Primordial Ooze

When I first mentioned that I got a new Sony HDR-HC3 high definition camcorder, I promised that I would follow up with more information. Well, after a long weekend of shooting and experimenting, I can finally do that. This post is inspired by my friend Pete who reminded me I promised to do this.

UPDATE: So, it's like two months later and I'm finally getting around to finishing this post.

The Short Take

In short, the MacBook seems capable of serving as a hi-definition video editing platform. I was able to capture, edit, and create DVD's from the high-definition footage taken from my Sony HDR-HC3. This news doesn't come without caveats, though. The primary being that you will certainly need massive amounts of high-speed external storage to make the setup useful and fun.

I'll break my experience down into these sections:

• My hardware/software setup
• Storage issues
• Display and work flow issues
• Dealing with interlacing
• DVD authoring
• Internet distribution

The Tools

Here is my rig, from soup to nuts:

• Black MacBook with Intel Core Duo, 1GB RAM and 80GB 5200-rpm SATA drive - $1599
• 500GB Lacie BigDisk Extreme d2 - $320
• Sony HDR-HC3 - $1500
• Dell 24“ wide-screen monitor $750
• Apple Mini-DVI to VGA adapter - $19.99
• Quicktime 7 Pro - $29.99

The 24” monitor is obviously very optional, but any kind of second monitor makes editing easier.

Storage

Regular MiniDV camcorders record in a format known as DV. Hi-definition camcorders record in a format known as HDV. Both are lossy formats, but they are as high-quality as you can practically get out of your camcorder. The cool thing about HDV is that you can use commonly found MiniDV tapes. HDV devices can also play back regular DV tapes, which I'm sad to say was the impetus for my purchase of the Sony HDR-HC3. I could have gone and gotten a $300 cheapo camcorder but I tend to solve problems with a sledgehammer.

My MacBook comes with a 80GB 5400-rpm SATA drive. I didn't shoot a full hour of video, but I believe I shot approximately 50 minutes of HDV at 1080i and the file sizes add up to approximately 20GB. That looks like an hour of HDV will be roughly double DV's 12GB per hour of storage. This is simply not feasible within the constraints of a 80GB drive since I only have 20GB left for my OS, pictures, and other installed applications. However, the drive did seem capable of the sustained transfer.

To solve this problem (with a sledgehammer). I went and bought a 500GB Lacie BigDisk Extreme. This is a striped drive (RAID 0) that seemed to meet the vague performance specs that were floating around in my head. I opened the package to find a pretty big unit. The picture makes you think it's just big enough to enclose a 3.5“ hard drive but my guess is that it houses two vertically oriented drives. Now perhaps you can picture the size of the beast.

The advantage of a drive like a Lacie BigDisk is that it's cooled and the disks are managed properly. They power down when not in use and sleep when the computer sleeps. I'll report if this is not the case but the manual says it will happen!

UPDATE: The Lacie disk has been running like a champ for two months. It has a smart power-on feature which kicks in when my computer sleeps, I dismount the volume, or I shut down. In all of these cases, the drive goes into standby and basically shuts down. This limits the wear and tear on the drive. Only time will tell if this ultimately means I'll have reliable storage for 2+ years (which is all I'd ask out of an external drive).

Setup of this disk was brainless. I was interested to see that it was pre-formatted with OS X's HFS+. Windows 2000/XP users can opt to reformat to NTFS or use the included Windows drivers that let XP users read/write HFS+ volumes. Hmmm, wouldn't that be good for Boot Camp users, too? Too bad Microsoft makes it hard/impossible to do the reverse for NTFS.

Even at 500GB, I still won't be able to store many MiniDV tapes on the drive. More than likely I'll keep some of the best clips at full-resolution and encode the others at a reduced size and more aggressive encoding like H.264. If I store 960x540, this should still be more than enough raw data to make a crystal-clear DVD at 720x480.

Display and work flow issues

Playback of the files isn't always smooth but I'm bearing with it since 7 out of 10 files do play back flawlessly. The occasional stutters don't seem to affect the final products such as a streamed video or a DVD.

