I never really used the Genius feature in iTunes much since I pretty much have all of my shuffling goodness taken care of by a bunch of Smart Playlists.  But I was pretty intrigued by the new Genius Mixes – 12 auto-generated radio station-like mixes derived from your library and Genius information.  So I decided to give it a spin because it does sound pretty fun if it works.

The one that first jumped out as me was a mix based on Electric Light Orchestra, Steely Dan and Suga Shikao – a Japanese singer-songwriter that I like.  I thought that this was an intriguing and eclectic starting spot for a mix.  I also had them filed in different genres, so Genius was clearly not doing simple genre-matching.  And hey, it seemed like it would work.  So while I was working, I fired that one up to see what it came up with.  Turns out that it would have been a good mix had I wanted to listen to an ELO song, followed by a Steely Dan song, followed by a Suga Shikao song, followed by an ELO song, lather, rinse, and repeat.  Not so awesome.

Went back to the selection screen to seek a different mix.  Perhaps the first one was a little too eclectic for the Genius algorithm.  Ah-ha – one based on Queen, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Tom Petty.  Certainly they can manage to toss together a serviceable classic rock mix.  That one got off to a decent start with Honky Tonk Women, but in a couple moves I was getting Roxy Music ballads and some crappy NeoProg I didn’t know I even had.  Now, while I realize having the crappy NeoProg was indeed my fault, in my defense I had forgotten about it, and either way, it really had no business being in that mix.

So I punted and went back to classic Genius configuration – select a specific tune and then hit the Genius button.  At least that way you can see what is in the generated mix.  I started off with Tempted by Squeeze – expecting a peppering of 80’s New Wave, assorted Power Pop and perhaps some other British singer-songwriters like Graham Parker or Richard Thompson.  Instead it coughed up some Rush and pulled tracks from the single Grateful Dead album I have.  Strike three.

Another flaw of note: it seems to completely ignore user ratings.  I know not everyone rates all their stuff since it can be a pain.  However, I would expect that it would prioritize on higher-rated stuff if someone had rated everything as I have.  Apparently not.

I really like the Genius/Genius Mix idea, but sadly it still seems to be pretty half-baked.  Time to go back to the good old Smart Playlists.

I happened across an interesting iPhone App today that integrates with/enhances the built-in camera.  It is called CameraBag and it purports to emulate other camera formats/film sizes/effects.  You can use it “live” while taking pictures or doctor already taken pictures on your iPhone, and I must say, it’s pretty cool.  It won’t replace Photoshop, but for on-the-fly pix to be posted to the cloud, it has it’s uses.  And at a current price of $2.99, one could do worse.

The app mimics various cameras lens/exposure styles (apparently the preset names are changed for copyright reasons), border styles and aspect ratios:

1. Helga: An old toy square format camera with vignetting. Square format.
2. Lolo: Not sure of the vintage, but makes very vivid shots. Square format w/borders.
3. Cinema: Dramatic contrast-y shots with the appropriate 16:9 aspect ratio.
4. Ansel: Mister Adams style smooth silvery B/W gradients.  Original aspect.
5. 1962: Old style contrast-y B/W. Original aspect.
6. 1974: Washed out color photos.  3:2 bordered aspect (Polaroid?).
7. Infrared: For infrared landscapes shots.  Original aspect.

Here are comparison shots based on one picture – click on the thumbs for larger pix (the thumbnails don’t represent the aspect ratio of the final shots):

This is the original shot from my iPhone.  Predictably, it’s a crappy shot.  A no flash indoor/incandescent light/no ambient light shot, so it is fuzzy and has the horrible indoor white balancing issues you would see in such a snap.  Not to mention, the iPhone is not the best camera on the planet.

The orginal shot

This is the Helga tweek: all nicely washed out and vignetted.  It has charm.

Helga preset

This is the Lolo shot: it boosted the shitty indoor “gold bloom” white balance issues, but amped up the colors and contrast.  I’ll say more about this preset later since this is a bad example of this preset.  Note the stylistic thick border around this one – kind of cool, no?

Lolo preset

The Cinema shot: the aspect of this shot is all wrong (since it is applying a 16:9 landscape aspect to a portrait aspect shot), but it’s nicely touched up the contrast and colors of the shot.  Probably want to shoot “live” through the CameraBag when using this one rather than post-processing (it gives you a mask to aim off of when you are shooting “live”).

