When Apple releases a product, they have to set the interface in such a way that it’s “fits” a broad range of user ability and experience.  Once you own the product, it’s time to make it “yours” by customizing the way it looks and works.

One cool place to do that is the Finder and Application Toolbars.

To customize the Finder Window Toolbar you either right-click on the toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar or go to the View menu in the Menu Bar (that’s at the top of your screen) and select Customize Toolbar from the drop down menu.

When you do this a drop-down window appears with your Toolbar options. This is from a Finder Window.

The items I think are missing from the Toolbar are New Folder, Delete and Get Info. (Separate Delete from the other Icons with a Space so you don’t click it accidentally.) I also use the Separator to group similar items. Even though the line is very subtle, the eye sees it — thought not consciously — and immediately goes to the right group where I can quickly select the proper Icon.

In Mail, I add Print, Flag, Read/Unread and for some people Smaller/Larger to adjust the Font size of a message from someone that is in a small unreadable font.

In Safari I add Print and Home.

Try this in all the apps you use regularly.  Select the Toolbar Icons for tasks you perform most often and would rather click on, than hunt for through a Menu. You’ll find the quality of your user experience increases as you make the computing environment look and feel however fits your own style best.

——————-

Wyn Matthews is new to the FoleyPod Digital-Life Coach eZine. He comes to us with decades of Mac and PC troubleshooting experience, and is an expert on both systems.

——————-

DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION OF YOUR OWN?
Click on the HELP button at the bottom of the page to submit your own question.

The ability to take a picture of what’s on your computer screen (also called a “screenshot”) is a very handy one.  If you’re a technology or social media blogger, it’s an essential one.

One of the most common reasons for taking a screenshot, in my field, is for my customers to be able to show me the precise error message they’re getting.  Naturally, the more accurate information I have regarding their issues, the faster and more effectively I can solve those issues and get people back up and running.

There are two programs I use for taking screenshots, though there are dozens of them on the market.  The first one comes with your Mac, and I’m going to talk about that one first, because I know people will ask me about it if I don’t.  My recommendation, however, is that you try out the second method, because it’s easier, and fun, and the interface is really well designed and laid out.  (I’m a big sucker for a great user interface.)

First method: Apple’s Grab program.

Mac OSX includes an application called Grab, which lives in the Applications/Utilities folder.  With Grab, there are four ways to take a screenshot:

1.  Selection: With this option you can draw a selection box around whatever portion of your screen you wish to capture.  Only the selected portion will be captured.

2.  Window: With this option, you select only the open window you want to capture, without needing to draw a box around it.

3.  Screen: This option takes a picture of your entire screen, in all its glory, including all visible windows and whatever you might have living on your desktop.

4.  Timed Screen: This option also takes a picture of your entire screen, but allows you to set a countdown, similar to the timer on your camera.  This advanced option will never be utilized by most users, and is useful when you wish to invoke an active menu items that goes away when you move your cursor.  I use this option quite frequently while building websites, to demonstrate page features to a customer.

Perhaps the most simple and direct method of activating Grab’s Selection method without having to open the Grab program, is to use the key-combination: Shift + Command + 4. (⇧⌘4)

Pressing this key combination turns your cursor into a crosshair, which you can use to draw a selector box around the portion of the screen you wish to capture.  When you let go of your mouse, you’ll hear a sound effect like a shutter closing, and the screenshot image will be saved to your desktop.  You can then email this file, or save it to another folder, import it into iPhoto, or edit it in Photoshop.

Second method: TechSmith’s Jing – Author’s Choice

If you’re like me, and you find these four options to be a bit limiting, you might want to check out a nifty FREE program called Jing.  (Check it out HERE.)

Jing is a superb piece of ‘ware, that allows you to take screenshots that you can later annotate with arrows, text, highlights, and other indicators.  Think digital magic marker.

Jing also allows you to take up to 5 minute screencasts (video captures of your screen!) that you can save for later, or send to friends and colleagues.  (I’ll be posting an article about this feature in the very near future, so stay tuned!)

