URGENT Need Rewriters To Start ASAP – Short Term Project by commpub

While I am training a full-time staff, I need several talented rewriters to pick up the slack! I need rewriters that can start immediately and return their first rewrites by Tuesday morning, 27 July (Eastern time zone)… (Budget: $30-250, Jobs: Article Rewriting, Articles, Copywriting)


Aetuts+ Survey: What Do You Want?

Our recent Tuts+ Survey showed that many of you have feedback on how we can make Aetuts+ better for you. Now is your chance to let us know what you want from Aetuts+. Please take a few minutes to complete our reader survey.

All questions are optional. You only need to answer what you want to.

You’ll have the chance to tell us what you like, don’t like, and to make suggestions for the site. All questions are optional, so you only have to provide answers where you have something to say. Every completed survey will be read, and your feedback will lead to real, tangible changes in the kinds of content we publish.

Take the Aetuts+ Survey now!


Win an Audio Engineering Notebook from Audio Issues

There is a lot to keep track of when producing music. Win this book to stay on top of it all. To enter, all you’ve gotta do is comment! One random commenter will be chosen as winner. Too easy.

Win an Audio Engineering Notebook from Audio Issues

For the chance to win a copy of Audio Notes (pictured above) put together by Björgvin Bendiktsson, all you need to do is comment. You might like to let us know how you’re currently keeping track of your tracks, or how you think this book will help you. Make sure to include your correct email address with your comment so that we can contact you. This giveaway is open worldwide, but make sure to get your comment in before midnight this Saturday, Pacific Eastern Standard Time.

What Do You Get?

Audio Notes is a compact A5 size notebook. Its small size is perfect to carry with you but still large enough for easy writing. Its coil bound spine enables comfortable page handling.

Audio Notes has a track-sheet on every page designed by a sound engineer for music production purposes. Its custom 24-track design is perfect to capture all the production ideas you need for any of your sessions.

Reviewers of my printable audio engineering track-sheets have said, among other things:

  • “They have helped students prepare for recording/mixing sessions.”
  • “Excellent for keeping things in order.”

So a book filled with these useful track-sheets is guaranteed to help you prepare for your sessions as well as keeping them in order.

There is a lot of fancy home recording equipment out there but sometimes you just need to get back to basics and keep your notes an arms-length away. By using Audio Notes you can keep your sessions organized both in- and outside of the studio.

Audio Notes is a notebook designed for the note-taking engineer that never wants to forget another production idea.

Not only is it designed to keep all your production notes organized by song and artist, but with a little audio engineering tip on every page it’s my hope that it will inspire your productions as well.

If you miss out, check it out at the Audio Issues website.

Please note: Envato staff and people who have written more than two tutorials/articles for a Tuts+ site are not eligible to enter.


Some Tech Behind Inception And Avatar Becomes A Reality On Your iPad And iPhone

Several years ago, it seems like just about everyone saw the film Titanic. This past year, it seems the same was true for Avatar. And this past Summer, it seems as if everyone is seeing Inception. All three films share something in common: their use of Autodesk Maya, a piece of visual effects software. Now that technology has been ported to the iPhone and iPad.

Obviously, Autodesk Fluid FX isn’t going to be as powerful as Maya running on a hardcore system. But Fluid FX is nonetheless impressive. And it’s pretty amazing that these kind of effects can be done on these relatively cheap consumer devices, whereas a just a few years ago systems costing thousands of dollars were required to render this stuff.

The best way to describe what the app can do is to show it to you. For that, watch the video below. But basically, it’s an app that lets you manipulate pictures with a range of effects. And it has other natural elements like smoke and fire that you can manipulate on your iPad or iPhone.

The use of these devices’ multi-touch capabilities is the key to all of this. The app can recognize up to 10 simultaneous multi-touch inputs, we’re told.

The resulting work you make can saved to your devices. Or you can output any of this to a larger screen, like a television. There’s also a way to cycle through various effects and put them on display. But to me Fluid FX is just as interesting as a technological demonstration of what these devices are now capable of. And perhaps even more so, as a way to show was the other software Autodesk offers is capable of.

