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 ‘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.

Spaces

It’s good to have your own space

Clutter is something that computers are great at. And the fact that you can have open a browser, iTunes, iPhoto, a few finder windows means that before you know it, your screen can be awash with clutter. The frustration of clicking through windows to find the one that you want to actually get to is both time wasting and inefficient. Is there anything that can help you?

What to do:

Firstly, open System Preferences, and find the button that says Exposé and Spaces.

Once you’ve pressed that, you should see the options for spaces.

Click on “Enable Spaces” and if you wish “Show Spaces in menu bar”. From the picture above you can see that there are 4 “screens”. Each of these screens can hold different windows.

Watch the video below to see an example of spaces in action:

As you can see, once you’ve enabled spaces, you can have 4 separate “monitors” where you can drop different programs into. You can activate spaces with a hotkey, or use the spaces icon in your menubar to jump to a specific space.

Here you can see a couple of things. Firstly, I have set up certain programs to open up in specific spaces. That can easily be done by pressing the “+” sign, adding the program and then assigning a space to that program. At the bottom, you can set a hotkey to show all your spaces at one go.

This is one of the features of my Mac I use almost without thinking, and one of those features I miss most when I use a computer that’s not my own!

Macstarter Project 1 pt II

Viewing and Converting

In part I of this project, we downloaded a YouTube Video, and have it saved ready to watch on our iWhatever device. Before we can convert it, let’s make sure the video is watchable to start with.

You may have noticed that your downloaded file has got a .flv at the end. This means that it is a Flash Video. These are the videos that a lot of websites have, but our hand held devices generally don’t play these movie files. To view a flv movie on your Mac, you should first install Perian, which is by far one of the most useful things you can have on your Mac. Once this is installed, you’ll be able to watch almost any kind of video file without problems.

View your downloaded YouTube movie, and see if it’s ok. Now it’s time for converting it, and for this we use our old friend Handbrake. Simply follow the instructions given on the Movies on the Go article, and you will have a converted movie ready to go!

Macstarter Project 1 pt I

Making Movies playable

Over the last few days, I’ve been using my iPad a lot for viewing movies. Of course you can buy and rent movies on your iPad, the videos I wanted to watch come from YouTube. Herein lies the problem for me. My iPad is not a 3G model, therefore I can’t access the internet when I’m on the move. So, for my first project, I want to be able to grab videos from YouTube, and then make them playable on my iPad. This really isn’t as hard as you may think it is, but it does involve some steps.

Getting movies

The first step in our quest is to grab movies from YouTube. This is actually a lot easier than you might think it is. You can get a number of websites that will let you download from YouTube, including vixy.net and zamzar.com. But my problem with these sites is that the file you end up getting is often very low in quality, and very unwatchable. So to grab our movies, we’re going to use Firefox and use an extension (or add-on).

Firefox Add-ons

Even if you’re not a regular user of Firefox, it’s well worth having a copy in your Applications folder for times just like this. So, go ahead, and open up firefox (or install it first following these instructions).

Once you’ve opened up Firefox, head to the Tools section, and choose Add-ons.

From the window that opens up, you can click on the Get Add-ons button, and in the search bar, type “video downloadhelper” and press enter. The first result that you should see is the Add-on that is called “Video Downloadhelper”! Click on the button that says “Add to Firefox”,

and in the following window click “Install”.

Once the Add-on has installed, you must restart Firefox (it’s easiest to click the “Restart Firefox” button. Firefox will now restart and you are good to go.

Downloading Videos

Now it’s a simple case of going to YouTube, finding the videos you want and clicking on the Add-on button which is sitting in your Firefox Toolbar. Note: if you click on the actual symbol, it will open up a help window, which is what we don’t want!. Rather, you have to click on the tiny little arrow next to the symbol.

When you click the little arrow, you will see a link to download your video. Depending on the video, you may well get more than one link.

Here, you can see that I have 5 different links I can choose from. You can also see that there are various numbers in front of the titles. The higher the number, the better the quality of the video (but also the bigger the file will be). Click the file that you want, (I always choose the best quality), and choose a place for your file to be saved.

Now you have the file, you have to be able to watch it, and then convert it to a version that your iPad / iPhone / iPod / whatever will play. That’s in Part II!