Bitwise Magazine

Blu-Rays – when Technology Goes Backward

Why DVDs are so much less annoying

Tuesday 3 April 2012

The companies who distribute them would have us believe that Blu-ray discs are essentially better than DVDs. They have better picture quality, better sound, more special features….

So why is it that my heart sinks whenever I get a Blu-ray to watch? Simple. The damn' things don't let me resume playback. It drives me up the wall! Often, I like to watch a long film over two nights,. With a DVD I can stop the disk one night and, when I restart it the night after, it automatically plays from the point at which it was stopped. With a Blu-ray, more often than not, when I play the disk on the second night, the damn' thing goes right back to the beginning and I then have to spend a frustrating few minutes winding my way forward to the point where I really want to be. I say “more often than not” since some Blu-rays do resume from the point where I left off. But these seem to be the exception rather than the rule. For a long time I blamed my Blu-ray player. I (...)

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Get to No. 1 on Google (in easy steps)

Book review

Monday 26 March 2012

Get to No. 1 on Google (in easy steps) – 3rd edition $14.99 / £10.99
by Ben Norman
ISBN-10: 1840785330
ISBN-13: 978-1840785333
http://www.ineasysteps.com
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk

If you have a web site one thing you would no doubt love to do is what this book promises: Get to No.1 on Google. But how exactly do you do it and what exactly does it mean to “get to number one” anyway? This book takes you through the process of identifying what you want to achieve from Google searches (for example, which words in a search you would like to lead people to your site) and then finding ways of optimising your site to accomplish that. If you have never given any thought to search-engine optimisation (SEO), the book will be invaluable to you. If, on the other hand, you have studied the subject to some extent you may already be familiar with many of the tips and tricks described: using keywords, choosing a domain name, using header and meta tags, giving (...)

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PagePlus X6

DTP review

Monday 19 March 2012

http://www.serif.com/pageplus/
$99.99 / £68 (£81.69 inc VAT)

Serif is an odd company. Odd in a good way. The thing is, their software is so inexpensive that it's tempting to dismiss the company as no more than a “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” outfit: one of those low cost operations whose products promise much more than they deliver. Nothing could be further from the truth. Serif produces great software. The latest release of their DTP package, PagePlus, is an excellent example of a program that is packed with high-end features but without a high-end price tag. Here I have imported a PDF file and PagePlus X6 has created an editable publication PagePlus can be used to create anything from simple one-page ‘flyers' or posters to quite complex magazines and books. It lets you accurately position text blocks and (...)

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Win a copy of Snagit 11 and Snagit for Mac 2 from Techsmith!

Competition Time!

Sunday 18 March 2012

Have you ever tried explaining over the phone or email how to do something on your computer, only to realise it would be much easier to show people how to do it? Or have you ever seen something really cool online but not been able to copy/paste it to share? These are just two problems that can be solved with Snagit from TechSmith.

Snagit lets you capture anything from your screen, including images, web pages, video and text. These images and videos can then be easily edited, saved and shared through the Snagit application. See The Bitwise review. For your chance to win please answer the following question: What cannot be captured using Snagit? A – Video B – Images C – Smell For more information please visit http://www.techsmith.com/snagit. Competition now ended. Winner (picked at random from correct entries) to be notified 1st week in April.

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Snagit 11 (Windows) 2 (Mac) Review

screen grabbing tools

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Snagit 11
£38.95 incl. VAT
Upgrade £19.00 incl. VAT

Snagit for Mac 2
£76.50 incl. VAT
Upgrade £38.50 incl. VAT

Snagit is a slick screen capture tool that lets you grab pictures of your PC screen, a specific window or a marked area (either a rectangle or a ‘freehand-drawn' shape). It has a number of built-in editing tools to let you add captions and annotations and it can save your screen grabs in a variety of different image formats. I reviewed the previous Windows version, Snagit 10, last May. Two new versions have been released recently, Snagit 11 for Windows and Snagit 2 for the Mac. These are broadly similar tools and, though not functionally equivalent, each has gained several useful new capabilities (summarised below). The most striking of these is its ability to capture videos in addition to static images. Snagit lets you grab activity from the screen, including the mouse cursors (...)

