Make Film Work — I make videos. Sometimes I write about it.

1 Salem, MA from Jason Hawkins on Vimeo.

Since moving to Salem I’ve been working on an idea to create video snapshots about some of the cool things I’ve seen here. This video highlights the The Build Guild, a meetup for people in the web industry, and is the first in (what will become) a series of similar snapshots.

Unfortunately, I was a little off my game when I shot this and as a result the audio suffered greatly. Sorry about that.

About a year ago I worked for a few months teaching myself Ruby on Rails. I’m not a programmer, but I really wanted a tape logger that I could use on my iPhone, and one hadn’t been introduced yet. So I made my own.

It’s not perfect. I did the best I could with the knowledge of programming that I had at the time, and the result was a single release of a web app I called Tapes. Since it’s debut in Apple’s web app section I’ve had 5,485 people sign up as users. I have no way of checking to see if they’re actually using the application, but if even a handful of them still find it useful I’d be thrilled.

But now we have the ability to write native apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. I would love nothing more than to be able to sell Tapes (don’t worry, I’m thinking $4.99) through the iTunes store and do my part to fill the gaping void of production-oriented apps. My biggest problem in reaching this goal is that I’m STILL NOT A PROGRAMMER. I’ve been studying up on C since February, but I don’t really feel like I’ve got a firm grasp on it yet. And after that I have to learn Objective-C. And then the Cocoa-touch framework. And make sure the UI is intuitive. And then get accepted into Apple’s dev program even though I’m not really a developer. All without having a formal education in computer science.

Basically, it’s hard.

But hard isn’t bad. Just challenging. So I promise you this, Internets: If it can be done, it shall be done. I will do my best to come out with a native tape or footage logging application at some point in the future. I have no idea when, or how. But I’m going to try.

And if you know anybody that knows anything about writing Objective-C apps, please send them my way.

Because I need some help.

This summer has been pretty crazy what with moving across the country and everything. I haven’t had the time to write about everything that I thought was interesting, so I thought about creating a linked list (no affiliation to this guy, of course) to catch up on what’s been going on around here.

• The biggest news is that Meagan and I have moved from Orlando, FL to Salem, MA. We love it. Salem is amazing. You should definitely take a look at all of the pictures I’ve shot since moving.

• The real bombshell here, however, is that Meagan is going to be working with legendary, dragon-slaying designer Dan Cederholm, of SimpleBits fame. We’re all pretty excited about that, and I can’t wait to see what kind of mind-expanding creations these two come up with in the months to come.
• A week (to the day) after arriving in Salem, Meagan and I found ourselves attending the first ever gathering of The Build Guild. The Build Guild is a collection of web developers and designers from the greater Salem area, who meet to talk shop and eat some delicious Salem food. The first meeting was a lot of fun, thanks in a big way to the Guild’s founders, Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni.

• A fews days prior to leaving Orlando, I wrote about my MacBook Pro having a logic board failure. After I got the computer back I decided to try and restore the system from my latest Time Machine backup. Something I wasn’t aware of is that Time Machine uses your computer’s MAC address to identify it for a backup. When that address changes (such as when you get a new logic board), you have to perform a bit of Unix voodoo to get it to work again. I found a great walk-through on the topic over at Mac OSX Hints. If you’re having a similar issue, this should straighten things out.
• I’m a big fan of The Edit Blog for it’s fantastic production-related content. On a recent post Scott linked to a post by a very frustrated filmmaker trying to work with Soundtrack Pro for audio mixing. He lists his grievances and calls for it’s immediate execution by Apple. I’ve had my share of frustrations with Soundtrack Pro, but I’ve never wished death upon it before. He makes some great points though. Definitely worth a read.
• Lastly, I’m going to bookend this post with another mention of moving. One of my new favorite blogs, Big Contrarian recently had a post about moving that I loved. Read it and subscribe immediately.

Back in March I bought a bag from STM, based (in part) on a post by designer Cameron Moll.

I love this bag. It’s just about perfect. I love the the pockets, especially. There are just so many really well placed storage spaces on this bag. I can fit all of the normal computer accessories (power supply, extension cable, headphones, etc.) plus just about everything else I might want to take (a hard-cover Moleskine, pen, wireless Mighty Mouse, wireless aluminum Apple Keyboard, Swiss Army Pocketknife/USB drive, Apple Remote…).

So imagine my surprise (read: horror) when I noticed that the strap on my amazing little 4 month old bag was coming undone. In a word, bummer.

The good news is that shortly after shooting an email to STM, they wrote me back asking where they could send a replacement strap, and apologized for any inconvenience. Fantastic.

So it looks like I’ll be keeping this bag around for a while longer. And for that I am grateful. I’m pretty sure I’ll be looking to them first for any future digital cargo-carrying needs.

Around 2am, Thursday morning I put my MacBook Pro to sleep. I was going out into the living room to watch a movie with my roommates (the Mel Gibson tour-de-force, Ransom) when I figured I could use my computer to convert some video I was in the process of archiving. I went back into my room and lifted the lid. The screen didn’t turn on.

Now, I know that sometimes that happens. You just have to give it a minute before the screen kicks in and you’re right as rain. Well, I gave it half an hour and still nothing. I tried connecting my external display and nothing. I wasn’t even getting a backlight. NOTHING. At this point I went and made an appointment at the Millenia Apple store for that afternoon.

After taking a look at it, and hearing about my various restart/reset attempts, the Genius (named Jason, btw) told me that my logic board was probably fried.

Well, that sucks. He told me they’d send it out and have it back to me in about 10 days. The problem then is that I’m not going to be around in 10 days. I’ll be settling into my new home in Salem, MA at that point. So he kindly told me that they’d be happy to ship it there instead.

I went home and spent a few days trying to work exclusively from my iPhone. And as great as it is, it’s not a desktop replacement. At least not yet. So I dug out the first Mac I ever bought, a 12″ PowerBook G4. It was in need of a pretty serious cleaning as it had recently been put through the special kind of abuse only a 14 year-old can inflict.

After the cleaning, however, the trackpad wasn’t as responsive as I would have liked. I also lost the ability to use two-finger scrolling. I solved the latter by downloading iScroll2. But to fix the first issue, I’d have to do a little bit of Mac surgery. I went into the closet and pulled out a twin PowerBook G4 that only lived for about a week before being stepped on by an unapologetic professor with a weight and coordination problem.

I took stock of what parts I was going to harvest (I seemed to be missing a few screws from the working machine too) and got down to business. The process took about an hour, and in the end I had what felt like a much newer PowerBook G4 to play with. Which is what I’m writing this on now.

I look forward to getting my working MacBook Pro back in a week or so, but it’s always a humbling experience going back a few years in the Mac legacy. In fact, I’m amazed that this machine runs as well as it does. With a lone 1.33GHz PPC processor, and just 768MB of RAM, I don’t have a problem running Leopard, or doing all of the web-browsing things I’d want to do. Obviously I’m not doing any video work on this machine, but it’s fine for photos, and music, and most multi-media operations.

It’s just one more reason why I love these machines so much, and why I’m not ripping my hair out over a toasted logic board.