I will STILL be moderating comments and recieving emails from you guys, but I do NOT have time to do both. In the mean time I’m sure you won’t miss me much—you’ve got Loren Feldman (tech) out there, Richard Harrington (final cut pro), David Pogue (NYTimes tech) to read. (I read them as well, duh.)
I WILL be back though. I’m not giving up on this whole blogging thing. I just need to make some money, eh? :)
Don’t be afraid to ask me anything while I’m working—just shoot to my contact / socialize page, and GET AT ME!
Sincerely,
The BROKEST blogger there EVER WAS.
Zakk Forchilli.
Taking longer than expected [ALBUM-UPDATE]
As you may know, last week / week and a half ago—I began production on my cousin Eric’s album. [POP-PUNK, ACOUSTIC-SPLIT]
We had to take a weeks off due to me being sick as hell, and to just do some extra pre-production.
We’ve been using Guitar Rig 4 for our tone. We’re getting a new tube amp soon, so this advice [OBVIOUS-ADVICE] will be implemented.
Guitar Rig 4 is absolutely fantastic, yet it’s an AMP-SIMULATOR. We need to grab the full tone from the guitar. I’m sick of going INSANE with EQ, PRESETS, and ANNOYING SHIT I don’t have the slightest clue about.
The advice was, that I should mic an amp with a condenser versus using my M-Audio DIRECT to Guitar Rig. Obvious to me yet I just didn’t hear the advice from the RIGHT person in the past. I will be doing some experimenting soon.
HELP—anyone that reads my blog into Pro Tools / Audio / Metal Guitar?? Any sick advice would be great.
Conclusion: Qill be away for much longer than I expected. I was trying to keep this blog thing going for once but it’s getting me absolutely nowhere. I almost feel guilty taking my time (when I should be working on my life according to everyone) with this when there’s many other things I should be doing. I will possibly come back when this album is finished, along with giving more updates on it.. Who knows. CONTACT PAGE USE IT.
iCloud – As Simple As It Could Possibly Get..
Apple has released iCloud for Mac OS X Lion as well as iCloud in iOS5. I’m not exactly going to write an article here. I’m going to lay it out as simply as it can be laid out. Screenshots and lists are all you people want to see anyway, so here we go.
iCloud in iOS5 & OS X Lion
iCloud is fully integrated into anything you do on your iDevice that has to do with your Contacts, Calendars, Mail Accounts, Bookmarks and other information. Apple did this right and gave us all of this functionality for the good price of, FREE.
I Get Personal With Behance’s Action Book / Action Method
Aside from hunting for worthless free WordPress themes, the death of Steve Jobs and the hourly wait for iOS5—I’ve been away for a few days.
First of all, if you’re a creative person without you own laptop.. You’ve come to the right post.
I found the perfect helper for all of this downtime. The elegant, social-creative-professional-portfolio website, Behance.net has a sub-company titled, Creatives Outfitter. They make incredible notebooks, notepads, etc. There’s much more to it.
These aren’t your usually stationary. We’re talking, elegant-creative-productive-professional. That’s what Behance is all about in the first place. I spent around $15. I’d never spend fifteen bones on a pad of paper. Unless, it gave me a template allowing me to get shit done. That’s what this does.
I purchased the Action Book. I’ve spent the last 6 days writing in it. It helps you prepare for anything you’ve decided to call a project. From simply something at home that you’d like to create steps—to be more productive. From business meetings, to planning blog posts, the action book alone has everything you need to be at the top of your game. I used it to detail out this post itself. It was a late night so i wrote a ton, and won’t be sharing everything, but just enough.
Uses
1. Bloggers without laptops – I, personally do not own a laptop. I’m still stuck on my 2007 iMac, and I’ve been wanting to switch to a MacBook Pro since, most likely the day I bought the thing. SO when I’m sitting in my living room watching tv, I don’t have the luxury of hittin up my homies unless I’d like to use the iPhone that i smashed to pieces practically. I went nuts with the Action Book and knocked out huge details on about 4 posts I’d like to use for @zakkforchilli. Some, I’ll probably throw away, but It’ll be good to have the extra ideas floating around for later projects and such.
