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Yourlocalcinema.com has been shortlisted for a National Lottery Award. For those who haven't paid this site a visit before, they provide listings of the latest subtitled and audio described cinema showings around the UK, as well as subtitled trailers, and several links to articles concerning accessible cinema (Their Site Map is a good place to start to get your bearings).

Voting for them in this contest is a great opportunity to highlight the interest in accessible cinema and encourage more investment in this area. You can vote by going to the National Lottery page here, clicking on the Best Arts Project category and then on YourLocalCinema.com where you can read a bit more about what they do and cast your vote. A direct link to YourLocalCinema.com's entry on the shortlist is here.

Voting closes at midday on the 10th July 2009.

While you're at it, I highly recommend you subscribe to Yourlocalcinema.com's email updates, even if you don't require subtitles or audio description, since turning up to these showings will help cinemas realise how much of a demand there is for this service.

Please do take a moment out of your day to have a look around.

Safari 4: First Impressions

Safari 4 is finally out of Beta so I thought I'd take it for a spin (I never did convince myself to try the Beta and fiddle with webkit frameworks to keep Safari 3 at the same time..). A fresh install of Safari 4 on Tiger looks like this:



First look, seems they've ditched the tabs-on-top idea (woo!) although I wouldn't be surprised if there's a hidden enable option in there (apparently there was the option to switch them off in the beta). Gone is the old metal look in favour of the grey plastic style found in iTunes and other Apple apps (Although I believe Safari 3 was like this under Leopard already??). Despite the modern stylings, I have to say though that the interface now seems quite dull (not that it had much colour before mind). I personally don't like that the close button on tabs only appears when you mouse near, and even that's in grey:



Some other changes as far as I can tell, but first a screenie of Safari 3 on Tiger that I managed to dig up:



Firstly, in Safari 4 the reload button takes the place of the snapback button (not shown in the above screenie) which was at the right end of the address field:



I didn't really use snapback, but I did use the reload button which was on the left, Now it seems the only option is to use the one here since it's not in the customise toolbar sets (of course ⌘R does the same thing). Another small gripe, the add bookmark button seems to have shimmied over to right beside the address field. As far as I can remember, the original was a separate button and I may have swapped it round with the Home button, whereas it's part of the address bar in Safari 4 and a bit too close for my liking.

Safari 3 had a blue loading bar that appeared behind the text in the address bar, in Safari 4 this has also slid to the right and has become a darker blue. Also, while loading there is the option to click the stop icon, doing away with the need for a separate Stop button altogether.



One final thing before you become truly bored with Safari 4's interface (it's not really THAT different), when the Safari window is in the background, the title bar becomes pale and the window controls lose their colour (in other apps, only the buttons change colour). A minor change but good visual feedback.



On to actually using Safari 4 then. On the surface it really doesn't behave much differently from Safari 3 tbh, which is both a good thing and little bit disappointing (I like being surprised). Apple boasts 150 features on their site (not 150 *new* features mind) so i'll leave it to you to go a Googling. One of the most talked about though was the introduction of Top Sites and so this was my first stop.

Top sites, as the name implies, keeps a record of your most frequently visited websites and displays them to you as a nice curved wall of previews. You can enter Edit mode and 'pin' the ones you want to keep, drag them around, or remove the ones you don't want. A nice touch is the little star icon on sites that have changed so you know which ones to visit. You can have 24, 12, or 6 previews on display and you can also drag links into the window to add them. (Note the sites below are just examples)



It had me enraptured for the first five minutes anyway (It brought back memories of CubicEye - completely different mind! - anyone used that?), then I realised something. Top Sites, while oh so pleasing on the eyes, isn't anymore useful than what we had before. For starters, if I pin the sites I use the most (Blogs, news sites etc) i'd effectively just be pinning the links that are already in my bookmarks bar. Okay so I get to see them all on one page, but it's still a click away (The little icon of squares opens Top Sites) which is no more than clicking a drop down of links. Also, while Top Sites does show if a page has been updated, most of the updates i'm interested in are returned by RSS feeds which is already comfortably handled by the bookmarks bar and other RSS readers. I probably will use Top Sites, if only for the visual gloss, and possibly there's a way to set Top Sites as the home page, but in the long run that might grate. In any case, it's a nice optional extra.

