BRUSCA

365 Days – May

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Photography, Social Networking, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my May photos.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for May is

365 Days – April

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Apple, Photography, Social Networking, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my April photos.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for April is

HTML5 Video Playback…

Posted by Brusca under Adobe, Apple, Design, Dreamweaver, Flash, Video, iPhone

I just finished up watching the latest Diggnation and was quite surprised to hear Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose claim there was no reason to use the flash video playback anymore. As you can imagine I was astounded at this notion. Video playback through the Flash player on the web has been a major part of my focus for more than 5 years now and the next best options are not even close.

I for one have not yet delved into building HTML5 pages yet, so I thought I would do a quick test. As a quick test I spent 5 minutes adding a video tag to an HTML page and linked a video to it, excellent! Fast and easy, what everybody likes. So I tested this on Safari first, knowing this browser seems to support HTML5 the best, and no worries there. Next Firefox 3.6, see the resulting screen shot below. Turns out FF supports the video tag but not the H.264 codec. So because of this you cannot use alternative content, like say the flash plugin just in case your browser does not support that specific tag. You just get a big grey box. Check out how the video presents in your browser http://www.brucelevick.com/html5.html.

So without even getting to the most commonly used browser on the market there is already a big issue of the different codecs supported in different browsers (Flash plays the same codecs no matter what the  browser), with no control that I can see if one of these codecs is not supported. As for IE, the most commonly used browser, no support whatsoever for the video tag. Yes I certainly should ditch my Flash video playback (sarcasm if you didn’t pick up on it.) . I will say one thing that at least with browsers that have no support you can implement alternative content. Until IE supports some other codec the others don’t, then HTML5 video playback is going to be a nightmare to manage.

Check out how your browser measures up. http://html5test.com/

Also check out the “limited” attributes the HTML5 video tag has. http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_video.asp. Don’t even get me started on the comparisons to the Flash video functions.

Sorry for the rant, I just find this very frustrating to hear industry geeks make ridiculously uninformed statements, and that the (video playback) wheel is being reinvented so to speak. Lets not go back 10 years and go through that same teeth pulling revolution we went through 10 years ago. I can’t go through that client heartache implementing elements working on one browser and not the other, not again. HTML5 video playback… not for a while.

C’era una volta il West

Posted by Brusca under Film making, Movies, Video

or “Once Upon a Time in the West” is a movie filmed in 1968. This particular scene is the first six minutes of the movie, and was referred to by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad (if you haven’t watched Breaking Bad, you really should check it out) in a recent podcast, as one of the best opening scenes ever. So after hearing Vince laud the opening scene of this movie, I had to go check it out for myself. I must say I completely agree with him on this.

There is virtually no dialog, yet the actors along with gorgeous camera angles and the tension building atmosphere created by the sound builds to a climactic standoff on the station platform. For a movie filmed in the 60′s it really shows more than anything that it’s not all about technology, but more so having that creative spark in the first place.

Enjoy!!

365 Days – March

Posted by Brusca under 365 Days of 2010, Photography, Social Networking, flickr, iPhone

I have decided to take a photo for each day of 2010 with my iPhone. They can be self portraits or anything that takes my fancy or wherever I am at at the time. All photos are edited directly on the iPhone and mostly edited with the Best Camera App, developed by Chase Jarvis. At the end of the year I will hopefully put a book together, perhaps produced in Aperture. Here are my March photos. You can check out January here and February here.

For more details on these photos visit my Flickr Collection, 365 Days of 2010. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brusca/collections/72157623604227238/

My Favourite iPhone photo for March is

Location, location… location

Posted by Brusca under Location Software, Social Networking, Software

OK the location war is on in earnest and Gowalla and Foursquare seem to be at the top of the heap in terms of popularity and fighting the battle to be at the top. This though is only the beginning of location centric applications, and I’m not going to speculate on who is the best (cough Gowalla!) here.

http://www.foursquare.com

http://www.gowalla.com

My belief is that location centric applications are going to be the next big wave (trust me it’s a small wave right now). The idea of checking into a location through a mobile phone opens up so many doors, too many to describe in one post.

The first awesome opportunity that comes to mind is when a business can tap into the Gowalla and or Foursquare data or API (or both) and push through deals and or specials to the application interfaces, so that when a user checks into the pub, restaurant or whatever the location is, they simply receive a push notification or an SMS of a special deal for checking in their, like a free beer, or half price meal that the user can then claim for checking in. Or perhaps another alternative is within the interface of the chosen location software, the user can browse through nearby specials within a given radius, from 100m to 1km.

I love the countless opportunities this opens itself up for. Oh the above idea is mine, get your own :0) HA HA!

SXSW Interactive Checkin Visualization from SimpleGeo Inc. on Vimeo.

This is the data SimpleGeo collected from the eight geolocated data providers (FourSquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Flickr, Bump, Brightkite, BlockChalk, and Fwix) during the South by SouthWest Interactive Festival. The live datastream was available on http://austin.vicarious.ly, but we thought people might enjoy a conference retrospective in data. If you’d like to have access to this data and more, and/or outsource your entire geolocation infrastructure to the experts in massive geodatasets, check out http://simplegeo.com; we’re in Beta right now, with a full launch at the end of March!

Created with Processing (http://processing.org/ ).

Maps from the OpenStreetMap project (http://www.openstreetmap.org ).

Music: “Pocket Tanks,” Eliran Ben-Ishai (DNA-Groove).

Get your fill on the Desktop

Posted by Brusca under Design, Nikon D90, Photography, flickr

I have converted a few of my favourite photos into desktops. I’ll throw a few more out there when I get the chance. Here a three very different subjects for you to choose from. Camera of choice is the Nikon D90, Enjoy!

Extract the GPS data from your Sony Handycam

Posted by Brusca under Film making, Flash, Location Software, Video

Since I bought the Sony HD XR520 last May, I have always wondered about retrieving the raw GPS data that is recorded when you capture footage. A lot of the new Sony models record GPS points now and I have looked online with not much luck on how to retrieve this raw data. Turns out it is really very simple. The software you receive with your Sony camera, Picture Motion Browser (PMB) has a very nice map feature, which displays your selected videos on the map and gives you the option to export that data to an xml (KML) file to be imported into Google Earth.

So there are many visualisations you could achieve with this xml data. In the coming posts I will import this into flash and create a flash map of my own to display and play the videos taken from the camera.

Extract the GPS data from your Sony Handycam from Bruce Levick on Vimeo.

How to extract the GPS data from your Sony Handycam