Apple January Announcement

Just the other day, last Thursday, Apple had a special presentation in New York in the Guggenheim and it addressed the publishing industry and the stranglehold it has had over it, for goodness knows how long. In the same way that Apple has been a disruptive force with regards the music industry and has been spearheading the sale of music via digital form and is going the same direction with the movie industry, it is hardly surprising that books and publishing is going to get the same treatment. There are a huge number of reasons why electronic books should be dominant by now, ecological, technological and even physiological. You only have to mention the idea of students in schools being able to have all of their books in an iPad and parents get excited that their little darlings, will no longer be harmed by having to carry around too many kilograms around the school daily. With regards the ecological argument for electronic books it is obvious that many trees of the world are going to be saved by a reduced amount of paper being required for making books.

A new era of textbook publishing

We are most certainly, at the cusp of a revolution in the publishing industry and book reading is finally going to change and I think it is a change for the better. Many of us traditional book readers, that are used to the dead tree versions of books, like to have the feel of a book in our hands and the smell of the ink on paper. On the other hand young people that are going through school now are more used to the fantastic technology that is available to us now and don’t have the romantic notions of what a book should be like.

There are some benefits of course to having a paper-based book, no batteries required to charge it or keep it going, easy to write notes in the margins or even to rip pages out if you’re so inclined. On the other hand the electronic books in some ways have even more things going for them. You can have a large number of electronic books in one small device. All of the text within the book is searchable and as we have seen with these latest text books the multimedia aspects of electronic books, turn a boring dusty old text into a rollercoaster ride of fun and learning. Many people will benefit from the different types of learning available with the use of photos, infographics, charts, animations, audio and video clips, that can all be used within the main body of the book and also to create exciting glossaries and pages of description.

iBooks Author a legacy from Steve Jobs

The destructive influence of technology over the textbook publishing industry is something that was close to the heart of Steve Jobs. At least in America, Apple have had a big influence upon education with efforts that have made to bring young people into the Apple Mac fold, while still students in schools. Not so much in other countries, where little effort has been made to get Apple computers into the schools. I wonder if the deals that Apple has made with the textbook publishers in the US will be any good across the other side of the pond, where we have different spelling of words, as well as huge differences in the subjects being studied, not to mention languages. Apple do seem to be looking towards having a worldwide market, even if they do tend to push things out first in their own country.

Books, writers, authors, media content producers – How will this new technology change the world?

I am all for the struggling artist, writer and content producer not getting blocked by the gatekeepers of the traditional published world, such as the agents and publishing companies. I like the idea that a writer and artist can create their stuff and get it out there building a fan base on the go. It seems to me that this is the best way forward with chance for the cream to rise to the top. A more egalitarian creative publishing world, could be possible, if the tools are made available to everyone. Apple have done this with making iBooks author available for free, you just have to have a Mac to be able to use it. Creative types tend to gravitate towards using the Mac anyway, so you could say the first step has already been made.

How will this new type of iBooks publishing work in reality?

As I mentioned just about anybody can pick up the tools to channel their creativity towards being published. The work can be given away, although if it is to be sold then there is possibly a requirement is that it has to be sold through the iBook store. There are some that complain that Apple is locking people into just one way of doing it. While that may be true to a certain extent, so long as there are other ways that creativity and sales of that creativity can flourish, I say – So what! When you consider that authors using the old paradigms of book publishing and the percentage that they would earn from sales would be very small indeed, then the 70% that is possible by using Apple as your storefront does seem to be quite generous.

Although it is still early days, the signs are very promising for this new way of publishing, with over 350,000 text books being sold in the first three days of the store being open. That is quite an amazing number when you consider that the number of titles available is quite small compared to what it will be like in one or two years time.

Using the iBooks Author Software

So if I want to write a book and sell it through the iBook store, first thing I have to do is to put the content into the iBooks Author application. You can work directly into the application or you can use other applications and bring the content in from those. When you have it all set up the way that you would like it to be in its finished form, you can apply for the account so that you can sell your work through iBooks. Whether you live in the United States or not you have to have a US tax identity and you also have to the able to provide an ISBN number for the book you intend to publish. That is if you are planning to work directly with Apple. I expect that payments would be made on a monthly basis in the same way that application developers get paid for their applications that are sold through the Mac App Store. If you don’t intend to work directly through Apple then you can use one of the publishing aggregators such as Lulu. One of the benefits for going in that direction, would be that Lulu would provide you with the ISBN numbers. Organising your own ISBN numbers can be a little awkward because of the way that they are set up on a country by country basis and from what I have seen that it is either a little expensive or just not that easy. In the UK you will pay £118 for 10 ISBN numbers or get 100 for £256.32. You will want to be sure that your book is going to sell if you are making that investment and that you will get the use out of the numbers you buy. I could see a group of authors getting together to buy a set of 100 and sharing out the costs.