Dealing with interlacing

The Sony HC3 records 1080i, which is an interlaced format. This is very visible on my LCD display but looks AMAZING on my HDTV via the camera's component out since my HDTV is a CRT and naturally de-interlaces the video. On the LCD, the interlacing takes the form of noise that resembles horizontal lines around fast-moving elements of the movie. Quicktime allows me to automatically de-interlace this or view only a single field to eliminate the problem. However, you lose a bit of sharpness when this is done. Simply old down the Apple key + J, select the video track, and click on either ”single field“ or ”de-interlace“ in the ”visual settings“ tab.

Getting rid of the interlacing even at lower resolutions should be easy, but it took a while before I was able to get all of the settings right. I've been using the iPOD setting in QuickTime to write files for distribution since it ”just works“ and yields good quality files.

iMovie HD

My biggest gripe with this pre-installed application is that it rips all of the video into your iMovie file. If you want to use the same clip in a different project, the entire clip is copied. This can chew up your hard drive like crazy.

I understand why Apple did it. Most people don't create multiple projects using the same clips. To share files would likely yield to all kinds of relinking logic that would drive most novice users absolutely insane. So, I feel Apple took the simpler route and just made the program easy to use... ignoring file space efficiency.

For me, I want a library of clips available on my drive so I can make montages and stuff like that. For now, that just doesn't seem possible but perhaps I can experiment with file system symbolic links. Perhaps I can work around the limitation that way. Even if I do find a workflow that uses symbolic links, it sounds like a lot of work.

If you're able to accept this kind of limitation, though, you get a lot of power in iMovie HD and it's built into OS X. Combine that with iDVD and you can basically make DVD's with almost no effort.

In my recent trip to Florida, I brought a few blank DVD's since I suspected I'd want to burn a few DVD's for my family. As it turns out, I was able to burn 3-4 disc with photo and HD footage of the weekend as it happened. It was easy, fast, and my family was really amazed.

It just works.

Performance

There are two metrics of performance for me.

First, can I save the HD footage to my drive without dropping frames. Yes, I was able to save video either to the internal 5400rpm 80GB drive and to my Lacie external disk.

Second, I am able to convert captured footage to iPod or DVD format in a reasonable time period. Ripping video takes time and it takes a lot of time on my MacBook. If I'm rendering a 2-minute clip, no big deal. If I want to rip our trip to the Bronx Zoo, I basically need to go to bed and let the MacBook work all night.

The Intel Code Duo chip found in my MacBook is still just a mobile chip and has some serious speed limitations for this kind of intensive processing. I suspect that video conversion would be 2-5x faster on a new Mac Pro with the ”woodcrest“ chips or the just-announced MacBook Pro's with Intel Core 2 Duo chipset.

Still, I rarely have very long clips that I work with so everything I do is within my tolerance levels.

Conclusion

I could write all night long about how well all of this stuff works. In short, HD on a MacBook is a reality. If you have a MacBook Pro, especially one of the newer ones with Intel Core 2 Duo, then you'll have an even better experience particularly when it comes to converting videos to iPod format, H.264 720p high-quality QuickTime files, and DVD burning.

My advice is to stopp mucking around with video on a PC. When it's time to upograde to a new machine, get a damn Mac and be happier for it. If you really miss your Windows apps, get Parallels, install Boot Camp, or wait for VMWare's workstation for the Mac (due soon).

There is really no other way to go, but that's just me and my opinions speaking.

By Nick at 10:59 PM |Tagged as dv , hd , hdv , highdef , idvd , imovie , mac , macbook , video , video editing | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

So frakking cool…

You have to watch the movie. This guy rigged the LED’s to strobe back and forth. Complete with schematics! (Link)

By Nick at 8:57 AM |Tagged as battlestar , battlestar+galacticaa , cylon , halloween , jack-o-lantern | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (0)

Pavan Podila has released his new XalmXporter app.