Jing’s description of this feature is pretty fun too:

“Jabber away while pointing at things with your mouse.  Jing records the onscreen action as five minute (or less) movie that can be shared instantly.”

Pretty cool.

The BEST thing about Jing is that it’s cross platform, which means that it is available for Mac OSX and Windows users alike.

Using Jing is so easy, I feel silly even writing about it.  When you launch Jing, it doesn’t appear in your dock, and instead hangs out over on the top right section of your screen, out of the way, until you need it.  (You can move it, if you prefer it to hang out somewhere else.

To invoke Jing, simply hover over it, and it opens up a bit, presenting you with these three options.  It’s entirely self-explanatory.  The top option is a cross-hair, which allows you to draw your selector box, similar to Grab’s option #1 described above.

Once you’ve made your selection, Choose Capture an Image (the first button from the left), and you’re presented with your screenshot inside of this editor window.

You can annotate your screenshot in a blink, and then save it out and send it out.

Thanks for reading!

—-

DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION OF YOUR OWN?
Click on the HELP button at the bottom of the page to submit your own question.

iPhoto Library Manager

Pausha and I have a unique issue in our house regarding photos.  I’m the photographer, and she’s the designer.  She likes to have access to all of the shots I take, because they  often find their way into site and print designs that she does for clients.  In short, I have become part of her stock library, which I like a lot, because it’s very interesting for me to see my images show up in neat and unexpected ways.

Our issue is one of workflow.  Pausha works in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop.  I work in Apple’s Aperture.  I like Aperture because of the feature-set, and because Aperture (like iPhoto) is an excellent image organizer software.  Like iTunes for your photos, but with a very robust set of editing tools.

We’ve tried a few different ways of dealing with this issue, and some readers may find these methods familiar.  My first solution was to put a LaCie hard drive on my Airport, thus creating a network drive that anyone in the office could access.  I then exported all of my photos from Aperture (yeah, 10,000+ of them..) and sorted them into categories.  Each category had its own folder, and then all of those folders went up into the network drive for Pausha to go sift through whenever she wanted.

This solution was a pain in neck, because each and every time I would go shoot something, I’d have to export all of my images, after importing them all, sort them into categories, and then upload them to the drive.  In short, it became a lot of work for me, to provide her with the images she needed.  Another issue with this solution is that we could not browse through the many files on the network drive visually. We’ve all become accustomed to using services like iStockPhoto and Flickr, and FaceBook, and being able to visually browse through photo libraries to find what we’re after.  For this reason, my first solution was a non-starter.

My next solution was to use my MobileMe in combination with my Aperture program to create a series of galleries up on our .Mac/MobileMe account that she could go sort through visually.

This worked pretty well at first.  My favorite part of this solution was that it would take advantage of smart albums created in Aperture, which is was already using anyway.  Providing I add tags to my images upon import using several keywords that I had setup ahead of time, the smart albums would auto-import any images tagged with those keywords.  A few examples of my own keywords are Flowers, Portraits, Candid, Outdoor, Pets, Statues, Paris, Poland, Beach, etc.

Well, this solution failed as well; with almost 10,000 images being loaded up on MobileMe, the problem with creating those synced galleries in my Aperture was that every time I would launch Aperture, it would go through an intensely long syncing process, as it compared my 21 gallery albums with the MobileMe server, thus slowing Aperture down to a halt and making it relatively unusable until the syncing was complete.

Of course, I would then import my newest images, tag them on the way in, which would push most of them to the smart albums corresponding to the images’ keywords, and then the MobileMe gallery syncing would immediately start up again, because the system would detect new images!  Again, Aperture became unusable for the next 15 minutes.

The sad result of this solution is that I actually stopped shooting and using Aperture for a while, out of sheer frustration.  It became a simple case of creativity being hindered by our technology.  Now, this very concept is the reason I created FoleyPod in the first place, so back to the drawing board I went.

People have asked me why I don’t simply install Aperture on her computer, import my own library into it, and then overwrite that library with my own on a monthly basis.  This is a good solution, but for the fact that Pausha doesn’t want to learn Aperture, and that she also has a large handful of new images of her own that she’s adding every month to her iPhoto Library.   She already knows how to use iPhoto, and is comfortable in that environment.

