Apple have done it again – made me go “Oh my God!”
Yesterday, I used the new AirPlay Mirroring feature on my iPhone 4S for the first time and was pleasantly surprised…
‘Apple’ Archives
OS X 10.6.8 Update and Black Screen
This morning, I updated my iMac to 10.6.8 and got a black screen when the system was due to restart.
My machine is a mid 2010 27″ Quad Core i7 with 12GB RAM. It’s the first time I’ve ever had this problem with an update and I tend to install from Apple Updates off their site, rather than via Software Update. Before updating the OS I repair permissions and restart the machine.
On this occasion, after the installer finished and went to restart, it just hung… and hung with a black screen. I waited 10 minutes without any changes so finally held in the power button and rebooted. It seems like it went into PRAM clearing mode as I had two start-ups before the blue screen. Then came the Aurora followed by the black screen. Finally, it all restarted and I was able to log in to my account.
Just to be sure, I restarted the system and all was well. I did have to delete and relaunch the MAMP widget from my dashboard but so far, everything else seems fine.
Bluetooth Devices and OS X
I use a Magic Trackpad as an optional device with my iMac. This is going to get a lot more use with the release of OS X 10.7 Lion, as multi-touch gestures have been significantly emphasised. Read more about the gestures here. The only problem is that sometimes I get dropouts, where the trackpad loses it’s connection to my iMac…
If you have a Magic Mouse or wireless Bluetooth keyboard and experience the same issues, try this:
Go to System Preferences > Bluetooth. Select your peripheral from the list on the left then click the little cog at the bottom. Add it to your favourites. This seems to have resolved it for me.
Just remember, if you use more than one pointing device (I have a Wacom tablet with a stylus/mouse ), make sure the mouse is not sitting on the tablet when you try to use the trackpad!
Do I Need an iPad?
The new iPad 2 is in town and it is becoming the next must-have item. Apple are so very smart with their marketing, creating both desire and need where there isn’t one, just like those ad men that make life miserable for millions*…
Removing Custom Swatches in OS X
If you have several custom swatches that you have created for client work, the management of these swatches can become an issue.
First of all, you have more than one row of spaces available to use; click on the dot above the buttons to pull down and reveal more slots.
Custom Colour Swatches
As the number of swatches build up, you might want to delete some. To do this, drag a blank (white) slot over the colour chip you want to delete.
Retiming Video in Motion
Changing the duration of a clip in Apple’s Motion is really easy:
Select your clip in either the Project Pane (F5) or the Timing Pane (F6) then go to the Inspector (cmd + 3). At the bottom is the Timing drill-down menu.
Extracting Video from DVD for Editing
I have just had a client provide a DVD (unprotected) containing the source footage they want editing. The set-top-ready disc was all the client had as the raw files were overseas and edits needed to be made.
To get the best possible quality footage off the disc, for importing to Final Cut Pro, I used the MPEG Streamclip software made by Squared 5. I exported the files at 100% to DV-PAL. This matched my FCP settings so playback and editing without rendering was possible.
Adding Images to Your Signature in Mail
Here’s a quick way of adding a signature with a graphic to your signature in Apple Mail. Please note, this will show the image as an attachment in Outlook etc and will only work if the recipient has html emails enabled.
Smoother Animations in Motion
When creating animations using Apple Motion or Adobe After Effects or even Flash, you need to use keyframes. These are the key frames where changes to an object are set, such as a ball being on the left of the screen and ending on the right. To do this, you would use 2 keyframes for the beginning and the end of the animation, with different values for the x (horizontal) position and the animation would happen as the timeline moves between the 2 values.
Adobe Plan to Scrap iPhone Development
There has been a storm brewing between Apple and Adobe over the Flash platform and the lack of support for it on the Apple mobile devices. The issue is that Apple see Flash as a CPU hog that drains the battery of iPhones/iPod Touch/iPads.