See more+screenshots after the break! I love this thing!
Occupying most of the time I spend on my computer / the internet has been Spotify. It has been a huge pleasure using it, and I’m actually proud to say that it mostly, for me, replaces iTunes. Especially, iTunes Ping. Spotify flourishes where iTunes falters.
For those who aren’t familiar, I will quickly touch on what Spotify has been doing lately. Facebook. At f8 this year, (Facebook’s annual dev conference) they announced they would be taking music to a whole new level on Facebook. They’ve incorporated services like iheartradio, MOG, and most profoundly Spotify, directly into Facebook.
Spotify is surely the better pick of the bunch newly associated with Facebook. So I went with it, and surely I was more than satisfied. Going hand-in-hand with a webapp and a desktop application, it did what iTunes couldn’t, and flourished with it.
There are things I love about Spotify’s new move, and some things I’m not a fan of within the apps.
Read tons more + SCREENSHOTS after the break.
Firefox 7 vs. Safari 5.1 in Mac OSX Lion – RAM Usage Stats [VERSUS]
Today, Mashable decided to report on the newly released Firefox 7′s memory usage. They based it on Flash running and Flash not running. They used Hulu HD video streaming for the Flash test and they used a Mac running Lion. Lifehacker reported on Firefox 7′s memory usage vs Opera 11, Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome 14. They chose to leave out Safari “since they are using Windows,” which makes no sense since Safari is for sure, still on Windows. So I’m here to fill that gap.
“(all tests were done on Windows, so we’ll be ignoring Safari here)” -Lifehacker
Initial Thoughts
I’ve posted about Safari recently after having a run-in with its ridiculous memory usage. It’s officially, a RAM killer. This following test told me that Safari only folds under immense pressure. I’ll explain later. When you have more than a few windows open, each with a few tabs, you’re going to get a huge overload using Safari. Google Chrome seems to deal with immense pressure pretty well. So far I’ve only had it crash on me two or three times with the same windows open as Safari did. Safari on the other hand, had crash at least three times a day.
So, I figured that even with a couple of windows open using Flash, its performance would be going down the drain. This test proved me completely wrong. It seems that Safari holds up pretty well when you’re not pushing it to its limit.
The test (with SCREENSHOTS) after the break:
Realizing Your Influence On The Social Media Scene, And Using It Correctly
The big names in Social Media such as Mashable and TechCrunch especially, (due to the recent clusterf*** with AOL & Michael Arrington) have great influence over what sites we visit, what apps we use, and mostly what startups and apps we even know about.
If you ask anyone, they’ll tell you that these sites are mostly/partly responsible for at least half of the well-known startups’ success. Startups will tell you that if it wasn’t for TechCrunch, they would be a failed startup. Brands go crazy to get plugged on these sites. Sending flowers to the TechCrunch HQ? Come on; this is making everyone desperate and it’s sometimes sickening. One mention on Mashable or TechCrunch and millions of people are shooting over to your new startup to check it out.
So you’ve got all of this traffic to your startup. Sure, these Social Media giants are giving you millions of page views, but are they really causing these sites success? Most of the time, yes. The only thing these giants can’t do is make up the users mind about signing up. But, those users wouldn’t be there in the first place. So yes, these sites are mostly responsible.
Enough with the introduction. I’m writing this after a small annoyance I came across today. I threw out a couple ranting Tweets about Mashable and how they need to stop dictating influence where and when they don’t need to. That’s a general statement, but you will see what I mean as you read.
Tons! More after the break. The incident, the solution and how we lost:
GetGlue’s New iPhone App Is Nice; Their Website, Not So Much..
GetGlue, the “activity-check-in website” similar to but more popular than, Miso—has come out with a new iPhone app. They have polished the interface just a little. Quickly I came to thinking, they need to do the same to their webpage. Their iOS GUI makes their web-app look like it was run over by Web 2.0.
New graphical features include:
- Polished main page
- New conversation view with iChat-like bubbles
- New “checked-in” page with more content; more options
- Smaller fonts on the check-in history page
- Within conversation, a pop-up for “Agree-Cool-Funny-Reply”
