Apple Quick Tips

I was looking through the iTunes music store to see if there were any podcasts I might be interested in. I came across the Apple Quick Tips video podcast section. They are short videos focused on making you life with your Mac a little easier. Some you may already know, some maybe not. I subscribed to the podcast because I’m into making my life easier. You can also view them on Apples site. 

Let me know if they help you or not and if you have any additional suggestions.

iTunes fast forward or “Scrubbing”

Found a nice tip today. If you watch or listen to podcasts, sometimes you want to jump ahead to say skip commercials or parts you don’t want to listen to or watch try this. Hold down the ctrl+option+command (Apple Key) and then press the right arrow. This will skip ahead 5 seconds. 

Let me know of you have any other iTunes tips or tricks.

Developing for WordPress on a Macintosh

I’m helping a local church redesign their website. Since they are not programmers I thought the best approach would be to use wordpress so they can easily update the site. To develop the site I wanted to use my mac and this is how I set it up. Download XAMPP and WordPress. Install XAMPP, just use the installer, it makes it simpler. XAMP installs into your Applications directory and this is the only place it can be installed.

XAMPP stores the web site in the htdoc folder, but I wanted my development sites in my Sites folder, so I had to do a little tweeking. You just need to use virtual hosts to point to you dev site. In the httpd.conf file change the DocumentRoot and the Directory  to “/Users/<your name>/Sites and uncomment the Virtual Hosts include. 

Open the httpd-vhosts.conf file and add the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot “/Users/<your name>/Sites/wordpress”
ServerName <site name>.localhost
</VirtualHost>

Now one last thing, you need to change your host file so you can access you site with <site name>.localhost. You’ll need to add something like this at the end of the file:

## Custom 
127.0.0.1  <site name>.localhost

This makes it nice because wordpress like to be in the root directory. 

Copy the wordpress folder to you Sites folder and your ready to go!

iMovie 08

I have a Sony DCR-SR200 camcorder with a lot of home movies on it. I decided it was time to get the movies onto the computer to edit them and free up some space on the camcorders 40GB hard drive. Getting the movies into iMovie 08 is incredibly easy. Just launch iMovie and plug in the camcorder, select the clips and import. It’s so much faster than my old DV camcorder where importing a movie was real time. After using iMovie a little more each time I learn some new stuff and I thought I would share.

I am running out of space on my notebooks hard drive and as you know raw video footage takes up some room. So if you have an external hard drive, connect the hard drive before you start iMovie and you can import to the external hard drive. Also, you can move imported events to an external hard drive by:

1. Open iMovie
2. Change the view in the Events window to View Events by Volume. You can do this by clicking the Volume icon to the right of Event Library or by right-clicking in the Event Library and selecting it.
3. Open the volume where your events are stored. Select it and drag it to the volume you want to store it in. This puts the event at the root of the volume in an iMovie Events folder.

This is great if you have a notebook like me. 

I also learned how to capture a still from the video, just place the playhead on the frame you want, right-click and select Add still to project. This was a feature I liked in iMovie HD but did not know how to do in 08. It’s also very easy just to drag and drop titles and transitions into the project.

The more I use iMovie 08 the more I am coming to like it. I was like all the other naysayers when the new iMovie appeared, iMovie HD was fine and I was comfortable using it. Give iMovie 08 a try, play around with it, you might be surprised. 

If you have any tips, tricks or questions let me know.