I started thinking and thought it would be cool to have a setup that would allow people to see their snaps rights away, without having to go around to the camera itself. With a DSLR that supports remote control from a laptop, that is fairly easy to set up, but as it turned out, my cameras don’t support remote control over USB. So I started looking into alternatives and soon hit on the idea of using an EyeFi card and my iPad. (A few weeks after I started planning our photo booth, a story popped up on Engadget about a similar, albeit more professional, setup.)

What you’ll need

• A digital camera with remote shutter release (I used the Panasonic GF-1 with a cheap wireless remote shutter release from eBay)
• An EyeFi SD card in the camera (make sure it’s a newer EyeFi card with support for “direct mode”)
• An iPad connected to the EyeFi network running the free EyeFi app
• A tall tripod
• A table or stand of some kind for the iPad
• (optional) A frame, backdrop or props of some kind for guests to pose with

Camera, remote shutter, iPad and EyeFi card

The photo booth setup – the iPad is just off to the side on a table

One of the snaps from the photo booth

Other Tips

I had been on the lookout for the Panasonic 20mm prime lens, as it’s considered to be one of the best Micro Four-Third lenses out there. When I spotted a package deal that offered the 20mm lens with the GF-1, I couldn’t resist. Although both the GF-1 and E-PL1 have both been succeeded by newer models, I thought I’d share my impressions after using the GF-1 for about two weeks.

Advantage GF-1

• Autofocus lamp
• Build quality
• Screen resolution
• Jog wheel
• Custom settings dial
• Remote shutter

The GF-1 had a substantially higher retail price than the E-PL1, so its superior build quality is to be expected. While the E-PL1 can certainly survive a bump or two, it does feel quite plasticky and cheap when compared with the GF-1, which has a metal body and rock-solid switches.

The screen resolution on the GF-1 is higher than that of the E-PL1, which loooks very grainy in low light. And speaking of low light, none of the Olympus M4/3 cameras have a focus-assist lamp (that annoying orange lamp you’ll find on every cheap point and shoot camera). This means that they are terrible at focusing in low light situations whereas the GF-1, which does have a focus-assist lamp, has no problems at all. I have no idea why Olympus refuses to add an AF assist feature to their M4/3 cameras, but after a few weeks with the GF-1, I really do miss it on the E-PL1.

The other features are nice to have, but wouldn’t necessarily convince me to get one over the other – although the remote shutter feature will come in handy this summer, where I plan on rigging up an iPad photo-booth contraption (like this one) at our wedding.

Advantage E-PL1

• In-body image stabilisation
• Slightly smaller & cheaper
• Bounce flash
• Better grip
• More accessory options (external audio)

Part of the attraction of the M4/3 cameras are the large number of cheap “legacy” lenses you can use on them with appropriate adapters. Old Nikon, Konica and numerous other old 35mm lenses can be bought cheaply on eBay and used with a M4/3 camera. The sensor size is well suited for them and the old lenses offer great optical quality at bargain prices (provided you’re willing to focus manually).

Panasonic’s M4/3 cameras forego a built-in image stabilisation feature, as Panasonic prefers to use in-lens stabilisation instead.  The E-PL1 however has a sensor stabilisation feature, that will work with any lens – even old legacy lenses. This is quite useful to have, particularly when using longer focal lengths or when shooting at low light.

The E-PL1 also has a slightly better grip to it and its built-in flash can be pointed to the ceiling or just above your subject, allowing you to avoid overly bright direct flash in your images.

It is also often said that Olympus cameras produce nicer JPEGs that require less post-processing – something which I am also keen to avoid for casual shots, if it can be helped. So far, I would tend to agree that the colours and white balance in my E-PL1 shots are usually better than the GF-1, where I’m still experimenting with different settings and options.

Conclusion

Both cameras have their merit and I haven’t yet been able to make up my mind which one I want to keep.