Another cool feature is the introduction of Coverflow in the history and bookmarks browsers. If you've ever used iTunes, you know what Coverflow is. If not, it's basically a scrollable library of previews that you can flip through to find what you want. In the case of iTunes that's songs and albums, for Safari it's websites. It's really nice and I can see being able to browse your entire history this way being immensely efficient:



I've noticed one small issue though: If you have your bookmarks set up with folders as I have, these won't display as it only shows websites. This is more of a personal problem mind, since I have so many folders within folders (hence the previous post) and I've never made use of Collections (Should I?). So I think a reorganisation of my bookmarks is inevitable before I can use Coverflow fully.

Another welcome addition is the Developer tools (I honestly can't say what Safari 3 had since I used Firefox for all my testing) and, while the Safari 4 Developer tools don't at first glance appear to have the ability to make changes like you can in Firebug (or at least not as easily, there's something called the Snippet Editor but I haven't tried it yet), there are nice touches like the Resources section in the Web Inspector which shows you the download time and size of a sites files. These are definitely options I need to explore in more detail so I defer to the conclusions of the real web developers out there.



Rather than a comprehensive review, since I'm sure there are plenty out there, this has just been my initial reactions to Safari 4. Overall i'm happy with the new version: it's not so different as to turn me away, but it has enough sparkle to keep me playing with it. Together with Firefox, Safari on the Mac is still my browser of choice (Everything i've heard about Safari 3 on Windows has me in no hurry to try it - Firefox all the way - but maybe Safari 4 will be better?).

I've got a few more posts in the pipline: another movie review (maybe), some games reviews, as well as some projects i'm just getting started with (hopefully), so feel free to wait with baited breath;-) Oh, in other news, i've accepted an offer from my dad to go home to Scotland to work for the summer. I'll still be online, but things might be a bit quiet in the coming week.

Cheers.

Ideas anyone??

Just a quick one today. How do y'all manage your bookmarks?

I'm slowly suffocating under the weight of all the bookmarks I have in Safari - I actually have no idea how many there are - and then there's all the ones from Firefox too *shudders* I've spent most of the morning trying to clear them all out and better organise my hierarchy, but since I like to categorise stuff I have folder within folder within folder...you get the picture.

Oh I went all modern and signed up to Delicious awhile ago now of course, but it's not yet part of my bookmarking strategy. In fact, it's filling up with bookmarks too so I desperately need to sync it with my desktop browsers. I've been taking Cocoalicious for a spin (a desktop client that lets you manage your Delicious bookmarks). It's all right but the lack of any help had me scratching my head as to how you delete bookmarks - until I discovered you press backspace instead of delete, geez! It's a bit simple though and doesn't seem to do much else but hey it's free. I know there's other apps/plugins out there (Safarilicious etc) but until I get my bookmarks organised, there's no point sticking them on Delicious.

I'm not all together convinced Delicious is for me anyway, I can't really seem to get away from folders in favour of tags (it's weird seeing stuff coming up under multiple tags in Cocoalicious). Still, maybe when I finally get through this lot i'll give it a shot. A nice little tut I found just now suggests using symbols in the bookmarks bar. I've already replaced "Apple" with the Apple symbol as seen below, now I just need to get a bit more creative with the rest to squeeze more in..

Rambo's Movie Rundown (Issue 2)

Watchmen is this issue's subject although I wouldn't really call this a review. This is a difficult one to write and I expect you can find more in-depth coverage elsewhere, however here are some thoughts if you're interested.

First off, it's important to establish that I knew nothing of the Watchmen series prior to seeing this film. The history of The Comedian, Rorschach et al means nothing to me, so what follows is based solely on my experience with the film. I won't really go into detail on the plot either - it's a bit fuzzy in my head anyway to be honest - since I feel other reviewer's could do it more justice.