Cinema preset

The Ansel shot: very nice smooth greyscaling.  This will work nicely if one wants a good B/W shot.

Ansel preset

The 1962 shot: cool, constrasty and grainy.  I like this one.  One could get all dramatic with this one.

1962 preset

The 1974 shot: normally I like more saturated photos but I like the somewhat washed out version here and the interesting aspect ratio/bordering. Plus, Bethany likes it, so it’s gotta be good.

1974 preset

The Infrared shot: probably a bad example since I think this is mostly for outdoor nature shots.

Infrared preset

One can either post-process shots taken with the internal camera – in which case it creates a new processed copy – or “shoot directly” from the plugin where it just saves the doctored version. As noted above, it’s probably a good idea to shoot “live” through the app when using one of the square-ish or cinema presets.

I wanted to give another quick look at one of the presets that looks useful: the Lolo preset.  It seems to make things really vivid.  Consider the following:

Bad light Lolo test

This is a prety banal shot really.  Just an uninteresting tester picture of some junk on my back porch.  However, this was taken on one of those horrible San Fransicso days where the light, the air, and everything else was basically the color of dirty dishwater.  The light was low, the focus is lame, and there was no flash.  But everything with color, including the cherry tomatoes on our dying vines, has some snap.  So that’s sort of cool.

All told, CameraBag is no substitute for lovingly post-processing your shots in Photoshop/Pixelmator/whatever.  Then again, the iPhone is not really a substitute for a proper point and shoot (or better).  Since more and more photos from sketchy “cameras” like the iPhone are getting put online via social networking sites/apps without intervention, I think that CameraBag is not a bad way to touch up an iPhone photo or front-load a little artistic touch before doing something with it.

Final verdict: check it out!

We are going to get iPhones this weekend and remembered over lunch today that we should order up more of our favorite iPhoneAndOrPod protection products in anticipation of the new units.  I normally don’t like to hype products here, but I love the hell out of what these guys do. The company is GelaSkins and I really like the unique iProduct protection solutions that they offer.  So I feel the need to pump them.

Lots of iPhone/Pod protection solutions are clunky and too big.  Anything that makes it harder to slip your iUnit into your pocket is a bad thing in my book.  But an unprotected iUnit is a bad thing as well.  The GelaSkins offerings nicely splits that difference I think.  First off, you get a usefully protective “skin” that adheres without adhesive [somehow - and so can be removed] to the back, front and clickwheel [where apropos] of your iUnit.  Moreover, your get a clear and invisible film that adheres to the touchscreen [or plain old screen] of the iUnit.  So with these, your business will not get scratched up.  But what makes it better is that the skins got the arts all over them.  There are some skins are based on some typical works of art [Klimt, Kandinski, Giger, Van Gough, etc] but most of the designs have been submitted from current independent artists.  That makes things pretty cool and indie-friendly.  My current iPod Touch is sporting skins from SoCal artist Aaron Kraten.  Finally, if you get some of the artsy fartsy skins you can, if you feel the need to accessorize, download wallpapers for your iUnit desktop that matches your skin.

What’s not to like about any of this?  Not only are the offerings pretty cheap, but they come with extra screen protectors as well.

By way of full disclosure, these will not protect you from dropping or otherwise raging on your iUnit.  These are great surface but not shock protection.  That said, if you don’t want the art, or already have some cuddling device for your iUnit, you can order the touchscreen skins by themselves.  These are great because not only do they protect your touchscreen, but I personally find the “action” on the touchscreen better after putting it on.  It was like getting a new keyboard.  I think that anyone with a touchable iUnit should get a few spares. And hey, if you’re a cool independent artist/designer, it seems that you can submit your business for publication, so do it.

They seemed to start off with protectors for iUnits but have apparently branched out into cuts for other things like the NintendoDS, PSP and even laptops.  This is all good stuff and if you think that any of that sounds like something you may need, do check their stuff out.

I was getting tired of dual-booting my MacBook Pro with Boot Camp when I wanted to play stuff like Portal or Civilization IV.  Dual-booting is a pain and the laptop fan controls do not function properly when Boot Camping.  So, I experimented with running things under the generally awesome VMware Fusion.  First the WinXP license business got pernickety with me when loading my Boot Camp partition under VMware.  After fixing that, some of the games worked pretty well, but I kept getting show-stopping map rendering errors with Civ IV and that was pretty much a deal breaker.  When I was searching around for a solution to that problem, I ended up stumbling across some information about CrossOver Games.  COG is a branch of the WINE-based CrossOver Mac/Linux products from Codeweavers that focuses on running Windows-based games rather than desktop/office software.  And after trying it out, I must say that I’m a convert.