As promised I've uploaded the source and binaries of XamlXporter. XamlXporter is a script for exporter Illustrator artwork in WPF/XAML. It is written in C# 2.0 for easier maintainence.

It currently exports the following objects from Illustrator CS2:

• Strokes
• Linear and Radial gradients
• Text (single - line only)
• Opacities
• Visibility
• Paths
• Colors (CMYK, RGB, Spot, Gradients, Gray)
• Layers, Groups, CompoundPaths
• XAML comments

For more details about this project visit http://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=xamlxporter

 A previous blog post about this project can be found here. 

By Nick at 12:03 PM |Tagged as .net , adobe , dotnet , illustration , illustrator , wpf , xaml | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

John Cody over at omnisoft.com has posted an e-mail exchange between himself and handango, a portal for mobile apps, where it looks like they've not only renegged on an free advertising prize, but has removed all of his content and terminated his account when he complained about it.

OMNISOFT is the developer of popular PDA programs like SATALERT and VNOTES. He and many other mobile app developers rely on handango for a significant portion of their sales since handango is by far the biggest game in town.

If you read  the e-mail exchange that he had with them when he found out that they would not honor the $5,000.00 ad allowance he won in a 2005 raffle. He complained when they renegged and rightfully so.

The e-mail exchange can be found here. Their resolution was to simply delete his account and refuse to carry any of his products!

To me, this seems like a horrible case of a big company taking advantage of the little guy. This doesn’t sound like good business to me.

UPDATE: Digg this article!

UPDATE 11/1/2006: The Register picks up the story!

By Nick at 1:51 PM |Tagged as handango , mobile , monopoly , omnisoft , pda | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Someone sent this to me, and like him, I could not stop laughing.

"Spirit has been displaying some anomalous behavior," said Project Manager John Callas, who noted the rover's unsuccessful attempts to flip itself over and otherwise damage its scientific instruments. "And the thousand or so daily messages of 'STILL NO WATER' really point to a crisis of purpose."

(reported by the Onion, link)

By Nick at 8:52 AM |Tagged as humor , mars , rover , science , spirit | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My friend Derek and I were talking about my original post on how Windows type kicks OSX type's ass, and he told me that he had done quite a bit of research on the issue. He thought he was crazy, but soon found out he wasn't.

In my previous post on the topic, I was really criticizing a rendering anomaly. The effect I showed happened when an underlying window was exposed:

However, this post will describe some of the research Derek did with some commentary from yours truly. First, consider this blog post made way back in 2003:

http://www.macobserver.com/columns/devilsadvocate/2003/20030523.shtml

If you click on the second image in that post, you can clearly see how the Windows type is simply superior to the Mac version. Keep in mind that screenshots of displays can be misleading. If sub-pixel smoothing is employed, the image capture will have sub-pixel artifacts which when displayed on an LCD with a different RGB geometry, will produce crappy-looking text. However, I can attest that what yoy probably see when viewing those screenshots is my experience.

Consider this sample created by Derek. OSX on the left, Windows on the right:

You tell me which is better? Before you do that, some caveats:

• the web sites depicted may point to fonts not available on both platforms (unlikely)
• LCD geometry issues could make the screenshots invalid (unlikely)

Mac OS X type is just “blurry” when compared to Windows type.

This is kind of disturbing when you consider that OS X prides itself on the superior rendering quality of quartz. Perhaps Microsoft has a patent on ClearType (their sub-pixel antialiasing technology) and Apple refuses to license it.

Here is a Mac vs Windows type showdown. There, the Mac wins mainly for the number of fonts provided, not necessarily on the quality of type on the platform.

As a recent “switcher”, I really hope the quality improves somehow. While I can see myself “getting used to” the reduced clarity, I still hope for the best.

By Nick at 5:22 AM |Tagged as apple , cleartype , fonts , mac , osx , quartz , type , typeface , windows | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here are some pictures I took of my family on my visit to Florida. I spent a lot of time with my cousin Billy on the football field. Two of his four sons were playing that day and I took lots of pictures.

This is my Grandma, she’ll be 89 next week.