For these reasons, we finally settled on using iPhoto as our parent libraries, and employing Fat Cat Software’s iPhoto Library Manager to regularly merge our iPhoto libraries together.  iPhoto Library Manager is (fairly) simple to use, and maintains additional file attributes that you would lose when doing an image export.  Attributes such as Titles, Rating, Keywords, etc.  In fact, this software provides several other extremely useful features unrelated to library merges and syncing, such as first aid to rescue photos from corrupted libraries, Applescript support to help with automating various tasks, easily splitting large libraries into smaller libraries, and creating a shared library folder that other users on your machine can also access, just to name a few.

So, my workflow is this:

• I import my images into Aperture, just as a normally would.  I tag my photos during import, and they all go into the projects and smart folders I’ve assigned them to.

• Next, I create a new album, and dump all images into it that have not yet been synced over to Pausha’s library.

• Next, I launch iPhoto, go up to File, and select Show Aperture Library.

I locate the Unsynced folder and import those items into iPhoto.

Because the images have already been tagged with keywords, and because Aperture and iPhoto talk to each other just as great Apple applications do and should, all of my images come over and get immediately filed into the smart albums I’ve created in iPhoto.

• I can then remove those images from the Unsynced album in Aperture and close Aperture.

• Next, I connect to Pausha’s computer over the network,

and I launch iPhoto Library Manager, and run the Merge tool on our libraries.  (Note that beforehand I had to merge both libraries off of a little external hard drive, because it would have taken a million years to do the initial merge over a network.  Also, if your network is not very fast, you can do this with an iPod or an external HD.  See Fat Cat Software’s site for more info on this.)

That’s it!

What I love about this solution is that while I do most of my work in Aperture, I now have a redundant set of images in iPhoto and they’re all very well organized, but separate from my Aperture library.  See, I don’t necessarily want Pausha’s images in my Aperture, since that is where I deal with my own photography.  Also, iPhoto has a few great features that as yet have not been ported into Aperture, such as one-click Flickr and Facebook sharing.

In short, I now think of Aperture as my project workspace, and iPhoto as my output gallery.  When I want to show photos to a visiting friend, I launch iPhoto.  The downside of this method is that I now have a 22GB Aperture library AND a 22GB iPhoto library.  Pausha has a 22GB iPhoto library on her computer.  If this were 3 years ago, we’d have a crisis on our hands, but it’s not 2006, and we both have 500GB hard drives in our MacBook Pros, so we can handle the extra space.

Our Time Machine software backs us all up nice and tidy, and I don’t ever have to worry about losing an image, or the meta data assigned to those images (which can be, as any professional will tell you, every bit as valuable as the images themselves.)

My dream is that Apple will soon release some sort of Aperture or iPhoto Server version, so that we don’t have to have redundant libraries on each of our computers.  This will enable us to work together into a single shared library that we could access from within the network, or even from outside the network, using a remote access system.

Until that time arrives, I’ll stick with this solution.

Thanks for reading!

~ Chris

I just found out about this great tool from a story over at the LifeHacker website, which I read quite often.

Click through to the original article HERE to download the FREE Adobe Shortcut App.

Here’s an excerpt from the Lifehacker article:

Windows/Mac/Linux: The free Adobe Shortcut App gives fast access to look up keyboard shortcuts for the entire array of Adobe products from one simple place.

Once you’ve installed the Adobe AIR application, you can choose a program from the buttons on the top, and find a shortcut using the search box, browsing, or even adding them to a favorites list. You can switch between viewing Windows or Mac shortcuts, or even view the cheat sheet in PDF format. It’s a quick and easy way to look up the shortcuts without having to pull out the help file. Adobe Shortcut App is a free download for all platforms, requires Adobe AIR.

With the release of iLife ’09, Apple has made creating an amazing slideshow from your digital photos easier than ever before. What used to take a couple of hours now takes less than 30 minutes, and I’m going to now walk you through how to make a 3-minute long slideshow of your own, in ten minutes or less.

