If you want to see the camera, head along to The Edge at SLQ tonight, where I'll be showing it off and talking about it. Still hard to find, but apparently the backlog of orders should be clear by the end of March. Given the delays we've already seen, take that with as large a grain of salt as you wish. If you're interested, here are a bunch of videos I've shot — too big for the blog, so view in their own windows:

• An Afternoon at The Scratch
• Rain and Flooding in The Gap
• Australia Day at the Green Beacon Brewing Co

All the others are here on Vimeo.

This year in particular is set to be a different kind of experience. Hazel is off to school, and we'll experience a whole new set of highs and lows there. Much as I've loved spending time with Hazel as she's been growing up, I'll enjoy being able to throw myself more completely into some projects. For the past few years, I've been working part time, spending 1-2 weekdays each week at home with her. It's been mostly great, and with any luck I've laid some foundations for her to build on, but, as Tim Minchin can testify, it's never all plain sailing.

In a few short weeks, though, she's off to school. She was born in July, yet if she'd been born in June, this all would have happened last year. Though a child can start Year 1 early, they can't start Prep early, and the government is entirely inflexible on this. Some kids aren't ready for school, and they can be held back, but kids who are ready for school yet "too young" can't go early. Most state governments in Australia have similar policies, and most of them actually require their kids to be even older than Queensland does.

The right way to do this is (to my mind) what New Zealand does. Every kid starts Reception (the local equivalent of Prep/Year 0) on their fifth birthday. If they start in the second half of the year, they'll probably do another year of Reception, and if they start in the first half of the year, they probably won't, but it's the teacher's call. Perfect. Judging kids by their capabilities and not by a number shouldn't be a revolutionary concept.

The upshot of all of this is that Hazel lost most of her friends at the end of last year when they "graduated" and she didn't. She'll now be in a class with kids of widely varying abilities rather than in a class of kids mostly at the same level. And yes, I did write to the government on this, but they ignored almost everything in my letter, sending a form letter in return. Their main point was "we've got to draw the line somewhere", ignoring the fact that their own rules for early Year 1 entry are, indeed, flexible. While I appreciate that they don't want to create a "free childcare" system, I'm sure that they could find a way to address the needs of the kids more effectively while getting parents back into the workforce more quickly.

Finally, a note that other countries do things differently. The UK starts a full year earlier, for example. Hazel would have been in school after her 4th birthday, not when she's 5 and a half. They also have an additional year longer at the end, roughly on the same level as our first year of university. Australia should, if it wants to compete internationally in the long term, should look to more education, earlier, not less education starting later.

First

It's a fundraiser, where you play Letterpress against as many people as you like, and the loser of each game pays $5 to Movember. Don't have Letterpress? (App Store link just there.) It's free to play one game at a time, but you'll probably want to spend $1 on the full version. Don't have an iOS device? We'll have some spare. Come and have a drink anyway.

Second, I'm presenting the final Brisbane InDesign User Group meeting for the year on Tuesday 20 November, talking about the new features of CS6 and how to create an iPad app directly from Creative Cloud tools. Free, but you'll need to register.

Third, I've just launched a 10-minute documentary I made at the 48 Hour Game Making Challenge 2012. Good people doing crazy things in two days flat, this video was inspired by Brendan Keogh's epic series of articles written on the event last year. Hope you like it, and if you want something similar made for your event, just drop me a line: iain [at] funwithstuff.com.

And I'm still waiting for my Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

One big thing I've done over the past several months is to create a large (9000+ words) rough guide to editing in Final Cut Pro X. It takes you from ingest, past the rough cut, through the fine cut, to effects, transitions, export and archiving. If you're new to editing or just to FCP X, I really hope it helps. And it's available for FREE, serialised in six parts, starting today and for the next five days. Here's Part One: Import and Organize.

If you like it, tell your friends. If you want video training, start with this free series by Michael Wohl. And if you want training in-person, contact me! I'm an Apple Certified Trainer, and that's what I do for a living these days, through my site: trainingbrisbane.com.