The GF-1 is certainly more versatile, particularly in low-light settings, but to really get the most out of the body you may want to to invest in Panasonic’s more expensive M4/3 lenses with in-lens stabilization. The camera also feels much more solid and nicer to use as a whole.

The E-PL1 has a certain cheap and cheerful charm to it: the design and construction are certainly never going to win any prizes and its quirky menu and buttons don’t exactly inspire confidence. But after using it for half a year, I can attest to its ruggedness and it’s a really solid camera that delivers great shots every time you take it out – provided you don’t need fast focusing in low-light situations. It’s also hard to beat on a budget.

As the name implies, I hope to turn the site into a useful resource for all of us in that kind of role, so for interview & articles about supporting and testing OS X and iOS apps, head on over to wesupportsoftware.com.

The long-rumoured Mac App Store has finally been announced and developers have started to post their reactions and opinions. So far, everyone seems cautiously optimistic and despite some concerns and understandable misgivings about handing over 30% of application revenue to Apple, there have only been a few developers who have categorically rejected the Mac App Store.

So how will the Mac App Store really impact developers? The answer depends on what type of developer you’re talking to and what kind of products they sell. These three groups come to mind:

The lone Mac Developer

These guys are going to love the App Store. Until now, they’ve had to take care of their own marketing, sales, licensing, online store, support, etc, all in addition to writing their apps. Being on the App Store won’t magically make these additional jobs go away, but it remove some of pressure to do all of these simultaneously.

Write an app, upload it to the App Store and you’ll be able to start selling it immediately – no credit card handling, license processing, marketing effort required.

Verdict: The App Store is a good thing for independent Mac developers and will allow them to focus on their core development activities.

Mid-sized Software Companies

There aren’t many mid-sized companies out there that focus exclusively on making Macintosh software, but there are more than you might think. OmniGroup, RealMacSoftware, Rogue Amoeba, equinux, Panic… the list is fairly long and has bee steadily growing these last few years. These companies typically make 5-10 software titles and have dedicated staff for design, marketing, sales, support and other activities.

Having dedicated staff to take care of all that stuff allows these companies to push out more products than a lone Mac developer could.

These companies may have previously relied on the traditional base of Mac users, but may have found it difficult to reach the growing number of switchers. These new Mac users don’t read Macworld, have never heard of TUAW and don’t normally buy software for their computer. But these new users have gotten into the habit of purchasing iOS apps from the App Store and are likely to continue that habit in the Mac App Store. So overall, the Mac App Store should allow all developers to reach a far larger potential audience.

The challenge for the mid-sized Mac software makers will be competing for attention alongside hundreds of smaller Mac developers. Brand recognition or positive reviews don’t matter as much in the App Store, where the all-important Top 25 lists dictate discoverability.

Verdict: The App Store will require many mid-sized developers to adjust their marketing and sales strategies. While they have typically mainly marketed their products to traditional Mac users, the App Store has a far greater variety of users that can’t be reached through traditional Macintosh marketing channels.

Software Giants

Only a few of these really spring to mind: Microsoft, Adobe and Filemaker and perhaps one or two other companies with more than 250 people working predominantly on Macintosh software.

These companies are large enough to get by without addressing the Mac App Store juggernaut and quite a few pundits have suggested they will ignore it entirely, as Apple’s policies are too restrictive.

However, I do have to question the reasoning to a certain degree: even if you have the distribution channel, brand recognition and products that your customers need, it still seems to make sense to make it as easy for customers to get your products as possible.

Apple clearly intends to sell iWork through the Mac App Store, so I don’t think Microsoft can afford to risk users ditching Office in favour of Apple’s alternative. I expect to see Microsoft selling standalone versions of all the Office apps on the App Store by next year.

Adobe will most likely not be able to sell their CS Suite of products without giving up their licensing and copy protection schemes. But it’s very likely we’ll see their consumer-orientated apps such as Photoshop Express and Lightroom on the App Store in the near future.

Verdict: Like the mid-sized Mac developers, large developers will have to adapt their sales and marketing strategies to the realities of the App Store. They may choose to ignore it, but given the reach the App Store will presumably have, they may not be able to ignore it for long.

