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iTunes is your friend

I really like iTunes. It’s a wonderful piece of software that just works as expected and does it’s job really well.

I’ve been asked to talk at the PowerUp conference on the Gold Coast this weekend and was given an open opportunity to talk about whatever I wanted. Although I think the Web 2.0 story is the one most people still need to hear, the general feeling was that there were already plenty of people talking about web 2.0 stuff, so something a bit different would be good. (Besides, my other session will be about web 2.0 stuff anyway, looking at tools for collaboration)

I’m a bit wary of being caught out without Internet access when I present… I’ve been in situations before where I was told there would be access, where there was access, where I should have been able to get access, but for whatever reason the firewall gods were not smiling upon me and I had none. I don’t expect that to be the case this weekend, and of course I plan to present it live… but I’m starting to learn to cover my bases and to that end I’ve been making a few screencasts using iShowU, capturing those portions of my presentations that require access to the cloud. Just in case.

So if you’re interested, here is part of my presentation about iTunes. I thought this stuff was kind of obvious but I’ve spoken to many people lately who still haven’t got their head around this stuff.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/00viJjSQL_Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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Audio Plumbing

picture-1.pngI’ve been trying to make a screencast of Skype conversation. And I thought it would be pretty simple. But as so often happens, there are technical issues to overcome that can make things so much trickier than you first thought they would be.

I’ve done quite a bit of screen capturing before, usually for short training videos on how to do certain software tasks. In fact I made a CD for a commercial training organisation a few years back that had over 80 tutorial screencasts on it made with Capture Cam Pro, so I figured I knew how to do this stuff. I’ve also been using Jing lately to make short screencasts on tech tips for our school network users. I think that screencasting is a great way to learn (and teach) this sort of practical, “show me” sort of stuff. Atomic Learning is another excellent resource based on this idea.

So I wanted to make a couple of screencasts to demonstrate how to use the features of Skype. I’d been using Snapz Pro X on the Mac, but wasn’t totally happy with it. I’d heard good things about iShowU so I downloaded a copy to try. I only had to use it a couple of times before I realised that it was going to be well worth the $20 they were asking for it, so bought a copy immediately. Easy to use, lots of professional options, and very customisable. A cool tool.

So I set up a screen capture, fired up Skype and called the Skype call testing service at echo123. iShowU captured all the on-screen action easily, as well as my microphone input, BUT not the audio coming out of Skype. Hmmm, that’s no good… I can’t do a demo of Skype if I can’t hear the conversation played back in the screen capture. I thought of a bunch of ideas to solve this, including using Audio Hijack Pro to capture the Skype audio, iShowU to capture everything else, and then dropping it into iMovie to edit them into a single movie but that seemed like it was all getting too hard and time consuming. I’m basically quite lazy, so I wanted a better, more elegant solution.

After quite a bit of trial and error I finally figured out how to do this, so here is my solution in case you ever need to do it yourself.

picture-2.pngThe trick is to use Soundflower, a Mac system extension that lets you route audio around the system in non-standard ways. From the Soundflower website, it says “Soundflower is a Mac OS X system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and PPC computers.”

So, here’s how you do it – or at least it’s what eventually worked for me after much trial and error…

  1. First, I set the audio inputs of the Mac to Soundflower (2ch), that’s input, output and system.
  2. Then in the Skype preferences, set the Audio input to your desired microphone (I used a USB headset mic) and the Audio output to Soundflower (2ch). I set the ringing to Soundflower as well, but that’s probably not so important.
  3. picture-3.pngFinally, in iShowU, set the Input selection to Record Microphone Audio, Force it to Mono, and turn on Record System Audio. Set the microphone input to the USB headset (in my case). I also prefer to get the monitor feed while both previewing and recording, so turn that on if you want.
  4. By the way, setting the compression to H.264 makes a huge difference to the size of the final files.

There you have it. From what I can figure out, it works by routing the Skype microphone input to Soundflower, then routing its output to be the Mac’s regular audio input as a Soundflower stream. Then the Mac uses that diverted audio stream and treats it as the regular mic input to the computer (except after passing it via Skype it now has the entire Skype conversation in it) and then using iShowU to monitor the standard audio feed, which now contains the Skype audio. This may all be totally useless information to most of you, but for someone out there it may just save you a whole lot of time. I hope so.

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Good Ideas come from complete Twits

twitterrific-1.jpgTwitter is a really interesting bit of software. When I first heard about it on MacBreak Weekly I thought it sounded pretty interesting although it still didn’t really make a lot of sense to me. Being naturally curious I headed over to the Twitter website and signed up for an account. After having a play with it for a while, it seemed to make even less sense so I gradually lost interest in it and moved on to other diversions.

