Blu-ray just a brief stop on the way to full digital delivery

I'm no longer going to be amassing a collection of DVDs. Since DVD first became mainstream, I've been purchasing my favorite movies on disc so that I have them at my disposal for that late night when I just have to watch "Pulp Fiction."

Now that the DVD format war has been settled, I have purchased few Blu-ray discs, but I can't help but think that the hundreds of standard DVDs I own are outdated.

There's no denying that Blu-ray offers a high-definition viewing experience. While a standard-definition DVD looks good, viewing a high-definition DVD is similar to seeing a sporting event on TV in HD: You don't want to go back to what you had before.

I could replace all of my standard DVDs with high-def Blu-ray versions, but all I can envision is having to go through the same expensive process again in 10 years. Is it really worth the investment?

I firmly believe Blu-ray will be the last method of physical media distribution. We're already seeing the beginnings of the transition to online and digital media distribution with devices such as AppleTV and NetFlix's new instant viewing service. While neither service is perfect or populated enough to replace the walls of DVDs at Best Buy, it's something to be legitimately considered in a few years.

One thing I'm considering is a Drobo and converting my entire DVD collection to high-quality digital copies. For about $1,000, I can purchase a Drobo with four 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drives, which would afford me the space to store digital versions of about 300 movies.

While the quality of standard DVDs converted to digital won't match Blu-ray, the trade-off of a fully digitized movie library versus stacks of DVDs is worth it. As high-definition copies of movies become available, I'll have a platform to store and back up my movies.

And in those cases where I don't necessarily need to physically own a copy of a movie? Online rental services such as iTunes and Netflix will fill the gap just fine. Since I replaced my Blockbuster card for a Netflix subscription two years ago, I've yet to have the urge to see something so much that waiting a day for it to arrive in my mailbox wasn't acceptable.

If this all seems far-fetched, just remember that up until a few years ago, the thought of recording TV shows to a hard drive was hard to fathom. Then we threw out our VCRs and replaced them with TiVo.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in the Evansville Courier & Press

Repository moves links off browser, onto Web

About a year ago, I decided to open Firefox's bookmarks manager and delete every bookmark I have amassed over the years. I deleted every news story, blog post and miscellaneous link I kept stored locally, because keeping a local bookmark repository is no longer needed.

Storing bookmarks in the browser is a 20th-century technology that harks back to the days of the original versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer. In those days, search engines weren't nearly as powerful as today. Many people still used the digital equivalent of the yellow pages (called Web directories) to navigate the Web. How archaic.

Today's search engines are the new bookmark repository. Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine you fancy is able to index billions of Web pages and find what you are looking for in an instant. If I want to look up information on Arnold Schwarzenegger but can't spell it, Google can figure out what I'm looking for.

If I remember reading a blog post a few years ago about a rumored cell phone from Apple but don't remember the title or source, I can more often than not find it quicker by searching Google than the thousands of bookmarks I had stored.

I'm not completely anti-bookmark. I keep a repository of bookmarks online using Yahoo's del.icio.us. It is a social bookmarking site that allows users to store bookmarks online and see what others are linking to.

When a bookmark is published to del.icio.us, the user has the ability to "tag" the bookmark with descriptive words that help explain its contents. For example, if one were to tag this article he might use "courierpress," "socialbookmarking" and "opinion." Tagging a link makes it easy for you to find similarly tagged bookmarks in your own collection or globally in the entire del.icio.us network.

I can also subscribe to other users' links much in the way I subscribe to a friend's Flickr photos or Facebook updates. I subscribe to several photographer's links because it is a great way to find new photography techniques, great snapshots and other information related to photography that I might not find on my own.

Browser makers are starting to notice the appeal of social bookmarking. Yahoo, the makers of del.icio.us, offers a Firefox extension that pulls a user's bookmarks into the browser as a replacement for the browser's built-in bookmarking system. Social browser Flock has similar functionality natively built into its browser as the default bookmarking functionality.

Whether or not you see the benefits of the social aspects of services such as del.icio.us, it's making more sense to store information like bookmarks "in the cloud." In this world of a nearly ubiquitous network connections, ensuring we have access to our information from any device or machine is becoming even more essential.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in the Evansville Courier & Press

User-created apps shine on Mac OS X

It's no secret that I prefer using a Mac as my primary computing platform. I first switched to the Mac from a Windows PC in 2001 with the release of Mac OS X.