A good thing?

The Mac App Store will finally allow Mac developers to sell their applications to the millions of new Mac switchers that they haven’t been able to reach via the traditional Mac software sales channels. But access to all of those new users will come at a price: The Mac App Store will attract thousands of iOS developers looking to make a quick buck and the App Store makes it fairly difficult for quality apps to get noticed. Any apps that fall outside of Apple’s rules will find it difficult to attract users used to the convenience of 1-click shopping and developers will also need to deal with Apple’s 30% cut and the price pressures that are common in the aggressive App Store market.

But the Mac App Store will get more users buying software, increasing the pie for everyone, which can ultimately only be a good thing.

But just how similar is the nano’s multi-touch interface when compared with the real deal? Let’s look at some of the typical actions you might want to do:

As you can see, some of the most important actions use different multi-touch gestures on the iPod nano then they do on real iOS devices. If Apple sees the nano as the device that will introduce people to multi-touch, it seems like a curious decision to not unify the gestures across all multi-touch platforms.

Tap and hold to get back to the menu screen looks like a particularly annoying gesture for such an important command: not only does it force you to find an area on the tiny screen that doesn’t trigger another function, it also requires a slight delay, which means you won’t know if you’ve hit an empty space until you wait the second or two to see if the gesture is going to work. In contrast, the iPhone’s home button is extremely responsive and even novice users immediately grasp that a single press will instantly put them back on the home screen.

You can see what I mean in this engadget video, where Ross Miller occasionally struggles to get back to the home screen:

Apple clearly sees multi-touch as the new mouse and keyboard, but using different gestures for the same basic tasks strikes me as the equivalent of suddenly reprogramming a users mouse buttons to launch exposé.
I’m sure these discrepancies are not going to be a major issue for anyone upgrading from an iPod nano to an iPhone or iPad though. The interface looks good and that will probably be enough to ensure Apple sells millions this holiday season. Whether a multi-touch interface on such a tiny screen proves to be practical in everyday use (I wonder how the actors in the commercial are changing songs without being able to see the screen?), is something we’ll presumably find out when the first reviews start to trickle in next week.

Think I’m full of shit? Buy the new iPod nano at Amazon.com.
“Golly, he’s right!?” Treat yourself to a new iPod touch at Amazon.com instead.

Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Mail – we all get more links to articles and webpages nowadays than ever before. I would often find myself coming across an interesting article, but would lose track of it in a mess of tabs, unless I read it right away.

Bookmaking is the most obvious option, but you risk cluttering your useful bookmarks with lots of items you’ll only look at once.  So how can you organise your reading? Here’s the system I use…

One-hit wonders

If I’m skimming Twitter (using Twitter for iPhone or Echofon on the Mac) or my RSS feeds (using Reeder app on my iPhone or NetNewsWire on the Mac), I probably will only read the linked items once.

But if I haven’t got the time right away to fully immerse myself in the article, I send anything that catch my eye to Instapaper, using the handy Instapaper bookmarklet. This service will store the URL for you, until you’re ready to read the full article. The nice thing about Instapaper is that most Twitter clients and RSS readers now have “Send to instapaper” functionality built-in. You can either browse stored articles via the website, or use one of the many Instapaper clients available for several devices, including Amazon’s Kindle.

Then, whenever I have a slot of time set aside for reading, I head over to Instapaper and go through the articles. Anything that’s been read is archived, unless I know I’ll what to reference it at some point later – which brings me to…

Reference Material

These are the tutorials, how-to’s, cheat-sheets and other million useful sites that the internet seems to churn out daily. If I know it’s a topic I might need to look-up later at some point, these types of links get sent to my Delicious account, where they are tagged and can be easily looked up when I need them. This helps me to save time doing research on a project or subject later, and helps solve “if I could only find that one site”-anguish.