I’ve now changed my mind about it. Twitter is a way cool tool!

How to explain it? Twitter is designed as a sort of cross-hybrid tool that merges email, SMS, instant messaging and waving your arms around trying to get attention. It is aimed at answering the very simple question – “What are you doing?” You simply type your response to that question in no more than 140 characters and send your current activity, thought, question, mood or state of mind out into the Cloud that is the Internet.

My first thought about Twitter was the same as most people’s first thoughts about blogging… “Why?” Why on earth would anyone be at all interested in what I am doing right now? Who would care? The idea of taking the time to write a short sentence stating my current activity or thoughts, and sending them to who-knows-where just seemed to be totally bizarre to me. Not only that, but it seemed so inconvenient to have to go to the Twitter website just to do this… I simply couldn’t see what the attraction was.

And then I started to piece a few things together, and it slowly started to make sense to me. First I changed my primary browser to Flock. Flock has a lot of very neat integration with Web 2.0 tools and one of its benefits is built-in support for Twitter using a plugin called TwitterBar. Instead of having to go to the Twitter website to add a “Tweet”, I could just type it into the browser’s address bar and click the send button. That made it very simple to send a message but I still couldn’t quite see why I’d want to do that.

Then I discovered that Edublogs had a sidebar widget plugin called Twitters and it was able to take the RSS feed from my own Twitter account and automatically make my own messages appear on my blog. Interesting, but still bizarre. It meant I could now easily send a short message to the web stating what I was doing at any given moment, and then have it appear on my blog without actually doing anything to put it there. Conceptually interesting, but for what purpose would I want to do this?

But I kept hearing people talk about Twitter in glowing terms. I had to be missing something surely? So after quite a while of ignoring it, I eventually revisited my Twitter account to see if I could get to the bottom of this bizarre tool. I noticed that some other people’s tweet lists had other names with an @ symbol in front of them, so I tried to find out what that meant. It appeared to be a sort of conversation taking place and the @ symbol was being used as a way of indicating who was being replied to in a much larger group conversation.

Still intrigued, I started to see who else was using Twitter that I might know. Browsing through the users list, I spotted someone whose name I recognised and a button marked Follow. I clicked it. You are now following this person. Hmm, not sure what that means but let’s keep playing. I wonder who they know? Oh,I recognise this other person that they know. Follow them too. Hey, they know this other person that I’ve heard of too. Click. Follow them as well. Eventually I started to build a biggish list of people whose names I recognised who I was now “following”. As I played, a couple of emails arrived telling me that some of these people were now following me. When I went back to my main Twitter webpage I started to see several messages in the list from the people I was following. All of a sudden, I got it. These people, who I have some respect and interest in, are telling me what they are doing right now. I was getting an insight into what was going on in their world. They were sharing ideas, insights, websites, links, suggestions, all appearing in a list on my own page. Ahhhh! I get it! This is my network of people, and I can stay in touch with them constantly, vicariously, discretely and silently.

The real magic happened when I discovered a wonderful bit of software for the Mac called Twitterific. Twitterific installs and runs in the background, popping up a small message using Growl whenever one of my Twit friends sends a message – or tweet – out. I then discovered that by sending a return tweet, and prefacing it with an @ symbol followed by their username, I could indicate to who this tweet was replying to. This is necessary because tweets are public to anyone following me so the @ convention helps keep the conversation making sense. Twitterific suddenly made the whole thing make sense since I no longer had to monitor the Twitter website for activity… the activity came to me! (PC users might like to try Twitteroo, which is kind of similar) I can also tweet directly from my mobile phone by sending an SMS message or going to Twitter Mobile.

Now I get it, I really like Twitter. You have to have a few people to follow, and a few people to follow you, before it really makes any sense. I’m currently following 63 people, and 67 people are following me. It makes perfect sense, in a kind of bizarre exhibitionist way.

What does make perfect sense is what Twitter suddenly enables. I have a network of 63 people, comprised mostly of some of the world’s most innovative educators. 63 people to bounce ideas off, share links with, get advice from. 63 people who are willing to share a little insight into how they think and what they do. 63 people all stumbling across new cool web tools and willingly sharing them. 63 people to tap into when I need to gather a crowd to try an idea, find a partner to test a technology, or simply have a whine about my day.

I know it sounds bizarre, but it works, and its awesome.