A friend of mine recently stated that they wanted to learn graphics and wondered if I could recommend any good websites.

Graphics is a pretty wide ranging topic and my own experience is still growing so this is the response I provide, which might help other people as well.

  ~~~~~~~

What type of graphics are you trying to learn? There’s a pretty wide range of potential items to consider.

Camtasia is considered to be one of the best screen video capture and editing programs. Its not cheap at about $300 or $180 with an education discount. Camtasia studio comes bundled with SnagIT also (normally about $30). SnagIt is pretty much an essential tool for bloggers doing static screen shots, but its actually kind of cool for creating flash images rapidly and on the fly with clickable or hover over items.

On the graphics side I use the following programs regularly:

1. Snagit for day to day blogging images and basic image manipulation – sometimes some light web design graphic images.
2. Camtasia – Excellent for turning a presentation into a video (any format including flash) You can also capture video of your computer screen with easy zoom and focusing options.
1. 
3. Jing – free video capture program made by TechSmith that also makes Camtasia. This is a very limited video capture program, very easy. Only enables output to swf files for embedding as flash (no .avi or .wmv or .mov options which means you can’t make the video viral)
4. Fireworks – good for taking a graphic designed image and converting a concept into a web page in Dreamweaver (made by Macromedia owned by Adobe and bundled with Creative Suite 3)
5. Photoshop – Good for creating the designed image above to make a web site concept (made by Adobe bundled in Creative Suite 3)
6. Illustrator – Good for logos and other parts of images to then send to Photoshop  (also bundled in Creative Suite 3)
7. Flash – I actually don’t use this much the last 9 months. SnagIt and Camtasia(this month) are probably going to cover most of my flash work as they make it easier than Flash itself.  (bundled in Creative Suite 3 also)

Money Savings Tip! Now Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash all come together if you buy Adobe Creative Suite 3.  That retails for $1700 unless you are student.  Then you can buy it for about $589  through Campus Tech.

That may seem like a lot for a student, but it is not all that much and if you are a college student that needs to find a way to make $600 to buy the software, I can help point you in the right direction.  If you are not a college student, but you want your school aged children to learn how to use this software, they can qualify for an educational discount if they are in k – 12 or in college. 

For an $1100 savings, it might not hurt to go sign up for some college courses yourself.  Might have to forego a new pair of Nike golf shoes and some time on the links, but picking up some new job skills and learning how to use this great software could do your career some wonders.

All that said we are both doing it the hard way. Graphics is much much easier if you have a Mac. Doing graphics on a PC is like doing this stuff with your mouse hand tied behind your back.  (my friend and I both came out of the corporate world and still rely to heavily on personal computers)

Not sure what you are trying to do first with graphics, but I’d recommend getting the software above as you prioritize it and then learning it. Once you figure out which software program you are trying to learn I can probably help you more figuring out where to go.

I was just reading over at Family Matters, who in the great spirit of the blogosphere was nice enough to quote arstechnica.com, who reported from MacWorld that Apple is picking up the licensing engine for Dragon Naturally Speaking, throwing out iListen and pushing in Dragon Naturally Speaking into MacSpeech in a product called Dictate (in beta).

I came out of the fortune 500 corporate finance world powered by PC’s and the Mac was always some obscure piece of equipment that under funded*(or over funded depending on your perspective) art schools tended to use to get work done.  Over the last 2-3 years, that inbred corporate perspective has been changed as I started to do a great deal more work with graphics, video, audio and web design.

One of the things keeping me on the fence from making a final conversion or at least making an addition to my computer collection in the form of an Apple iBook or an Apple Air (odd name in that I want a computer with substance as opposed to a box filled with . . . .) is the absence of 2 tools.  One is a better version of MindManager for the Mac and the other is a great speech recognition program, preferably Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Here’s the quote from the articles I mentioned above:

ars technica reports from MacWorld:

As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance’s speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.

