Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he'll really appreciate it.
Remember that audio makes up the first half of the term, “audio-visual.” Movies are just as much about sound as they are vision – a fact that Hollywood never forgets; nor should you. Apple made some fairly great improvements to the audio editing capabilities of iMovie ’11, and here they are.
Gone are the days of folding and unfolding huge maps that you get from the gas station or the Automobile Club, what with GPS, Maps apps, and the like. Using the built-in Maps app is a great way to get where you need to go, but what if you want to take your navigation to the next level? What if you need to make sure you don’t get a speeding ticket? What if you want to get your kids excited about the National Park you’re all going to see? Maps app won’t do any of that justice. Here are three apps that will, though.
There are two main reasons to move your iMovie files to an external storage drive. One is that video files take up a LOT of space, and the non-destructive editing that iMovie does can also add to the file load on your main hard drive (or SSD, in the case of a MacBook Air). The other is organizational – you might want to put all your stuff in one, easily accessed place for later retrieval and further editing.
Lucky for you, then, iMovie makes this pretty easy. Here’s how.
Road-trips are tons of fun, but it’s easy to forget that the journey itself is just as important as the destination. Sure, you may be driving across the country to head to a resort or amusement park, but there’s fun to be had along the way as well.
Here are three apps that will help you get off the highway and deeper into the joys of traveling the road this summer.
Sure, iMovie is now available on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, but nothing beats a big old screen to edit your video on. You no longer have to export the video from your iOS device to your iTunes or iPhoto, then import into iMovie. With iMovie ’11, you can bring it right into the app with no middle steps. How refreshingly simple! Here’s how.
Blog GM Authority posted today that General Motors cars, the Chevrolet Spark and Sonic, would be among the first to integrate with Apple’s promised eyes-free feature announced at WWDC this past week.
Because, seriously, who wants to spend time planning so much?
Planning, sheesh, who needs it? Maybe you’re young, fancy free, and willing to take a risk on things like hotels and fuel being available when you get there? Maybe you’re just taking a zen-like trip in your car, and planning really messes with your mojo. Either way, there are apps for that, as you’ll quickly see.
Editing videos can lead to a great sense of fulfillment when you’re all done and showing off the fruits of your labors to a packed house of admirers, but you have to admit that the grunt work can be kind of a slog. Anything that makes the editing process a little faster or a little bit simpler has my vote for being a tip worth knowing about.
iMovie ’11 has a host of under-the-radar tricks that will help you take your editing workflow up a notch. One sweet trick that both saves time and impresses other video editors is using multitouch gestures right on the trackpad.
Microsoft today officially announced their new tablet, Surface for Windows, in two flavors, one with ARM chips (just like the iPad) and one with Intel chips, like standard laptops, including Macbooks. This is Microsoft directly competing with Apple for the iPad market, for sure.
So, you’ve got that big road-trip planned this summer, right? Got everything packed, maps apps at hand, ready to see the world from the point of view of your car, up close and personal in a way jet travel will never be. Pile in the dog and the kids and hit the road!
Of course, once the initial excitement wears off somewhere down the road, the kids are gonna get whiney. Instead of numbing them out with cartoons or video games, how about a bunch of classic car games? Of course you can use your iOS device! Here are a few fun apps that will teach the whole family some great ways to stay interested in the world outside the windows while staving off boredom.
Not to overstate it, but it’s summer time and as such, it’s time for vacation movies, right? Whether you travel to the banks of the Champs-Elysse, the patriotic visage of Mount Rushmore, or choose a more modest stay-cation, making home movies is a time-honored tradition.
Editing the videos with iMovie on a Mac after you take them is joyful work as well, and those that have been doing it a while may not be huge fans of the current iMovie ’11 visual interface. I haven’t been, until I was able to make a couple of tweaks to make the iMovie of today look and feel more like the iMovie I came to love a few versions ago.
iPhoto is a fantastic photo storage and editing app for Mac OS X. It’s been around forever and a day, and continues to get upgrades every couple of years. The lastest version, iPhoto ’11, is chock full of features and tools that let you organize and share your photography with your family and friends on the web, on your Mac, or on your TV. Wouldn’t it be great to use all those features to make your photographic life just that much nicer?