There are several ways that you can start your slideshow. If you’ve been playing with the new Faces feature in iPhoto 8 (included with iLife ’09) you know how easy it is to organize your images based on subject. You can also base your slideshow on a particular Event, if all of your images happened to be taken on the same date, and are therefore organized together.

For my example, I can’t really use either of the two techniques mentioned above, as my images span the course of a two-week long vacation, and my images are not all of the same person, or subject, so I’m going to take a bit more traditional approach.

While iPhoto 8 allows you to be completely spontaneous in your creativity, and includes brand-new tools to help you get in and out rather quickly, it does help a bit if you know what you’re going for ahead of time.

My slideshow’s theme is Paris by Foot, and includes several photos I took while Pausha and I walked around the city over the course of a couple of weeks. Now, music is very important to me, and most of what I do has its own soundtrack.  And so the first thing I did, even before I selected any of my images, was to select my song.

Tip: Your slideshow can (and likely should!) have it’s own soundtrack. It’s much more enjoyable to view several dozen photos when you have a snappy tune to hum along with, and choosing the perfect song can make your presentation much more powerful, emotional, and therefore memorable for the viewer.

A little preparation: I selected a song called Le Sapin by a contemporary French singer named Charlie. To make things easier later on, I created a new Playlist in iTunes, and named it Paris by Foot. I then dragged my song into that playlist. I also noted that the song is 3:09 long, which will therefore be the approximate duration of my slideshow.

My next step was to return to iPhoto and create a new album, also named Paris by Foot. I sifted through, and chose 50 photos for my slideshow, and then dragged them into this new Album.

I entered the album by selecting it in iPhoto’s sidebar.

I then pulled the Magnification slider (on the bottom right) about 3/4 of the way to the left, to shrink my thumbnail images enough to view all 50 of my photos at the same time.

Now, my next step was to arrange them into sequence.   Some of these photos were taken in the early morning, some at high noon, some at dusk, and others in the evening.   I dragged them around inside of this album so that the morning photos appear first, then afternoon, dusk, and finally the evening photos.   This small touch creates a bit of narrative for my slideshow.   Even though my photos were not taken in the same day, this step adds the illusion of continuity, and tells a more interesting visual story.

After organizing my images, I ran some quick math.  My song is just over 3 minutes in length.  I have 50 photos, which means that each photo would be displayed for approximately 3.75 seconds, which is far too fast for a slideshow.  I’d like each image to appear on screen for at least 5 seconds, which means that I put about 12 too many images into my album.   I found it easier to remove images from the project after I had gone through the effort of arranging them in order.  I went into my album, and removed 11 images, leaving us with 39 photos. Perfect!

————–

Now we’re ready to get started!  Keep in mind, you don’t have to put in that degree of preparation work I’ve just described, but it does help out a bit.  There is something to say for simply diving in without a plan and being spontaneous too.

Let’s begin. Because we’ve already got an album created in iPhoto, we’re going to create our slideshow from that album, which is one of a handful of ways to create a new slideshow.

I select the Paris by Foot album, and then click on the + button at the bottom left of iPhoto.

I then select Slideshow from the resulting window, and hit Create.

You’ll notice that iPhoto rearranges itself a bit, with our first image in the viewer, and all of the images above.

You can rearrange your images in the top viewer now.   I’m already satisfied with the sequence of images, so I’m going to proceed to the next step, which is to select a Theme.

Click on the Theme button at the bottom of the viewer.   You’re now presented with 6 options:

• Classic

• Ken Burns

• Scrapbook

• Shatter

• Sliding Panels

• Snapshots

I usually go with the ol’ standby, Ken Burns effect, but it’s been done to death, and I want to try something new, so for this project, we’re going to go with Snapshots, which is really slick.

Next step, music. Click on the Music button at the bottom of the viewer.

Tip: Note that “Play music during slidehow” is selected by default. Should you ever want to create a slideshow with no soundtrack, this is where you’d control that.

We’re concerned with that “Source” menu. Because I put my song into an iTunes playlist ahead of time, I’m going to select iTunes Playlists, and then Paris by Foot, and hit Apply.