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Aikido in North Devon

Yes, I have a life beyond...

Friday 2 March 2012

I’m a bit behind schedule with Bitwise at the moment...

Partly that's because I run a software company, partly it's because I write books and teach programming courses. But it's also because I've been busy setting up a new Aikido club in North Devon, UK. Yes, I teach aikido too in, er, my "spare time". Anyway, if you live anywhere near where I teach, I'd love to see you. If not, well, normal Bitwise service will be resumed as soon as possible...

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Word style sheets for books and eBooks

Latest adventures in self-publishing

Sunday 26 February 2012

As some of you may know, I have a blog elsewhere devoted to the art, craft and craftiness of self-publishing.

Over the years I've published all sorts of things. I've written articles and columns for dozens of different print magazines. I've published a paperback book on Ruby programming with a US publisher. At one time I had my own magazine publishing company. More recently I've published a book of my old interviews (with 80s pop stars) and some novels (about 80s pop stars and horrible murders) for Kindle. And now I'm going through the process of publishing them as paperbacks. My latest article is about simplifying the formatting process with style sheets: http://dark-neon.blogspot.com/2012/02/using-style-sheets.html. Incidentally, I am a big fan of self-publishing. I am completely convinced that this is the start of a revolution in publishing. I would be very surprised if there were (...)

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Self-publish a paperback

First steps

Monday 20 February 2012

While it’s the in-thing to publish eBooks these days, paperback books aren’t going away any time soon.

Elsewhere, I have a blog devoted to the dark arts of self-publishing. Up to now, I've concentrated on the ins and outs of publishing to Kindle. Today, however, I wrote the first in what will be a series of articles about publishing the same work as a paperback. If you are interested in making the leap from e-Book to p-Book, see: http://dark-neon.blogspot.com/2012/02/formatting-kindle-book-for-lulu-or.html.

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Exposure 4 Photoshop plugin

from Alien Skin Software

Monday 13 February 2012

Alien Skin Software today announced the immediate availability of Exposure 4, the new version of its photography effects plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Photoshop Lightroom.

Exposure provides accurate film simulation and a wide range of creative effects. Popular classic films are accurately simulated, like Kodachrome, Polaroid, and Panatomic-X. Exposure reproduces the ethereal glow of black & white infrared film, and now color infrared. Pricing and Availability: Exposure 4 is available from www.alienskin.com for $249 USD. Owners of any version of Exposure may upgrade for $99 USD. Free upgrades were automatically sent to everyone who purchased Exposure 3 directly from Alien Skin Software in November 2011 or later.

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Chrome Flash Crash

Why Chrome’s shine is tarnished

Sunday 12 February 2012

For a while I loved Google’s Chrome browser. It has the virtue of being fast to load and generally fast to use. And it seems not to gobble up as much memory as Firefox (as least, the last version I used – having switched to Chrome a few months back, I haven’t since updated Firefox).

But lately Chrome has been getting almost unlivable with. Because it crashes. Frequently. Maybe this is because I have recently switched to a new PC that uses a 64-bit version of Windows 7? All I know for sure is that two Chrome plugins repeatedly cease to function. They are: 1) the Skype Toolbars plugin that lets me click a phone number in a web page in order to dial it and 2) Adobe Flash. The Flash plugin is the biggest problem because Flash content is all over the place. I've never experienced Flash crashes before in Internet Explorer or Firefox but in Chrome the crashes occur regularly – often several times a day. This is what a crash looks like… A bit of Googling quickly revealed that this is a widespread problem and it is one of the major sources of irritation to (...)

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Win The Book Of Ruby - Free!

Enter now

Thursday 9 February 2012

It’s the book I wrote but I’m not giving it away (I’m far too mean ).

However, here's someone who is... http://www.impressivewebs.com/book-giveaway-ruby/. Enter now, for a chance to win!