Essentials

Any website I find myself using daily eventually gets added to my Safari Bookmarks bar (I don’t bother with the “non-bar” bookmarks). Alternatively, if it’s a project-specfic URL, it might get added to a VoodooPad document for later reference.

That’s basically the way I do most of my online reading – I’d be interested to hear the apps and services you guys use!

If you play guitar, you’ve probably tried the various tab and chord sites out there. I recently discovered Chordie.com and it has quickly become my favourite.

One thing I often do is look up chords for songs I’m listening to in iTunes. I do it so often that I decided to put together a little script to make it a bit easier to do.

Head on over to my Projects page to download Search Chordie and to find out how to use it.

Download Search Chordie

Search Chordie is based on Search Wikipedia by the fantastic Doug Adams – check out his other iTunes scripts at DougScripts.com.

Thanks also to Chordie.com – if you play the guitar, you’re going to love this fantastic resource.

• Consumers that don’t own a DSLR see these new cameras as an attractive compromise offering DSLR quality with a consumer-friendly interface and lower cost
• Prosumers that already own a DSLR see them as a great alternative to their bulky DSLRs that they can take out and about

Which models are on the market?

Until now, Olympus and Panasonic have been the only two companies offering cameras in this space, so they have generally been referred to as “Micro Four-Thirds” cameras – after the joint standard those two companies established together.

However, Sony have recently announced their “Alpha Nex” series, which uses a larger APS-C sized sensor, that should give the Micro four-thirds competitors a run for their money.

Is it a DSLR? Is it a Micro Four-Thirds? No, it’s…

With Sony entering the fray, a new term is needed to describe the cameras within this category. In the interest of keeping things simple, I’m just going to refer to them as “Micro DSLRs“.

Latest Developments

So what has happened since the release of the original Olympus E-P1 that kicked everything off?

• Olympus have followed up with the overpriced E-P2 and the lower-end E-PL1
• Panasonic’s GF1 has been established itself as geek’s camera of choice
• Sony have dialed their shrinking machine to eleven and introduced the tiny Alpha Nex-3 and Alpha Nex-5 models

If you’re in the market, it’s probably worth waiting until the new Sony models are released in July, but it’s definitely turning into an interesting year for Micro DSLR fans.

I should have a chance to take a look at a few of these new models in the upcoming months, so stay tuned.

But OS X has gone through a lot of changes since Transmit 3 was first introduced and the app is starting to show its age. Enter Transmit 4!

This latest update adds a completely new user interface, innovative new features like Transmit Disk as well as a slew of customisation options. I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester for version 4, so I’ve had a few weeks to play with the new version – here are some of my thoughts.

New UI

Panic is know for their sleek user interface design and attention to detail and Transmit 4 is no exception. First off, the biggest change of them all: A NEW TRUCK!

But the logo isn’t all that has been refreshed: The entire app feels brand new. Most UI elements have been given a 2010 update and the interface feels a lot tidier.

You start off with a list of your configured servers that uses a sleek black look that was made popular by apps such as Pixelmator, CoverScout 3 and SongGenie (disclaimer – I work for equinux).

Selecting a server puts you into a familiar file browsing mode – more on that below:

Buttons and features are usually exactly where you would expect to find them and unobtrusive animations and pretty icons round out the package and give the app a nice touch of Panic personality. Here are a few bits of eye candy I noticed during testing:

File Browsing, Places & Quick Look

An FTP client fundamentally has two jobs: show me my remote files and allow me to move files between my local and remote storage. To accomplish that, an FTP application has to replicate a lot of the functionality of a regular file browser, so users can browser their local files as well as their remote files.

Transmit 4 offers single and dual file-browser layouts, (rearrangable!) tabs and the icon, llist, column and cover flow viewing styles you are familiar with from the Finder. But it also has a few additional tricks up its sleeve, that you won’t find in the Finder.

Here are some of the more interesting file browsing options:

• Folders above Files changes the sort order, so that folders are always displayed before your files in a view
• Quick Look makes it easy to see a file’s content and even works with remote files stored on your FTP server
• Places can store shortcuts to your most frequently used folders, so they are just a click away. You can also drag files to a Place shortcut.