Next step, fine tuning. Click on the Settings button at the bottom of the viewer.  Notice that there are TWO buttons at the top of the Slideshow Settings menu, “All Slides,” which allows you to make adjustments which will effect the entire slideshow, and “This Slide,” which is where you can apply cool visual effects to each image individually.

Let’s start from the top here. With “All Slides” selected, we have two options governing the length of time each slide is displayed.  You can choose to “Play each slide for a minimum of X seconds.”   This options is best when you have a long slideshow which will span a few songs, and allows you to set the duration of each slide manually.  The music will repeat if necessary.

The other option is “Fit slideshow to music.” Choosing this option will force iPhoto to figure out the average duration necessary to fit your chosen music.  This is the option we’re going to use, as it makes for a more polished presentation, and we did a little bit of prep work earlier to have this option work in our favor.

Our next task is to decide whether or not we want an intro slide (basically a title card) bearing the name of our project.  If you do want a title slide, you can click on the little right arrow to edit the title text.  We do not want a title slide, so we uncheck this box.

Repeat slideshow? No. Uncheck this box too.

Aspect Ratio.  Well, let’s ask ourselves, where are people going to view this?  At the computer?  On their TV? I’m going to choose iPhone from this menu, because that’s where I show most of my photos. (Long gone are the days of carrying photo albums in your wallet.)

Now we’re done with the “All slides” menu.  Now select “This slide.”

You’ll notice that we can choose to apply black and white, sepia tone, or “antique” effects to each slide. I like the “antique” setting because it reminds me of the way that Kodachrome film dealt with colors back in the 70’s.  You can advance from slide to slide applying (or not applying) one of these three filters. I’m going to apply “antique” to most of them, just for fun.

Tip: While we’re completing this step, do keep in mind that if we come across any images which could use some additional editing, simply double-clicking on the slide in the top menu will bring that image into edit mode, where it can be cropped, effected, filtered, etc.  One has only to click the Done button at the bottom right to return to the slideshow viewer, where the updated image has replaced the old version.

If you already know (as I do) that you’d like to apply one of these filters to all photos, you don’t have to apply it one at a time.  Simply select all photos in the top viewer, and then apply the filter.  All images will be effected.

Now we’re ready to preview our slideshow!   Click on the Preview button, to see how the slideshow will look once exported.

I happen to really enjoy this Snapshots theme.  The slides overlap each other as they advance, to simulate a table covered with photos, but as the new slide moves in, the preceding slide desaturates to gray, which is a really fun effect.

Changing Themes.  Why not try out some of the other Themes while we’re at it?  Simply click on the Themes button again, and choose another theme.

You’ll note that bringing up the Settings Menu will give you new set of adjustments for your new theme.

For instance, the Ken Burns allows you to get in there and fine tune precise zoom and speed controls for each slide, if you like.  This is a bigger deal than it might sound to you. Slideshows with such detailed control over animation used to require hours of keyframing and fine tuning in Apple’s excellent, though very expensive Final Cut Pro software.  This is a huge advancement in the quality and power of consumer-level creative software!

Tip: As you try out different Themes, you’ll need to repeat the Music selection step and you’ll want to go into the Setting menu for each them to make sure you’ve got everything adjusted to your taste.

Finally, (yes we’re almost done!!) when you’ve got your Theme selected, Music is set, and all of your Settings are perfect, it’s time to Export your slideshow out so that it can be shared with friends and family, or sent to your Apple TV or burned to a DVD for viewing in the living room.   If you wish to keep this slideshow in iPhoto, and you only intend to view it there, at your computer, you’re done.

For the rest of us, click Export at the bottom right of the viewer.

Just as with iMovie, you now have the opportunity to create a single, or multiple exports of your project, each one exported to settings relevant to it’s purpose.

My intention for this project is to put it on my iPhone, and also on the web.  I’m therefore only concerned with selecting the Mobile option.

Tip: If you know what you’re doing in Quicktime, you can also choose the “Custom Export” option, but if you don’t know .wmv from a .mp4, I suggest you stay away from that button for now.

Once you click Export, you’ll have only to select the location to which iPhoto will save the slideshow file, and you’re done!   iPhoto created a new folder in my Pictures folder called iPhoto Slideshows.

