Our chat was very informal and we had a laugh along the way. He is also into video creation and uses a Canon video camera to capture his images. I met up with Andrew first of all on YouTube which is a surprise seeing as Twitter seems to be the place these days. Mind you seeing as we are both into vide then it should not be a surprise.

Andrew is a photographer too and loves nothing better than getting out and about taking pictures of amongst other things , Fire Hydrants. Have a listen to the podcast because he talks about what he has in his camera bag and also about the workflow he uses to take something from initial idea to a finished art work.

Bob has been a supporter of Mac20Q for some time and was telling me that he has listened right from the start of the podcast. Thanks Bob, good to have you along for the ride. He was the winner of one of our software giveaway competitions too!

A good chat was had and covered all the good stuff about being a Mac user. Bob is in the process of making a podcast about Bridge the card game. He started doing it as an audio podcast then decided to start again but with video. Makes more sense if you can see the cards, for this he has been using BoinxTV. I also have BoinxTV but it didn’t work on my iMac and when I looked at it working on the MacBook I decided that it was more for making Live TV programs with multiple cameras. I think I am better off using FinalCut Express or iMovie.

Whilst on the subject of FinalCut Express, I have still been working away to learn how to use the application and I am pleased that I am getting into it due to using Lynda .com with the excellent tutorials they have there. I also found FinalCutKing web site and there is a whole load of video tutorials on the IzzyVideo web site. All good quality stuff. I checked out YouTube also but the quality of the tutorials is much more variable and at the lower end of the scale.

I though it was funny that all the news sites have been talking about Applecare not being available to smokers because the filth that had accumulated in the machine had made it un safe for the technicians, Well smokers are disgusting creatures and deserve it if it is true. Blackened lungs and blackened insides of the computer. So there you go passive smoking is bad for computers too.

Back to Bob – he is certainly a die hard Mac user, having experience with Macs from the very early days, he did veer away during the dark days when Jobs was pushed aside but was happy to come back to the fold when Intel processors appeared in the Mac computers. Thanks to Bob for coming on Mac 20 Questions. I had a great time chatting with him and if you would like to be featured on Mac 20 Questions then why not contact me and we can make a date and time to record an interview.

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Today I am talking to a guy that nearly confessed to being a makeup guy, you know lipstick and blusher and all that, but did confess to being a geek. Unfortunately his wife is not a Mac person yet but he is working on her, I tell him to get out the thumbscrews. His son aged five though is a computer user with a laptop of his own.

David does have an iMac 20 inch model and is a recent switcher. He got drawn into the Mac world with iPods and moved into it with a white Macbook, he has moved on to a later model MacBook though. He is a firm believer in AppleCare. I have not had AppleCare on any of my Macs but he has got his moneys’ worth out of it.

We talk about Boxee and Plex, I don’t use those because I can’t get the best out of it because I live in Spain. I just wish I could use the BBC iPlayer, I may have to get something that will hide my IP address.

I talk about getting a satellite box from Elgato which will allow me to save things to watch later. He has a Sanyo Xacti video camcorder and loves using iMovie to make professional looking DVDs for the family.

He has his own podcast and is on episode 14 at the moment. He said the latest was going to be about Christmas presents for the Geek in your life.

David confesses to being an inbox zero type and also to having been outside the Milton Keynes Apple Store at 4am in the morning to get an iPhone. He uses Tweetie two and uses Brizzly which is a web based twitter client. There was a Twitter client in the latest MacHeist, Twitterific

Hooray I finally got my hands on Final Cut Express, Only took 2 weeks to get here from Birmingham to Spain. There is a chance that it was in the post office here for a few days because I didn’t get the note to say it was in the post office to collect. Often the post person is completely useless putting the post in the wrong box. Some of the house owners don’t check their post for months because they don’t live here – they live in Holland or Germany. Then when they do check and find a letter or whatever that is not theirs, they just dump it rather than put in the right box

Grrrr !!

Ah well I have it now just because I called to correos and asked if they had anything for me, or it would have probably sat there for a few more days or weeks. I still am happy to have saved 70 euro by buying off the Apple Store site in the UK rather than getting from the Apple Store Spain.

As soon as I had installed FinalCut Express I had to download a 180 mb  to update it to the latest. I will talk more about how it is going in a blog post and podcast.

Click the picture to hear the podcast

In this interview I am talking to Donato Espositio. A Brummie of Italian extraction. He arrived at school knowing only italian because he only spoke italian at home. Now Italian is the second language and he speaks pure Brummie, to the extent of using the word Brummie as his signature and brand name. He goes by the name of BostinBloke on Twitter Get Your Twitter Productivity Tools Here and also iBostin. On his web site he has had professors explaining the origins of the word Bostin which apparently goes back to Shakespearean times. Who would have expected that then?

Donato gave a demonstration of his iFart app on the iPhone. Well he told me that it was using the application, it could have been live I suppose but we had better not go into that, at least he wasn’t complaining of any smells happening at the time. No – I believe him honest, really, cross my fart, I mean heart.

Donato has met the BBC presenter of the One Show Adrian Childs because he was filmed wearing one of the famous Bostin T shirts while covering the European football championship. Adrian is obviously proud of his West Midland heritage too. Naturally the conversation skirted around the football teams of the area seeing as Adrian is  a Baggies fan, for his sins.

Donato has recently switched to the Mac and came in via seeing the one on one presentations that his son was having as part of learning to use his Mac. He also has a nephew that makes music on a Mac using Garageband. I was only a matter of time before Donato succumbed, and got down and dirty with iPhoto and the rest of iLife. He has spent many an happy hour putting in the names to the faces and is very fond of the geographic features implemented with the Geo tagging of photos from his camera. Ah! Happy days.