Suffice to say the film is, at least initially, explored from the point of view of Rorschach and his journal entries. Following the death of The Comedian, Rorschach tries to uncover the 'mask killer' who he thinks is out to get him and his fellow Watchmen. The film takes place in an alternate 1980s with the US and Russia on the brink of nuclear war. The Watchmen, a group of masked vigilantes, have been retired. It seems they've fallen out of favour with America despite their popularity in the past, and the country has become one of criminality and vice. All but one of the Watchmen - Dr Manhattan - don't have superpowers. As the original Nite Owl explains to Dan (Nite Owl II), the Watchmen were started by frustrated cops deciding to wear masks like the criminals they put away.

Watchmen is a dark, at times gruesome film. That wasn't unexpected. Having seen Sin City, I expected a similar dark and gritty graphic novel to movie adaptation. Watchmen, however, makes Sin City look like Toy Story. Unlike the superheroes of Marvel and DC, which only dabble with controversial themes, the Watchmen are not the usual knights in shining armour kind of superheroes. They're all shades of very dark grey in between. Some of them, like The Comedian and Rorschach, are psychotic, while others are megalomaniacs. While it was refreshing to see superheroes who weren't really superheroes, I felt the film overemphasised their flawed natures, to the extent that it was difficult to identify with any of them.

This was particularly evident with The Comedian, the embodiment of vice in the film. [SPOILER] I felt the scene where he tries to rape the original Silk Spectre was in bad taste. While i've come across rape scenes before, Watchmen's delivery almost glorified it with the camera angles, particular of Silk Spectre's body. While the rape didn't take place (although it could be argued the attempt itself was a form of mental rape), and it reinforced The Comedian's sexist nature, I felt it was overplayed, fetishing the whole thing.

Dan, aka Nite Owl II, drives the narrative with Rorschach and, despite being among the cleanest of the group, he was a bit wishy-washy for me and never seemed to take action. Of course, I think the intention was probably to juxtapose those two characters and it worked, but it made a film that left me feeling pretty frustrated. Rorschach, despite being the character I most identified with, was difficult to stomach. [SPOILER] I liked that he exuded confidence and the glimpse of his back story really helped, but his demise knocked the wind out of me.

That was the hardest part of this film to swallow. At times it seemed to glorify war, while at others it seemed to be anti-war. The latter half of the film saw the main characters desperate to prevent nuclear meltdown, with the frustration of having a character, Dr Manhattan, who could prevent it on a whim, doing nothing. [SPOILER] To witness his return from apathy to concern, only to have him side with the idea that peace at all costs is worth it - ie, the murder of millions to save billions - was intensely frustrating.

Needless to say, I'm still feeling the after affects of a film that paints such a dark picture of the human condition. The film suggests it's a parody (I fail to see the humor), but it's a depressingly possible future for us. It seems every other day that some country or another is shaking a stick at everyone else and I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone decides to throw it.

Reasons to be homesick...

If dedication to purpose can be quantified, surely the lack of posts since the 2nd of March is an indication of my commitment. Oh hell, that's crap, i've just been overwhelmed with coursework, mostly through my own lack of time management! Still, the first lot is done now, and all in time (just). I'm pretty happy with the virtual environment written work I did - a historical adventure set in ancient Japan - but like all things that run up to the last hour, there's probably more I could have put in. I'm very pleased with our group project, we put a lot of good work in I thought. Now we just have to follow up our promises and make it;-)

Re the post title: I'm not really homesick but the coursework had to take priority this weekend so I cancelled the trip to Scotland=( However, I promised Habboi i'd post about this so, first on my list of reasons to miss home is...

Oor Wullie and The Broons

When I was just a wee lad, I grew up on our nation's favourite comics, Oor Wullie and the Broons. They're published in annuals, but I think they can also be found in the newspapers sometimes. I also read The Beano and The Dandy (By the same publishing company as Oor Wullie and The Broons, but also issued in England I believe).

Oor Wullie follows the adventures of 'William', a cheeky young boy who gets into all sorts of trouble through various schemes. He has trademark spiky hair, wears black dungarees and usually ends each strip sitting on his bucket and, in the strips I read, with his pet mouse Jeemy. We had one or two of the annuals at home and I still read them when I find them. It's probably easier for you to wiki them, but seeing Habboi trying to make sense of the language last week was hilarious.