Autodesk’s Joe Stam, who has won two Oscars for his work effect work on films, created this app. Previously, Autodesk has released Sketchbook Mobile for the iPhone and iPad, which was a top-selling app.

Autodesk Fluid FX will be out in the App Store tomorrow. It will cost $1.99.


NSFW: Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption

Get out of the way, old man! You’re being Disrupted! Screw you, newspapers: blogs are stealing your readers and Craigslist is pillaging your revenue! Take that publishers: Andrew Wiley doesn’t need you and your stupid dead trees!

And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it’s you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don’t mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger’s apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels!

But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these).

As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it.”

Yeah!

Except, no.

Disclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I’ve spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK. A couple of years ago I decided to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my over-priced apartment in London and instead live permanently in hotels – in San Francisco, or wherever in the world I find myself in any given month. I’ve just finished writing a book about hotel living.

In the past thirty years I’ve stayed in hundreds – thousands? – of hotels. Some have been amazingly opulent, some adequate, some dreadful, some absolute flea-pit shit holes by the side of highways in Dallas. But every one of them has been licensed to operate as a hotel. Why? Because I don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong.

Call me old-fashioned.

In New York, as in many major cities, there is a serious problem with transient hotels. Slum landlords know that even the most scummy city apartment – $500 a month stuff – can deliver that same amount per day simply by packing the place with bunk beds and advertising it on Craigslist or any one of the plethora of foreign language NYC hotel sites as a travelers’ hotel. Not only does this put guests at risk due to a lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety, while causing a living hell of noise and violence and shady goings on for the owners of adjacent apartments – but, given that New York apartment vacancy rates are hovering around 1% (against an 8% national average), it also makes it harder for families to find somewhere else to live when they’re forced out by drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves.

And yet, despite all of these sound reasons for outlawing faux-tels, it seems that some people would rather let a Spaniard burn to death, or a family be left homeless, than allow The Man to impede the rise of AirFuckingBnB.

Says the opening para of this post by one Sean O’Neill, writing on Newsweek’s budget travel blog…

“Hundreds of New Yorkers, like others nationwide, have been making a few extra dollars by using sites such as AirBnB, Crashpadder, Roomorama, and Craigslist to sublet pullout sofas, living rooms, and whole apartments. But that may end soon. This week, New York state senators vote on a bill that would make it illegal for any homeowner or renter to sublet for less than a month.”

And says Joe Gebbia, president of AirBnB.com…

“We have received over 300 letters from New Yorkers who depend on renting by the night to make ends meet. As everyone knows, NYC is financially a challenging place to live – especially in a down economy. The consequences of this generalised bill will negatively impact thousands of New Yorkers more than by the small number of ‘illegal hotels’.”

Yeah, Joe. Screw the small number of “illegal hotels” and the untold misery they cause. Hipsters in peril – that’s the big story here. Except it’s really not. For a start, there’s an explicit exemption in the bill that allows for the letting of rooms in private dwellings if the owner is present (as is often the case in AirBnB lets). And for other lets (absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money) State Senator Liz Krueger who sponsored the bill has made it clear that “the city is not going to knock on doors,”; AirBnB users will only fall foul of the law if their neighbours complain. Which they’re perfectly entitled to do.

And yet, commentators like Masnick and O’Neill and entrepreneurs like Gebbia are so enraptured by the cult of “Disruption” – that any use of the Internet to circumvent the traditional way of doing things is inherently good – that they can’t help but see the new law as The Man standing in the way of Progress. Or as Masnick puts it “the hotels, which have their high prices and don’t like the competition.”

They simply can’t contemplate the heretical idea that sometimes The Man is right, and that some of his laws are created for good reason. That not everyone on the Internet is a Gawker-reading, fixie riding hipster who just wants to share his space with weary travelers for a few bucks extra pot money. That some people on Craigslist are criminals. That sometimes legislation is needed to protect innocent people from those criminals, even if it stops the rest of us us doing precisely what we want. And that one of the dictionary definitions of Disrupt is “to interrupt or impede progress”, rather than the opposite.

