video

How and probably why Apple’s streaming event failed so badly

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My interest is in how a bad presentation – the video stream was so very poor though the actual talk was good – can affect the audience’s experience. I’m interested because I present and I’ve had things go wrong. Just never on this scale.

The short answer is that it wasn’t how many people tried to watch it at the same time. It was the fancy page that Apple put it on.

Unlike the last live stream Apple did, this time around Apple decided to add some JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) code to the apple.com page which added an interactive element on the bottom showing tweets about the event. As a result, this was causing the page to make refresh calls every few milliseconds. By Apple making the decision to add the JSON code, it made the apple.com website un-cachable. By contrast, Apple usually has Akamai caching the page for their live events but this time around there would have been no way for Akamai to have done that, which causes a huge impact on the performance when it comes to loading the page and the stream. And since Apple embeds their video directly in the web page, any performance problems in the page also impacts the video. Akamai didn’t return my call asking for more details, but looking at the code shows there was no way Akamai could have cached it. This is also one of the reasons why when I tried to load the Apple live event page on my iPad, it would make Safari quit. That’s a problem with the code on the page, not with the video.

Inside Apple’s Live Event Stream Failure, And Why It Happened: It Wasn’t A Capacity Issue – Dan Rayburn, Streaming Media Blog (9 September 2014)

Elders react to Oculus Rift

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It makes a change from all those stories about teenagers reacting sarcastically to old technology: this is a video about older people reacting confusedly to new technology.

Notice that I said older, not old. And ‘elder’ is in the title of the video.

This has nothing to do with how I happen to be old enough that I have only just about got the faintest notion what Oculus Rift is and not quite as much interest:

Streaming yourself writing – madness or genius?

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I lean toward madness. But that’s just in general life. Over this specific question, I truly do not know. I do know that I won’t be doing this. But maybe it has more benefits than it might seem. This is a video of a fella named Ross Pruden. It’s a video of him writing. For hours.

Actually, for four hours. He says at the top that it’s a marathon five-hour writing session but, face it, he could’ve been pretty sure nobody would watch to the end to find out. Let the man have a lunch break, why don’t you?

There’s a lot of piddling about at the top but then it is a straight locked-off shot of this man typing. You can’t see what he’s writing but there is a clock, a word count and a total number of stories he’s written. All these numbers go up just about exactly as excitingly as football scores change on Ceefax. I’m honestly torn over what I’d watch more of: at least football has – no, I’m stuck for anything football has. Fortunately, there are other choices than football or this, but before you too race off to ANYTHING else, do take a peek.

Take a peek to see if I’m kidding. I’m not, but you need to know. And then have a think: is he doing this because it’s a brutally persistent form of accountability? To save you digging into this as I have, you should know that Pruden has a bit of a mission on: he was trying to raise Kickstarter funds for a writing project. Is it a spoiler if I tell you he succeeded? Take a look at his Kickstarter page.

But maybe, just maybe, we could live stream ourselves writing. You and I. Maybe it would be competing for the world’s most boring Skype call – a hotly contested trophy – or maybe it would really, really, really make us write.

You go first.

After Pruden:

Video: how different To Do apps make you work

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There is nothing like trying out a To Do app for yourself and before settling on OmniFocus. But there is this:

Robert McGinley Myers of the Anxious Machines site has made a video showing the major To Do apps in action and talking about what is and isn’t satisfactory about them. I’m shocked how many of these I’ve used and recognise.

Weekend viewing: The Adobe Illustrator story

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I have a love/like relationship with Adobe. Sometimes the firm is irritating – Adobe Flash just seemed to get more irksome every minute – but I think Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are miraculous.

Usually I forget that I ever worked in computers. Certainly it is a jolt to be reminded that I was ever a programmer – I used to yearn to include dramatic plot twists in my software, I was never going to be happy staying there – but I even forget that I wrote extensively for computing magazines. But sometimes, just sometimes I’m so really glad I did. Because while I don’t think I ever wrote about Adobe products much, I was in the trade as this company came along and made the most astonishing impact on all of us.

You might find a book or a magazine or a newspaper that wasn’t designed in Adobe InDesign, it is just about possible. But you cannot find anything that didn’t go through Adobe Photoshop. Cannot. This one company touches everything we read and through that it touches every one of us.

About twelve years ago I had a really good time reading Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story Hardcover by Pamela Pfiffner (UK edition, US edition). All the news I knew from my years in the computing press plus the story behind it, I was riveted. Slightly narked at how 100% pro-Adobe it all is and if had been published later than 2002 it might have had to have more gristle in with the positive meat. But it was a deeply interesting story.

And now there’s a video. This is specifically about Adobe Illustrator which is actually the Adobe program I know the least well, but I was riveted. I’m assuming it was produced for the 25th anniversary of Illustrator back in 2012 but I only saw it today thanks to The Loop.

The video is 20 minutes long and I’d have watched an hour without noticing:

I should say, Adobe products are all available on the official site here.

Productivity porn

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Sometimes I am such a man. Wait, not like that: I mean productivity porn in the way one means property porn, a shall-we-say overt interest in a video for things other than its artistic value. But I will watch videos of how to use software. I will watch YouTube videos reviewing hardware or software that I’m considering – even though every single video by every single body begins “Wassup, guys?” and I want to slit someone’s wrists.

But this is such a new low that I had to share it with you. I was looking up a thing on YouTube, it was for work, honest, and I found a video called Inbox Processing with David Allen.

Now, David Allen is a clever bloke. He wrote Getting Things Done (UK edition, US edition), the book that has become a cult called GTD and which I promise you is so smart that it has helped me and I credit him a lot on my own book, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition). My problem with Allen is that I feel he’s more a corporate guy than a writer, a creator. His book could flow a bit better, if you see what I mean.

He is, though, definitely clever and I thought this was a video about how he handles the eleventy-billion emails he must get every day. That was worth a look. I’ve just been away and come back to a full inbox which took me some hours to get back down to nothing and right now I’ll take any advice to get that done faster or avoid needing to do it at all.

This is not that story.

This is the story of how David Allen, GTD guru organises his actual, physical inbox. The metal inbox on his desk. He puts things in and he takes things out.

Now watch how that is padded out to 5’44”.