First, Belkin announces (but does not ship) a $299 Thunderbolt dock with USB 2, Gig Ethernet, HDMI, FW800, audio, and a single daisy chain thunderbolt port in addition to the one you use to attach it.
CES 2012: Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock to Launch in September at $299
Then, Matrox, makers of high end video hardware and those neat Dual/TripleHead2Go boxes announces their Thunderbolt dock, with Ethernet, USB 2 and 3, Audio, DVI, and no daisy chaining thunderbolt port for $249
Matrox Announces DS-1 Thunderbolt Docking Station for $249
Before shipping the original, Belkin decides to update their product, bump the price to $399, and add eSATA, USB 3, and remove the dedicated HDMI port (but including a MiniDP to HDMI adapter).
Belkin Upgrades Thunderbolt Express Dock with USB 3.0 and eSATA, Bumps Price to $399.99

Is everyone (including Apple) insane? The Thunderbolt device we need the most is a hub so we don’t have to put displays at the end of the daisy chain, where they make the least amount of sense. “You need this external drive? here, let me unplug my display for you”. (Don’t point out Apple’s $999 Thunderbolt Display – we all have perfectly functioning displays that don’t need replacing)

Currently the 27″ iMac is the only machine with two thunderbolt ports. The Mac Mini (with it’s Thunderbolt and HDMI port) is the only other machine you can connect two displays to without daisy chaining, but of course it has no onboard display.

Currently I have a Mac Mini with two 24″ LED cinema displays on it (using an active DVI to MiniDP converter, adapted from the HDMI output). Although nothing is broken, it’s not a quad core machine and not a thunderbolt machine. The current Mac Mini’s essentially make you chose quad i7 OR discrete GPU (not both) so they’re out of the question. I’ve never understood why Apple bothered putting an HDMI port on these. I have several at home and at work hooked up via HDMI to projectors and really an adapter would not have killed me. I’d rather have two MiniDP/Thunderbolt ports I know I can adapt to anything.
So, if anyone at Apple is listening, if you want to push Thunderbolt in the right direction, release all of you new Macs with 6 (yes 6) thunderbolt ports on them, and dedicated, first party, TB to Ethernet, FireWire800, and USB 3 dongles available for purchase (or just make them free, I know they cost $3 to make).

While we’re making insane Mini mockups, I thought I’d add this:

If it were THAT size I’d accept Intel Graphics and one of those SSD sticks that are in the MacBook Air’s – starting $299

Boy it would be nice if Apple used MagSafe on these things, making it even easier to plug into the Cinema Displays. You may be wondering why I kept Gigabit Ethernet, the largest port, on these. The answer is so the machine has at least one real MAC address and I imagine these things will change how we do load balancing and cluster rendering/compiling.

I’ve been using DAZ | Studio and Bryce a lot lately for new content. Recently, they changed their content store to one powered by Magneto. The following things have gone wrong since

• Platinum Club and Sale item prices were not being shown (solved)
• Asynchronous checkout lead to double purchases (solved)
• Prerequisites lists are often random (solved)
• Downloads include a Fatal PHP error, which zip files are robust enough to endure, but only by dumb luck. (effectively solved)

To fix the last problem, they converted all their old .exe and .app installers to just zip directories of the content. Of course, without the installer, you have to do a directory merge to install them. This is actually what I’d prefer they did with new content because it actually makes batch installing easier. Now I can just ditto everything.

1. Unzip all your downloaded content into a single new decretory
2. Open Terminal
3. ditto folderofunzippedstuff/* dazlibraryfolder

Obviously you’ll need to edit that line yourself. As I mentioned, the zip files still include the error. If you tail one of them you’ll see it ends with

Fatal error: Call to undefined method (blah blah blah) in
(...)DownloadController.php on line 106

Googling around seemed to indicate a mere relaunch of things might fix this. Either way, c’mon DAZ, finish the job. I’m so close to loving you again.

and that’s why Marco Arment isn’t a hypocrite. Just wanted to say that before Build and Analyze airs today.

No seriously, if you listen to any of the shows on 5by5 you’ll probably pick up on this attitude. The hosts mock Microsoft and Google for announcing products that are in their infancies that either never ship or don’t live up to the hype. Meanwhile, Apple doesn’t announce things until they basically have something ready to ship, at least to developers. Can you imagine if Marco said Instapaper would be for Android back in 2011? Everyone would be hounding him for the last 18 or 6 months (depending on which part of 2011 he chose to say that.) Maybe that is when he started working for all we know. *Update – The Verge says it started in December 2011

The point is, by not promising something he(they) were working on, and then surprising us, Instapaper for Android gets a lot of launch day press (when people CAN buy it) and probably more good will than being yet another vaporware app that fails to deliver. That being said, I’m sorry I’ve been teasing iDecorate updates.

A preview for The Hobbit was shown in its intended 48fps and reviews were mixed-to-nauseous. Duh

As someone with 20/10 eyes that can see CRTs blink (trust me, this is not a super power), video higher than 24fps looks bad. The reason is the same reason King Kong looks so much worse than the CG in Jurassic Park: Motion Blur. Our eyes are used to it. Go twirl some LEDs around in a dark room and you’ll see what I mean. You only need to rotate the light a few times a second for your brain to see the “Circle” of light rather in a series of points.

Before CGI, ILM used Go Motion to motion blur their stop-motion models. Shooting material in 30,48,60 fps effectively turns real life footage into disorienting stop motion.

King Kong looks bad compared to Jurassic Park because the CG models are too “focused”. It almost looks like the effects were applied the Final Cut Pro 3’s motion blur checkbox which “simply” (it’s actually a complex process) interpolates and bleeds frames rather than being generated by the rendering software. Or, if it is by the software, the dials are too far to the left.

