Dodona gives you answers

I recently bought a Flip Video camera. After shooting some videos, I wanted to import them into iMovie. This is what I found out:

What doesn’t work:

• Use the “import from camera” command.
  Although iMovie does recognise the Flip camera and automatically pops up the import from camera window on startup (with the camera already plugged in to the USB port), when I try to import a video I get an “Error while importing” message, and nothing is imported.

What does work:

• Use iPhoto to import the videos, and then use these in iMovie (my favorite).
  First I use iPhoto to import the videos from the camera. After this, quit iPhoto (this seems to be important to prevent errors, don’t ask why…) After that start up iMovie. It tells me it needs to generate miniatures for all the videos in my iPhoto library. This can take quite some time, depending on how many videos you have imported. After this is done, I can use my movies in iMovie by selecting them in the “iPhoto-videos” in the Events library.
  Pros: The iPhoto library is intergrated into iMovie, and has preview filmstrips which allow you to “preview-scroll” through the movie.
  Cons: There will probably be duplicate copies of the imported movies in both the iPhoto and iMovie library. This takes up twice as much disk-space.
  And iPhoto doesn’t show a preview of the videos you import. It does allow you to skip already imported videos.
  
• Select “Import movies…” from the iMovie File menu.
  Make sure you Flip camera is plugged in to your computer. Now navigate to FLIPVIDEO > DCIM > 100VIDEO. The “100VIDEO” folder is the folder where all your movies are. Select the ones you want to import and import them.
  Pros: The videos are on your hard-disk only once.
  Cons: The videos have names like “VID00001.MP4″. Not very descriptive… And there is no preview either so you have no indication of what you are importing.
• Use the FlipShare program that comes with the Flip camera.
  In FlipShare, select one or more videos to import. Then press the “Save to computer” icon at the bottom of the screen. The videos are now saved to your computer. Now select “Import movies…” from the iMovie File menu. Navigate you home folder and then to Movies > FlipShare Data > Videos. The “Videos” folder is the folder where all your movies imported with FlipShare are. Select the ones you want to import in iMovie and import them.
  Pros: FlipShare shows nice previews before importing videos.
  Cons: When importing movies into iMovie from the FlipShare video directory, there are no previews and the videos have names like “VID00001.MP4″ again…

(Although this text is in English, I am Dutch, and so is my copy of iMovie. So I hope I translated all command- and menu-names correctly)

To batch rename a lot of files, I recently used Renamer4mac. It’s simple and has a fully functional 10 day free trial. After that it’s $26.

Link: www.renamer4mac.com
Status: Tested it, works nice

I just got my new MacBook Pro and wanted to migrate my old Powerbook G4 to it. By default, this is done by connecting the two computers using a firewire cable. But my old Powerbook G4 has and old firewire port, and for the new MacBook, Apple for some reason has decided it needs a different firewire port. And now I have no firewire cable to connect the two different ports…

In the installation/migration program, Apple suggest to connect both computers to your local network using ethernet cables. But I was doing this at home and only had one ethernet cable present… Apples next suggestion is to migrate using Airport. I started doing this, but it was very slow and would take about 8 hours to complete (and my hard-disk wasn’t even that full).

I didn’t want to wait that long, so I aborted the migration and decided to create the smallest possible network, and connect the two computers directly using the ethernet cable (so without a router). And this worked! The migration now was finished in about an hour and a half.

Conclusion: If you don’t have the right fire-wire cable and want to migrate your Powerbook to your MacBook Pro, connect them directly using a fire-wire cable.

Status: Tested it, works.

I have several devices in my local network which need to be configured using a web interface. To reach this interface, I have to point my browser to their IP address. But how do I know which device has which address?

With IP Scanner you can scan your local area network to determine the identity of all machines and internet devices on the LAN. Now you now which IP address to surf to! (the demo is limited to scan a maximum of 5 devices, the full version costs $29.99)

Link: IP Scanner for Macintosh
Status: Tested it, works

By default, when pasting text in Mac OS X, the formatting of the copied text is pasted as well. This is supposed to be a feature, but I find it quite annoying. A few programs however, support text pasting without formatting:

Word and Mail: “Shift-Option-Command-V”
Indesign: “”Shift-Command-V”

Link: A New Mac Tip Every Day: Pasting without formatting!

Know other programs that offer this feature as well? Leave a comment!

Use A-to-G to convert your Mac Addressbook contacts into a .CSV file which you can import into Gmail.

Link: www.bborofka.com/A_to_G/A_to_G.html

Status: tested it, works

To backup a mailbox in Mac Mail, just drag it on the desktop or into another folder directly from Mail.
To import the back-upped .mbox folder, don’t select the .mbox folder itself, but the folder it’s in. So if its on your desktop, just select your desktop folder.