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Objective-C Book Reviews

For books on Mac/iOS programming

Wednesday 18 January 2012

The principal application programming language both of the Mac and Apple’s various iOS devices is Objective-C. It is not the easiest of languages to learn. A beginner may find its mix of C and Smalltalk-like syntax baffling. Even an experienced programmer is likely to have problems, not only learning the language but also getting to grips with the Xcode development environment. Here I look at four books that might help you get over a few of the barriers…

These are the books… Objective-C Fundamentals $44.99 by Christopher Fairbairn, Collin Ruffenach, Johannes Fahrenkrug Manning Publications ISBN-10: 1935182536 ISBN-13: 978-1935182535 Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide $39.99 by Aaron Hillegass Addison-Wesley ISBN-10: 0321706285 ISBN-13: 978-0321706287 Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (4th Edition) $49.99 by Aaron Hillegass, Adam Preble Addison-Wesley ISBN-10: 0321774086 ISBN-13: 978-0321774088 Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide $59.99 by Mark Dalrymple Addison-Wesley ISBN-10: 0321706250 ISBN-13: 978-0321706256 At first sight, three of these books appear to be aimed at more or less the same type of reader: Objective-C Fundamentals, Objective-C Programming and Cocoa Programming (...)

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Camtasia 2 For Mac

Mac screen-recording tool

Saturday 7 January 2012

$99 / £76.50 (inc VAT)
Upgrade from version 1: $49 / £38.50
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia-mac-features.html

Screen recording software is invaluable if you want to make software demos or tutorials. On a Mac, you can use the free QuickTime player to make simple screen recordings. However, its recording capabilities are limited (full screen or rectangular area but no fixed-size presets or selected windows) and there is no editor. So it's fine for very simple recordings but it's not suitable for creating good quality screencasts. On Windows, my favourite screen recording program is TechSmith's Camtasia. Recently, TechSmith released Camtasia 2 for the Mac and I was keen to see how that compared with the Windows version. First impressions were good. In common with the Windows version, Camtasia for the Mac is divided into two parts: the recorder and the editor. The recorder takes the form of a (...)

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Adobe Flash, alive or dead?

The problem of Flex

Wednesday 4 January 2012

Adobe Flash is dead. I’ve read that so often recently on blogs and in forums that I was almost starting to believe it might be true...

Mark Twaine is said to have remarked "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" after reading his obituary in a newspaper. The reports of the death of Adobe Flash have, I think, also been greatly exaggerated. This is my take on the story.

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The Comic Sans Liberation Front

The bandwagon is rolling but I won’t be jumping on…

Saturday 31 December 2011

My New Year’s Resolution this year is to be less forgiving of stupidity. Detractors of the Comic Sans font come high on my list of offenders.

I first became aware of the mouth-foaming passion that the Comic Sans font arouses after I published a free eBook on Ruby programming. I decided that, since Ruby was a frothy, friendly kind of language I would use a frothy, friendly kind of font for the code listings. A boring font like Courier is ok for a workaday language such as Java or C#. But Ruby deserved something more frivolous – Comic Sans would do just fine. Little did I know what a terrible thing I had done. Soon my book was being denounced on forums and comment-threads all over the damn' place. Some people were of the opinion that anyone who could use Comic Sans must be inherently untrustworthy and possibly bordering on the demented. So, instead of judging the book by the information it contained, they judged it by (...)

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Taming the Mac Mouse

Get the little blighter under control!

Tuesday 27 December 2011

One of the thing that’s been driving me up the wall when using my Mac is the damn’ mouse’s habit of sending my documents whizzing off screen when I’m least expecting it. I’m using the iMac’s ‘Magic Mouse’ which is a cute looking thing that has no buttons at all yet pretends it has two buttons plus a built in touch-pad. Sounds a great idea. But in practice, it just tries to do too damn’ much.

The horizontal scrolling thing is especially infuriating. If I just happen to touch the mouse with a finger and then move the mouse to the left or right, my active document scrolls out of view. Whoosh! Now you see it, now you don't! For example, if I'm writing in Word, all my text suddenly vanishes beyond the edge of the Word window leaving me with a seemingly blank document. Grrrrr…. Why would anyone ever want that to happen? What is the point of it? Is there any application that anyone has ever used in which this is a desirable feature? I tried using the Mac's built-in mouse configuration tools but they didn't fix the problem. So I did myself some Googling and pretty soon I discovered that I'm not the only person who finds this behaviour frustrating beyond endurance. People (...)