First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren’t allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, “training” the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate’s review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person’s voice—in addition to plain ol’ American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English. [Read entire article.]

My wallet won’t be happy ($199 – includes headset) but my carpal tunnel can’t wait for the release. Stay tuned, I’ll be talking about this a lot more.

Family Matters » » MacSpeech Announces Dictate

*  My wife graduated from a great art school called the Savannah College of Art and Design.  I do believe that art schools can teach very useful knowledge, skills and abilities that society needs for many purposes. 

** On a complete side note if you want to find a great weekend getaway I highly endorse Savannah.  Break out your beach stuff, and pack up your travel gear and check out Savannah.  I highly recommend it in April when the flowers and trees are blooming and the beach is hot but not too hot.

You probably remember seeing some of the media hype running up to and through the iPhone launch on June 29. You probably heard some of the estimates that the iPhone could, would and had sold 500,000 iPhones the first couple days it was on the market. Well, if those numbers seemed suspicious to you, then give yourself a pat on the back for being able to cut through the spin.

AT&T said it signed up 146,000 iPhone customers, well below analyst estimates, which ran as high as 500,000 units. Shares of Apple were down as much as 5 percent in early trading and about 2.5 percent at midday, trading around $140. AT&T?s shares were down less than 1 percent, at slightly under $40.

AT&T has an exclusive deal with Apple to provide wireless service for the iPhone, the combination digital music player, cellular phone and Internet device. The phone went on sale on June 29, two days before the quarter ended, amid fanfare surpassed only by the release of the final ?Harry Potter? book last week.

AT&T Earnings Up, but iPhone Sales Disappoint – New York Times

Selling a cellphone is for good or bad currently about signing up a subscriber. No subscriber is pretty much no sale. Carriers own the market for good or bad and possibly until Google attempts to ‘open’ the market with their own variety of Information Monopoly. At&t released their 2nd quarter numbers and it shows that the iPhone did not due even half as well as the news media claimed. The iPhone didn’t sell 500k nor 400k nor even 250k. It sold 146k.

So there was a lot of hype in those numbers. Now sure, you could argue that some people bought the iPhone from an Apple store. You could say there were difficulties with people getting signed up with At&t resulting from buying from an Apple store even. But let’s think about that for a second.

1. If you make the argument that the sales came from Apple Stores (say 364,000 units sold), then that would indicate that only Apple can sell the iPhone most of the time and that At&t doesn’t know what they are doing. Now I wouldn’t rule that out, but it doesn’t help Apple be successful setting up partnerships with the cell phone industry let alone At&t who has a 5 year lock on the iPhone

2. It could be argued that the phone subscriber number was low due to the difficulty signing up with At&t. There did seem to be a few anecdotes on the internet, but nothing indicated that 364,000 people were having trouble. That would be proof of a very serious problem for At&t and Apple (ergo don’t buy it at the Apple Store if you want an easy transition onto your At&t plan.)

3. Let’s look at the dark side for a second. In the book publishing world, publishers hire people to go out and buy up their books to create the illusion of a best seller. If 500,000 units were the number of total iPhones sold, and lets say that only 50,000 people experienced a slow sign up(that’s still a huge number of customers treated poorly), then we have to account for the other 294,000 unit sales. Could it be that Apple or At&t or someone else with an iPhone agenda went out and purchased up the other 294,000 units to pump up the numbers? Obviously, Apple would have the most to gain from hype, but it could be that a number of people wanted to see if the iPhone would sell on eBay or ask the question Will it Blend? for their YouTube show.

Now don’t get me wrong, neither Apple nor At&t have the best track records at book keeping. I have no idea what type of financial reporting software either company is using nor how their accountants and auditors de’ jour are applying GAAP principles to their numbers. It could also be possible that neither company knows how to count. Regardless of the scenario and possibilities, stock holders didn’t like the news and peppered their At&t stock on Apple before taking a bite out of Apple’s value.

