Tag Archives: software

Subscriptions (and Apple Music)

We’ll get back to the agony and ecstasy of personal transport in a bit, but I wanted to do a quick write up about subscriptions (and Apple Music).

I have something of an aversion to subscriptions.

It’s a bit of a dilemma for me, because while I get that you need to pay for things, the idea that I have to continue paying to get access to a piece of software or, to a lesser degree, some service, is kind of scary. I realise software development isn’t free, and subscriptions make for attractive revenue streams for developers who constantly work on new features, but not enough to release proper upgrade versions, but traditionally, paying an upfront cost for something and then owning it until the day you die is still somehow more palatable.

Maybe it’s just because we’ve paid upfront for software for so long that makes this idea that you need to keep paying or lose access to the stuff that you’ve worked on seem so foreign. Office 365 isn’t so bad in that you can still open and view documents created with the office suite, but even when the price of the subscription makes the cost the same over time, it’s still a hard pill to swallow.

At the time, the Photography Plan for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop made a lot of sense. I recently purchased Lightroom 5 about a year after Lightroom 4, and at that stage I was paying about $100/year for Lightroom, so I’d essentially be paying $20/year extra for Photoshop which seemed like a great deal. Unfortunately, a few things have made this less attractive over time.

For one, Adobe hasn’t released a new version of Lightroom since 2015, so I’ve ended up paying more than those who picked up the standalone version. I also haven’t used Photoshop as much as I thought I would have, making that “added value” null and void, and to top it all off, Adobe has slowly increased prices. New subscriptions to the Adobe Photography Plan are currently $14.29/month, which starts to eat into that extra value of Photoshop, especially if you’re only using it a few times a year.

So that’s software, what about services? Things get a little more complicated when we’re talking about services. I don’t watch enough mainstream TV to subscribe to streaming services like Netflix or any of the other Australian offerings, and even though there are some great streaming services for anime, I’ve never really been able to reconcile paying a monthly fee for their entire library when I only want to watch one or two shows.

I think one of the main problems I have with subscriptions is that most of the time, I’d rather pay for an entire year upfront, instead of a month at a time. It’s weird, but I think I have an easier time justifying $120/year than I do $10 a month, especially if I’m getting some kind of discount that makes the annual option even more appealing.

How does all of this apply to Apple Music? To answer that question, we kind of need to talk about Spotify first…

Continue Reading →

Nvidia’s ShadowPlay and One Angry Earthshaker

fraps movies settings

Occasionally, I put gaming-related videos on YouTube. For all of those videos, I’ve used Fraps to capture in-game footage, and as far as software-based capture tools go, it isn’t bad. I’ve been using Fraps for a few years now, and for the most part, I’ve been pretty happy with it.

That said, there are a few things about Fraps I don’t like. For starters, it creates massive files on disk — it works out to be about 1.2GB/minute for 720p footage at 60fps. There’s no option to record at arbitrary resolutions, only your display resolution or half size, whatever that turns out to be1. And enabling Fraps usually kills my FPS, which usually gets me killed in whatever game I’m playing. The frame rate drop I experience in certain (read: more recent, more demanding) games turns me off recording unless I really want to, otherwise I’d probably record far more often than I do. That, and the massive hard drive space requirements for recording.

But like any in-game capture tool, the worst thing about Fraps is that I have to manually enable it whenever I want to record something. That’s fine if I know something cool might happen in advance, or when I know I’m going to do something which I might need footage for later, but I honestly couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve done something epic and wished it has been recorded. So many times I’ve missed out on capturing some real Kodak moments, and all because FRAPS wasn’t recording. The “workaround” for this, if you can call it that, is to have Fraps running all the time — but when gaming sessions go for hours on end, I have neither the hard drive space nor the low-FPS tolerance for that to be a viable solution.

shadowplay settings

Enter Nvidia’s ShadowPlay.

In Shadow Mode, ShadowPlay automatically records everything in the background. It records up to the last ten minutes of gameplay in the background, which you can then save to disk if you want by pressing the appropriate key combo. Do something epic, and want to have a permanent record of it? No need to gripe about not having Fraps turned on and recording to your friends over TeamSpeak, because ShadowPlay already recorded it for you. All you have to do is save the recording.

ShadowPlay is also great because it doesn’t produce massive files when recording footage. It uses the GPU to transcode your recordings on the fly to H.264 (which is why you’ll need a GTX 600 or 700 series graphics card), resulting in reasonably-sized files, and best of all, there’s no performance hit that I’ve noticed thus far. (For comparative purposes, 1GB of hard drive space gives me roughly three minutes of in-game footage with ShadowPlay at 1080p/60fps, compared to under a minute with Fraps at 720p/60fps.) There are alternative software capture tools that can perform similar compression on your recordings, but those use CPU power instead of a dedicated H.264 encoder built into the graphics card. And since my CPU is a few years old now, I don’t really have those CPU cycles to spare when I’m gaming.