One of the smartest things Apple did with Mac OS X was to offer software development tools for free to anyone with a Mac. Apple therefore made it easy for anyone to create useful and innovative Mac applications. Until recently, Microsoft charged several hundred dollars to acquire a similar set of tools.

Here are some of my favorite applications:

SpamSieve: OS X's email client comes with spam filtering, but I have found C-Command's SpamSieve to be much more reliable.

SpamSieve learns what you consider spam as you mark messages. Since I started using SpamSieve a few years ago, I have gone from dealing with dozens of spam messages a day to two or three at most. SpamSieve also works with third-party e-mail clients such as Microsoft's Entourage and Mozilla's Thunderbird.

Things: I usually have several personal and professional projects going on at one time. Cultured Code's Things keeps track of these projects. Things allows me to create a project and then associate a variety of tasks that need to be completed in order to accomplish the project's goal. When I was plotting this column, I created a project in Things with tasks for researching, writing, editing and submitting the column.

Acorn: I used to be a fan of Photoshop for resizing images and other rudimentary alterations, but it always seemed too heavy for such a small amount of image editing. Flying Meat's Acorn image editor is 1/13 the price of Photoshop and accomplishes most of its basic editing options.

Delicious Library: I own a lot of books, DVDs and video games and have always wanted to keep them organized and searchable on my Mac. Until a few years ago, it seemed a chore. When Delicious Monster released Delicious Library, cataloging went from being a tedious process to enjoyable. The main part of the interface shows the covers of DVDs, books and games on a wooden shelf that can then be organized and filtered.

My favorite feature of Delicious Library is the ability to scan new titles in by holding the bar code up to my Mac's Webcam.

If you are looking to find other new Mac software, the best place is Apple's downloads section at www.apple.com/downloads.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press

Twitter makes it easy to be up to date

Holiday World has opened its gates for another season of fun. I normally wouldn't have known this because I'm not much of a theme park guy, but the park set up an account on Twitter (http://twitter.com/HolidayWorld) that I began following. Twitter is the micro-blogging service that allows users to share their thoughts via the Web or their mobile phone.

Several times a day, someone inside the park would post about painting Santa, tweaking the landscaping and even a weather scare. Holiday World's use of Twitter is just one example of how Twitter is easily the most useful and fun service launched in the past five years.

Many of the detractors point out that Twitter is mind-numbing mediocrity and just gives people another outlet to vent about what they are eating or their adorable cat, but that's the minority of users.

Twitter is the quickest venue for breaking news I have found. All three of the major cable news outlets and large newspapers such as The New York Times have their own Twitter accounts that automatically notify users when new stories are published on the site. I'm still waiting for the Courier & Press to establish its Twitter account.

When it comes to local news, other Twitter users are even quicker at breaking news than the major media outlets. When the initial earthquake hit April 18, Twitter was the first place many people in the area discussed the quake.

My favorite use of Twitter is as the digital watercooler. I work out of my house, so things I would normally chat about in the break room or with the guy across the hall I now share on Twitter. Since it's a public conversation, others around the world can also chime in with their thoughts and ideas. The daily conversation covers major tech news, politics or just the latest YouTube sensation.

Twitter is quickly replacing instant messaging as the best way to keep up to date with friends and colleagues.

If you want to get involved with Twitter, first sign up for a free account at http://twitter.com. You can then update your status either via the Web site or by establishing a connection with your mobile phone and sending updates via text messages. If you don't have an unlimited texting plan, using it with Twitter can grow costly.

Twitter also provides instructions that allow third-party developers to write their own Twitter-powered applications. For Windows users, my favorite is Twhirl (http://www.twhirl.org/). For Mac users, Icon Factory's Twitterrific is in a league of its own (http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/). Both applications are free, though Twitterrific offers a $15 version that removes its ads.

When I first started using Twitter two years ago, I didn't understand what the fuss was about. Today, I couldn't imagine not posting to it. In the next year, Twitter usage is going to explode as it becomes even more mainstream.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

Originally published in the Evansville Courier & Press