Murphy Mac

Quick post in case you haven’t seen this:

I’ll be the first to admit I knew nothing of Webkit until I saw it mentioned on Digg. I always forget to look at Digg. Murphy does too.

Then I read this glowing review by Seth Weintraub over at ComputerWorld. What is Webkit? It’s a developmental version of Safari you can get your hands on right now. I’ll let the post speak for itself, but in summary Seth thinks Webkit is seriously fast. More importantly, the often-ornery Digg comment crowd seems to agree.

When you start Webkit up you’ll see all your links and bookmarks. Basically, jumping back and forth between Webkit and Safari should be more or less transparent. I only played with it for a few minutes. Gmail wasn’t doing so well with auto-fill on the address line. Let us know how you do in the comments.

Here’s the link to Webkit’s nightly builds.

NOTE: Murphy could use a little help on an Applescript with regard to captured text, paths, and spaces in file names. If you have the required expertise please drop an email to murphy at murphymac dot com.  Thanks.

We’re getting ready to make our first iMovie 08 screencast - and we’ve hit a snag. Has anyone gotten the audio to fade in and fade out? There are a few unanswered threads on Apple Discussions and elsewhere so maybe some other users are having issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s a background audio track or a clip attached to a video segment, neither work. Even though 2 seconds is selected with manual fade, nothing happens. At least nothing Murphy can discern.

As for the rest of iMovie 08: It definitely has its good points. Things are missing from iMovieHD - we’ll get to those in a minute. First, the good points.

It’s nice to have all your events (source video) accessible in one tidy pane where you can combine them into one project. The old iMovie let you drag from one project to another, but many users may have found that cumbersome. Murphy doesn’t keep a lot of video on disk as it takes up a lot of space, so this feature may go somewhat underused. But that brings up another point: Archiving your raw materials.

You can easily delete an event from iMovie and leave the project in place. The project won’t be fully functional until you bring the source video (the event) back online. Murphy copied some source video to an external drive, deleted it from iMovie, then put the source back. The project recognized the source video as soon as it was back. Even if it was just copied back into Finder. That’s pretty nice. There’s no mention of this in the help file, so your might want create a backup before testing this out.

Editing seems far more intuitive in iMovie 08. There are some nuances but it seems far better than the awkward interface of iMovie’s past. Murphy made a whole screencast about using the in and out markers in iMovieHD because they seemed so unintuitive. It’s nice to have lots of thumbnails and an obvious dropzone to deposit your video into. There’s a preference to make all your transitions the same kind too, which may or may not have been in the previous version.

The big problem many users will have with iMovie 08 is effects. Slow motion, fast motion - not there. Many forum posters have mentioned work-arounds - like taking your project back and forth into the older iMovie. In fact, one poster has mentioned in numerous places on Apple Discussions that this iMovie is not an upgrade to the older iMovies. (scroll to ziatron’s posts) If that’s true they really shouldn’t have named it iMovie. Granted, it’s a whole new product. But I don’t think Apple’s plan was to distribute two versions of iMovie, as the poster suggests. iMovie 08 feels incomplete, if not a little rushed. Falling back on iMovieHD (’06) couldn’t have been the preferred solution.

Murphy has spent more than a reasonable amount of time trying to get audio to fade in or out. Please post your success story, if you have one. Taking the audio to Garage Band or the older iMovieHD doesn’t count!

Watch for a screencast about iMovie audio soon, maybe even tomorrow.

Selecting part of your image and masking your background to make it transparent is tricky business. Even with Photoshop.

Apple gave us some tools in Leopard that make a quick and dirty extraction pretty easy. There’s an Instant Alpha tool like the one in the iWork applications. But there’s also a nice Extract Shape tool that looks a lot like the one in Photoshop, minus all the fancy options.

You can make your web pages and other documents look a little more polished by adding transparency. The transparency opens up new possibilities, like subjects that pop out of their frames.

In the screencast, Murphy uses the Extract Shape tool to select a kitten in a photo and make the background transparent. The tool allows for further enhancement by dragging across colors you want to matte. This is similar to using the Instant Alpha tool that’s now included with Preview.

Here’s another example of what you can do.

Reminder from Murphy: Amazon is having a sale on Apple products. This Macbook is $1097 before a $75 rebate at post time. That’s $1022.91 with a rebate. The black Macbook has a $100 rebate. Get yourself some Merry Christmas stuff.

Murphy stumbled across an old HP iPaq the other day and intalled Salling Clicker on it. Instant remote control for iTunes, via the Salling Clicker pane installed in System Preferences.

It’s amazing there aren’t more Wifi remotes these days. With computers acting as media libraries line-of-sight infrared seems totally inadequate. That’s where Salling Clicker comes in. The software works with either Bluetooth or Wifi to control functions on a remote computer. And the list of devices it works on is extensive. The bad news is for LG phone users. You’re on your own.

Watch the screencast to see how Murphy controls his iTunes library. He can even use the hardware buttons on the Pocket PC to advance to the next song or go back. The same button also controls the volume.

If you dig a little further into Salling Clicker you’ll see it can be used to control a slideshow in iPhoto or to send a Mac off to sleep. There are functions for news feeds and mail too.

Murphy is looking forward to seeing Salling Clicker on an iPod Touch and iPhone when the platform is opened up to developers early in 2008. The Touch might be the perfect Wifi remote control.

A trial version of the software shows all the functionality, but locks after a finite number of clicks. If you’ve got an old Pocket PC lying around you might want to take a look. Or check to see if your phone is on the list of supported devices. There’s a Windows version too.

You don’t need third party tools to keep your Quicktime movie always on top. Select your movie in Finder, hit Shift-Command-Y, and your movie opens in a Sticky.  (The keyboard shortcut invokes an item in Services)  Set the Sticky to float and the movie stays on top of other windows. Now you can get some work done with the movie playing in the corner, but your other windows won’t cover the video.

You could also look at this as an easier way to play your Quicktime file back borderless. They won’t be perfectly borderless, like Murphy showed you in this tip. But setting the Sticky color to gray makes it look pretty close. The extra screen real estate is nice to have on a laptop. And Murphy’s other Quicktime tip didn’t have the Always on Top option.

It’s a little surprising Apple hasn’t added an Always on Top menu to Quicktime. But this seems like a reasonable workaround. Take a look as Murphy plays with Quicktime and Sticky notes in the screencast.