Mac | Glenn Ward

Tuning up the iPad for the office, streamline your tablet for business use

I bought my iPad for 2 main reasons, firstly to make the 1:30hr train journey to work bare able with some light entertainment and the other to make myself more efficient at my work both in the office and on the train.

Choose your Apps wisely, it will be different for everyone depending on your industry and function but there are apps out there for most purposes. Most of the good ones are not free so I urge you to do some research, ask around or install the free version to find out if it suits your needs. There’s nothing worse than purchasing something that is completely not what you though it was. It’s not like you can return an App.

So here’s my build so far and I will go into more details on certain apps in separate blog posts. The following apps are my productivity apps, in my opinion these are apps that make me more efficient in my daily tasks. In my opinion the best apps are the ones that span across your Mac desktop / laptop, iPad and iPhone. So, my first recommendation does just that, it’s free and it will be appropriate for most.

Evernote – Evernote is a intuitive note taking app that with all the basic functions you will need to make, save and organize your notes. The beauty is that I can start my note taking in a meeting or on the train and when I open the desktop of mobile version my notes are there waiting for me right where I left off.

Keynote – Another app that is available on Mac, Pad and Phone. I have now started using keynote for presentations after doing some testing on importing PowerPoint presentations. Obviously industry standard for most, this was more of a need than a want, more on this in a separate post. My other keynote recommendations are to download the keynote remote for your iPhone, you can not only control your presentation but also check your notes remotely. Finally, buy the adapters for VGA connection and hdmi.

Dropbox – You’ve probably used this before but again a great app for syncing your files across all your devices.

SimpleMind – I had the trial version of this software for a day before I bought the full version. There is loads of mind mapping software out there but I found this one did exactly what I needed to do and it has really helped me get some sleep after large brain dumps.

Sketchbook – what it says on the tin, it’s a digital sketchbook full of nice features to produce some really nice visuals.

Bamboo Paper – a simpler sketchbook but great for quick visualization that you would usually scrawl on a bit of paper to explain something.

Tips and tricks
You can open PDF attachments on your emails in iBooks, just click the icon in the top right.

Here’s where the Backslash is on an Apple Mac keyboard when working in windows

Just a quick one as my post on where to find the hashtag on an Apple Mac keyboard seemed to help a lot of people out.

I have VMWare installed on a few Macs running Window XP and Vista on various computers and it has recently become necessary to type a backslash when entering a user name and password. Unfortunately the key is not in the same position as in the Mac OS.

Bottom left hand corner, the ~ key (I think its called the tilde key next to the z)

Movies on the move – Convert your DVD’s for viewing on your iPhone, iPod or Mobile Device

I often want to take a few of my favourite movies away with me when I go away. It is possible to convert your DVD’s into a format that will play on your iPod, iPhone or any portable device to save you physically carrying the discs around with you. I am going to talk about a software I use on a Mac but you can download similar software for windows, just look on download.com or softpedia.com.

I use Handbrake to convert my DVD’s it’s really easy to use and now comes with present for most popular portable devices. Open up handbrake and insert you DVD, if you DVD Player software loads up just quit out of this as you don’t want the computer doing two things at once. Choose Source in the top left hand corner and locate your disc, you don’t have to go deep into folder structure, top level is enough for handbrake to assess the disc. Once selected Handbrake will review all the chapter on the disc. Make sure you have selected the first chapter right through to the last chapter to ensure you convert the entire DVD.

Select the preset for the output video using the drawer on the right handside of the interface. Handbrake now has presets for iPhone, iPod and iPod Touch to make things nice and simple but if you are worried about file size then you can fine tune the settings yourself.

Once you are happy and have selected where you would like your file to be saved hit the Start button next to the Source button at the top of the interface.

Open the file in iTunes and it will be copied into your iTunes Media Folder, next time you sync you device the file will be uploaded.

Also see Duplicating DVD’s and CD’s using Mac OSX’s Disk Utility

VM Fusion – Easily boot Windows from your partitioned Bootcamp drive.

The other night I finally grew tired of rebooting my Macbook to use windows programs, saving work to hard drives and rebooting back in Mac OS X.

I downloaded the latest trial version of VM Fusion fully prepared to delete the drive partition and re install all of my software (that would have taken hours) but VMWare luckily had thought of that.

I installed the virtual desktop and fired it up. To my surprise the first option on the list of windows choices was to boot from Bootcamps partitioned drive. Without hesitating I went for it. It does some stuff at the beginning which takes a minute or so but then I was in. Fusion needed to install VM Tools in order to get full functionality and for some reason went through installing device drivers again.

I did get the blue screen of death at one point but I think this was down to installing too many drivers and updates at the same time, but this lead me to start it up again in the old fashioned Bootcamp way and fix it so that still works too.

Very pleased! Took a little time to get fully functional but saved me a lot of time and will save me a in the future!

