Saturday, February 2, 2008

The Apple Blog (4 сообщения)

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The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
http://theappleblog.com
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  • Crazy EDGE Outage

    att_logo.gifAs many folks have reported, AT&T’s EDGE network is struggling in the midwest. Outages have been patchy but seem to have affected entire cities, or at least large areas. But to my knowledge, there haven’t been any accounts of service dropping within inches…until now.

    Here I sit, in downtown Cincinnati, and of the three iPhones in my office, two of them have absolutely no cell service. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Any attempted call immediately fails. They are the equivalent of an iPod Touch, plus a camera. Fortunately for me, mine works perfectly fine and I get to just listen to the frustrations of my coworkers and not experience any of my own. But the rants really fired up when we decided to sit all three iPhones, each with the exact same hardware (purchased within two months of each other), side by side. Here’s what we saw:

    iphones_small.jpg

    Pretty weird. I’ve experienced similar things with people that have other phones on the same network, but never with the exact same hardware. So who’s to blame here? AT&T or Apple? Either way, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the outage, and I can say (from experience) that there are some really grumpy AT&T customers out there.

    So what about you, loyal TAB readers? Can anyone reproduce this?

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    Комментарии к сообщению:
    http://theappleblog.com/2008/02/01/crazy-edge-outage/#comments



  • MarsEdit Update Kicks Your Blogging Up A Notch

    MarsEdit

    I’m not one to get excited about dot-update releases from a software vendor, but a tool that was mentioned in my “must have” post – MarsEdit – has just updated from version 2.0 to 2.1, with that “0.1″ adding far more than a tenth of new features.

    One of my major complaints about the previous version has been the horrendous preview feature. While you could connect MarsEdit up to your site CSS style sheets fairly easily, rendering of your entries was always slow and buggy. The new preview feature is fast, responsive and (so far) bug/crash-free. This makes creating entries more fluid and enables you to trust what you see locally rather than having to preview posts on your site before publishing.

    One other great, new feature is the ability to search your posts locally. If you contribute to a number of blogs (public or private) or just post quite a bit, this can be a great way to go back and see if you’ve already hit upon a topic before. It can also be a great way to gather support materials for a new post. Since you can use MarsEdit as a note-taking system (you don’t have to post drafts to a server), this can also be a fantastic way to organize small bits of info you keep promising to find a place for.

    Finally – for Movable Type and WordPress users – authors have the ability to do free-tagging instead of picking from a list of defined keywords. I’m a huge Drupal fan, and Drupal does have free-tagging support, so perhaps Dan will read this humble post and work on interfacing with the Drupal API’s.

    MarsEdit is not free, but it’s a bargain at $30. Dan is very responsive in the ME forums and both he and the app have a presence on Twitter (when Twitter is actually up, that is).

    If you have any good/bad experiences with MarsEdit please drop a note in the comments and if you have alternative blogging client/post organization suggestions let us know as well (always good to hear from those three ecto users out there).

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  • Using Your Mac Wisely: Video Content

    When it comes to harnessing your Mac's power for video encoding, you're left with two choices: digital or physical.

    Digital

    Handbrake is the go to source for creating digital copies of your video. With Handbrake you can pop in a DVD and select the appropriate preset. You can encode straight to iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. Handbrake is open source, and completely free.

    handbrake_vdot9.png

    iSquint is great for converting DivX/XviD to Mp4. It's freeware for basic use, or you can purchase Visual Hub which offers a variety of services. For basic use, iSquint works well and converts fairly quickly. For the best iPod TV out settings, select:

    • Check Optimize for TV
    • Check H.264
    • Scale the slider to the quality setting of your choice

    isquint.jpg

    Quick tip for your iPods. If you want to import a video without transferring it to iTunes. Be sure your iPod is set to "Manually Manage" and you can now drag and drop files right onto the iPod icon in iTunes and transfer straight to it.

    Physical

    MacTheRipper allows you to import DVD Vob files right to your Hard Drive. Couple it with Dvd2OneX and you can shrink the file down to 4.4 gigs so it will fit right on a single layer DVD-R. Personally, if you can find it, I prefer the original version of Dvd2OneX, not the new Dvd2OneX2. Also Dvd2One isn’t freeware and requires purchasing.

    cover.jpg

    Toast 8 will take your Dvd2One or MacTheRipper file and burn it for playback on DVD players. Toast 8 is not freeware and will require purchasing to unlock all its features. Be sure to select UDF in Toast 8 to ensure proper playback.

    toast-8.jpg

    iTunes
    When dealing with importing videos into iTunes, it’s a simple drag and drop. If the video you copy doesn’t go into the proper category (Movie, TV Show, etc) be sure to edit the Metadata as follows:

    • Right click and select ‘Get Info’
    • Click the ‘Video’ tab
    • From the drop down select: TV Show, Movie, or Music Video

    itunes.jpg

    Comment any questions, I’ll see if I can answer them. Also if you use any other resources or methods for converting your videos, I’d love to hear about them.

    Disclaimer: This article is not intended for any illegal activity. What you do with it is your problem.

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  • Reflections on another Tuesday at Macworld

    This is the fifth year I’ve attended Macworld Expo on the day of the keynote, and it definitely wasn’t as exciting as 2007. But after last year’s introduction of the long-rumored iPhone, how could it be?

    Of course, another big difference is that I didn’t get into the keynote this year. There’s always a disconnect between those who attend the keynote and those who don’t. (more…)

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