Reading Radar

It’s about to become 2009. Most of you are already there. So, what’s it like? I know everyone is supposed to make resolutions and all that, but instead of doing that, maybe the resolutions I should list are on the part of an island. An island formerly known as Podcast island. An island that resolves to have a new name, a new look, a new owner, a new sense of community to move on with the changes.

I’ll let Itazura announce the new name when he wants, or let it just show up on the map after the transfer goes through, but the new look is already pretty much complete. The Destination Station was and continues to be a highly popular drop-in spot for explorers looking for cool locations and builds in SL, so Itazura dropped it in the center of the island. Then he partitioned off the plots into mini-islands and re-united them with a road encircling the outer island. It’s both separate and joined, peacefully isolating and yet more uniting than the previous layout. It’s nice.

Gary will have a place to record video for his fastpitch softball stuff in the SE corner, which you can see in the picture above (the big round yellow softball) so he’ll still be around. Right now I think the list of people with rented parcels is Gary, Gomem Desoto, Keeme and Nika, Danny Dwyer, Arri Gaffer, Stuart Warf, me, SLPN headquarters, and umm. Some Rezzednecks.

Some more views:

As for me, I’m floating a little prefab near the start/finish line of the racetrack so I can hang my feet over the edge and look out at the water.

Oh, yeah… if you’re driving by, and you can’t find a rest stop… feel free to help yourself. I guess maybe this is what I think of all the negativity on the SL blogs at the moment, and the people projecting it.

Itazura took the change in circumstances and handled them in his usual thinking manner. He did a great job. I think it’s going to be a fun place with a sense of community again.

Sometimes you just need a change. And we definitely needed a change in locomotion methodology from the SLPN Headquarters to the Destination Station. It needed to be simple, fast, and reliable. This is what we found.

Nika really has a twisted sense of humor. Knowing how much EVERYONE HATES FRICKEN, she sent me… well, this.

Next time the lump of coal will be fine, thanks!

Christmas cannot be complete without a little unsolicited media, so here’s some for ya. Daphne and I did a little special about Christmas stuff in SL, and she has a version of the audio on her podcast feed, I have one on my podcast feed, and then there’s this video:

If you’re subscribed to the SLPN Video feed, you’ll get that as a little stocking stuffer for your ipod.

Jane and Rocky did something really nice for me tonight. They pulled over some of their tiny furry little friends to tempt my appetite. But I was a very well behaved wolf, aside from some piddling in the snow after this video had already been shot, but please don’t tell, ok?

Thanks to Azelle Mavendorf, Dagmar Klaar, Jane2 McMahon, Martini Discovolante, Mousearina Ballyhoo, Peachy Sassoon, Rocky Torok, and Songbird1028 Sorbet for singing their tiny little hearts and lungs out, and for not telling anyone that Dagmar defeated me in paw to paw combat later. I especially appreciate that part.

They can haz web site!

William Pitre was the Traveling Avatar. But just about anyone in SL can be The Floating Avatar, when the conditions are right.

It beats just standing around like some gravity suck-up or something.

It’s no mystery to anyone who’s been in SL for any length of time that music is one of the most pervasive and enjoyable forms of entertainment in SL. It’s real people, with real music, playing in SL for the enjoyment of others, and it’s probably one of the best places to get music where it really is about the interaction and the music, not about the money and the fame.

Rich Palmer (Rich DeSoto in-world) is one of the guys who has been doing this in SL for a long time, and this year, he’s giving you his music. That’s right, free holiday music, void of DRM so you can use it as YOU see fit. It’s awesome. Please download, listen and let Rich know how much you appreciate it.

Thanks, Rich, and thanks to Crap for plurking this link.

The beauty of change is that things don’t remain the same as they were. Simple enough, right? But when it comes to the Mac and options for screencasting or machinima recording, that’s both good and potentially expensive.

The History

When I first started messing around with Machinima, or videoing SL anyway, I was using Snapz Pro X. It’s great for screen capture stills, providing a few more options than the built in OS X screen capture tools (which are really usually more than adequate), and it can also do video. The video side of things, I wouldn’t really rate so highly. It’s ok. It seemed to affect the system a bit when recording while running SL, and if I recall correctly, I didn’t like how it had to output to disk immediately, so if you stopped recording, it could cause you wait time before you could record again.

Next, I tried iShowU, in it’s Tiger and lower incarnation. I had issues with it, namely performance and with soundflower not working and therefore not recording audio sometimes. It worked, but it was not reliable in my opinion.

Then I came to ScreenFlow, which at the time was owned by a small company which was basically the creator of the application, as far as I could tell. ScreenFlow was a game changer. ScreenFlow did not require you to select a part of the screen to record, as all the other apps did. It just recorded the whole screen, then you’d actually edit the video you shot in the program itself, including being able to set the viewing area. You can zoom in, zoom out, pan around, and generally make great screencasts where you are zooming all over the place, and all because ScreenFlow records the whole screen first and has you edit later. It allows for some very dynamic screencasts.

All seemed well, but my enthusiasm for the built-in ScreenFlow editor started waning for a reason. The reason is that I wanted to start using Final Cut Express 4 to edit videos instead of ScreenFlow’s built-in editor, or any other video editor for that matter. This really meant that for me, ScreenFlow went from mandatory to just one more option. This led me to … the FUTURE!! Er… the PRESENT!!

The Present

Oh, how time changes things. There are now three really solid screencasting tools which are more than suitable for machinima on the Mac, and two of those are products that I found inadequate in earlier versions.

In no particular order, the three contenders, the ones whose icons have a safe place on my dock (for now).

ScreenFlow

IShowU HD

ScreenFlick

I’ll cover each of these one by one in their own posts, coming up! Soon… really. And actually, I lied. These are in the order they are in for a reason, and I’ll cover that as well.

Back when it was announced that Big Spaceship would be working with LL to “transform the Second Life Experience,” a lot of people made comments regarding Big Spaceship, or rather comments about who they weren’t. Namely, someone that anyone had ever heard of. At least not anyone who is a resident in SL. Well, ok, no one that I could find. Still, I figured I’d give them the benefit of the doubt, and see what came of it. It seemed to me good enough that LL was willing to get help where they needed it, and clearly UI and non-confusing user experience is one area where they need it.

So when Kat Linden posted that they are testing the new Second Life homepage this week, I thought “yay, let’s see it” and trundled off for a look. Here’s the screenshot she posted:

Crap Mariner eloquently shared his thoughts. I don’t know if I was as overtly hostile, but I guess I wasn’t too kind in my comments I posted in the SL forum thread on the topic. I said:

Please take the “flirt” thing and the woman with boobs that could each fill a sim off … SL has a reputation as it is.

I hope it didn’t cost too much.

Looking at it again, I still think I’m right… this is like a photo album slideshow, not a product or company homepage that’s designed to convey what the product is, and help the world know what to do next or why they’d even want to. It’s confusing. It’s black, as cm/ls pointed out, and it’s wide. And it uses Flash. Crap didn’t point out that using flash on a homepage is another sin, so I will. It’s stupid and unnecessary, especially if this is the result.

There is no focal point. Your eye zooms off to each side of the page looking for boundaries, and there aren’t any. It hurts to look at and try to make sense of.

Based on this one look at their product, Big Spaceship should work for facebook. Jumble and clutter are mandatory there.

Fiber. It’s not just for old folks.