We talked at the kitchen table for hours, catching up.

One factoid that was odd to me was the fact t hat these 9–12 year olds do not punt on the 4th down. Instead, they go for it every time. Billy says that the kicks don’t always work out so well so it’s not a sure thing.

I traveled on Southwest, great experience.

I brought a few blank discs and I made a few DVDs with my MacBook while I was there. Everyone was amazed. I was able to burn some hi-def footage I took on the first night of my visit, some stills, and even some video footage at the beginning of the tape.

All in all, the trip was great. It’s nice to be back, but I’m sorry it’s over.

By Nick at 4:42 AM |Tagged as florida , football , lomo , photography | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in West Palm Beach airport right now. I'm connected to the Internet via a free Wi-Fi connection provided by the airport. Very cool. Here is a picture I just snapped of my unshaven self.

This weekend, my brother and I are seeing my grandma. She's 90 and will be 91 in a week. It's been about a year and a half since I've seen her so I'm looking forward to our visit. Plus, I have lots of video and photo equipment ready to record her telling stories from the old days.

Perhaps I will have some adventures to tell, perhaps I'll be watching soap operas and daytime television. Who knows.

By Nick at 4:13 PM |Tagged as family , florida , isight , vacation | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Aaron B. Hockley in his Another Blogger blog, has a pretty nice round-up of what bloggers think about the new Google Reader.

We’ve probably all read what the big boys (Scoble, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, etc) have said about the new Google Reader, but here’s a compilation of what some “ordinary” bloggers have to say (click for the full post)

Highlights (for me) include:

• No search funtion in GOOGLE reader? WTF?

:-)

By Nick at 10:27 AM |Tagged as aggregator , blogging , bloglines , googlreader | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Lots of people rag on Microsoft for producing crappy software. Lots of people praise Apple for creating software which is the complete opposite. I'm one of those people. However, truth be told... Microsoft gets a lot right. In this case, type.

In my efforts not to become a Apple Apologist, I bring you my rant on type in OSX.

<rant>

Consider this Mac OSX Screenshot:

Notice the corrupted text. Let me tell you that this crap simple doesn't happen on a Windows PC. If I had to pick one aspect of the Mac which simply “didn't feel right” it would be that the type isn't as good as it is under Windows. It's hard to quantify (well, actually, look at that screenshot) but it's a feeling I get and I can't shake it.

As I commit Mac blasphemy here, let me clarify a bit. I'm not talking a head-to-head comparison of custom rendering engines, like a comparison between Illustrator/Win vs. Illustrator/Windows. I'm talking about the fact that the every day type rendering engine in the Mac OSX is simply not as good as Windows (as I look over my shoulder...)

I may be “used” to Windows, of course, and my opinion is a bit subjective, but I doubt it. Refer to that screenshot again and know this. That just doesn't happen with Windows.
</rant>

Lots of people rag on Microsoft for producing crappy software. Lots of people praise Apple for creating software which is the complete opposite. I'm one of those people. However, truth be told... Microsoft gets a lot right. In this case, type.

In my efforts not to become a Apple Apologist, I bring you my rant on type in OSX.

By Nick at 11:19 PM |Tagged as apple , cleartype , fonts , mac , osx , quartz , type , typeface , windows | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Quoted once before, XKCD is an awsome daily comic that I highly recommend for many good thought-provoking laughs.

Priceless.

By Nick at 5:05 PM |Tagged as comic , humor , illustration , webcomic | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I saw this over at Northwest Noise and it was a great quote to post over here:

Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?

In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable. (Link)

Brilliant! Of course, I think I remember Steve Jobs saying that video on a portable device would never go anywhere because the screen was too small and the experience would be way too diluted. He contrasted this to the audio experience of an iPod + headphones, which is concert-level fidelity. A decent thought, but I think he got that wrong.

Still, I think the Zune stuff is silly… not that I’m really up on the latest Zune news. To me, simple is always best. That is until 5–or-so years from now where some of the things Zune is doing now are universally considered simple and thus painless and fun.