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Blow Up 3

Photoshop plugin

Monday 5 December 2011

Blow Up 3 $199
Alien Skin Software
http://www.alienskin.com/blowup/
Requirements: Photoshop CS4 or later; or Lightroom 2 or later; Intel Core 2 processor or compatible; Mac OS X 10.6 or later, Windows Vista or later

Blow Up 3 is a Photoshop (and Lightroom) plugin for enlarging images while retaining clarity. It has to be said that this is a specialised requirement: either you need it badly or you don't need it at all. If you need to magnify images to be printed on posters, for example, Blow Up may be useful (see also my review of Blow Up 2). If you just use photographs for your web site, it's probably unlikely to be of much interest. Normally, if you enlarge a small image, the larger image will end up with blurred or distorted edges and relatively poor definition. Blow Up 3 takes a smarter approach to enlargement by creating a vector-based ‘map' of your image and enlarging the image one small piece at a time in an effort to retain clarity at larger sizes. There are various presets to (...)

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Mastering XCode 4: Develop and Design

Book review

Monday 28 November 2011

Mastering XCode 4: Develop and Design $49.99 / £33.99
Joshua Nozzi
Peachpit Press
http://xcodebook.com
http://www.computermanuals.co.uk/scripts/browse.asp?ref=243244
ISBN-10: 0321767527
ISBN-13: 978-0321767523

If you are used, as I am, to programming in Visual Studio on Windows, trying to write programs in Apple's Mac IDE, XCode, is an uphill struggle. Not only am I still unfamiliar with the conventions of the Mac interface itself, but I am also new to the main XCode language, Objective-C, and its associated Cocoa framework. On top of all that, I can't figure out how to get XCode to do the things that are second nature to me in Visual Studio. Mastering XCode 4 is aimed at someone just like me. It claims that it will guide me through all the XCode tools and show me how to write and debug an app using the Cocoa framework. OK, so how well did it succeed? In brief, the answer is: it succeeded… up to a point. The book gives a good account of the XCode tools and it explains fundamental (...)

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Customize Visual Studio’s Colours – easy when you know how

How to banish the blues

Thursday 24 November 2011

Visual Studio is one of those rare pieces of software for which I have considerable affection. This is just as well since it’s one of the two pieces of software that I use every day. The other is Microsoft Word. ‘Affection’ is not a word that springs to mind in relation to MS Word. ‘Irritation’ is more to the point. I particularly dislike the bloody awkward, space-hogging ribbon-bar which very effectively hides away all the functions that used to be instantly accessible on menus.

At least Visual Studio still has menus. I dread, I quake with fear, at the thought that one day Microsoft might replace them with a ribbon. No, that would just be too horrible! Anyway, suffice to say that in my view, Visual Studio is head and shoulders above any other IDE for programmers. If you've had the misfortune to use Eclipse or XCode you will surely know what I mean. There are just two things I don't like. 1) Visual Studio 2010 has introduced auto-undocking windows. Nothing wrong with that apart from the fact that every time I double-click a tabbed document in the editor, the damn' thing undocks itself. Yes, I know I should avoid double-clicking the tabs, but I still do it often enough to find this behaviour annoying; and 2) the colour scheme! I don't mean the colours in the (...)

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Tiffen Dfx v3 Photo

Image processing filters

Tuesday 22 November 2011

Tiffen Dfx v3 Filter Suite Photo Plugin $199.95
Tiffen Software
http://www.tiffensoftware.com/

Tiffen Dfx Filter Suite is a collection of image-enhancing filters that simulate a number of ‘traditional' photography effects achieved using glass lenses and filters (Tiffen is a manufacturer of glass photographic filters), as well as various types of film stocks and photographic processing effects. There are 125 filters with thousands of individually configured variations or ‘presets'. The filters are available for use with a few popular image editing packages (listed at the end of this review) and there is also a standalone version available. I've been using Tiffen Dfx with Adobe PhotoShop. The tabbed effects are show at the bottom of the screen with configured 'presets' at the right-hand side. You can divide the screen to see the image before and after applying an (...)

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