Original post: Importing Mail .mbox files

I recently had to import movies to my Mac from a Cannon FS100 camera. This and other similar cameras record their movies as .MOD files. After some web-surfing I found out MOD video files are actually MPEG-2 files with AC3 audio.

MPEG2 files are not supported by Quicktime by default. You have to buy the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component from the Apple store. It costs $20.

There are some free alternatives to view MPEG-2 files on a Mac:

• For playback, I liked the VLC player the best.
• An alternative player is MPlayer (but it played my movies rather slow)
• To convert .MOD or MPEG 2 files to another format use ffmpegX

NOTE: Apart from ffmpegX the above players don’t recognise the .MOD extension. There is a simple workaround for this; just change the extension of the file you want to play to .mpg.

The missing link
OK, so this works, but having to change the extension or convert the file is not very practical, especially when you have a lot of movie files.
But that’s when I bumped in to VideoPier from Aquafadas. It’s a program especially designed for Macs to work with MPEG2 camcorders. “The missing link between MPEG2 camcorders and your Mac” as they call it. It’s a bit like iPhoto for MPEG2 Camcorders. It has no problem with the .MOD files, lets you browse them, play them and export them to Quicktime, DV, iMovie, iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.
VideoPier has a free but limited trail version, the full version costs $49.

It can be nice to use images in your email signature, for example a company logo. But preferably I think this image should not be sent as an attachment. If you do, messages like this will get mixed up with messages including “real” attachments. I personally can find this quite frustrating, for example when I’m trying to find back a certain e-mail with a certain attachment.

By hosting the signature image somewhere online, the recipient of the e-mail will be able to view the image, but it won’t be attached to the e-mail. Disadvantage of this method is that quite a few email clients have the display of online images switched off by default, so those recipients won’t be able to view the image (unless they switch them on offcourse).

Mac Mail
To use on-line images in your Mac Mail signature, this is how you go about:
1. Set up a (placeholder) signature in Mac Mail
2. Quit Mail
3. Create a web page representing you signature in your favorite editor
4. Open the page in Safari
5. Save the page as a web archive
6. Place the web archive in the Library -> Mail -> Signatures directory residing in your user directory, and give it the same name as the signature you want to replace.

More detailed tutorial: Custom CSS Signatures in Mail
Original post: Create HTML signatures for Mail

Mac Entourage
After a lot of trying my conclusion is that it’s not possible to use on line images in a Microsoft Office 2008 Entourage signature. So, the only simple alternative is to send them as an attachment after all.

I did find a nice Apple Script which lets you send HTML pages as e-mail in Entourage. It lets you select an HTML file or a pages from Internet Explorer (???), to be sent as an e-mail. You can choose to send the messages with images attached, or referred to online. In theory you could select an HTML file with this script every time to use as your signature, but that’s a bit complicated I guess.

Link to the script: Send Complex HTML X 2.1
Developer homepage: homepage.mac.com/berkowit28/

Webmail
If you use a webmail service like Gmail or Hotmail, the Firefox WiseStamp extension might be worth a try (Did not test it yet myself)

Windows
This is how it should work in Outlook 2007 (did not test it yet):
Easy: Creating HTML Signatures on Outlook 2007
Harder: Email Signature Etiquette with Outlook 2007

Although not exactly what I was looking for, in the process I found out on Windows there are quite a few applications which let you manage e-mail signatures company-wide. This is a review of some of them:
Standard Corporate Signature Template

As a webdesigner I often want to measure if a certain distance or size in a browser window corresponds to the distance I want it to be. A handy way to do this is to use an on-screen ruler which measures distances in pixels on your screen.

I used to use the ruler option in Art Directors Toolkit for this, which comes bundled with Mac OS X. What I like about this ruler is the compound option, so you can measure horizontal and vertical distances at the same time. A disadvantage is that it has the default Mac OS X shadow. This can make it quite difficult to measure things exactly, because the shadow blocks your view. You can solve this problem by using ShadowKiller, a little app which removes (or returns) all shadows behind Mac OS X windows. It works, but is not very handy.

Today I found PixelStick. It is a ruler, but with no shadow! Great! And it’s free too! Disadvantage: no compound option. But I like the simple-ness of it. You can use it to measure distances in any angle (default), but also lock it to measure only horizontally or vertically. And just as the Art Directors Toolkit ruler it always stays on top of the other application windows.

Links:
Art DIrectors Toolkit: www.code-line.com/software/artdirectorstoolkit.html
PixelStick: www.pixelatedsoftware.com/products/pixelstick/

Status: Tested (both), Works (both)