On the other hand you might have a book that you want to give away, in which case you don’t have to go through the Apple iBook store. I have created a small iBook already through the iBooks author application and was able to export it and then copy it to my iPad. To be honest the process didn’t go particularly well, I have a number of problems to deal with and I am still working out why those problems occurred. I expect though that it would be easy enough once you have created an iBook in the iBooks version 2 format so that it will be possible to host the files on your website or in some place where it can be shared. From that shared place your readers or fans will be able to enjoy your creative content. I did think it would be possible at first to sell my books in this way, only finding out later that there is an agreement that is part of the software, requiring you to sell through the Apple iBook store. This may change, if other applications become available that produce electronic books in the same format in which case Apple may not know or be able to police how it was the book was produced, to enforce the selling through the Apple channel.

Is Apple deviating from the ePub Standards

The electronic format of the books as used by the textbooks you will find in the Apple iBook store, with all of the associated multimedia content is somewhere in between the EPUB2 and a new version that is being worked on and published at present. There are people that are claiming that Apple are sabotaging the Open Epub publishing format by including technology in this format that are not in the standard format, as well as not adhering to the standard as they should have done. Whether this is true or not doesn’t really matter because in all likelihood this format will become a standard for electronic publishing, at least where textbooks are concerned. It is still possible to publish books in the standard Epub format and they will still be available to be read on devices that also support that standard. This new Apple format has the .iba suffix

With the use I have had so far of iBooks Author, I have found it quite similar to Pages and maybe Keynote in terms of use. It is quite useful and handy to have that familiarity with the interface already. There are extra things within the application of course, with regards the importing, exporting and the elements that you can include within a document. Obviously it is easy to add text, you can drag and drop from Word documents or from Pages documents. Same with images, very easy to add them and as you would expect it is drag-and-drop simple. You can have an image or a video which will be viewed when the book is opened. I did set it so that a video played in my book and it was in the correct format as required by the application, but seemed to make the application crash. It seems that more testing is required by me to have this working properly.

The iBooks Store is highly USA biased

I looked at the options for creating an account so that I could sell my books through Apple and there are a number of barriers if you don’t live in the United States. You do have to get yourself US tax code identity numbers and fill in a number of forms to register, it seems quite complicated, but I may persevere to see if I can complete the process. If it is not possible, then there is still the easier route by going through one of the aggregators. I would most likely use Lulu where I have an account already. I did look at a couple of aggregators on this side of the pond and one was mostly in German and the other seemed to be more French based. With all of the hoops that you have to jump through, I am sure that many will be put off and if you still want to sell electronic books that are in the older Epub 2, then you can still sell those by whatever means you wish. No need to give part of the proceeds to Apple.

Like many people that have dissected the details of iBooks and the requirements for publishing, I am a little disappointed. There is to a certain extent a gatekeeper to the world of publishing, instead of it being the established publishing houses, agents and distribution mechanism of the old way of doing it, there is the technical details of the process as created by Apple.

Not quite the same as seeing a book for sale in an actual book store

There are lots of old school type people that see self publishing as an inferior way of getting a book out there to the reading public. There is something in the kudos of having an actual book sitting on a bookshelf for sale within a bookstore. I can see how that would be appealing, but I think that the businessman has to take over from the creative person, when you’re looking to have a best seller with the operative word being ‘seller’. What it comes down to is the writer or author getting paid for the blood, sweat and tears, time and effort that goes into creating any sort of book. Personally I would rather see the cash from sales of books than getting a warm fuzzy feeling from having a book for sale in a bricks and mortar shop.

One of the important things with creating bitmaps is to make the image look good, with extra things like drop shadows and outlines. This is particularly so with text that you might include within an image. In this Pixelmator 2 review I point out that there are some things with Pixelmator that could certainly be improved upon. It has got better with version 2 of Pixelmator, in that it is now possible to fairly easily, add some drop shadows to text and to shapes. In the past I would be able to create drop shadows in Pixelmator, but only by using extra filter plug-ins and the one that I used was from Noise Industries. (Well not the only way – there is the making a duplicate and making it into a shadow layer.) I do still have those extra plug-in filters available, as I have installed FX Factory which includes those filters that are free to use, along with some that you have to pay for. The Pixelmator filters that are available within FX Factory can also be used within video editing applications such as Final Cut Pro 10 and iMovie.