Last week we wrote about the rookie mistakes that Apple made on the new iPhone.  We covered 19 mistakes that we noted within the first 48 hours of the release of the iPhone.  Many more mistakes have been identified since then, some of which might be able to be fixed with iPhone 2.0.

However, those were mobile phone mistakes for the most part.  Those were rookie mistakes made by a rookie mobile phone designer.

We would not have expected them to make rookie mistakes when it came to the design of the MP3 player in the iPhone, the thing that put the ‘i” in the iPhone.  Apple apparently forgot to include some of the core functionality that imprinted the Apple signature on the iPod and made it a great device in the first place.  (not the only thing but a key thing)

They purposefully removed the ability to drag and drop music onto the iPhone.  They went for a glitzy looking interface on the phone itself and dumbed down the interface between the phone to the computer to iTunes.  So its now just as tedious to synch up the iPhone with your computer as any other MP3 player with the exception of an iPod.  The iPhone might have been a great gadget if it had been as good as an iPod plus had the abilities of a good phone.

In fact it doesn’t have the capabilities of a good phone and isn’t as good as an iPhone. 

Monster’s and Critics put together a nice summary of activation numbers iPhone users may need to turn their iBrick into an iPhone.

Many news organizations and bloggers are calling out At&t as the source of the activation issues. I suspect that its Apple’s low tech method of activating iPhones through iTunes that is taxing At&t’s system. At&t like all major wireless carriers are setup to activate phones . . . wirelessly. Trying to force a half million activations in two days through servers handing off from Apple to At&t is definitely an exceptional process for At&t and not one that could have been tested before hand. But Apple had to be special and ‘control’ activations through their own site so they could get a few more iTunes users.

That control seems to have caused some of their new and existing customers hours of hold time headaches. Hopefully Apple tested the iPhone better than they tested their atypical activation process.

Activation Support Numbers for the iPhone

AT&T Customer Service (1-877-419-4500)
AT&T Activation Status number (877-800-3701)
Cellular Customer Service (800-331-0500)
Port Request (866-895-1097)
Apple Support (AT&T) number (877-777-4189)
Port and activations line (888-898-7685)
Apple support group (800-694-7466)

Source: AT&T suffers wrath of bloggers over activation issues – Tech

Apple is very new to the mobile phone design business.  This newbie status enabled them to throw out a few rules and come up with a sexy software interface, but they missed a number of things that mobile phone consumers have grown to expect or demand over the years.

These mistakes are gathered from multiple news stories and consumer complaints that have surfaced in the first 24 hours or so after the launch of the iPhone.  Apple’s rush to market may have ignored the marketing studies that probably highlighted these problems months ago.

Below I present these 19 Rookie Mistakes Apple Made on iPhone in a quick video presentation based on a MindManager Mindmap, a snap shot of the actual mindmap, and the text exported from the mindmap.

Video Presentation 19 Rookie Mistakes Apple Made on iPhone

Image of Mindmap of 19 Rookie Mistakes Apple Made on iPhone

Text from Mindmap export of 19 Rookie Mistakes Apple made on iPhone

19 Rookie Mistakes Apple Made on iPhone

1. No IM Support
   • Yahoo
   • AOL
   • MSN
2. No MultiMedia Services MMS
   • So you can’t snap a picture and message it
3. No Voice Recorder
4. No Voice Dialer
   • Ergo No Hands Free Dialing!
5. Stuck on Older At&t Edge Platform S L  O    W
   • Stuck with Battery Sucking WiFi
6. Can’t swap At&t Sim cards
   • If you don’t like it, you can’t give it to your spouse or kids
7. Headphone Jacks not Standard
   • Go buy an uncool $10 adapter
8. oftware Keyboard Is Prone to Typos No Kiddinv!
   • Have fun with Passwords!
9. The Reorientate Program only works in 3 programs not in common programs like E-mail
   • No Messages viewed in Widescreen Display
10. No Custom Ringtones
    • That’s almost good, you won’t waste money buying an iTune Ringtone!
