Supersize Me

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But it doesn’t just stop there. We’ve all got digital cameras these days, and I’m sure I’m not the only one with an unfeasibly large number of pictures waiting to be organised. These days just getting them off my memory card and in a place that I’ll one day be able to find them again is an achievement in itself – forget about actually printing them out. And as for updating the family website, well, no, I haven’t got round to that either.

And I haven’t even mentioned the most time consuming things that western civilisation has to offer – games. While you can be drawn into a film, whole nights can pass while you play your favourite game. Who needs sleep when you have Counter-Strike? And with PCs and three competing consoles it’s hard to know where to turn.

The point is then that we are all content rich, but increasingly time poor. Our broadband connections are getting faster and our hard disks are getting fatter, but there aren’t any more hours in the day.

This is why I’m beginning to see the sense in things that could save me time. In the past I’ve played with the application Muvee Auto Producer. It’s really quite nifty. Just give it a few video clips and some music and it will create your movie for you at the click of a button. Hey, maybe those tapes can edit themselves!

Alternatively, you could go for one of Sony’s new DVD camcorders. These record straight to discs that will play in most DVD drives - no capture or editing necessary. They also give the benefit of being able to skip straight to automatically created chapters.

Recently, Apple added an Autofill feature to iTunes for the iPod shuffle – just plug it in and it will automatically fill up your shuffle with music from your collection. And iPhoto will automatically create a web page for you from an album of pictures, and layout a photo book, which you can then order online and get sent a real hard copy.

In PaintShop Pro and Photoshop there’s the auto adjust feature that will correct the brightness and contrast of your image in one step, so you don’t have to bother peering at histograms and fiddling with saturation controls.

Now in the past I might have viewed things like this as dumbing down what ought to be a creative manual process, but these days my priorities have changed and I see them as valuable timesavers. If they serve a useful purpose and do a decent job then as far as I’m concerned it’s an excellent use of those ever increasing CPU clock cycles.

So it seems that products and applications have to either be very easy to use, or offer loads of specialised features for those who do want to spend the time and effort to do things manually in order get the best results, with very little room for a middle ground. Often we spend too much time, effort and money on getting more, not because we need to, but just because we can. In the digital age, it’s too often about quantify over quality, so while MP3 is now the norm, high resolution audio formats such as DVD Audio and SACD are virtually ignored.

So after a couple of hours, a pile of metal shavings and a sore hand later, I had a fully upgraded Sky Plus box enabling me to record TV to my heart's content. Ok, so I’ve never had filled more than 40 per cent of its capacity, but I’m hoping that by the time that I’ve filled it up completely, they’ll have created a program that can watch your TV for you…

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