ShadowPlay has a manual recording option too á la Fraps, in case you want to go down that path. But having something sit in the background silently recording my every move is great, and means I don’t have to think about what I’m going to be doing next and whether I want to have that on file for later. It’s like having an instant rewind for anything.

There’s always room for improvement though, and ShadowPlay is no exception. It needs the ability to record voice input, for starters. If I’m communicating hilarious things over TeamSpeak but all the recording captures is my teammates’ responses, then that’s not very useful. And I have to do some more thorough testing, but I’ve had a few recordings with a number of graphical glitches too. Then again, Nvidia have labelled it a beta for a reason, so I’m sure it’ll get there.

But for now, ShadowPlay is pretty great. Reasonably-sized files, little to no performance hit when recording, and the best part is, it means I don’t have to worry about turning on Fraps before doing something cool. What’s not to love?

ShadowPlay makes recoding game footage an afterthought, which is what it should be — because you’re supposed to be playing games, not thinking about whether you want to record what you’re doing in games.

About the video2: OK, so, there was this one game of DOTA 2 I was playing, right. We had an Earthshaker on our team who wanted to play him like a carry — constantly going 1v1 against other heroes. Dude thought he was invincible, even after he died three times in the space of two and a half minutes. After he died he’d usually ping-spam the map, resulting in our Death Prophet getting worked up and shout at him over in-game voice. It was hilarious, right up until the point where Earthshaker revealed he had a mic after all, but apparently only used it to abuse other teammates over voice. We lost the game, of course, but it was really strange. Almost like the dude was drunk or something.


  1. Since I game at 2560×1440, the native resolution of my display, half size turns out to be 720p, which works out well enough for YouTube purposes. 1080p would be great, but recording at full size and then down-sizing is too much work. 
  2. I had to upload the video to Vimeo because YouTube blocked the audio because of the Lady Gaga going on in the background. But the audio is kind of the best part. And yeah, sorry about having the not-very ad-free Spotify going on in the background. (The new Lady Gaga is just OK, IMHO). 

Buy the apps outright, full-price, directly from the developer.

It’s not a bargain if you don’t need it.

Let’s just say there is one of these bundles – lets just call it MacTheft – and the price for eleven apps is $19.95. And, let’s just say they promise to give $5.00 of your purchase to starving children in cataclysmicly devastated regions of the world. Therefore, the price of the software – all eleven apps – is theoretically $14.95. But, let’s just say there is only two apps out of the eleven that you really think you need. Here is a crazy idea to try…

Buy the apps outright, full-price, directly from the developer.

Crazy, right?

[…]

OK, fine. You want a “bargain”. How about this… Contact the developers of the two apps you want and say something like…

“Hey, I see you have your apps available on MacTheft and, while that is great and all, I really don’t need all eleven of them. I really only need two, your’s and this other guy’s. Therefore, I am contacting each of you to see if I could give you $7.50 cents directly. I figure that is about 10 times more than you will get from my individual sale if I buy it through MacTheft. Also, I was planing on giving five dollars to the starving children too.”

via Minimal Mac.

Minimal Mac is, of course, talking about the recent MacHeist nanoBundle which contained heaps of pretty cool apps for the bargain-basement price of just $20.

I wasn’t going to buy the bundle at first, but then Tweetie (the super-mega-awesome Twitter client for Mac) came along, and I figured I might as well buy it for Tweetie, and get the rest of the apps for free (which were valued at over $260 if bought separately). Here’s hoping I actually get around to using RapidWeaver one of these days…

In hindsight after reading the above article I should have really bought Tweetie separately (the few-and-far between ads are so awesome I have them turned on anyway, haha), but the clincher this time was that there was some sort of “public beta” access to Tweetie 2 for Mac – a pretty big deal as 2.0 has been a long time coming, and will probably feature all those cool Twitter features the iPhone version of Tweetie has had for the past couple of months.

The thing is, had I bought Tweetie directly from the developer all those months ago, there’s absolutely no obligation for the developer to come along and say “hey, thanks for purchasing our app, we’ll get in touch when we need beta testers for the next version”. By buying Tweetie from MacHeist, not only did I get into some privileged beta program (along with every other purchaser), but I also got a whole lot of other apps for, what is essentially free. Where’s the loser here? The developers of the other programs? They gain some publicity. The charity who received the 25% donation? Well, any money’s better than no money. Me? I “paid” for an app I use constantly, and got some more apps for free. Who then, is the loser here?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against schemes like MacHeist. They’re a great way to get some HUGE publicity for your app – had you asked me a year ago what ShoveBox was, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Same for pretty much every other app that came included in last year’s MacHeist bundle, and same again for this year’s nanoBundle. Ambrosia Software recenltly had a pretty good sale as well – I’ve been looking to pick up a copy of EV Nova for a while now, and they had it in a bundle with some other apps. The only catch was, it was the Windows-only version. Ambrosia make some cool Mac stuff and EV Nova is available for Mac as well – so I didn’t end up buying that particular bundle that time around. Just a month or so ago however, I picked up EV Nova from their website, at full retail, and as a result, got both the Mac and PC versions for the same price, similar to what Valve will be doing when they release Steam for Mac sometime later this year.