11. Camera is Average
    • 2 megapixels
    • Useless if you move or its dark according to Gizmodo
12. No Video and No Audio Capability for camera
    • We mentioned the absence of a voice recorder too!
13. No To Do List
    • Maybe that’s why Apple missed so many of these obvisous features! (ergo they couldn’t put them on their to do list)
14. Inability to Sync with Corporate Servers
    • No Suits Sporting an iPhone -> Go Back to Sleep Blackberry
15. Name doesn’t go well with the word ‘My’
    • Can you hand me My IPhone? ->My Eye Phone
16. Phone doesn’t work Much until Activated
    • Did we mention that many Activations are running slow!
    • Some waiting for 14 hours!
      • Cause
        • People transferring their old wireless numbers to At&t for an iPhone
        • Buy some IBuprofen first!
17. Doesn’t sync with Outlook Calendar and Contacts wirelessly
18. No Internet Flash support when browsing
19. No SD expansion slot for things like Pictures

 If you are one of the minority of people that use a Mac, you may be extremely excited about the launch of the iPhone.  If you are a devotee of the iPod, you may be looking to trade in your iPod and cancel your current cell plan paying the $100-$200 cancellation fee, in order to then pay $500 up front for a new iPhone.

The commercials look sexy, the gadget looks like a sexy gadget, its Apple and for the last 10 years(maybe a little less) Apple has been cool again.  Apple has a problem with the iPhone and it has been under reported.  People have been crazed over a product that has been hyped for almost 2 years and is only finally coming to market (while other cell makers have already rushed out devices that do the same thing and look the same but without the Apple name).

Apple’s problem is that they are working with AT&T and have given the mobile service provider an exclusive deal for 5 years.  Mobile phone models, even iPods do not last five years.  The product life cycle doesn’t last five years.  Five years for an untested mobile product with an untested mobile phone maker was a stupid deal for At&t to make, if they want to sell iPhones. 

Another possible hindrance for Apple is the nature of its agreement with AT&T, he said. AT&T gave Apple an unprecedented amount of say in how the iPhone will be sold and what the phone will feature; Motorola and other carriers, accustomed to obeying carrier dictates, would likely be envious.
But Apple has also given AT&T a five-year exclusive deal to sell the phone, analysts say. Exclusive deals rarely run more than one year. Phonemakers want to build market share by selling through multiple carriers. “AT&T gave a lot, but so did Apple,” Hazelton said.

Source: Apple’s iPhone casts big shadow on cell industry | Chicago Tribune

I’m sure they do but they win regardless of whether any iPhones sell.  If they don’t sell, then Apple will have to pay the bill when AT&T returns the product or chops the price down to something normal like $99(A $200 – $300 per phone charge that Apple will have to pay.)  At&t will win because they will be bringing foot traffic into their stores and their websites.  If people can’t afford the ridiculous price of the iPhone, At&t can convince them to pick up another product.

The thing is though that At&t is a dud.  Under the Cingular brand Bell South/ SBC did quite a bit to revamp a wireless business and then they brought in the albatross that was a mostly failing At&t. They then made the stupid decision of going with the At&t brand name because it is recognized.  That is normally smart marketing, when the brand has no positive connotations, but At&t has a long and recent history of bad service, Bad quality, Bad customer service, Bad prices, Bad billing capabilities, and more. 

Apple has a good image in most of those areas if you discount the crappy batteries and the iPod sudden death syndrome and ignore those monstrous junky Apple Box things with the jello colors from several years back (the ones that couldn’t be upgraded and got stuck in a bunch of colleges where they rapidly rotted away or became outdated).

So Apple has given an exclusive deal to a company with a brand name that is a dud in the wireless world.  What is going to happen to all those Apple devotee types that get suckered into setting up 2 year plans with At&t and end up getting bad service with their cool looking phones?