By Nick at 4:56 PM |Tagged as apple , gates , ipod , portablemusic , stevejobs , zune | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From EPOD:

The Cork Oak (Quercus suber) is one of the species of trees that has its bark “harvested” to produce the variety of objects that we use in our daily lives. Things like “corks” for wine bottles, floor tiles, wallboards, gaskets, coasters and sporting equipment, to name a few. The unique properties of natural cork are primarily the result of its specialized structure -- it's bark is composed of tiny cells, each a 14-sided polyhedron, with the intercellular space entirely filled with air. There are approximately 40 million of these cells in a single cubic centimeter of cork bark.

Cork is lightweight, rot resistant, compressible and expandable, fire resistant, impermeable, soft and buoyant too. It has been used for thousands of years by the Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures. Cork oaks grow best in the Mediterranean climate of Portugal, Spain and Northern Africa. The commercial “stripping” of bark is tightly controlled to ensure a continued harvest of this valuable natural resource. The first bark is not harvested from a tree until it's 25-years old and then only every nine years afterward, on a rotating basis. This process allows a tree to be harvested for over 200 years. The cork is peeled off in large panels from the main sections of the trunk, including the large branches. About a third of the bark can be harvested from the tree at one time.

The above picture was taken of a tree that had been previously harvested and was in the process of growing new bark. This self-portrait was taken on a trip to southern Portugal in January of 2004. Portugal accounts for over 50% of the world’s cork production. While traveling through the Portuguese countryside it was hard not to notice these exceptional and highly prized trees.
(Link)

You may hate me for making you sit through that, but now you know where corks come from.

By Nick at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're interested in getting in your daily Chess fix and you don't want to pay anything, consider firing up your browser and heading on over to Shredder Chess Online. Shredder is a pretty powerful Chess engine. Way better than I'll ever be even at it's easiest settings. You can buy some rich GUI clients for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. They even have a mobile phone client, but this version doesn't support my mobile PDA yet.

The online version is clean, simple, and uses a well-implemented AJAX-based interface. Did I mention that it's free?

The idea of a web-based game like this is very appealing to me and
Shredder for Mac OS X provides a more advanced UI, with the ability to change many parameters of the Chess “brain” you're facing:

Here is what the GUI looks like, there are a few “themes” you can apply to the game but this one looks the best IMHO:

There are tons and tons of Chess solutions out there with zillions of ways to play. I just wanted to describe the method I've been using lately as I teach my kids how to play the game.

If you're interested in getting in your daily Chess fix and you don't want to pay anything, consider firing up your browser and heading on over to Shredder Chess Online.

By Nick at 11:25 PM |Tagged as chess | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My coworker, Pavan Podila, has been doing some amazing things with WPF. He has his own WPF Blog and when he posted a sneak peak at his new XAML Exporter for Adobe Illustrator CS2, I just had to point to it.

Before that, he posted an amazing sample of what you can do with WPF’s 3D mesh support:

Notice the ripple is being dragged by the mouse! Check out this video of the water effect:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1536259699335459617&hl=en

Oh, and while you’re at it, check out this sample of his OSX “Genie” effect, done i n WPF:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8775170776607857561&hl=en

By Nick at 12:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ll start off this comparison with a disclaimer. The review I present here is not as comprehensive as you’d get if you were reading a real publication. Below is an account of the review I did for myself as I debated on which tool I wanted to use moving forward. Perhaps the insight will be useful to you, perhaps not. There you have it.

I have been a loyal user of Bloglines for a long, long time. I was sold on the concept of a server-based aggregator the moment I was aware that the tools were out there. No tool could ever really compare to Bloglines. I always admired it’s simplicity and usefulness. Now there is another compelling choice out there and I’m once again tempted to switch.

As I used Bloglines, I saw that the feature set started to become rather stale after a while. So, I started to play with some of the other tools out there. To my dismay, tools like Rojo, Netvibes, Google Reader never seemed impressive enough to switch. Google reader, for instance, was terribly slow in it’s initial version. So, I was stuck with Bloglines. It worked, so I dismissed the lack of development and simply enjoyed the tool that still worked for me.