Yeah, I know I’ll probably never use some of those applications, but the thing is, other people might. I know I’ll almost never need to use a clipboard manager under OSX, but other people might – now that Clips was included in MacHeist, I can now recommend it to other people to try out. Sure, the couple of people I tell in my lifetime that buy Clips for the full price probably won’t make up for the 50,000 or so people who bought Clips for nothing, but even if every person managed to on-sell just one copy, that’s an additional 50,000 copies they probably wouldn’t have sold. I know I’m not taking into consideration things like support costs and all that, but do you kinda see my point?

That being said, if developers actually offered decent discounts (25% or more) on some of their apps, I can certainly see myself buying software more often. Hell, Panic held a sale with 50% off all their software last year, and I picked up Transmit because it was a frequently used app of mine. I wish I picked up Coda at the same time, but I know I’d almost never use it. So, to Cultured Code, Panic, Ambrosia, and all those other software developers that make cool stuff – have sales. You’d be surprised how many people will buy your stuff if it’s priced decently.

That’s how I’m going to justify it to myself, anyway. Your mileage may differ, but here’s hoping you got something out of this. mini-rant.

iPhone Carrier Bundles Update

I’ve jailbroken my iPhone 3G, extracted and modified the bundle included, to enable tethering, set up MMS properly (full resolution photos anyone?) and properly configuring Group SMS.

Previously if you attempted to send a SMS message to a group of people, it would instead be sent as a MMS, at MMS rates. Not good. [This carrier update allows you to send multiple messages to groups as SMSs, not as MMSs – Benny]

This new bundle also conforms to the official bundles avaliable for iPhone OS 3 (unneeded/redundant settings have been removed, like EnableMMSCEditing).

All data (iPhone data and tethering) goes through the telstra.iph APN, and MMS goes through telstra.mms.

You can find the carrier bundle here: Telstra_au.ipcc.

via iPhone Carrier Bundles Update | Selling Expectations.

Beau then goes on to handle that pesky no-manual-carrier update issue:

Enabling custom carrier file uploading in iTunes 8.2:

For OS X users, paste or type the following into Terminal, and then restart iTunes:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

For Windows users, please paste these into ‘Run’ (Press WinKey + R while on the desktop:
32bit –
"C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1

64bit –
"C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1

Smiley’s Shooty Adventure: Robotron meets Geometry Wars

Smiley

Robotron meets Geometry Wars, Smiley’s Shooty Adventure is a frantic action shooter available for both Mac and Windows. Created by Caffeine Monster Software, you are in charge of a smiley face as you take on enemies coming from all directions, using your mouse to point the fire and keyboard to move the smiley, perfect for lunch breaks when the boss is not looking and small enough to hide away quick =]

via Smiley’s Shooty Adventure [Mac, Windows, Game]: Robotron meets Geometry Wars | CreativeApplications.Net.

Anything that implements some Geometry Wars action is good enough for me 🙂

Just downloaded the demo. I’ll let you know how it goes…

A Week Without Apple – Day Two, A Lesson in Understanding

Now there are many things Mac OS X does better than Windows 7 and vice-versa. I’m not taking advantage of either OS and it’s features. I’m sure Windows 7 has lots more up it’s sleeve than I know about. Ditto Mac OS X – I know I don’t use all the things in Mac OS X like I should because I’m too lazy to seek it out. The aim of this experiment isn’t to choose a winner, or declare Mac OS X THE BEST OS EVAR SCREW YOU MICRO$OFT! It’s to see what Windows is, how it works, what it does and what it does differently. Everyone’s computer use is different, so you need to make up your own mind as to whether Windows 7 or Mac OS X is for you. It’s great to have competition and choice. Windows 7 is way better than I expected and very competent.

[…]

So while the HP is much cheaper, has better specs, a built in card reader, HDMI and digital TV, loads more ports and a snazzy webcam, it has some real livability faults. The LCD is rubbish and even a layman can tell it looks awful, it’s that poor. The trackpad is virtually useless with it’s total lack of glide. If the screen was slightly higher quality and the trackpad not so crappy, it would be a vastly better experience. I’m actually confused as to why HP sent me this laptop to replace the MBP. The MBP retails for $3,199 – you’d think they’d send something a bit more upmarket.

via A Week Without Apple – Day Two, A Lesson in Understanding | MacTalk Australia.

I concur wholeheartedly.

This is why I use a Mac – even though I’m more than proficient at using both either/all OSs well.