GarageBand 4.1

(For those not in the know, GarageBand is Apple's make-your-own music program.)

GarageBand 4.1 is part of the iLife 08 suite (also comprising iPhoto, iMovie, the .Mac Web Gallery, iWeb and iDVD) and is the logical 'next-step-forward' from previous versions.

Although most of the advertising and many of the articles about it dwell (at great length, sometimes) on the new Magic GarageBand, I found that I whizzed through that aspect in about five minutes. Woohoo, you can choose different instruments to play exactly the same piece of muzak.

The real difference lies in its speed: the app is a real hog of processor power and I still find myself quitting out of all unused apps before launching it - a bad habit from G4 days - but unless you're attempting a really ambitious project it's not really necessary anymore. In fact, I've had the warning window that I've exceeded my number of tracks appear before I've had the dreaded "Some parts of this song have not been played..." window (which means it's too big and the computer's not coping and you have to save it as a song in its own right and then start up another one and import the song you just saved as a single track...phew!).

Another plus is the introduction of an Arrangements feature - amazingly handy and time saving, especially if you're using a theme repeatedly in your song, as it allows you to denote parts of it as 'verse' or 'chorus' (or whatever you want to call them), and to copy and paste them and move them around and change their order. Unfortunately, if you decide you want the 'verse' section, say, to be a little longer, you can't just drag the bar to extend that section and push the next section along (if you drag the bar over, all you're doing is extending the 'verse' part to include a few bars in the next section. You need to create a new section and then move it to the end of the one you want to extend; It's a lot less stuffing around than doing it the old way but there's a lot of room for improvement in the Arrangements area.

There are a lot of little tweaks on features that were in the older versions of GarageBand; one of my favourites is a drop-down menu on lops that will display the family of loops - very good when the loop you have is close but not quite right, and you can thus easily chose a better one without having to wade through the loops menu (which has also been expanded - goody! New noises!)

New features also described for the app (which I haven't used yet, but I can see they'd be a good thing) include multi-take recording, support for 24-bit recording and notation, and a greater range of effects you can apply to your tracks and instruments (which I've tinkered with, acknowledged there are more than there used t be, and made a mental promise to investigate further, one of these days, when I have time...)

Overall: it's still intuitively easy to use, and it's still a good app, better than it was, but could do with yet more tweaking in some areas.

What one should wear at a fashionable Japanese dinner...

A straw poll was conducted by the Daily Telegraph this week (with no mention of the total number of respondents!) to ascertain public understanding of the Kyoto Protocol.  Respondents were asked to select a description of Kyoto from a set of multiple options: a) A Korean car, b) The treaty that ended WWII, c) An agreement on carbon emissions and d) A Japanese banquet dish.  

Almost half of the people surveyed answered correctly, identifying Kyoto as an agreement on carbon emissions, but close to half of those who answered correctly admitted guessing the response.  38 percent thought the Kyoto Protocol was the treaty that ended World War 2, and 14 percent thought it was a Japanese banquet dish...

This is very much a current topic, and makes me wonder - is it really our school system that is letting us down, history-wise, or is it simply that the average, man-in-the-street Australian chooses to be massively uninformed?  This is a topic which all Australians should have heard of (it's been very much on the news for at least the past few months) whether it is mentioned in school or not, which would indicate that the craptacular poll results stem less from a namby-pamby syllabus and more from a high percentage of the respondents being apathetic, lazy, disinterested and possibly just plain stupid.

But they'll be allowed to vote at the upcoming election, where they can exercise their opinions as to the shortfalls of the education system and our position on global matters of environment...

OOOO three posts in one day LOL

Gotta see today's Joy of Tech

You can turn Steve Ballmer into Johnny Depp (sort of...)

UberLOL

And I don't know why the colour and layout are screwy...

... I think I may go back to using Camino...

Second World Country

One thing that I was expecting from Leopard (and I'm not sure why, as the advertising for Leopard doesn't mention it) was a crisper, faster, better iChat.  There really hasn't been much of an improvement in this area, and it's not really Leopard's fault.  Dad and I tried the whole presentation and screen sharing thing last night, and the app quit on us.  Not enough bandwidth.  Ferchrissakes, we're both on broadband!!!  But yes, folks, it's good ol' Telstra-governed, Australian broadband.

Mr Justin Vellejo, of the Daily Telegraph, wrote an article on October 20, 2007, in which he claims broadband in Australia is a "Third World Joke".