This might solve the media streaming to the Xbox issue, watch this space.

Apple MacBook trackpad fingertip shortcut strokes

I was amazed how many people with MacBooks did not make full use of the mouse pad fingertip shortcuts so here’s a few to get you started.

Firstly, quite obviously the entire pad is a button.

Two finger scrolling, by placing two fingers on the pad a stroking up and down you can scroll pages with ease.

Holding ctrl and placing two fingers on the trackpad allows you to zoom in on the macs screen.

Zoom in, similarly to the iPhone you can zoom in by placing your fingers together and pinching open.

Zoom out, pinching closed zooms out.

Rotate, place your thumb and index finger on the trackpad and rotate the two together. This is especially useful in programs such as Adobe Photoshop.

Four fingers up for expose, place all four fingers on the pad and then throw then up, this will throw all your windows away from the desktop and allow you to choose your next program.

Four fingers down for expose, place all fingers on the trackpad and drag them towards you, this will place all of your windows on your desktop for you to select your next navigation.

Four fingers left / right, reveals all your open programs, using one finger your can scroll through and select similarly to tabbing through programs in Windows.

Three fingers scroll to navigate, scroll through folders of images etc

For more detail click Apple > System Preferences > Trackpad

Apple Mac Keyboard Twitter #hashtag bug – The key facts

As if it wasn’t annoying enough that on the Apple Mac Keyboard sometimes the @ sign and ” are sometimes not as displayed on the keys (mine is right in the Mac OS and wrong in my Windows XP environment) but just wait until you write your next Tweet and need to emphasis a word with a hashtag, where is it? this was only brought to my attention in the past week and reminded me that there were a few other characters I have been meaning to find without having to google it and then paste it into my work. Here’s a few useful symbols and characters.

# = Alt + 3
€ = Alt + 2
© = Alt + G
• = Alt + 8
And one just for fun
 = Alt + Shift + K

Thanks Nick Buckley for raising the #hashtag issue

VMWare vs Bootcamp – What is best for running a Windows Operating System on your Mac?

Unfortunately, though I tried to avoid it, I do have a need for both Microsoft software as well a Mac based software, both at work and at home. I am fortunate enough to run two different set ups for running windows on an Apple Mac machine. At work I have a VMWare environment known as VM Fusion running Windows XP and on my home MacBook I have Windows vista running on a partitioned part of the drive, set up using Apples Bootcamp which comes pre installed on the Mac. For both situations you will need a working copy of windows.

VMWare Fusion Environment
The VMWare environment essentially loads a program and within this program loads the Windows operating system. All programs such as Microsoft Office work as usual within the environment. Fusion also has a handy little feature known as Unity which hides the VMWare surround displaying you windows programs in much the same way as you mac software. If, for example you minimise Word it slinks down to the Dock and not the Windows taskbar. If you take the time to set up VMWare Fusion you can also conveniently save down your files to convenient places within the Mac system so as to avoid the need to drag and drop files between the operating systems. We have VMWare fully integrated on the company network which means full support from the IT department.

Bootcamp
Bootcamp is relatively easy to install, it happens in two stages. First, you partition the drive, then you install your windows operating system on the partition. The benefit of running the Windows OS separate to Mac OS you would think would be less of a drain on resources but I have to say that when I boot up in Vista the Apple Mac hardware reacts in a completely different way. The fan kicks in pretty early and the system gets hot. Granted the speed seems to be good but if I’m honest with the processors and ram I am operating with I don’t think I’d notice a difference in speed between my windows programs running in Bootcamp and the windows programs running in VMFusion, the downside being running two operating systems at the same time. The main disadvantage is the fact that the two are separate, you can create a drop box to pass files between the two setups as you can see the partitioned drive from each system but it means rebooting.

In summary, if you are prepared to folk out a little extra for a VMWare licence it is well work it. It just means a more seamless work flow between applications. If you want to copy and paste from a window in outlook to Photoshop you can do, if you want to drag and drop from your windows desktop to an application you can do. As a time saver and for ease of use I’d say VMWare Fusion is the winner.

Download flash video from the web to use in local projects using firefox add-ons

Although not strictly good practise to take video from the internet for use in your local projects it is something I am asked a lot about and how do I do it.

There are two stages to this, firstly the ability to download the file and secondly encoding the file for use. Thanks to various firefox addons downloading the files are not an issue. I use Video Download Helper as I have the most success with it from multiple sites. Recent improvements allow you to convert the file server side and download it although as this does not come packaged it means you need to install ffmpeg locally. To install ffmpeg on a windows machine follow the instructions in this link. For a Mac however watch this space as I am currently installing it. In the meantime I recomend the shareware ffmpegx, this provides a reasonable desktop solution. You will need to download some codecs but the location of these are shown on the softwares start up window. Save these down to a folder that you are not likely to change I have a folder called ffmpeg in my profile folder. Browse to these files at the start up screen and you are set to go.