The Broons are just as good. It follows a Scottish family (The 'Browns' in English) and features such memorable characters as the bairn and grandpaw Broon. You can wiki it here but I suggest you try to get your hands on the annuals=)

I have to admit, even though I understand the language in them both fine, I don't regard myself as being able to speak Scots. My dialect is so watered down it's pretty much English. I remember seeing a programme on TV about Oor Wullie - it might have been the "Happy Birthday Oor Wullie" that Wikipedia mentions - and when I heard the voiceovers, I found the pronunciation of some of the words didn't match what was in my head. For example "crivvens!" (an exclamation of surprise) was pronounced "creevans" whereas I always thought it was how it's written.

It's hard to know really, nobody teaches Scots, lol, so unless you live around it, I can see how English completely takes over. Wikipedia sums it up nicely. Quite disheartening too is the quote from the Scottish Education Department in the 1840s: "..it is not the language of 'educated' people anywhere, and could not be described as a suitable medium of education or culture." I have to admit, with shame, that when I go home and I (sometimes) hear people talking Scots, it can be quite jarring and I do form the impression that it's somehow lower than English.

Then there's also Scottish Gaelic of course, which is a language in its own right. I don't speak it, except to know that 'Alba' is Gaelic for Scotland, and I have the vague understanding that it's spoken in some communities in the north of Scotland, but it's dying out, much to my regret. I would like to somehow preserve both Gaelic and Scots if I could.

Huh, well thinking about all that's kinda put me in a sour mood, so I'll end quickly with my second reason to be homesick: Scotch pies=) You normally can't get them in England, since every bakery i've tried has given me pork pies, christmas mince pies, or blank looks. They're replacement down here is probably sausage rolls, although you get those back home too, but I actually found one in the supermarket today!! (Yes, I was probably the ONLY ONE in the supermarket who was that excited about them). It was unusually expensive for a scotch pie, but there was only one and I had to have it. It even came with cooking instructions (eh?) but I'd scoffed it before I got home. It was delicious. Seriously people, you don't know what you're missing.

In case anyone thinks i'm going to die of food poisoning in the next few hours (I'm pretty sure it was cooked), I should clarfiy what Scotch pies are. It's basically minced mutton in pastry. You can eat them cold or hot. When they're hot it's best to get a fresh one as you can drink the hot grease that runs out of the pie, mmm!lol I actually found a recipe. I'll have to try making them soon=)

Since my pie didn't survive the trip home, here is a random picture of a Scotch pie:

Copyright EatScotland.com

Well, that's your lot, lesson for today: read comics and eat pies;-)

Opening multiple tabbed homepages in Safari

Since my last post grumbling about Twine, i've been trying out some other social bookmarking/social interests tools. More on that later, but it got me to thinking about opening a few different tabs when Safari starts up.

At the moment my homepage is faithful old Google, and I have a suite of regular links in the Bookmarks Bar above. Still, I thought it might be nice if I had other tabs open with some of the sites I want to quickly glance at. Strangely, I discovered Safari (3.2) doesn't do this out of the box (other browsers let you just type more web addresses separated by semi-colons), so I started reading around for some fix.

Macosxhints has a post on using Applescript to open multiple pages as the homepage but I didn't really want to go down that route (and in any case, i'm not sure where you put the Applescript?).

The first thing that came to my mind was using Automator. For those not in the know, Automator is an app preinstalled with Mac OS X that let's you script little actions in a really nice drag and drop way. Basically scripting for the masses=) I currently have a couple of workflows to back up my local emails and run an iTunes alarm clock.

Well the existing Safari action Display Webpages only opens webpages in seperate browser windows, so that was less than ideal. However, by installing the Display Webpages as Tabs action for Automator by Eric Blair, and using it in place of Display Webpages, you can create a workflow that opens multiple pages in tabs. For it to work, you have to enable Tabbed browsing in Safari, and set links from applications to "open in a new tab in the current window."

All well and good, and to be honest that might be a workable solution for you if you drag the app into your Finder startup items so that it runs when you turn on your Mac, or if you manually start the app yourself. However, I went a little further.

