iDVD 6 (well iLife ‘06 in general) is really awesome. I love all of the new themes and features. All of the menus are cleaner. It’s just awesome. The first thing I noticed besides the cleaner interface was that it supported my LaCie DVD burner even thought I don’t have a SuperDrive (Apple DVD Burner). That is so nice. Before I’d export a disk image and burn it in Disk Utility. I smiled anyway. I also really like the added flexibility you have when changing templates and making our own, especially the map view.
I thought I’d take the time to help all of you out who use iDVD 6 with this issue I found. When you click on burn (or if you go to save disk image, same thing applies) it encodes all of your video. You can press command-I whenever you are in iDVD and see all of your project options and stats, etc. I change the encode type to quality from performance because I like stuff I make to look good, just a thought. Anyway you can see that it encodes your video in the background while you are designing the menus and stuff for your DVD (which is awesome). If you wait long enough it will say ‘done’ next to your video in the Info window (command-I to get it).
Back to what I was saying, if you burn it after it has encoded your entire project or before it will check it and encode what’s left. Once it’s done it says ‘Encoding Audio’. At this point it says iDVD is not responding. I was like what the crap and restarted the entire DVD process. After the third time of restarting it after it ‘locked up’ (to mac haters: this never happens normally, that’s why I was so confused. on windows you just expect it to crash when you’re doing something big.) I thought I’d search the Internet. So I googled my issue and after a few minutes I found a forum that was discussing it.
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The new Notes feature in Facebook is awesome. Not only can you tag stuff and do all of the stuff you can do with pictures like comment, etc. you can import RSS feeds from a blog! I just typed in samsoffes.com and it was like ‘click here to save’ or something so I did because I didn’t want to read the stuff around it… and there was my blog inside my Facebook notes page. It made me happy. They check for RSS (actually they use my ATOM feed and not my RSS one, but I like saying RSS better and ATOM is basically the same thing) feeds and then import items separately and people can comment on my posts right from Facebook! There is also a new developers area on Facebook that I can’t wait to play with.
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A while ago someone gave me an AT&T Treo 600. Treo’s run from $300 - $400 so I was really pumped to get one for free, but it was AT&T and I have Cingular. So I just left it sitting there and figured I couldn’t do anything about except play palm games on it.
Two days ago I thought, how hard could it be? I bought a cable for it on eBay for $9.99 and today I sat down to try and unlock it to work with Cingular. After 3 hours and lots of frustration and flashing the firmware 4 or 5 times, it worked! I thought that I would never get it, but it popped up and was like you have voicemail. I looked at the top and it said Cingular! When you turn it on it still says AT&T, but it works!
If you need a Treo 600 unlocked, e-mail me and I’ll help you out. It’s not that hard once you figure out what you have to do and get the right software (which is really, really, really hard to find). I’m still not sure if the software I used is illegal or not. It didn’t say it was but it was really hard to find.
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I just finished watching the keynote from the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference 2006 (WWDC). I think I wet myself. First off, just go watch it. It is so worth your time (about an hour). They show off all the new stuff and of course there is some Vista bashing. For those of you who don’t care as much or don’t have time, I’ll list what I thought was simply amazing at the WWDC and recently at Apple.
Mac Pro - The PowerMac G5 is no more. It is now the Mac Pro. It features quad-core Intel Xeons at up to 3.0 GHz, 16GB of memory, and 2TB of disk space. It’s freakin’ nuts. (O, and it’s cheaper than a Dell with the same specs and $800 cheaper than a G5 that had half the speed and a quarter of the disk space.)
Displays - The Apple Displays didn’t change that much except for one thing. Price. They now start at $699 for the 20-inch model. It’s only $999 for the 23-inch and $1,999 for the 30-inch. You might be saying, “It’s still freakin’ expensive!” Ture, but the 30-inch just dropped $1,000 in price, so I’m happy.
Mighty Mouse - The Mighty Mouse is now wireless! It made me really, really happy. Now at $69, it’s still a little expensive for me to go buy one, but it’s cool.
Spaces - Spaces is like the Xwindow system for Linux. (I love Fedora 5 by the way. It’s the nicest Linux I’ve used so far, but it’s still Linux…) You can have 4 work spaces and move between them. You can also show all of them and drag windows from one to another. It’s really cool, just go check it out.
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Core Animation - Core Animation look amazing. I can’t wait to use it. It’s like Flash and Quartz, only in 3D space and easier. It looks awesome. You have to go watch the keynote to see it in action.
Basically everything I saw in Lepard looks amazing, but I’ll just hit on two more.
iChat - The new iChat and Mail look amazing and I must say I am looking forward to them the most. iChat now has integrated tabs and a new, cleaner look. It features real-time video effects during video chats. You can show a presentation or slideshow right in iChat while you are chatting. My personal favorite is Backdrop. You just step outside of the shot and tell it you are about to use a backdrop. It figures out what the background is and you can ad pictures or video behind where you are to make it look like you are green screening… only you’re not! It’s awesome.
Dashboard - The new Dashboard include a sweet tool called Web Clip. You can use any website as a widget. Like if you wanted to watch an eBay auction, you just drag the page to Dashboard, crop it to where ever you want it and now you have a live little clip of that page everytime you load Dashboard. It’s freaking sweet. I want it now.
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I started working on a new look for samsoffes.com because I was bored one day. I figured, why not make it Web 2.0ish because that’s what seems to be popular and what people like. So far, I’m really liking the new look. Summer has been crazy, so who knows how long it will take me. At least I’ve started…
With the new look, comes a new style. I’ll be switching from WordPress (my blogging engine) to my own CMS (content management system). Why? Because I can. That will take a little while to get going, but once I do, rock on.
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