Author: Rick

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Learn Guitar or Piano with GarageBand

Music, Easily Learned with a Computer

A recent Washington D.C. client wanted to learn how to play guitar and asked what the best software was for the job. The clear winner here is GarageBand on Mac OSX. It is part of iLife ’09 and included with all new Apple computers. GarageBand has a series of free lessons for guitar and keyboard/piano that go through all the basics (e.g., chords, strumming, etc.). After completing each lesson, you can play along with a song related to what you learned. You can easily repeat sections or slow down the music if you are having trouble playing at the pace of the teacher. If you’re like me an not particularly good, you can save yourself the embarrassment of practicing a chord change twenty times in front of a real teacher.

GarageBand

Learn from the Artist

There are also Artist Lessons, costing $4.99 each to learn a song directly from the artist who wrote it. There are only 20 Artist Lessons currently available, but these include songs from Sting, Rush, Ben Folds, John Legend and many other popular names.

GarageBand Artist Lessons

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Create Panoramas with Hugin

Hugin is free open source software for creating panoramas from a series of photos. It is not terribly difficult to use, but you should follow one of the tutorials such as the Lifehacker Hugin tutorial. This explains how to set control points between photos in order for Hugin to know where things line up.

There are downloads for Windows, Mac, and various flavors of Linux. For simplicity, download from the pre-compiled versions.

NY Panorama from Hugin

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Windows Phone 7

Surprisingly, Microsoft Announces Cool Phone

While Apple’s iPhone is the leader in smartphones, there is competition from Google’s Android phones, RIM’s Blackberries, and Palm’s Pre. This week’s announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona should put Microsoft back in the competition.

While Microsoft has made phone software for over 13 years, the phones were never popular outside of business. The phones looked like slimmed down versions of Windows and were clunky. With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is using the acclaimed user interface from their Zune music players and completely revamping the phones.

Expect to see phones running Windows Phone 7 around November 2010.

Note the first line of this video demo/promo. It says “A different kind of phone…” Reminds me a little of another company with small market share that asked people to “Think Different.”

For more videos, see Microsoft’s YouTube page on Windows Phone 7.