Category: Apple

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iTunes is your friend

I really like iTunes. It’s a wonderful piece of software that just works as expected and does it’s job really well.

I’ve been asked to talk at the PowerUp conference on the Gold Coast this weekend and was given an open opportunity to talk about whatever I wanted. Although I think the Web 2.0 story is the one most people still need to hear, the general feeling was that there were already plenty of people talking about web 2.0 stuff, so something a bit different would be good. (Besides, my other session will be about web 2.0 stuff anyway, looking at tools for collaboration)

I’m a bit wary of being caught out without Internet access when I present… I’ve been in situations before where I was told there would be access, where there was access, where I should have been able to get access, but for whatever reason the firewall gods were not smiling upon me and I had none. I don’t expect that to be the case this weekend, and of course I plan to present it live… but I’m starting to learn to cover my bases and to that end I’ve been making a few screencasts using iShowU, capturing those portions of my presentations that require access to the cloud. Just in case.

So if you’re interested, here is part of my presentation about iTunes. I thought this stuff was kind of obvious but I’ve spoken to many people lately who still haven’t got their head around this stuff.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/00viJjSQL_Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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Only on a Mac

This is so cool…

Found this image on Flickr via Digg of a guy who accidentally did a cmd+A in his Applications folder on his MacBook Pro, and then pressed Enter. In case that doesn’t mean much to you, it basically opened every application on his computer at the same time! If you take a look at his Dock, that’s a lot of applications!

The amazing thing is that the machine didn’t crash, which is an amazing testament to the power of OSX. I don’t think I’d even consider trying that on a Windows machine…

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A Series of Tubes

I’ve been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately… not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It’s a pretty cool site and it’s easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff.

I was really interested to find that Apple’s totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too… as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the ‘Tube. It’s very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it.

As a test, I edited together this little production last night using some Mac vs PC ads I just happened to have laying about on my hard drive. The process is easy, they imported into iMovie very simply, the new workflow is interesting and newbie video editors will probably love it, and the whole thing was put together in a very short timeframe.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/hRlKxVVGWks" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I thought it was fascinating to realise how many of these Mac vs PC ads have been made, and to see just how diverse they are.

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