AUSTRALIANS are paying nine times more for broadband that trundles along 35 times slower than the world's fastest networks.  A report from the US has revealed Australia has become the Third World of broadband developed nations, ranking 26th out of 30 countries for its transfer speeds.  Sydney households pay an average $2.65 per month for one megabyte of service at a speed of 1.7 megabytes a second, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's broadband rankings.  By comparison, users in Japan have the world's fastest broadband and pay a paltry 29c a month for one megabyte at a blistering 61 megabytes a second.  On a scale of speed, Australia is even ranked behind the Slovak Republic, which separated from the former Soviet country Czechoslovakia in 1993.

The problem with Leopard is that it was written in America.  For computers with American-speed broadband. or Japanese-speed broadband.  Or Korean-speed.  You get the idea.  I doubt we in Australia will be able to use some of Leopard's features unless it's at an ungodly hour of the morning when no one else is using broadband.

We're having an election here soon, and I'm gonna vote for whichever party is willing to drag us, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century, broadband-wise.  And at least make us a Second World country.

Leopard!!!

Installed it last night and have been playing with it since....  I've read quite a few comments about it in other blogs, both good and bad; so far, I like it.  I've had a couple of hiccups with some apps, but they were easily fixed by either downloading up-to-date versions (oops... like Adium - updated from 0.89.1 to 1.1.3) or by typing in "Leopard 10.5" and the name of the app in a Google search and most of the time finding the answer to the problem and fixing it that way.

Front Row finally works with iPhoto (it never did under Tiger) but I can't work out how to turn off, let alone change, the muzak that accompanies the slide show, and just for once neither the net nor the help menu has been much help...  Not that I use Front Row much anyway, just to watch DVDs from my bed; so in the end it's a minor annoyance and not a major peeve.

I went through the list of 300 changes (on the apple site) and tried them out on my own set-up, and learnt a lot on the way:

1. In iChat, when you change the background to a video (for example, so it looks like you have an aquarium behind you, you really need to be sure that you're wearing different coloured clothing to what the back ground originally was (photo shows a dark background and a dark singlet...) or it gets a bit confused... and you end up with fish or whatever where nature never intended (you have to imagine that the fish in the background are actually a movie and they swim around behind you as you talk).

2. Stacks opening up from the Dock will only fan if the Dock is positioned at the bottom of the screen... But the Download Stack is a blessing, in that it gets my downloads folder off my desktop and still keeps it in a very accessible place (refreshing desktop icons uses a fair bit of processor power, and although that's probably less true nowadays than it used to be, why push it?)

3. Safari is a whole lot better, and I've changed back to it from Camino... for the moment...

4. Quick look ROCKS!!!  I can see the contents of a Word document without launching Word.  I can scroll through a movie or a song and see if it's the one I was looking for without launching whichever app I need to open it.  All good.

5. There don't seem to have been any improvements to Speech Recognition and Speakable items, but as my computing life doesn't depend on them it's no biggy - I guess one day someone in Cupertino will notice that what was revolutionary in 1993 (Plain Talk) is a bit passe now and it's one area of the Mac that could use some serious updating.

Well, that's my initial impression, 24 hours after installing...

We've always been at war with Eastasia...

Imre Salusinszky and staff writers from The Australian say "SCHOOLS have been complacent about the teaching of Australian history, Prime Minister John Howard said today as he launched a compulsory national curriculum.

Under the new plan, students in years nine and 10 will be made to attend 150 hours of Australian history lessons, and the compulsory teaching of Australian history will be a condition of the next commonwealth schools funding agreement with the states and territories, which begins on January 1, 2009."

Quite so. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Perhaps, though, before attempting to teach history, we should attempt to 'up' the literacy and numeracy levels in schools so that the majority of students can not only be told about our history but can also read and write about it as well? So that they can, for example, work out the number of years between 1901 and 2007? Heaven forbid that they also be taught to think critically so that they can draw their own conclusions from what they read... Yes, curriculum and standards are an issue.

History is written by the winners. That may have been true even up to 20 years ago - nowadays, history is written by the whingers. I'm interested is seeing exactly what and whose version of events will be passed off as history this time (given that the whole post-modernist pendulum has pretty much reached the end of its swing). Facts versus Opinion versus Political Correctness is also an issue.

But the issue that's making me twitch a little is the whole "you will teach what we recommend as 'History', or we'll cut your funding" suggestion. As George Orwell said, in '1984': "We've always been at war with Eastasia." (For those of you who are unfamiliar with this classic novel - read it. Or at least read the Wikipedia entry for a very basic overview.)