Slobzilla's Switching Tactics

Deaf Snow Leopard

2009-09-15T17:20:47Z

Like every excitable Apple fanboy should I drove to an Apple store on August 28th, bought my copy of Snow Leopard, then immediately and dutifully installed it on my Macbook Pro. Later that night I tried to use my AT&T Option GT Ultra Express card and Globetrotter Connect software branded items (names now etched in my memory). I haven't had the use of that limb until this morning. Option updated their software for OSX 10.6 and now my Deaf Snow Leopard can hear in the wild again. Thank you Option team!

Shame on me for jumping right in and, if I wanted to immediately use the card, I could have just reinstalled 10.5. Sure, but what about the road warriors who bought a new mac in these last couple of weeks and tried to use their card or unwittingly subscribed to AT&T's 3G service as a new customer? Maybe AT&T will do something for us. Or maybe we all get postcards in the mail someday about a class action suit in which the class gets pennies the lawyers get tens or hundreds of thousands, but that's another story.

Celebrate iPhone 3.0 Day

2009-06-18T01:04:08Z

Spotlight

Everybody go 3.0? I've played with the cut & paste a smidgen, made two voice memos for no reason, and found a few things with the spotlight that I didn't know I had on the phone. I listen to podcasts like a fool and there are some changes to the podcast functions that are good (email a link, jump back 30 seconds for daydreamers and speed or slow the playback speed from the window). All in all, it's a good update and getting better. It's been a good first day.

Apple in their infinite wisdom and goodness put the best of these features in their API so look for programmers to roll this stuff into their apps. Good times.

cut & paste, bitches!!!

Voice Memos

Automator, am I worthy?

2009-06-13T17:15:26Z

The Slobzilla campus has been 100% Mac since 2005. For most "normal" people who use their computers mostly for email and surfing the web, switching away from Windows to OSX cures enough heartaches to make it worthwhile. For the creative types the iLife suite takes care of modern multimedia needs. It's bundled with every Mac - a nice bonus compared to most crap you'd find on a new windows box. For command line type powernerds there is the terminal whence insane computer madness is possible. Someday, I'd like to walk among the powernerds writing applescripts that anticipate my every want and desire or whatever it is they do. To that end I bought a copy of AppleScript 1-2-3 written by an AppleScript deity Sal Soghoian but that's way down the road.

Having switched to Mac is to have merged on the Apple Superhighway to nirvana where the signs are written in AppleScript. Automator is a rest stop somewhere along the way. It is a drag and drop workflow management tool written in AppleScript and Cocoa. You gain access to the crazy Unix-like power and the beauty of the Mac Graphical User Interface. Say you create a lot of short video clips with your Canon PowerShot G9 (hey, what a coincidence, me too!) and you want to put them on your website. Maybe you have a MobileMe account use iWeb to maintain a website as is your Jobs-given right to do. Well, when you import those clips into iPhoto don't just drag them over to iWeb right away. The G9 gives them to you as AVI files and, while iPhoto can handle them and iWeb will take them off your hands, Safari will choke on them when you try to look at your finished site. Sure, you can get a Safari plugin to help, but why bother?

Enter Automator. Batch processing all of those clips from AVI to m4v files is something Automator does well in a few simple steps. First, find "Movies" in the Automator library. Click on that and all of the pre-installed actions designed to deal with video are isolated. Next, find Ask for Movies among the actions and drag it to the window furthest to the right. Find Export Movies and drag that, too. Notice how they interlock? Workflow, baby. We can make this contraption work for us, now. At the Ask for Movies prompt type avi and hit the Run button at the top right corner. Another window should pop up with the search results. Select any or all of the files, hit the choose button, take a sip of your Mojito and watch your handiwork. The files are automatically converted into m4v files and go wherever you sent them (probably the Movies folder). Feel free to use those on your iWeb page knowing that they'll play nicely when you look at your masterpiece later.

Congratulations, you're finding value in the 'Apple Premium' at which the Windows users turn up their noses. Of course, they don't accomplish much with their computers and they are very rarely happy but they have that extra few hundred bucks they saved on their machine. Good on 'em, they can use it for virus protection software...