Do yourself a favor and buy a copy of Amadeus Pro at:

http://www.hairersoft.com/AmadeusPro/

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

There are a lot of myths about the Microsoft Windows’ crappy performance and the Mac OS X’s stability. But if I was to give you one good reason to switch it would be uptime or the time between system reboots. My average uptime on a MacBook is 21 days. During that time the laptop is opened, closed, sleeps, travels, runs 27-30 apps at a time and never crashes. I reboot it when I need to install an upgrade that needs it or when I’ve been pushing it hard and there are some memory leaks in one of the applications I’m using.

On the other hand, my Windows Vista laptop almost never comes back to life after I close the lid. It always reboots itself or hangs. I need to manually reboot it twice a day to maintain decent performance running 3 apps. It will also reboot itself right after it downloads another patch from Microsoft. It doesn’t bother asking me politely and waiting for my answer. If I leave my room to collect a package and miss the warning I might be returning to a machine that has just rebooted itself.

So, there you go: 21 days vs. 5 hours. Which is more stable, reliable?

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

I’ve been trying to find a simple video editing application that doesn’t cost a lot of money, but does what I want, not what its developers thought I’d need. I haven’t found one. What I want is a more advanced version of QuickTime Pro in which I could lay and mix video tracks recorded at different resolutions, import audio tracks, and edit the whole thing to my heart’s content. I don’t want it to resample my videos, because I’m putting together screen recordings, not blurry surfer videos. It would be really cool if I could add QuickTime transitions and save everything as a lossless QuickTime movie. I tried doing that in ScreenFlow, then iMovie, but I got disappointing results. The ease of editing in ScreenFlow was offset by its poor movie cropping precision. Also, as soon as I wanted to add some effects, I had to export footage. And then it dawned on me, that I could break everything into smaller pieces, put them on slides in Keynote, and export a QuickTime movie from Keynote. Then I add titles and credits in iMovie. Not ideal, but has to do for now.

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

I found a silly feature (bug?) in Numbers ‘09 today. When the cell’s format is set to Text, Numbers will treat everything you type into that cell as text. I wanted to type a formula into such a cell and instead of some text I got =lower(”SOME TEXT”). Changing the cell’s format to Automatic fixed things.

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

It's one of those things that happen only to me (i.e. I'm that stupid). I was just trying to print a preview of my course notes on an HP LaserJet P1005 from Pages. I was busy reading a long article and I didn't notice the problem for a good half an hour. I was ready to do some googling on the problem when I realized that I was using VMware Fusion the other day and added a USB controller via the VMware Settings panel to one of the virtual machines. My first reaction was to remove the USB controller from the VM I was working with yesterday but that did not help, because VMware has added USB controllers to each VM. In the end I had to power off each VM, remove the USB controller by hand, switch the printer off, then on. Only then was I able to print the notes. I'm sure this situation must be rare, but if you you are using VMware and add a USB controller to one of the VMs, make sure you power the blasted things off and remove the USB controller. I wonder if simply quitting VMware would work as well, but I haven't tried it yet as I need those VMs to complete my notes.

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

When you want to create a mirror version of your movie, use QuickTime Pro -- open your movie in QTP, press Cmd+A to select the whole movie, press Cmd+J to open movie properties, click on the Video Track, Click on the button in the Flip/Rotate section. Don't forget to save ;-)

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

The Quartz Composer System Time patch is used to obtain numeric values for later re-use in your compositions. It has no inputs. All it does is read the local system time and provide it on its output (Time).

The Time output is an integer value incremented every second. This counter has its zero value set to January 1, 2001 GMT. If you wanted to convert it into current time, you'd need to use the Date Formatter patch.

[update]: I posted a sample System Time to Screen composition. It strings together System Time, Date Formatter, Image with String, and Billboard patches to generate a simple system time display.

Click here to download:

quartzcomposer-systemtimetoscr.zip (10 KB)

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

I just discovered the reason why iTunes couldn't download some of my favorite podcasts. The shows affected use PodTrac redirects to get third-party download numbers. PodTrac's servers cannot handle the load and iTunes gives you error -3150. What can you do? Paste the URL for the episode that iTunes is having problems downloading into a web browser and get rid of the PodTrac part of the URL.
 
Before:
 

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

I wrote another AppleScript job to help you. It copies the URL of the page you are looking at in Safari to a TextEdit document.

-- Copy the URL of the active tab of the frontmost
-- Safari window to TextEdit. Creates a new document,
-- if necessary.
-- Copyright (c) 2008 Jacek Artymiak

tell application "Safari"
  set theURL to URL of current tab of front window
end tell

tell application "TextEdit"
  if not (front document exists) then
   make new document
  end if
  set theDocument to front document
  set theText to text of theDocument
  set theText to theText & theURL
  set text of theDocument to theText
end tell

BTW. The same functionality might be available via Services, but clicking on a script icon is more convenient.

[ re-posted for archival purposes ]

I’ve run into a rarely reported problem with Quartz Composer Export to QuickTime Movie feature. It has nothing to do with Quartz Composer, but everything to do with understanding how this tool works and what it can do. I created my first patch using Video Input and piping it to Sprite via Blur Filter. I then wanted to export it to QuickTime movie, which resulted in a black, empty movie. I tried many things and then it finally dawned on me… Quartz Composer does not save video it captures via Video Input. What I had to do is capture and and save a clip using the built-in iSight camera and QuickTime Player Pro. I then switched the input of my patch from Video Input to Movie, gave it the path to the movie and then exported to a QuickTime movie. Worked like a charm the first time I tried it.