Time-Lapse Movies On-Line

A reminder that we're compiling daily time-lapse movies of the construction activities at the future Boylston Street store site, and posting them on-line, even though there are no posted links. The Webcam captures one frame every minute. For the time-lapse movies, we're grabbing one frame every five minutes, taken Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to about 9 p.m. I manually render and convert the still photos using Final Cut Express at two frames per-second, ending up with a 90-second clip. I try to do the rendering every night. However, sometimes I'm a little late with the process--be patient. The link for specific daily videos is:

http://ifostore.cachefly.net/boston/mmmdd.mov

The "mmm" is the first three letters of the month, and the "dd" is the one or two-digit day of the month. For example, the filename for the June 7th time-lapse would be "jun7.mov".

Not Much To Look At...

Well, all the foundation work isn't giving us much to look at, although the noises are quite a bit louder than what the images make it seem.

Anyway, I'll take this visual break to bring up a new topic of discussion: the Apple Store vs. your local Apple shop. As you see, the webcam is brought to you by the folks at Tech Superpowers, which conveniently enough, is located right across the back alley from the Apple Store. Traditionally, this has been very bad news for an "Apple Specialist" like us - the Apple Store produces a giant sucking sound as your customers go running over to the mothership.

We're hoping we're different - mainly because we're not a retail store. You can walk in and get a repair done (and you don't have to wait for a genius) and we have one of the country's only all-Mac Internet Cafés - but we don't sell iPods by the cartload. So we won't lose that business. But we still have a lot to lose - even our service business could suffer by the Apple Store being so close (even though most Apple Stores don't have the time to do in-house laptop repairs).

So the question for our readers: What do you prefer? Do you care where you buy your Mac from? Where you get it repaired? Do you feel better if the person that you're dealing with has an official Apple shirt vs. a Tech Superpowers shirt? Where have you gotten your best experiences?

All those questions... but we're curious to know what our future will hold.

Mike