Since I saved the Automator action as an app, I simply dragged it to my Applications folder (You don't have to, but it makes sense) and using the simple method of changing icons in Mac OS X, I copied the Safari one and pasted it over my new app (which I called "safariload" to remind me). I then dragged the app to the Dock to create a shortcut to it, and removed the original Safari link from the Dock (It's still in your Applications folder, don't worry!).

Simply clicking on the new app icon in the Dock - which looks just like the old Safari icon - causes the Automator functions to be executed, opening a safari window with multiple tabs. It works but with two minor issues: The the new Safari window isn't in focus when it loads and, since the app launches Safari and you have a shortcut pinned to your Dock, you have two Safari icons while Safari is open.

Still, it's another method I thought i'd throw out there. Don't know if it's original.

Big ball of Twine

"Semantic"

- Relating to meaning in language or logic

One of the new(ish) buzzwords around town seems to be the 'semantic web' or web 3.0 as some are calling it. I'll be honest and say I'm only ankle deep in the whole thing, but as far as I'm aware, the idea is for a web with meaning attached to the data. So, rather than search engines simply returning the results of keywords, those words will have meaning and relationships. Using metadata, sites and software will know the relationships between names and words, and manipulate the content in a useful way.

That's the theory anyway. One of the services aiming to deliver a semantic web is Twine by Radar Networks. I read an article about Twine on Think Artificial a few weeks ago and tonight I thought I'd take it for a spin. Twine describes itself as a "social interests tool" rather than a social networking tool. It's a way to keep up to date with your interests, rather than your friends (although it has some social networking capabilities too apparently). Twine allows you to gather all the data from your travels around the web (bookmarks, images, videos etc) in one place and filter them semantically. It's early days so some teething issues are to be expected, but overall I have to say my initial impression of Twine is less than favourable.

I've never really gone in for bookmarking services like Deli.cio.us or social networking services like Facebook, so I don't really know what I was expecting. But since my bookmarks are in need of a good spring clean, the allure of a system that learns your tastes and allows meaningful searching of data was too much to resist.

In practice I found the interface and it's manipulation very basic and clunky. You create twines on topics that interest you and Twine constantly returns the latest submissions to that area of interest. Twine seemed to do that okay, but I was disappointed to find I couldn't customise the twines homepage much (I was looking for an iGoogle like drag and drop functionality) so having multiple twines seems like it would be a bit cumbersome. Also, adding items to Twine could have been more intuitive. Sure, if you find a website you like you can just click the Add to Twine bookmark that they give you and a dialog pops up, allowing you to name the bookmark etc. The problem was, I accidentally added the item to My Items and an existing twine on a completely unrelated subject (some sharing option that it wouldn't let me deselect). Since it seems you can't remove items from twines you don't manage, I couldn't see a way to correct my mistake.

Another source of confusion was the functionality for importing your bookmarks. While I knew that sorting out my bookmarks in Twine would still mean going back to my old bookmarks folder and manually having a clear out, I thought that Twine would be a good way of filtering them easily to begin with. In practice though the tagging filters were next to useless: simply filtering my bookmarks into two categories - "bookmarks" and "videos" - and coming up with nonsensical related tags. I suspect this is because, as some reviewers have said, Twine relies on properly structured webpages to allow it to extract the metadata, and unfortunately the web is a scrap heap of poorly made webpages, so I can't blame Twine completely there. However, even with my bookmarks in Twine, I didn't seem to have basic options like batch commands (multiple item delete etc) or alphabetical sorting, and the lack of effective filters made clicking through individual bookmarks a chore. In the end I gave up.

That said, partly because I can't figure out a way to quit Twine, but also because I should give it the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to persevere a little longer. I still like the idea of semantic tagging of items and a more intelligent web, I just haven't found it so helpful in practice. I have a suspicion that Twine may not be for me after all, but I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on Twine or similar services. In my case, I'm basically looking for a way to keep up with my interests with an rss-like delivery. Other features like recommendations and social networking would be a bonus. Twine promises to deliver much of this but so far, it seems, not very intuitively.