control libraries.

Please post ideas & comments to the project page, here. If you want to check in project updates, please do!