I wonder if 48fps footage with a 1/24s exposure would “look right”. Of course, this is technically impossible for a camera (but not CG).

To me, using higher frame rates and 3D are just a pissing contest. Frame size matters a lot more, where we’re starting to push the limits of a 24bit pallet, but that’s another discussion.

A great blog post from Marco Arment regarding doing your own thing. I particularly like this part where he describes the bucket he doesn’t fit into

• Programmer: A meaningless, easily replaced translator between someone else’s specifications and source code.
• Software Engineer: Marginally more intelligent, but still having detailed algorithmic and structural specifications dictated by management without any real input.
• Software “Architect”: An asshole.
• Web Developer: Easy programming in “toy” scripting languages for those who can’t write C++. Alternatively, Spiderman.
• “Systems” anything: CS graduates who can’t program.
• Anything “Analyst”: MBAs who can’t program.
• Interaction Designer: Floaty psychology dropouts who conduct expensive tests to determine that the software engineers suck at design.
• Web Designer: Finicky artists who don’t understand how difficult that’s going to be in CSS and refuse to budge from their pixel-perfect PSDs.

It’s reading things like this that inch me closer and closer to self employment. I have a checklist I can’t share for that and unfortunately one of the items is a calendar date I can’t move. No this isn’t some bullshit New Years Resolution laundry list of ways to rationalize bettering myself instead of doing it. I’m already building apps and reaping monetary reward. Obviously the loss of my 9 to 5 salary will be a net loss monetarily but I’m already capable of living on what the apps bring in. I just need these dates to pass…

So MS will relieve you of $99 and remove Dell/HP/etc crapware from your PC if you bring it to one of their 20-something stores.

I have a better idea. Charge OEMs $100 extra for installing anything besides drivers on their “Windows PCs”.

Good point. I’m OK with running around the breeds of house cats though. You can use all the ones named after something and people won’t even know you’re talking about cats!

OS X Ragamuffin sounds good doesn’t it?

Today’s rumors (or “targets” as they’re calling themselves) is that the 7″ iPad will debut in October ’12, have a retina QXGA display, and be priced at $249.

My “target” has always been $299 for an 8GB non-retina 7″ iPad. While I’m not skeptical of Apple’s ability to sell at $249 and pack a retina display (after all, it would just be a larger cut of the screen used in the 4/4S) just for the sake of eating Amazon’s lunch, I am skeptical that they need to. It would sell just fine at $299 and their lineups don’t have a lot of *49’s in them. At either price we certainly can’t expect it to have 3G.

For those who say it would “cannibalize” iPod Touch sales:
Apple would be thrilled with that. They sell far more iPod Touch than iPad and converting those customers to iPad customers would make their market lead even more insurmountable.

I hope there’s at least an add-on price for 3G. I don’t need a jacket-pocketable iPad if it doesn’t have 3G. I do a lot of research and reading on my iPads while I’m out of the house. Oddly, when I’m home is when I play games and do other things that less require connectivity. I’d pay $399 for the 3G version. If there is no 3G option I’ll of course get one anyway, but I doubt I’ll find much use outside of development testing.

One thing that bothers me about a lot of companies today is their licensing for software being tied to a User/Workstation Pair. That’s as narrow as you can get. My favorite type of licensing is the kind you got with Final Cut Pro 7 – the license can be used in only one location at a time (and it will ping around to make sure you’re obeying) but installed many times. This let me install on both my laptop and desktop, and my new laptop and desktop without going through some deactivation ritual. Currently, my CS5 license is just on my desktop, with Coda and Pixelmator installed on my Air.

For the first time, Adobe is offering 2 installs (one as a backup it insists) and suggests your Work PC and your home Mac. Having slightly more freedom is welcome, though until I know if you must deactivate before moving machines I’ll have to wait to decide where to put my second install. I could potentially have the most freedom by putting on a virtual machine I can move around, but would it deactivate when it detects the tiny hardware changes? If it crashes can I recover that license? These are not insignificant questions.

I’m embarrassed to admit that the Final Cut Pro X disaster has drawn me further into Adobe’s camp when I was so close to getting out of it. Though I still find myself not falling in love with Pixelmator. It’s not a matter of doing things differently, it’s just the missing pieces and the existing ubiquity of the .psd

I went with the monthly cloud licensing rather than the full/upgrade price for CS6. In the long run it’ll still be way less money. While reading the license FAQs, I noticed one major difference between CS6 and another software subscription: MSDN. You pay for MSDN up front, and you get a perpetual license for anything you download and install during your license year even if you don’t renew. Since you’re paying month to month with Adobe, even if you sign up for the annual “contract”, when your subscription expires, your software goes with it. Adobe says the software needs to phone home every 30 days. I hope it phones home every single day and extends that 30 days as such. Imagine if it only checked on the first of the month. You leave for a trip on the 31th, open up your laptop on the 2nd, and are told to go find WiFi somewhere – not as easy a task as it might sound.

Now that the smartphone dust has settled, it appears we’re doomed to a fragmented duopoly. iOS V.Current will have the largest version slice but iOS Combined will be maybe about half of Android Combined. The others simply aren’t going to gain any ground.

I’m more optimistic in the tablet arena. Android Tablets are doing so poorly against the iPad that Windows 8 ReTweet and openWebOS have a shot at beating it and combined at least exceeding iOS. In both phones and tablets, what would be best for the consumer is 40-30-20-10 split between OS’s. In the Tablet world iOS will stay on top but the bottom three slots aren’t set yet. 25-25-25-25 is simply impossible. Someone has to “win”. Maybe after some Halo Effect from positive impressions with WebOS and Windows tablets (and some well engineered pairing between devices Apple seems to not give a crap about) WebOS and Windows Phone can gain some traction, if any carriers are willing to have them of course.