You can, and you will, if you read through the following tips and tricks for getting the most out of iPhoto in Mac OS X.
Summer time is vacation time, at least here in the U.S. With kids out of school for the warmest months of the year, families travel to amusement parks, historical sites, and even to other countries, making memories along the way.
What better way to store the photographic memories from this summer’s vacation than with high quality photos, edited, stored, and shared with just your iPad and iPhoto? Sound like a dream come true? Well, it’s not only possible, it’s fairly simple. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks to use with iPhoto for iPad
Some people dream of flying sheep, but blogger Mike Cane thinks different, dreaming of flying toasters. His dream – in November 2011 – was to see the classic Macintosh OS running on a nook Simple Touch, the eInk reader from Barnes and Noble. His dream seemed far-fetched, perhaps, even to him, but consider the following specs:
Original Macintosh: 68000 Motorola CPU at a blistering 8MHz(!), 128K(!) of RAM, and 512×342 screen Nook Touch: TI OMAP3621 (ARM Cortex-A8 core, 800MHz), 256MB RAM, and 600×800 screen.
The Nook Simple Touch outperforms the original Mac by quite a bit. All he needed was someone to bring his dream to life.
According to a report by ABI Research, Apple and Samsung have 50 percent of the smartphone market, and 90 percent of the global profits from that market. These top two companies dominate the smartphone industry so thoroughly, claims the research firm, that there is no one even close to becoming a third player.
“At this point in the year, Nokia will have to grow its Windows Phone business 5000 percent in 2012 just to offset its declines in Symbian shipments,” Michael Morgan, senior analyst for devices, applications & content at ABI, said in a statement.
If you take a photo in a forest but do not share it with others, does it really exist? Well, yeah, it probably does, but you know what I’m talking about. Sharing photos is really the point, right? Why else take them?
iPhoto for iPad has several ways to share your photos across social networks, to other iOS devices, and even right on the iPad itself. Let’s run through a few of them, yeah?
While organizing iPhotos by date using the iPhoto Events system seems like a great idea, what if you want to organize them some other way, like all your orange pictures in one place and all your blue pictures in another? What if you just want to see all your photos of dogs really quick but don’t want to have to create an entire album for them?
Spending a little time organizing your collection will pay of in the long run as you go back to find that perfect special picture for a project, and realize you have thousands upon thousands of photos. Yikes! Using a combination of Flags and Keywords, you might just organize yourself into having the perfect iPhoto system. Here’s how, using iPhoto ’11.
Apple attorneys are surely enjoying the latest ruling in the patent case involving Google’s Motorola Mobility unit, which grants Apple the chance of making its case via an injunction. The judge’s order yesterday is one last chance for both parties to plead the case to continue to trial, a trial that was canceled by Judge Richard Posner last week, with the judge ruling that neither party could prove damages.
In the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, the author tells the story of the first Apple computer, the Apple I, created ostensibly for the Homebrew Computer Club. According the the account in the book, Steve Wozniak wanted to give it away for free to members of the club; Steve Jobs, however, had a different vision. When convinced to sell the computer, Wozniak chose the price of $666.66, one that reflected his taste for repeating numbers, not the number of the beast. This friday, that price will get a hefty upgrade.
iPhoto has several Special Effects ready to play with, accessed with a tap on the little sparkly icon, the fifth from the left in the lower left corner of iPhoto on the iPad. Tap that, and a fan of special effects swatches will rise up from the bottom of the screen. There are six filters there, including Warm & cool, Duotone, Black & White, Aura, Vintage. and Artistic. Tap on a swatch you’d like to apply, and then tap or drag along the strip to select the effect that you prefer. Many of the filters can be further tweaked by pinching or dragging around in the photo itself. For example, the Vignette effect, found at the right within the Black & White strip, can be enlarged with a pinching out gesture, and moved around to a new center point with a simple drag. Play around and have fun here. Tap the question mark icon at the top for a tooltip for each of the effect swatches.
