Software Substitutes pt IV

Apple Macs have come with Quicktime player for a very long time. Quicktime was in fact invented by Apple specifically to make videos easy to play. But nowadays, your Video Cameras, phones, will take videos in a variety of formats. Add to this the huge number of videos you can download and watch on your computer. Can Quicktime handle all these files? Not really.

If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a huge favour and install Perian. This will let Quicktime play almost any video you throw at it. But if you really want a fine quality video player (which is also free), then look no further than VLC, which will play almost any file you can think of, and as a bonus plays DVD’s brilliantly as well.

Lastly, it’s worth having a copy of MPEG Streamclip in your Applications folder. This rather oddly named program doesn’t look as slick as most others, but what it lacks in the looks department, it makes up for in the usefulness department. MPEG Streamclip will open almost any movie file, and convert it to something else. This is great if you want to grab a YouTube clip off the internet, and put it in a iMovie project for example. But we’ll cover this at a later date in more detail.

Software Substitutes III

Your web browser is like your favorite brand of tea (you can tell I’m an Englishman!) or your favorite brand of anything really. Although you can use a different browser, it tends to leave a bad taste in your mouth!

I’m a Firefox person through and through. But Macs come with Safari, so why not just use Safari as my one and only browser? Well, for me, the choice is one of speed, ease of use, and most of all, the ability to install plug ins.

So what should we have in our Applications Folder? I would recommend having Firefox and Google Chrome as two backup browsers. The other day, I was on a website, on Firefox, and just could not get a video to play. Instead of wasting time on finding out the cause (as all other video sites were playing just fine), I just fired up Safari, went to the same website and watched the video without a problem. I’ve found that with these three browsers, I can handle any combination of video, image, text or form without problems.

Software Substitutes pt II

One of the most widely underused programs ever, in my opinion, would have to be Photoshop. I know people who own this program, but never do more than crop the odd picture and remove red-eye from their photos. In the scheme of things, Photoshop is one of the most advanced, feature rich programs you can buy. So why would you? It’s expensive and big.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy Photoshop. I own a copy myself, but you should only spend the money on it, if you actually need it’s power. In the mean time, how do you mess around with Photos and Pictures without Photoshop?

Firstly, Preview and iPhoto will do a huge amount for you. They will both crop, colour correct pictures in no time. iPhoto will allow you to straighten and sharpen pictures as well.

If you need a little more power, but don’t need the whole juggernaut of Photoshop, you could try Seashore. It’s small, light and fast. It’s not going to replace Photoshop, but it will do a lot of what you need it to.

Software Substitutes pt I

Do you have to buy expensive software to get stuff done on your Mac? Certainly, but before you splash out a few hundred euros / dollars on a program, you might want to ask yourself a couple of questions:

1. Do you really need the program?
2. Can something else do the same job?

So for the first Software Substitutes, we’ll take on the might of Microsoft Office. Having just released their new version last month (Microsoft Office 2011), many peopel will want to rush out and buy it. It is after all one of the best selling software the world over. But there are alternatives if you don’t want to (or don’t need to) spend money.

Open Office will do the job of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint quite well. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that it’s got all the features of Microsoft Office (which might actually be a good thing), but it will handle simple documents without a problem. But, if you don’t own Microsoft Office, it’s almost a compulsory to have in your Applications folder.

If all you need is a Word Processor for documents, then try Bean. It’s fast, simple and handles just about any format of document.

PDF Magic II

Here’s another incredible time-saver that I discovered by accident. When looking through a PDF file a while back, I was asked to save a single chapter of a handbook which contained 20 or so chapters. I simply opened up the PDF file in Preview, and opened the Sidebar. I went to the first page of this chapter and clicked on this page in the side bar. I scrolled down to the end of the chapter and Shift + Clicked the last page of the chapter in the Sidebar. This meant I had selected the entire chapter in the Sidebar. I then dragged these selected pages onto my desktop and voila! A new PDF file was created containing only those pages I had dragged. I renamed the file, and sent it off by email!

PDF Magic I

I’ve talked about Preview before, and I’ve made no secret that I think it’s one of the best things that your Mac has in it’s application folder. Here’s a trick that found out today by accident. I was asked to make a document in Word, that needed a few full pages from a PDF document. Just on a whim I tried to pull some pages out of my PDF file into my Word document. The following video should show you the result of my experiment!

From the video you can see that my empty Word document is on the left, with 3 empty pages. My PDF document is on the right with 3 pages. Simply pull any page out of the PDF Preview Sidebar, and put it into an empty Word document.

Of course, in this video, I simply take 3 pages and put them into 3 pages into a Word document. This is simply to show you how easy the procedure is. In my own document, I had to mix pages of text, with various pages from the PDF document. The final Word document was saved, and then printed to PDF. Now this is what I call a real time saver.

iPhoto Videos II

Yesterday, I sat with iPhoto open, and was trying to organise some (by some I mean a few thousand) photos of my beautiful daughter. As my wife and I have been snapping away, we’ve also been shooting videos as we go. I’m thinking of compiling a set of movies out of these videos, but trying to find them in amongst thousands of photos is a nightmare of Spielberg proportions. So what to do?

Simple. Go to File > New and choose Smart Album.

From the next window,

give your Smart Album a name, and choose “Photo is Movie” as I have done above. Click on OK, and you will have a smart album with all the videos you have shot.

Of course, this will pull in all the videos you have collected in iPhoto. So you could refine the Smart Album by clicking on the Plus sign on the right, and adding a few more things to narrow the album down to those just of a certain date, event or even a face from your collection. Once the Smart Album is made, you can simply drag the videos you want out of that Album in other Albums.

iPhoto Videos

One of my biggest complaints about iPhoto ‘08 was to do with videos. Any short video you filmed with your photo camera would be imported into iPhoto, along with all your photos. They were put into events along with the photos, but if you double clicked them to view them, Quicktime would open up and play the video. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at all, but it did kind of break the “flow” of going through your photos and videos. I’m glad to report that iPhoto ‘11 now plays videos without Quicktime opening up. In the new Full Screen mode, videos play in full screen. Simply brilliant.

iPhoto ‘11 Export II

Uploading to Picasa

Getting your photos onto your Picasa account is actually very easy. The first thing to do is install the iPhoto Uploader for Mac. This will streamline getting your pictures onto your Picasa account without having to have Picasa installed on your Mac. Once you have installed the uploader, fire up iPhoto. Now, select the photos you want to upload. Now go to File and choose Export, and choose Picasa Web Albums from the window that pops up:

Next, you have to sign in to your Google / Gmail account:

Once signed in, you have the choice of uploading your pictures into an existing album, or to create a new one. You can also decide whether the album is private or public.

Once you have chosen your options, you can click on Export and iPhoto will transport your iPhoto pictures to Picasa, ready for you to share with friends and family all over the world.

iPhoto Export

Sharing your photos

When dealing with iPhoto, I have chosen not to put mine, or my families photos on Facebook. But how then, do you share a set of photos with family and friends if you don’t want to use Facebook. It might shock some of you readers to note that there were and still are websites dedicated to sharing your photos. The advantage of these websites is that you have complete control over who sees each album you create.

Of the pick of the bunch (Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa) I personally choose to go with Picasa. It gives you a full 1GB of space, and charges you $5 a year for up to 20GB! The reason I choose Picasa is it’s so easy to go from iPhoto directly to uploading into one of your Picasa albums. In the next article I’ll talk about this export.