Not a huge podcast listener but has promised to at least to subscribe to this on in iTunes. What?? He hasn’t done that already?

I recommended the back up strategy as I use myself, Time Machine for the day to day backing up, followed by a once a week SuperDuper and the belt and braces is the important files being saved to the cloud using Mozy and DropBox. 2 GB of space available on each of those services for free. It doesn’t get much better than free does it.

Please make the trip to Donato’s sites Like Bostin Heroes to find out more about the West Midlands, Birmingham and the Black Country and buy a T shirt while you are there. Why? Because they are totally Bostin and you can’t help but smile while wearing one.

Bostin Heroes trailer

Donato on the BBC

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click the picture to listen to the Podcast

Chris has a company called FoleyPod and that’s his name of twitter too. he creates web pages so has to use Windows just for testing the web pages in the versions of IE
When editing sound uses Logic and we discuss Garageband.
Chris likes to use Pages as much as possible, has Office to be able to get into xl spreadsheets and has been known to play sudoku on the iPhone
Like me Chris is really impressed with the GPS on the iPhone, thinks it is great to see yourself as that little blue dot walking down the street.
He has bootcamp set up and also VM fusion – always amazes clients to see Mac and Windows on the same machine.

The browser Flock gets a mention for its super blogging tools built in and it is all in the sidebar – Facebook included which is normally a time sucking vortex. Easy to see  when things have been updated without having to go to the Facebook site. A Tweetie user on the Mac and on the iPhone and Seesmic gets a mention too.
Chris is a guitar player and has a covers band uses Garageband a lot to share ideas and is into Photography has a Nikon D90 digital SLR camera. personally I think that Aperture doesn’t need the faces and places extras from iPhoto, not really in keeping with the professional photographer needs, although he uses iTunes professionally
Finds Garageband to be great to use really easy  to make music with.
Time Machine is the best thing since sliced bread says Chris, he also use Carbon copy Cloner and SyncroniseProX
He has 14 drives do back things up with – Wow what a lot of drives. every 60 days will wipe the Time machine drive and starts again. Will not recommend Time Capsule because other things happening on the network like streaming from an Apple TV or a NetFlix thing will lead to corrupt back ups.
Evernote is a favourite application and would like to have this built in to Apple’s iCal
NetNewsWire  is the bees knees of an RSS reader likes the way it is synchronised so only has to look at a post once and have all the news aggregated in one place.
Apple J in iTunes gives you the show options and you can have more information in front of  you. Like if you want to mark tracks for whatever reason – comment and notes too
Chris rents movies from iTunes now and then.
iPhone favourite app is Evernote and Scrabble, Chris also uses Things
Mobile Me user and likes having all stuff synces through the cloud, he uses the public folder rather than have to use FTP

Podcasts

This week in Photography TWIP – listens and goes out shooting too at same time
Mac Os Ken
Screencasts online
On FoleyPod writes an ezine every month about tech things to do with the Mac
Recommended web sites

Reads Mac Life from the magazine good for tips
Like myself Chris loves WordPress and uses it to create web sites for clients

Click the Wizard to hear the Podcast

Rob uses PDF Pen if he gets PDF document that needs to do work on and send back to other people. We talk about Crayon Physics, an iPhone game.

We talk about Garageband as a tool for making podcasts and mention Ubercaster, which people like Stu Helm swear by. I did look at Ubercaster once but decided I was happy using Garage band and AmadeusPro for making my podcasts.

Favourite software is Coda from Panic Software for making web sites and is not terrible expensive. As far as buying things off iTunes is concerned well we got talking about Spotify.

iPhonography an iPhone photography site and Evernote on the iPhone – Your external brain. Did you know you can scan things into Evernote and have it do the OCR on it to make it searchable. Rob tells me about how he uses Spaces with certain spaces for certain tasks.

Growl gets a mention

Podcasts and podcast RSS reader

• Bart Busschots
• Boagworld Podcast
• Galactic Strings
• MacFormat
• Macworld UK News
• The MacCast
• The NosillaCast Podcast
• Typical Mac User Podcast
• For Mac Eyes Only
• Apple Quick Tips
• Geek brief TV
• Podcast for freelancers
• Mac Craic
• Stealth Mac Podcast
• Picture batcher – Easy Batch Photo – Yellowmug Software
• Destroy Twitter
• RSS Player
• Carpool – Llewtube

Rob's desktop set up

Some people just use the browser of choice and email and not much else, On the other hand there wil be users that will spend a whole day on a specific task like making a movie or a podcast and move on to using other apps on following days. Computers can do so many different things and people are all so different so a day in front of any computer is going to be unique and interesting.

Of course seeing as I am talking to Mac users there is going to be a lot of creativity and even the normal user is going to be a content maker of one sort or another. I presume that will  be the case anyway, we will find out as time goes by and the podcasts give us some evidence to go on.

I am a bit of a butterfly in the way I work. Even when I have a task that has to be completed by the end of the day I will still do other things as I go. A little bit of email checking, some twittering, I’ll research something or other or check out a video somewhere. Obviously being a podcaster and blogger I spend a lot of time using the applications that I need to complete those tasks. Amadeus Pro, Garageband08, Quick time, ScreenFlow, VideoCue and more. I have just been conned into making the newsletter for the Girona Grapvine which is a group of English speaking socially networking each Wednesday in Girona, for that I have been using Pages which is a super application for arranging things on a page. I will be outputting those as PDF’s when they are done.