Blogs disrupting newspapers is great, except when no-one can be held accountable for gross inaccuracies and libels. Online pharmacies disrupting doctors is great until someone is poisoned by Indian ‘viagra’. And advertising rooms on the Internet without legal safeguards is great until the platform is used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments and fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs.

If AirBnB et al are so smart then they’ll figure out a way to thrive in New York’s new legislative environment. These are, after all, disruptive times. But if they can’t understand the fact that disruption cuts both ways, and that the rights of Internet folk to create awesome new business models doesn’t trump a city’s right to disrupt criminality,  then it’s time for them – not the hotels industry or legislators – to get out of the way. Young man.

Information provided by CrunchBase
Information provided by CrunchBase


Going Global: George Stephanopoulos And ABC News Execs Discuss New iPad App


Earlier this week, ABC News launched a new iPad application that adds a twist to the way most apps present the news: a third dimension. Fire up the app and you’re immediately faced with a nifty-looking globe that’s covered in headlines and photographs depicting the day’s top stories; tap one and you’ll be linked to the relevant video clip or news article. It’s quite snazzy, at least from a looks perspective (more on that later), and it’s quickly risen to become the #1 free application on the App Store.

To learn more about the app, our own Lora Kolodny ventured over the ABC News headquarters, where she interviewed anchor George Stephanopoulos and a pair of execs who helped create the application.

Stephanopoulos says that he was quickly enamored of the application’s globe, which is a running theme in the interviews (though he said that he hadn’t had a chance to play around with it too much at the time of the interview). On a related note, when guaging his affinity for gadgets on a scale of 1-10, he gives himself a 4.5 (he does own an iPad, but his family has issues getting the cable box to behave properly).

Andrew Morse, Executive Producer of Integration and Innovation at ABC News Digital, says that the globe is meant to be a “meandering experience”. He explains that on traditional sites, people complain that you only get what you’re looking for, and that there isn’t the discovery factor you get from a newspaper.

Isaac Josephson, VP Product Development for ABC News Digital, says that the team has been working on the app for a solid three months, and that it stirred up more excitement among traditional broadcasters than any previous product they’d developed.

My take on the app? Looks aren’t everything — if you want to catch up on the day’s top headlines at a glance, this might not be what you’re looking for. The globe may be fun, but in my experience it also has a habit of obscuring most of the app’s available content (only two or three stories are legible at once). You can flick the globe around a few times and be pretty confident that you’ve seen everything, but it’s hard to kick the nagging feeling that you may have inadvertently skipped over the day’s top story.

That said, the ABC team may be right: if you’re just looking to kill some time discovering random highlights from the day’s news, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. And if you just want the headlines, you can venture over to the ABC News HTML5 site, which is integrated into the app.


Uranium Is Getting Some Glowing Reviews On Amazon

Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It’s actually been on sale for a while — BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today.

Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is “bad for you.” Another says that it killed a pet gorilla. But some positive reviews mark is as a “great gift for a hostile dictator.“

As Vogels points out, the best reviews are highlighted on reviews-only page. The most helpful positive review reads: “So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.” Meanwhile, the most helpful negative review reads: ”I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.”

Overall, uranium ore has earned 4 out of 5 stars after 221 customer reviews — with the majority of them giving it a 5-star rating. It’s largely seen as a good deal for $29.99. You may recall that these are the same users who love to review milk.

The discussions on the uranium page are good as well. One person wants to know, “Does this product put you on the CIA watch list?” Another person wants to know: “This is a joke, right?“

Unrelated, it’s worth noting that people who viewing uranium on Amazon also viewed items such as wolf urine, fresh whole rabbits, and yes, milk.

Information provided by CrunchBase


ParkWhiz Is The OpenTable For Parking Spots


Finding parking in near concerts or sports events can be an incredibly frustrating task. Because of the event, the cost to park in lots near the stadium or venue can be exorbitant. Plus, lots can fill up fast. Enter ParkWhiz, a Chicago-based startup that allows customers to reserve parking on the fly.

Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz.

So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country.

For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations.

In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year.

Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots.

Information provided by CrunchBase