Where have I been? Well, I’ll tell you. Between my day job as a technologist, my night job as a post-production zombie and being a dad and friend, there hasn’t been much time to keep things up-to-date.

I mean, hell, sometimes I don’t even have the perceived time to come up with 140 characters for Twitter, much less the order-of-magnitude more required for what may or may not be a compelling blog post.

The last few nights I’ve been color correcting/grading a film. This film will be premiering soon, and this is a bit of a rush job. I’ve had to pare down my workflow to the essentials in order to get the product out in time. This has been a frustratingly rewarding process.

Instead of thinking “how do I come up with a look that indicates the different moods or time periods of the characters on screen” I’ve been forced to really look at the basics: white balance, skin tones, contrast...

Well, I’ve been following the quiet, stealthy and nearly silent progress of an iOS app called (today) Taskmator. It was previously called Tasque, but changed due to conflict with a Linux program. Why?

Well, despite some early pundit-grade rim shots surrounding its initial release, it would seem that this is the first (and maybe the only) fork of the recently-released source code for Jesse GrosJean’s iOS Taskpaper that is undergoing active development.

As I awkwardly quipped above, the details around this release are slight. The Developer Amit Chaudhary maintains a Facebook page, which has some info on it, but none of the usual announcement/developer language one gets used to seeing from a support page.

Some discussion on the Hog Bay Software blog started out rough: the app had several legacy issues from Jesse’s code, and seemed to be an awkward compilation of the original software...

Final Cut Pro X is fantastic

There. I said it. I’ll say it a different way: I Don’t Miss Tracks One Tiny Bit.

I read a lot of posts from a lot of new FCPX users, and by far - one of the things that baffles folks (outside of the missing tracks - but that’s a whole ‘nother topic) is the lack of a save command.

You see, FCPX auto-saves your work. Silently, obediently. To some: annoyingly. But whatever. This is how the program was written.

Hitting Cmd-S in FCPX has no positive effect. It has a negative one though: you get an error message. This, I would submit, is a design flaw - one Apple should definitely correct, since 99.9% (no citation needed, right guys?) of their other apps and apps by third-party developers all use Cmd-S to save the current document. Natural, habitual usage of a Mac these days includes (if you are wise) an autonomic Save keystroke every couple of minutes.

If...

In search of a Plaintext Workflow

Lots of activity this month in the blogosphere relating to those searching for a “future-proof” format for their digital workflow. Plain text is cool (again) and Markdown is king.

I joined Svbtle after years of not-blogging (a wildly fluctuating busy:lazy ratio was the culprit) because of its simplicity and support for Markdown.

I’ve also dusted off my copies of Ulysses 3, Scrivener, FoldingText, SublimeText and Markdown Pro in search of a the One True Markdown Editor. I’m writing this post right now in Ulysses, if you care to know. I’ve tried Texts just tonight too - pretty - but I’m nervous about not seeing the Markdown code.

I preview and publish everything in Marked 2. You should too.

I’ve forced myself to switch from Omnifocus (still my favorite task management app of all time) to the excellent TaskPaper, despite the shaky uncertainty of iOS...