Then a few things happened. First, Bloglines started to improve. New features started popping up all of a sudden and my aggregated life started getting better. Then, a new world was open to me when Bloglines introduced their mobile version. My PDA is Internet-enabled and I now had the ability to read feeds during my 50–minute commute.

Now, Google Reader is back and with a vengeance. The new version is a completely new experience and boats dozens of features and speed improvements to boot. The dark side pulls at me. My situation is worsened when I find that Google Reader has a feature that I have been dying for Bloglines to add: mark individual items as read as you read them. There is AJAX magic going on here, but it works.

Google Reader has everything I need, yay! I can now use Google for everything!

Wait! Stop! Hold on a minute? What about their mobile version?

In a word, is sucks some serious ass! It’s simply unusable. The m ain reason is because the reader doesn’t show much from the entry. So, I’m constantly clicking on each entry, reading it, going back to the unread list, picking a new entry to look at, etc.

All of this switching is pretty slow on a mobile device, even if I have a 300Kbps connection (latency is not good). Your experience kind of looks like this:

Now, compare that to what you get in the Bloglines mobile reader. The full text in the feed is displayed. On my PDA, images usually get shrinked 50%, so the display doesn’t quote look this good:

Reading posts via Bloglines mobile is simply much more efficient. If a feed is large and has lots of entries and images, I can begin reading the first few entries while the rest of the entries load (though sometimes my scrollbar freezes, blast!)

Lastly, Bloglines skweezes all of the links you see in the feeds. So, anything I visit while surfing on the mobile device is nicely formatted for my phone.

I’m wondering how long Bloglines can survive, particularly if Google comes out with yet another revision that simply addresses all of my needs. That scenario is likely and I’ll be watching.

For now, I remain a Bloglines user and the mobile version is to be thanked for this.

I have been a loyal user of Bloglines for a long, long time. I was sold on the concept of a server-based aggregator the moment I was aware that the tools were out there. No tool could ever really compare to Bloglines. I always admired it’s simplicity and usefulness. Now there is another compelling choice out there and I’m once again tempted to switch.

By Nick at 10:24 PM |Tagged as aggregator , bloglines , google , netvibes | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A work colleague sent me this awesome targetted ad for Visual Studio! It’s placed on Sci Fi’s Battlestar Galactica homepage. Here is the screenshot:

By Nick at 9:48 AM |Tagged as battlestar , battlestargalactica , cylons , scifi | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I thought this was kind of funny news about Google’s Click-to-call service. A hacker made an illegal post to the Official Google Blog.

About that fake post

By A Googler

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog team

A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog last night, claiming that we've discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. As for the click-to-call test, it is progressing on schedule, and we're pleased with the results thus far.

And the post which caused the controversy:

Google Click-to-Call project cancelled

By Maximal

After concientiously considering, Google has decided not to continue with Google Click-to-call project. The project has been in the media on last days because of the notice of Google agreement with e-Bay. We finally consider click-to-call agreement with e-Bay a monopolistic aproach that would damage small companies in the CRM area.

This message has been translated using Google language tools.

I thought this was kind of funny news about Google’s Click-to-call service. A hacker made an illegal post to the Official Google Blog.

By Nick at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had previously wrote about the Krugle code searching engine. I never wound up using Krugle because it simply didn't match up to Google's default search. Now, Google has a specific frontend for searching code. What happens now?

I decided to experiment with some of the common searches that I do.

Let’s Compare

Let’s compare what Google Search, Google Code Search, and Krugle all return for the WPF class LinearDoubleKeyFrame.

