Apple News+ has lost half it’s magazines in one month!

So I was excited for Apple’s News+ magazine service and signed up for the free month after doing the math on my current subscriptions, and the $9.95 Apple News Plus. It was released on March 25th, and it is April 25th, and already it seems the service is already losing magazines! AND I DON’T SEE THIS REPORTED ANYWHERE ELSE! My biggest selling point was The Week magazine, which I have read for years, but as of now, The Week is no longer available!

In fact when I look at the lost today it seems there are only 109 magazines, though that is not including the couple of newspapers that show up differently, but is far short of the release list that MacStories put out that shows 251 magazines! In fact the magazines that used to be split into 2 pages are all on one page now in the app!

And the service while cool, does have issues. The Apple news app always opens to the news portion and you have to select news+ which is very slow to load. And after selecting to download the magazines I want to read only a select few show up in the My Magazines section. Shouldn’t all the ones I chose show up? Why should I have to go back to the full list to find the magazines I already chose to download? And what about notifications? I get tons of news notifications, but not a single one for when magazines show up! I just have to keep looking to see. This is not user friendly at all.

And why does my phone have different magazines than my ipad? Why is the xbox magazine on my phone, but not my ipad, honestly WTF!

In one month half the magazines are gone, and the news+ should have it’s own dedicated app with notifications of new issues, or this service just isn’t worth the cost! Especially if it is going to keep losing magazines at this rate!

Adobe Creative Cloud Video Production Suite updates for NAB 2019

So Adobe has updated it’s video suite in time for NAB 2019 with some exciting new features, and hopefully some stability improvements.

Obviously the most exciting new features is the content-aware fill for video in After Effects.

I am pretty excited to try this one out, as the results from the demos look impressive, but I think it will work best with moving footage so the pixels exist somewhere.

And the new expression engine in After Effects looks amazing.

I can’t wait to try that out.

For Premiere we get the Freeform view as a kind of visual storyboard.

This is pretty neat, though not a mind blower for me.

And the new rules and guides will make placing things much easier.

Pretty neat. And Faster Mask tracking will always be helpful.

Overall some cool new features, though I am hoping for more stability overall.

Why is iCloud ‘s Safari Bookmark sync so bad?

Now I use Firefox as my primary browser, and I have for years. I have enough if my life in google because I use a gmail account, and google search is too much of my life so I don’t want to use Chrome, even if it is marginally faster. And Safari I don’t really use on my mac, because I use Firefox, but I have to use it on my iPad and my iPhone.

My problem is, as it has been for years since they introduced iCloud syncing of bookmarks, is that it constantly fucks up and my bookmarks get destroyed. I end up with empty folders and bookmarks moved all over with all these new random folders. And this happens all the damn time!
Now when it existed I used Xmarks to sync my bookmarks between firefox and safari on my mac, but it never worked well and I tended to get messed up bookmarks both ways, but now that Xmarks is officially gone I realize that the issue is much deeper within iCloud.
In fact I don’t save any bookmarks in any version of Safari. I only add them to Firefox to keep them and I back them up when I add them so that I can restore and don’t have to fix my bookmarks ever. I even e-mail myself the links from my iPad so that I can add them to Firefox on my desktop. It is a pain but it means keeping my bookmarks safe.
And it means that I am constantly fixing my Safari bookmarks. And I know how to do that. You turn off iCloud syncing of Safari on all your devices, and let it sit for a bit, and tell the iOS devices to delete your bookmarks when you do this. Then I export my clean bookmarks from Firefox and import them into safari, then re-organize them so they are correct (bookmarks toolbar into favorites and move the rest of the bookmarks out of the folder they get stuck in). Then you turn back on iCloud Safari on all your devices and hope everything was cleared up. If it was, you will get your clean bookmarks back until iCloud messes them up again.
The stupid part is this is an easy problem to fix for Apple. Instead of always merging your bookmarks add a damn option to upload and overwrite bookmarks. This way I could easily clean them up in a single step! Xmarks had this. And so do other bookmarks sync programs. Apple just acts like it never fucks up, but it fucks up all the time!
Do people just live with their fucked up bookmarks? I don’t understand! WTF! Fix this shit Apple!

Powerbeats Pro heaphones

9 to 5 Mac has pulled images of the rumored Powerbeats Pro headphones out of ios 12.2. It looks the rumors are true and they remove the wire and charge in their case. I have the previous versions of these and think it is a huge mistake. I think the cable is a feature! It keeps them together and you can take them off and let it hang around your neck! Sure the around ear pieces keep them in your ears better, but I still knock them out once in while! And these had better be truly waterproof!

Also with my orevious ones sometimes the bluetooth messes up, will this now happen more often with individual ears? I think this a downgrade. I do hope they have actual waterproofing now though@

BlackMagic Design releases some major camera updates

Along with some impressive new capture cards, Blackmagic has released a new Ursa Mini Pro G2 with a super 35mm HDR image sensor, 15 stops of exposure and 120 fps at 4.6 K and 300 fps at cropped 1080p. All for $5999.