You guys, we all have a ton of photos! We take them on vacation, during school plays, on walks with our dogs, and while drinking at the bar with close friends (careful with that last one, folks). The upside of carrying around cameras of all kinds, from iPhones to iPads to serious DSLR cameras, is that we can record our lives at any given moment. The downside, of course, is that we have a veritable flood of images to sort through whenever we get them back to our computer.
iPhoto is a great virtual shoebox for keeping our photos handy, and it’s pretty good at basic editing tasks as well. There’s value, however, in viewing our photos in something other than the standard photo view.
Phil Zimmerman, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption for email in the 1990s, has come to the forefront yet again as the spokesman for Silent Circle, a company planning to beta test an encrypted phone call and text message app for the iPhone and other smartphones. The app will be free when it’s released in July of this year, but the service itself will cost somewhere in the $20 per month range.
Zimmerman, long a proponent of technological solutions to civil liberties, thinks people will pay for the privacy.
“I’m not going to apologize for the cost,” he told CNET, “This is not Facebook. Our customers are customers. They’re not products. They’re not part of the inventory.”
That may well be the case, but getting consumers to pay subscription fees is notoriously difficult. Silent Circle plans to offer a solution for easily encrypted email, phone calls, and instant messaging to start, with plans for encrypted SMS in the future.
In addition to the iPhone release, Zimmerman told CNET that the company was planning to roll out an app for Mac and PC as well, but that it’s not ready, yet. They’ll focus on the mobile app first, allowing customers to communicate securely if they both have the app installed. If only one does, the information will be encrypted to Silent Circle’s servers, but not from there to a recipient’s phone.
This sounds great for most consumers needing to keep their legal communication safe and private, but it’s unlikely that lawmakers will see it the same way. It’s possible that Phil Zimmerman may yet again fall under scrutiny as he did when he released his first encryption product nearly two decades ago.
Wow, those folks are quick. Looks like Google will be the first non-Apple company to update their Mac app, the Chrome web browser, to the higher resolution demanded of them by the just-barely-announced Macbook Pro.
Over at the Google Chrome Blog, the company promises to polish Chrome “until it shines on that machine,” referring to the sweet new bit of Apple candy from Cupertino.
In fact, the highly experimental and heavily alpha Canary release channel already has the new retina-display enabled browser ready for download. That’s fast, guys!
As you can see in the helpfully supplied image above, the higher resolution will bring all sorts of shininess and clarity to every bit of the Chrome browser experience. While we assume that Apple’s own web browser, Safari, already has the retina display sewn up, this is some great, super quick work by the folks in the Chrome group, assuring that their browser won’t be left in blurry dust anytime soon.
It might be possible in the near future to violate copyright law simply by selling your old iPad 2 or iPod touch to a buyer from eBay or Craigslist, if a case soon to be seen in the Supreme Court goes horribly wrong. The Supreme Court has been asked to examine a lower court decision to prevent the sale of used electronics without securing permission from copyright holders involved in manufacturing the devices.
So, a mere two days after Apple quietly released an update for its brand-spankin-new MacBook Pro, the magical company is doing it again. This time, the as-yet-released MacBook Air is the target of a new software update.
About MacBook Pro (Mid 2012) Software Update 1.0
This update is recommended for MacBook Pro (mid 2012) models.
The update includes fixes that improve graphics stability, external display support, and USB 3 device support.
Sound familiar? That’s because these are the same fixes that Apple reported for the MacBook Pro model. Sounds like someone announced these babies just a bit before they were totally ready? Ah, well, at least it’s all fixed. Right, Apple?