Montreal's Apple Store, located at 1321 Ste-Catherine Ouest (just beside the Ogilvy), will open Friday at 5PM. After that the opening hours will be Mon.-Fri.: 9am - 9pm, Sat.: 9am - 5pm and Sun.: noon - 5pm.
Unfortunately, I'll be busy friday so I won't be able to be there for the opening. However, today I was going downtown to check the PO box and run a few errands, so I couldn't resist to go have a look:
Employees were busy putting the final touch to the store for friday's opening:
I was also surprised to discover that Montreal's policemen are not riding segways, but a kind of 3-wheel scooter. Cool:
Please excuse the bad pictures quality. I wasn't carrying my camera so I had to use my cellphone to take those pictures.
I first tried to embed a Quicktime video on my web page, but for some reason it didn't work. In a way it give more control, better resolution (640x480), but it has the disavantage of taking lots of space on my hosting server. If it works. I'll try to see if I can get it to work in the future, but a video hosting service would probably be better as it doesn't use my server space.
Google Video seemed a good candidate since it has no file size or time limit (contrary to YouTube which has a 1 Gb and 10 min. limit). But the resolution is not better than YouTube (see this blog entry) and the Flash encoding took a long time.
Earlier in May, I got myself a Canon Powershot S5IS as birthday present. It's quite an improvement on my FujiFilm S 3100: I've doubled the zoom (12x) and the megapixels (8), it has face detection and image stabilisation, a bigger & adjustable LCD monitor, lots of shooting mode (including manual) and the flash is a little more powerful -- but the camera also has a hot-shoe to add an external flash when necessary. I'll do a full review when I have a little more time. All I can say for now is that it takes pretty nice pictures. So far, I tried it at one convention, a couple of family events, a walk at the Botanical Garden and I am very satisfied.
The zoom is quite impressive:
It also takes good video (with stereo sound!) which I couldn't do with the Fuji (poor quality video and no sound). I have just started experimenting with video. I still have to try doing some editing and I am looking for the best way to showcase my footage to family and friends. On YouTube? On my .Mac web gallery (with .Mac/MobileMe increasing to 20 Gb of storage that could be a solution)? I'll do some more tests and I'll see.
First, the test on YouTube. The first thing I notice is that the encoding dramatically reduce the resolution. It's rather disappointing. Anyway, judge for yourselves. Here's a family of ducks spotted last friday at the Montreal Botanical Garden (just beside the Japanese Pavillion):