However. There was a palpable bias, stemming from the fact of their employment, that old media was better, more reliable, more authoritative, more responsible, less prone to corruption, and so on. At one point, someone said the problem was that "we need to find a way to get people to pay for [it]", where "it" stands for information about restaurants — the reviews and opinions which so many people give away for free on the internet. It's fair to say that at least some of the panelists just don't get it.

Here are a few points that I'd dispute:

Yes, a newspaper's experienced reviewer can give a longer and more thorough opinion than random unpaid amateurs online.

Yes, some reviews are rigged (positively or negatively) on Urbanspoon, Tripadvisor (they do food too), Eatability and other sites, but the vast majority are not. The solution is not, as one panelist suggested, that "maybe the restaurants should start suing Urbanspoon". The public is just about smart enough to discern a worthwhile review from a valueless one.

No, I don't think many people really read food blogs compared to print media. Print still has the stickiness of simply being there on a table, ready to picked up and leafed through; I have to choose to visit a blog. It's the same reason that broadcast TV survives: many people are happy to consume what they are served. The influence of "food blogging" is, I think, overestimated.

However, I think they perhaps underestimate the power of the amateur review. If I'm looking for a special occasion meal, then yes, I'll read the opinions of the best reviewers. If I'm on holiday or really can't be bothered cooking, I'll just call up an app, look on a map, and find the best looking place nearby. I judge those places based on the collective wisdom of the internet, fed through my personal filters, possibly amended when I turn up and see the place. If a place has multiple negative reviews from different people and no positives, it's unlikely that they're all fakers from the restaurant next door. I didn't need a professional review, just a thumbs up or down.

And that's the thing. Print is still the place people will go for regular, informed opinions about restaurants and much else besides. They also have an important role in introducing people to new restaurants. Today, though, they're not the only source of that information. While real foodies (and I am not) will still prefer the in-depth print review, I don't usually need it, and can get the brief information I seek without print.

Before the internet, I would have asked a friend or taken a blind stab, and now I can ask strangers. I don't ask food bloggers, just random users of whatever service showed up on Google and looked reasonable.

Similarly, before the internet, I wouldn't have tracked down an old paper for a review from months prior. The mobile internet answers the "is this restaurant any good?" question in a way that print never did and answers the "what's the best restaurant near here?" question in a way that it never can. Print never solved either problem, they only gave a restaurant something to photocopy and display next to their menu on the street.

To keep their current committed foodie audience, print media needs to ensure that their content is better than the alternatives, and that it's just as visible. Their content's fine, but they're losing the visibility war that's so important for the casual review-seeker. If print wants to remain relevant, it needs to make its content just as obvious, searchable, location-enabled and user-comment-friendly as its competitors. If not, their audience will slowly drift away. Convenience, in the end, always wins.

Amazon, with the Kindle, and others with earlier e-readers have been pushing this future for text-heavy books for some years now, and they've gained enough traction and done enough deals to make that future assured. Yet, if you want to read a magazine you'll probably be wanting an iPad. A larger, colour, interactive display makes a world of difference, and a magazine is a very different game to books. Images are important, layout is important, fonts are important — and none were deemed important in the ebook world.

Zinio was one of the first companies to get the ball rolling here, back when all they had was a Mac and PC PDF-based reader app. It was painful back then, largely because reading a magazine on a computer screen was hardly the personal experience readers expected, and because the reader app was quite slow — on the desktop, it still is, thanks to AIR.

Adobe, as makers of the dominant publishing application InDesign, took their time, then produced the Digital Publishing Suite. Not based on PDF, it allowed a variety of additional multimedia widgets and could deal with horizontal and vertical layouts, to allow reading in either orientation — so long as the designers re-designed every page. (InDesign makes this process easier than it might be, but it's hardly automatic.)

Biggest criticisms of the Adobe DPS: magazine issues are huge, often over 500MB (largely because each page is simply rendered as a flat image) and you can't zoom in. (A competitor, MagAppZine, chose a similar delivery method, but uses more heavily compressed images at double the resolution, allows zooming, and looks good on the retina display.)