Places is really useful, but the way you add locations by dragging them to the breadcrumb area is a bit unconventional. Once you’ve figured it out though, it quickly became one of my favourite Transmit 4 features.

Transmit 4 offers enough view options to suit almost anyone’s preferred file browsing style. Whether you perfer to work with multiple windows, tabs, split layouts, column view etc – Transmit 4 has got you covered. While it’s debatable whether most users need so many options, file browsing habits are usually so ingrained that it was probably a good idea for Panic to include as many options as they could.

DockSend, Droplets, TransmitDisk and more…

Most of the time, I find myself uploading files to the same place over and over again. Transmit has a number of ways that give you an easy way to send a file to your FTP server straight from the finder:

• Drag it to a custom droplet you can create in Transmit 4
• Enable Docksend and you can drag it directly to the Transmit 4 icon in your Dock
• Turn on TransmitDisk…

TransmitDisk is a nifty new feature, that uses MacFUSE to allow you to mount your FTP server as a volume that the Finder can see. Once mounted, you can interact with your FTP folders like you would with a drive on your local network.

In my experience this worked fairly well, but occasionally felt a little bit more sluggish than using Transmit’s own file browser – but your mileage may vary.

Conclusion

Overall this is a great upgrade to an already very useful application. The new features are well thought out and make working with your FTP server a lot easier and faster. While this isn’t a revolutionary upgrade, it is solid enough to make it worth your while.

You can buy or upgrade to Transmit 4 in the Panic Online Store.

But there are a few areas that feel a bit crummy, when compared with the rest of the experience. Considering how many apps Apple had to completely overhaul for the iPad’s presentation in January, it’s no surprise to find a few rough edges, on the otherwise fantastic device.

File syncing

I understand why Apple is hesitant to add any kind of file system to the iPhone OS, but considering how much emphasis was placed on the iPad apps at launch, you would think that they would have come up with an elegant way to get documents on and off your iPad.

Unfortunately, in reality it’s a huge pain. Ted Landau took the time to document all the steps it takes to actually get a document into iWork on your iPad, none of which are particularly intuitive. Plus you then have the hassle of managing revisions and tracking multiple copies of the same file.

The iPhone app SimpleNote and Notational Velocity on the mac show how document sync can be done right. Some apps are also adding Dropbox support, which gives you an idea how file sync in general could be improved. Given the fact that Apple has already done a lot of the hard work by creating the MobileMe and iWork online services, one can only hope that we’ll see seamless, cloud-based file syncing added sooner rather than later.

Safari caching

If you open multiple tabs in safari on your Mac, switching between them is instantaneous. In mobile safari, you can never be sure whether the tab will open immediately, or whether it will need to be reloaded over your wifi or 3G connection. On the wifi-only iPad, where users can’t be sure they’ll always have access to an internet connection, webpage persistance is particularly an issue. The fact that Offline Pages (iTunes link) is currently one of the top free iPad apps in the App Store would seem to underline this point.

Mobile Safari’s limiting caching abilities are most likely due to the limited amount of RAM in the iPad, which has just 256MB, however as Rentzsch has pointed out, it should be possible to offload pages to the solid state drive as a workaround, although it’s not a trivial problem.

Calendar event creation

Making event creation in calendars difficult seems to be one of Apple’s favorite UI slip-ups. The calendar app on the iPad is gorgeously designed and it makes browsing through calendar entries a visual pleasure.

But the interface for adding entries seems to have been cut & paste directly from the iPhone version and doesn’t make any use of the additional screen real estate the iPad offers. You get the impression the designers spent all their time working on the rest of the UI and simply stuck the editing controls in there at the last minute.

Consistency between the two platforms is of course a good thing, provided it doesn’t slow the user down unnecessarily. I would argue that you could better use the iPad’s screen real estate to make a much more efficient and intuitive event creation UI.