Google Search returns these results. The first hit is as follows:

LinearDoubleKeyFrame Class (System.Windows.Media.Animation)

Animates from the Double value of the previous key frame to its own Value using linear interpolation. windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.animation.lineardoublekeyframe.aspx - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

Google Code Search returns these results. The fist hit is as follows:

AnimationBehaviors/AnimationBehaviors/AnimationBehaviors.cs

   331:   DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames da = new DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames();
          da.KeyFrames.Add(new LinearDoubleKeyFrame(0.0,KeyTime.FromTimeSpan(TimeSpan.Zero)));
          da.KeyFrames.Add(new LinearDoubleKeyFrame(0.0,KeyTime.FromTimeSpan(delay.TimeSpan)));
          da.KeyFrames.Add(new LinearDoubleKeyFrame(1.0, KeyTime.FromTimeSpan(delay.TimeSpan + duration.TimeSpan)));
          da.Duration = delay + duration;

www.brandonfurtwangler.com/.../AnimationBehaviors.zip - Unknown License - C#

Notice how the Google Code Search is focused on finding me source code and not the API. This tells me that a combination of Google Search and Google Code Search is what I’m looking for.

Now let’s see what Krugle returns.

No standard Code files found for LinearDoubleKeyFrame language:c#.

Suggestions:

• Make sure all search terms are spelled correctly.
• Try broader/different search settings for Language, Project and Found In.
• Check "Related Results" (to the right) for relevant Tech Info results.
• Try different keywords.
• Try more general keywords.

Know of a repository we should have found?

Help us improve our search results by sending us your feedback.

Oooh, that’s just NO GOOD. Krugle was very exciting to me, but my gut tells me that it’s very focused on open-source projects. They never seemed to penetrate MSDN, which should be easily indexed and added to their arsenal. So, Krugle is pretty much dead to me since I have a growing confidence that I’ll always get what I need by a simple combination of Google’s default search and their new code search.

Exploring Code Search

Like Google’s regular search, you can do an Advanced Search to fine-tune your results. You have extensive regular expressions support. I could, for instance tell the engine to search for this regular expression: Linear[A-Za-z]*KeyFrame. This correctly returns me results like “LinearDoubleKeyFrame,” “LinearColorKeyFrame,” and “LinearRectKeyFrame.” All of these results are relevant and exactly what I was looking for.

You can also filter on language, much like Krugle, but somewhat difficult/impossible with Google’s old-fashioned search (Did I just call Google search old-fashioned?!). However, VB.NET wasn’t a choice and neither was XAML. They may be added or forever omitted, who knows.

You can also filter your results on the kind of open-source license supported. I don’t personally have a use for this (maybe I should?) but I’m sure tons of open-source developers will find this feature essential. Choices range from the Apache License to the BSD License, to the venerable GPL and GLPL.

Finally, you can limit your search on packages and files. Packages seem to be domain and repository filters. The example they give is kernel.org, but I’m sure you can probably put in sourceforge.net or perhaps even codeplex.com. The filename filter is also pretty awesome and something I feel would be pretty difficult to accomplish precisely with Google Search.

What about Krugle, is it dead?

I personally feel that Google Code Search is going to kill Krugle in the long run. However, I fear that Krugle will suffer a painful extended demise rather than a quick and painless one.

Consider that the Google search engine is extremely basic just like all things Google. Perhaps Krugle can be of value to an audience that finds Google’s simple results lacking.

For instance, Krugle has links to Safari Books Online and their code search results have some pretty cool syntax highlighting. Furthermore, Krugle adorns their basic search feature with multiple result tabs as you dig deeper and deeper in your search journey. They also have UI elements allowing you to save results, add notes, and visualize where the source file lives in the project hierarchy.  That last item is pretty powerful.

That said, I still feel like a quick fix is all I need when I do my searches. I’ll probably use Google Search first and fall back to the source code search when I run out of ideas.

In my head, it’s better to provide a highly specialized yet simple tool that allows your users to combine and mash up multiple tools in in imaginative ways. A huge swiss army knife tool, like Krugle, is probably doomed to get too large, too confusing and ultimately unusable.

I had previously wrote about the Krugle code searching engine. I never wound up using Krugle because it simply didn't match up to Google's default search. Now, Google has a specific frontend for searching code. What happens now?

By Nick at 11:40 AM |Tagged as codesearch , google , krugle , source code | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)