And more exciting for lower end is an update to the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to add full Blackmagic RAW support with 1:1, 3:1, 5:1, 8P1 and 12:1 compression (as well as removing cinema dng codec because of licensing issues). This is a huge update to this impressive little camera!

Of course no Blackmagic raw support yet in premiere so you will need to purchase something like this from BRAW Studio. It is only $29 so worth it if you have a camera that uses it.

Stackable 2019 MacPro Rumors makes sense

So a YouTube Channel called Tailosive Tech has released a video on an inside source from apple on the new 2019 macpro.

And AppleInsider has also covered it (easier to read, especially since the edit is very trimmed, but not very covered and hurts my brain a bit as an editor).

Not only does this cover the new rumored 6K 31 inch monitor, but the new macpro, claiming the modular mac works like stackable legos, with a brain module with a soldered in cpu, and 8 slots of upgradeable RAM. Then you can add GPU modules, and storage modules, possibly modules with the unanounced thunderbolt 4, and eventually possibly third party modules eventually. Each module with it’s own power supply and cooling. And possibly not available until 2020.

This would seem to cover “modular” and why it has taken so long. Giving people an upgraded cheesgrater would not have taken this long, but Apple wouldn’t have made money off every upgrade in that scenario, while with this stackable design they would, including third party modules from licensing their propriety connector. And upgrades likely won’t be cheap. Instead of just a gpu, you are also getting a case, the custom connector a power supply and cooling system (and likely a reason for dropping NVIDIA support, as NVIDIA doesn’t like customized boxes and shapes, but AMD is all in with that).

And depending on the modules, this could be a very cool machine, though also very very expensive. Lets hope they have sone SATA modules as large ammounts of SSD storage are still prohibitively expensive. And let’s hope third party support comes quickly as a blackmagicdesign module for video i/o would be essential. And a sledless 4 drive sata raid module wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

I know this is all rumor, but it makes total sense. This lets Apple give expandability, but lets them control it completely and make money off of every bit of it. And Apple will have delivered what they said, and can charge what they want for it. It will not make everyone happy, especially since it will not be easily user upgradeable, and will be significantly more expensive than a machine that is user upgradeable, but it will ge a true pro machine.

I just hope they show it off at WWDC on June 3rd, but if they aren’t releasing until at least December 31st 2019, that may be way too early.

Canon has always been slow but what is up with using such old tech in their mirrorless cameras

OK Canon, what the hell? What are they thinking with the EOS R and EOS RP mirrorless cameras? 4 year old sensors that were behind the times on video quality when they came out.

I mean Canon made the DSLR Camera Video revolution, but when they made their C series video cameras they decided it was time to depricate video functionality on their still cameras in favor of their C series video cameras.

Then the mirrorless revolution started and by Sony, but followed by Fuji, Panasonic, Olympus and recently even Nikon, but Canon glass was so good, that people couldn’t wait for Canon to join in. And finally they have with insultingly old technology, and new very expensive lenses! It is a huge middle finger to everyone with a ton of canon lenses!

Really it makes the new BlackMagic Pocket Cinema 4K the last bastion of video for someone with Canon EF lenses and even that is heavily cropped and a small sensor leading to small depth of field.

Canon has betrayed it’s users, opting for usefull video features only with it’s expensive C series video cameras. And the best part is that by doing so they have also betrayed the still users they are supposedly aiming for. Who wants to spend thousands on old technology? A new sensor could have vastly improved both still and video quality, with better low light as well as color technology. Instead they opted for old tech to not canibalize their video cameras and screwed everyone.

Canon has screwed all it’s loyal customers and lost the race for both still and video users. They have betrayed the low end video movement they started and need to nan up and create sone new tech, but at this point it is too late.  With the bigger lenses negating their entire line of EF lenses they have lost their advantage (no matter how good their new super expensive lenses are).  And even their still feature advantages will eventually not save them (sony’s lack of hdr photography is a huge hit).

Camranger mini as a director’s monitor a short review

I picked up a camranger mini for my wife for christmas to use a a director’s monitor for a dslr.

The Device is mainly used to control a dslr for still photography, but also works for video, though at a very low frame rate. It is works by connecting a small device to your dslr via a USB cable and then connecting your iOS or Android device via wifi. And you can nominally control the camera from the device.

As a director’s monitor it works from framing, but not performances as the frame rate is just too low.

Still cool to be able to see without an attached monitor, especially if the camera is in motion, but a higher frame rate would be welcome.

Maybe the announced Camranger 2 which comes out this year will do better.

Comparison of DJI Ormo+ and DJI Osmo Pocket Quality

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While I was working on an idea for a short film, I realized the footage I had wasn;t good enough, so I decided to do a test between my DJI OSmo+ and my DJI Osmo Pocket to see the difference in quality.

It turned out to be a huge difference. The Osmo+ with Z-Axis is much more stable, but the DJI Osmo Pocket is so much sharper. The image quality on the pocket is just so much better.

An interesting comparison, and I wish that the Pocket had a Z-Axis stabilizer, though it would be much harder because of all of the phone connected to it.