My 3 minute slideshow took 3 minutes to export on my MacBook Pro.

Total time spent (including export): 11 minutes!!

Scroll down on this page to view my slideshow with each of the 6 available themes applied to them.

Now, let’s see what YOU can do with your slideshow.  Have fun!

Thanks for reading,

~ Chris.

Snapshots Theme

Ken Burns Theme

Sliding Panels Theme

Shatter Theme

Classic Theme

This post compliments April’s post about transferring DVD movies to your iPod or iPhone using Handbrake.  If you didn’t read that article, you can view it HERE

What are all these TV Shows doing in my Movies category??  Have you found yourself wondering this?

If you buy your Movies and TV shows from iTunes, the files are automatically placed in their respective categories in your iTunes Library upon download.  Movies goes into the Movies category, and TV Shows will appear in your TV Shows category.

However, if you own TV show collections on DVD, and use Handbrake to import them to your iTunes, they will be filed under Movies, and not under TV Shows.

You may not mind at first, but as you import many seasons of a particular show into iTunes, this starts to get a little irritating.

Here’s how to fix:
Go into your Movies category and locate your TV Show episode.  Click to select.

Now go up to File Menu and select Get Info.

From the resulting pop-up window, navigate to the Options Tab.

Choose TV Show from the Media Kind drop-down menu.  Hit Okay.

Go to your TV Shows menu, and rejoice.

You can also do this with multiple files at once.

Thanks for reading!

~ Chris

Here’s a great article from Mac|Life about moving your iPhoto libraries around.  This is especially useful if your iPhoto Libraries are starting to fill up your MacBook’s hard drive.

Enjoy!

—————-

If you’re like the fine folks here at Mac|Life, you spend way too much time taking pictures of random stuff and archiving it for later use. All these photos are taking a toll on our tiny MacBook Pro drives. If your internal drive is 20 percent photos, you got a problem. If 80 percent of those pics are of cats, you need psychological help.

Well we can’t help you and your crazy cat lady/man ways, but we can’t help you get your photos off your internal drive and onto another drive or an external drive.

Read more HERE.

This one comes up a lot.

“How do I put my DVDs into iTunes, and onto my iPhone or iPod?”

Let’s face it, we spend a lot of time on the run.  We take our coffee to go, and our digital entertainment is no longer confined to the big TV in the den.  Your Digital Lifestyle is portable, and luckily, your media is now portable too.

Ripping your DVDs and putting them onto your portable player, or simply storing them in your iTunes library for viewing over your network or on your Apple TV is relatively simple.  There’s a lot going on behind the scenes though: First, your computer has to rip all of the data from your DVD, strip it of copy protection, and then store it as a file.  It then has to convert the file to an iPod/iPhone-friendly format, and shrink the file down to a manageable size.

We used to have to use 3 different tools for this.  The good news, is now you only need to use one.  The better news is that this one tool is absolutely free!

It’s called Handbrake, and you can download it by clicking on the pineapple image above.

————————————————

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Handbrake into your Applications folder, you’re ready to rip your first DVD.  (by the way, the term “rip” does not mean “to steal.”  “rip” is a term used to described digitally moving ones and zeros from one media to another, such as from a DVD to a hard drive.)

Ready?  Okay, let’s do this.  Grab a DVD that you own (I had to say that) and you’d like to put on your iPhone or iPod.  Insert your DVD into your computer’s drive.

NOTE: Unless you’ve customized your system settings, your DVD Player application is going to automatically launch when it senses the DVD.  You’ll need to wait for this to happen and then quit DVD Player.  Some people find this “feature” to be useful.  I find it to be a huge annoyance.  If you feel the way I do, here’s how to defeat it:

From the Apple at the top left, select System Preferences.  Now click on CDs & DVDs.  Set “When you insert a video DVD:” to Ignore.

[While you're at it, do the same for the other ones.  I don't like it when my computer starts making decisions for me.  Just because I've inserted a DVD, it does not mean that I want to watch it right that very instant.  I can launch the DVD Player application myself, thank you very much... I way digress, sorry about that.  Moving along.]