Using Quicktime Pro
Once I have downloaded the flv I currently open it using QuickTime. To do this you will need to install perian, a codec bundle that improves the amount of video files that QuickTime can handle, while your at it go to Apples site > Quicktime and install as many codecs as possible too. Using Quicktime Pro (you will need to upgrade) you can export to most popular formats and even more if in the Quicktime Preferences under the Advanced tab you click Show Legacy Encoders and check the box. To export to windows media video I have flip4mac studio installed to export to wmv for presentations.

Making a smooth transition from Final Cut Pro to Adobe Premiere Pro

This is the first in a series of guides on Premiere Pro. Up until now I had been an avid Final Cut Pro user and always considered Adobe Premiere Pro to not quite be a professional standard editing platform. Perhaps my judgement was unfounded as I had only limited experience using the editing software but my new job meant that this would my new primary edit suite. Armed with a Mac Pro Dual Quadcore I got stuck in and once I got started I found many pros and cons with the platform, this is what I noted down as I made the change.

First let me touch on what I consider to be the main pros and cons of the software’s. For me premiere pro biggest asset is it’s seamless integration with the other adobe products. I have cs4 and in this most of the niggles associated with bringing unrendered files such as psd’s and aep’s has been ironed out. A hefty after effects file will slow down the display of an image in the preview pane but if you can live with this the time saving benefits are worth it. The other major time saver is the ability to drag and drop differing video formats to your project, place them in the timeline and not have to convert the video to the projects native video format or even render it out before previewing. Adobe has not seemed to complete the cross program synergy though at a crucial point. As you come to export your final piece premiere passes the project adobe media (the program we used to use merely to encode our flv’s. Unfortunately exporting a video file to full quality pal DV produces poor results especially for projects with text titling and linear shapes and effects created within premiere pro (more on this in a later post). Final cut on the other hand outputs perfect quality video.

Windows and Mac – There are some differences between the windows and mac versions of Premiere Pro that you should be aware of. Firstly when capturing video the files are saved as the operating systems preferred video. Mac saves as .mov and Windows saves as .avi. If you are hoping to export your files to be used directly in a Powerpoint Presentation on a Mac then you will struggle, there is no export to WMV option as there is in the windows version and the Mpeg formats are not supported in powerpoint. I shall write a separate detailed blog on my workarounds in this area.

Quicktime – I believe it is a necessity to have Quicktime Pro installed on your computer to save frustration with Adobes video Exports. I tend to export to the highest quality possible in Premiere and then re export them for purpose using quicktime. A bit long winded but I don’t have to do this for every export, as I mentioned it often depends on the graphical content of the video.

Making the change – There are a couple of pointers that will save you some time. With regards to making cuts in the timeline, unlike FCP there is no button for toggling the linkage between video and audio off and on, instead hold down the alt key as you make the cut or drag the clip around the timeline independently from the sound. Also another major difference is the ability to edit sound in the timeline by simply adding pushpins. For those familiar with After effects they will have no issues, simply click on the effects tab next to the source tab effects_tab and drop down the volume control menu followed by the level dropdown, place your scrubber in the timeline where you wish to begin the effects on the sound and click the stopwatch icon stopwatch_button this adds a keyframe and indicates the beginning of your change. Scrub along to where you wish the loudest or quietest point to be and add another keyframe. While the small triangle is black adjust your volume you should see the volume level in the effects pane reflect your changes. This is a skill you can also apply to motion and scale changes over time, and can also be useful in getting your head around the motion graphics program After effects. Any static graphical elements to your projects I would fully recommend building in Photoshop to the exact dimensions as your project and not resizing in premiere pro. These are the main things that I had to go looking for as most other differences were pretty intuitive or even the same as in Final Cut Pro. I’m sure there’s more I haven’t discussed so just ask in the comments box below.

As I write, I have decided to break this subject down into separate blog posts and go into greater detail.
- Setting up a Project, Device and Folder system in Premiere Pro.
- Exporting Video and preparing it for Powerpoint Presentations. (Workaround)
- Issues, Observations and Top Tips for using Adobe Media Encoder.

Setting up yahoo pop mail account in Apple Macs Mail program

If I ever figure something out that took me a while to google, I’ll write a short blog and hopefully save someone some time.

I recently bought an iPhone and for convenience, as the phone is set up to function better with A Yahoo mail account, I decided to move away from my old hotmail account. Probably best as over time the amount of junk it built up was getting annoying.

So I still wanted to pick up my mail on my MacBook pro but am not a fan setting up multiple mail programs on one machine so I went about setting up the yahoo account. Even using the automatic settings I was still recieving an error during connection. I wasted a few hours googling and changng settings but still no luck. Before I go through my working settings, go to your Yahoo mail online choose options then … Check the box that reads enable pop mail and bingo! Half the battle is won.

My working settings are -

mail_pop_settings