Since this is a WINE-based solution, COG lacks the traditional performance overhead inherent in emulators (Wine Is Not an Emulator), does not require a Windows license, and does not have the disk space hit of Boot Camp or VMware.  Those are all significant upsides.  On the downside, not every game under the sun is supported.  But, it seems a lot of their recent development efforts have focused on games that run under Valve’s Steam distribution platform.  Ostensibly, supporting the litany of copy protection schemes is one of the big challenges of developing something like COG, but Steam’s consistent distribution method cracks that nut for a bunch of games at once.  Since Steam is becoming more and more ascendent, I’m guessing that this has been a huge boon for Codeweavers’ efforts.

- Installation:

Installation is easy for Steam under COG – there is a built-in option for a Steam installation option in the installation wizard, it automatically creates a WinXP WINE “bottle” and bootstraps in the Steam client for you.  Then you just fire up Steam, enter your account information, and you’re good to go.  If you don’t want to download everything all over again (and are familiar with the Steam file hierarchy), then you can just drag in the content/save files from a Boot Camp partition or from external media to the proper places in the new bottle.  Drag the Steam icon to your Dock and fire it up.

- What works:

It appears that COG game compatibility under Steam depends on a variety of factors.  Some games are officially supported and those will obviously work.  High-performance modern FPS games like Bioshock or Crysis will categorically not.  Some games are not officially supported, but run just fine as-is.  Sometimes (as is the case with Civ IV), only the Steam version of a game works.  Their website has a very good compatibility list that includes hints and reports from users about non-supported games.  So just because a game is not listed, does not mean it will not run.  When in doubt, download the demo from Steam and find out for yourself.  Game complexity is not necessarily the deciding factor either.  I’m running the “unsupported” W40K: Dawn Of War RTS series just fine, but a whimsical download of the much simpler Geometry Wars just plain does not work.  From what I gather, they throw their support efforts behind games that the user base is clamoring for the most.

I am running the following games flawlessly:

- The Orange Box (Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2, etc)
- Civilization IV and it’s expansions (note: have not tried Colonization yet)
- Warhammer 40K: Dawn Of War and expansions
- A handful of causal games like Bejeweled 2, Luxor and Peggle

Check out their longer compatibility list for more.

- How it works:

Performance has been pretty good overall.  When initially invoking the Steam client there is a bit of startup lag while wineloader does its thing initially.  After that things run pretty smoothly.  The games are snappy, start up in an acceptable amount of time, and I (mostly) run everything at maximum resolution and have not had to downgrade the graphics settings for performance reasons.  The only game I needed to tune down was Civ IV when I got to the mid-game and lots of things are moving around on the map.  But stuff like Half-Life and Portal are perfectly fine graphics-wise w/out tuning things down.  Things seem happiest running in full-screen mode rather than windowed or the “full screen but you can still see your menu bar and use Spaces” resolution mode.  Occasionally some splash screens will not display – the Valve splash does not.  There are occasional issues like this with startup but when you get to the game itself, things seem fine.  The games perform well, but may take a little “nudging” at install time.

- It is worth it:

It depends on the user.  If the supported games hit your pocket right (Civ IV fans for example) then it is totally worth it.  For me, the Orange Box, Civ IV and Dawn of War hits most of my current non-console gaming needs, so that makes COG quite attractive to me.  The modern FPS fan, who most likely already has a teflon-cooled PC gaming rig, will probably not care about this as much.  The satisfied user will also probably want to have at least a journeyman tinkerer’s badge when using the product as it is a little rough around the edges at times and so may require a little tweeking.  Codeweavers offers a 7 day uncrippled demo that one can install and try for oneself.  The license is only $40 and comes with a year’s worth of “talk to a real person on the phone” support when you are dealing with problems with a supported game.  Their forum support also seems pretty responsive as well.  And hey, supporting a commercial deployment of open-source software is a good thing in my book.

In conclusion, this is a really solid product if you are an Intel-based Mac user, don’t want to bother with dual-booting, and your gaming itch can be scratched by Steam games in general and Valve games in particular.  With the rise of the new Intel-based Macs, I’m guessing/hoping that the need for products like COG will become less and less of an issue as more games see native/concurrent releases on both Win/OS X.