1. Most of them will get very mad at At&t
2. A few will get mad at Apple
3. The ones that get mad at At&t will take their vengeance out on At&t vocally, and At&t will drop the iPhone as a stop gap measure.
4. At&t will pass along any pain and expense back to Apple and Apple will do what it always does when it makes a mistake, they’ll fight it in court.

But none of this is going to be good for the consumer and especially not for Apple fans.  The iPhone may have the potential to fly, but its not going to fly well with an At&t albatross.

EMI, the third largest record company with acts such as the Beastie Boys and the Beatles, has been considering scrapping its use of DRM on downloaded music tracks. EMI has been in talks with more than one online music store. Despite Steve Jobs recent plea to anyone that would listen to end DRM, EMIA and Apple have not spoken yet, but that could change as a result of their now publicly mutual interest in moving away from DRM.

It would appear according to a Wall Street Journal article today that Steve Jobs was not aware that EMI was shopping around. The article goes on to elaborate that Jobs started his letter as a result of European Union pressure for Apple to make its products work on other devices.

CD sales fell this year by 20%. They account for 85% of US sales of music and such a big drop in sales has music companies working hard to catch up and get their cash flows back on track. The new question for the music companies will be, “Is it too little too late?’

Technorati tags: EMI, Apple, DRM

This week Steve Jobs came out with a letter to the world expressing the concept that he thinks that Digital Rights Management DRM is essentially a waste of time inspired by a reactionary Music Industry. He published his letter on his website and laid out the case against DRM and as a side point against the record industry that requires DRM.

Just a couple months ago Bill Gates invited a number of bloggers for a one on one personal dialogue. He intimated his distaste for DRM then as well. Recommending that music shoppers should burn music from CD’s as opposed to buying music with DRM, like the music offered at his Zune online music store. He essentially said the same thing that Steve Jobs is saying now, but a little eloquently.

With all this talk from the head of two of the companies that are so much at the heart of DRM through their media player software and now also through their physical media players, it seems as if they are starting to publicly state their opinion and acknowledge their agreement.

In private if they were to sit down and choose a course to act together or against individually the music industry, even when consumers benefit this would be considered collusion. However, free speech is still allowed in many forms throughout the US, and so both leaders are allowed to express their opinion publicly, even though it allows them to confirm with each other that they are publicly on the same sheet of music. The end result is the same as they can choose their direction knowing the move of the other, but the record industry also benefits from seeing the telegraphed signal as well.

This might be the beginning of the end of DRM as we know it and that can definitely be a good thing for consumers wallets, what it will do to and for the record industry and the TV and movie industry remains to be seen.

Technorati tags: apple, steve jobs, bill gates, DRM, digital rights management, collusion

Depending on your perspective you may be chagrined to learn that the latest version of Apple iTunes 7.02 does not function with Microsoft’s new Vista OS.  Apple is recommending that iTune users should not upgrade to Vista yet.

The first question is just who is incompatible with whom?

Is the new iTunes incompatible with Vista?

or

Is the new Vista incompatible with iTunes?

The answer to that question probably depends on your perspective and priorities in life.  If iTunes is more important then the second and if not then the first.

The second question though could be more interesting.  Is this some type of anti-trust move by Microsoft to block out iTunes from its market dominating Operating System base.  This would then allow Vista to potentially make way for more Microsoft OS users and fewer Mac users, while simultaneously opening the door a crack for Zune?

or

Is this some type of anti-trust move by Apple to block out Vista from its market dominating iPod user base?  Could they be opening the door to convert more people away from Microsoft’s Operating system and over to Apple’s OS and machines.  Will Apple make iTunes compatible with Vista prior to the release of Apple’s new Operating System expected this summer?

Prediction

Both companies are playing a game of chess against each other and the answers to all of the questions above would be the same, Yes!

Technorati tags: Microsoft v Apple, Microsoft, Apple, iTunes, Vista, Zune, Antitrust