Launch Handbrake.  Providing your DVD has already spun up, and appears on the desktop, Handbrake will assume that you want to use that DVD as your source, but just in case, you can find the source button at the very left of Handbrake’s toolbar.

Pressing the Source button forces a navigation window to open.

Choose your DVD from the sidebar on the left, and click on the Open button at the bottom right.  Handbrake will scan your DVD, and figure out what it needs to do.  This could take up to a minute, so don’t freak out and start clicking around.

Next, you’ll need to tell Handbrake where you’d like to save the new movie file.  Since this file is going to be anywhere between 700MB and 1.4 GB in size (seriously) I strongly recommend that you do not save it to your computer’s internal hard drive, unless you plan on only doing this once or twice.  If you’re foresee yourself ripping your entire movie collection, be sure to save it to a backup drive, or an external work drive.  Saving large (700MB+) files to your system drive is one of the fastest ways to cause disk fragmentation, which can be a huge issue.  [learn about this issue HERE.]

As you can see, I’m going to ignore my own advice, and save this to the desktop.

Next, you’ll need to tell Handbrake how to format your movie file for you.  Press “Toggle Presets” on Handbrake’s Toolbar to open the Presets pane.

Select iPhone/iPod Touch from the Presets Pane at the right.  If you’d also like to save the movie for your Apple TV, you can rip it a second time, choosing Apple TV as your preset next time.  Movies sized for the iPhone actually look okay (though not great) on the Apple TV.

That’s it!  Press the big ol’ Start button at the top left.

Handbrake will now chug through the process described above.  This will take sometime, depending on factors such as how much RAM you have installed, how fast your computer’s processor is, etc.

NOTE: Since this process can take up to a couple of hours (or more – Blade Runner ripped in 54 minutes on one of my Mac Minis) now is the perfect time to make sure that your Mac won’t fall asleep in the middle of the job.  Go back to System Preferences, and this time, click on Energy Saver.  Click on Show Details, and then set the first slider over to 3 hrs or never, so that your Mac will stay awake.

When Handbrake finishes, it will display this silly message.

The next step is to locate the new file Handbrake has just created for you, and drag it into your iTunes.  iTunes will copy it into your library, and it will display there.  You may then DELETE the original file, as it has been copied, not moved, into iTunes.

Now you can go into iTunes/Movies and watch your movie there.

Last step: plug in your iPhone/iPod, sync it, and you’re good to go.  The image below is what a movie looks like on my iPhone.  The controls appear whenever you touch the screen with your finger.  Touch it again, or simply wait a moment and the controls to disappear on their own.  Movies and TV shows are very watchable on the iPhone and the iPod Touch and I always load up with movies whenever I travel.

There you go.

Thanks for reading.

~ Chris

This post comes from MacWorld’s site.  I didn’t know how to do this before reading Joe Kissel’s article.  Enjoy~  Chris

Sync your iPhoto libraries
Stay in Sync
by Joe Kissel, Macworld.com

Although you can see one Mac’s iPhoto library on any other Mac in your home or office (as long as you’ve enabled photo sharing), you can’t edit or delete photos stored on another Mac, and you can’t even see the photos if the two computers aren’t on the same local network. So you may want to go beyond sharing, and start syncing your photos across Macs.

Continue reading at Macworld’s site HERE.

This post comes from Mac|Life, which is a resource that I read regularly.  I was going to write about this myself, but they Roberto Baldwin beat me to it, and he did a great job covering this new iTunes feature.  Enjoy!

How-To: Setup iTunes DJ on Your Mac and iPhone
by Roberto Baldwin

The latest iTunes update, iTunes 8.1 brought with it iTunes DJ. The new feature gives iPod touch and iPhone users with the Remote app installed on their device the ability to select and vote on the iTunes Dj playlist on a computer on a local network.

Here’s a quick how-to for the party people out there.

What you need:
> Computer with iTunes 8.1
> iPhone or iPod touch with Remote 1.2
> Wi-Fi network

1. Update iTunes and the Remote App.

Continue reading this article at the Mac|Life website HERE.