However, another important factor is that it's completely inaccessible. As there's no actual text present, there's no way for the system's text-to-speech functionality to make any sense of it. Despite all the other issues surrounding magazines-as-images, I suspect that a legal challenge from an interested organisation will put an end to this strategy in the long run. (It's worth noting that Zinio's solution does include full text, as text, on request.)

So how did Adobe and MagAppZine (and others) end up with just a series of images? If the layout is important, the delivery method, for now, has to be an image or a PDF. For a truly accessible, lightweight, text-rendered-by-device-quickly layout, you'd have to rebuild each magazine with HTML, and there's no easy way to do that right now from InDesign. (It's coming, but not ready yet. Maybe in CS6?)

Recreating print layouts in HTML would require a great deal of extra work, a whole set of skills that print designers rarely have, and that's assuming they can clear the rights issues for distribution of their favourite fonts. It's a non-starter for organisations already struggling to make a profit.

The biggest question for me is: why not PDF? Yes, it requires more effort to render, but it requires a whole lot less effort from the designers. And Adobe know their PDF. The big reason is that Adobe are trying to support the device first and the designers second. Like Apple, they've chosen to force designers, to some degree, to design specifically for the iPad (or other tablets) and not to support existing workflows, technologies and formats.

Apple's motivation is clear and oft-stated: to ensure the best experience on their devices. Adobe's solution, though, is hardly great for consumers, especially now that we have the retina display. What's their motivation? To be fair, they may have done this because, like Apple, they feel that displaying unmodified magazines as zoomable PDFs on the iPad results in a poor experience for users, and they feel that repurposing the content for the medium gives much better results. (Personally, I want the magazine layout, unchanged, and I'm happy to zoom in and move about.)

Maybe they made the choice that they felt was best for consumers. However, some less charitable people may say that they saw an opportunity to make a large amount of money, to become the middle man between publishers and the App Store. Some may say that. But I couldn't possibly comment.

Hazel's beaming smile was topped off with: "I'm so proud that you're so happy with me, Mummy."

Awesome wee beastie.

Mike has now admitted that he lied, and NPR have retracted their story based on his piece. He simply made up many of the crucial details, including the man with the claw hand ruined by a metal press, the underage workers, and the workers exposed to N-hexane. Some of those issues are real (to some degree at least) but he can't verify them directly, and claimed he did. He's now retreated into claiming that he's presenting "theater", but he's repeatedly claimed his words as the truth, and they are not.

Foxconn is not a place I'd like to work, but workers there get paid higher than the average wage, and are less likely to commit suicide than the national average. Apple have, by admission of the local inspection board, done more than other companies to ensure a safe, fairer working environment. Foxconn may well be a boring, horrible assembly line factory, but Mike Daisey making it sound worse than it is doesn't help.

UPDATE: Here's a transcript of the latest NPR show, entitled "Retraction". A key quote:

University clearly teaches more theory than app usage, and that's as it should be. Universities should teach students how to think, rather than how to do. If you just want to know how to do something, I can teach you more practical skills in a two-day intensive course than you'd get in a semester of a university degree (really!).

Still, it's a little unnerving to wonder just what they'll be teaching at universities in just a few years time, when half the class knows multimedia upside down and sideways already. More theory? Not if they want to appeal to half their audience. It's a tricky path to follow: claiming to teach work skills while appeasing academics' need to publish. Teaching people how to think when all they want is a bit of paper that will get them a job. Dealing with the fact that most of them work, many full time, when you're expecting them to devote 40 hours a week to study.

Here's the truth. If every university student simply read what their lecturers wanted, read all the notes, spent the amount of time they're meant to on study, and crafted assignments to satisfy assessment criteria, they'd all get perfect 7s. HDs. Or nearly. If you're thinking of studying — do it. Very worthwhile. Just don't think of it as a way to get a piece of paper, it's a way to expand your brain and make you a more interesting, employable person. Just ask your lecturers what they want, and you'll do well.