Pixelmator 2 improvements and failures

When you want to have a drop shadow on an item within Pixelmator 2, the way that you go about it will depend upon what type of object you are working with. The developers at Pixelmator could improve this and make it so that it is the same process for whatever type of object, whether it be a text object, a vector shape or a bitmap object.

Drop Shadows on text objects

If you want to have drop shadows on your text, it is now possible to do that, but it is not particularly obvious how to go about it. Open the system font palette and you can do that from the View Menu, show fonts or just hit command – T. There are some small controls at the top of the palette window that let you add the drop shadow and to control the amount of blur and the distance from the text. After you click on the button to apply the drop shadow you can control the opacity, blur, and offset. The final control to the right, lets you choose the angle of the drop shadow from the text.

While I was trying out these tools for the drop shadow, I also wanted to see if it was possible for me to add an outline to the text. I found that when I was able to add an outline, which I got in the text tool options, that the outline removed the fill. So the only way that I could get text to have outline and fill, was to have a duplicate of the original. One text object was the text with a fill and the other was the text as just an outline. It didn’t seem to be possible to change the thickness of the outline either. We shouldn’t have to convert our text into a bitmap to be able to apply outlines. Although version 2 of Pixelmator is better in many ways, it does still require a lot of work from the program developers to smooth out some rough edges.

Bitmaps, text and shapes in Pixelmator version 2

So you take the brush tool from the Pixelmator brushes palette and you draw a line in the background layer, so you end up with a line of whatever colour on top of a white background. You think to yourself, that it would be rather nice to have a drop shadow to that line and when you’re using Pixelmator you will be scratching your head, when it comes to working out how to do that. If instead of drawing the line on the layer that is the background layer, you were to create a new transparent layer and draw your line, then you would be able to apply a filter to the layer and give that line a drop shadow. If you try and apply a drop shadow to the line when drawn on the background layer you will find that the drop shadow that is applied will work on the whole of the rectangle of that layer. Obviously if you know how this works, then you can plan your design accordingly, so that if it is something that does need to have a drop shadow added to it you can put it on its own layer.

Drop shadows on shapes

With these vector shapes that are now part of Pixelmator version 2, it is very easy to add a drop shadows to these objects. The way that the objects are dealt with also work on layer by layer basis. Any objects that you put into a shape layer will all have the same configuration of colour, outline and drop shadow. You do get better tools within the window for manipulating these controls than you do when you’re working with text items.

Information on the Pixelmator website in the forum/help site

I have seen within the Pixelmator forum that provides help to Pixelmator users, that there should be within the Quartz composer filters, a drop shadow filter. On my computer in Pixelmator, that is not visible. Fortunately, I do have the Noise Industries filters that I can use to create my drop shadows. I can recommend getting the FX Factory Filters / Pixelmator plugins, as it is easy to install and there are enough free filters included to make it worthwhile having. When you are creating your drop shadow for your painted line then you should make sure you get it correct and just the way that you want it. If you go back to the filter afterwards then you will find that you will just add a shadow to the object again, and also be adding a shadow to the shadow that you created the first time around.

If you have other objects that you want to have a shadow added to it then you will need to put them on their own separate layers, so that you can add that shadow. Trying to add another item to a layer that has already been manipulated by the drop shadow filter will not automatically have the same drop shadow applied to it and you will get more shadows than you require if you use the filter again.

Using Pixelmator 2 versus using other applications

While Pixelmator 2 is a big improvement over the previous version there is still a lot of work to do if it can be compared with the big boy on the block, which is Adobe Creative Suite. Usability of the interface has to be improved and standardised across the various tools in the application. Having vector shapes within the application is very useful but it should be made so that each object within a layer can have its own settings. For manipulation of text and shapes to create logos and other graphic design creations, then I would recommend the use of ArtText 2. With ArtText 2 you get the ability to add as many outlines to an object as you wish. You have the opportunity to manipulate text as a proper vector graphic on a node by node basis. Within ArtText 2 it is very easy to be able to add drop shadows to whatever objects you have in your design.

Pixelmator vs Acorn

Acorn is another app that does the bitmap editing thing on OSX and it is OK but I do prefer the interface of Pixelmator vs Acorn graphics editor look and feel. Acorn is good at the drop shadow and has tempted a few people across from Pixelmator drop shadow manipulation.

Pixelmator on OSX Lion

On OSX Lion Pixelmator windows don’t have to be strewn all over the place you can be very organised by going into the full screen mode that is offered by Lion. If you have a separate monitor you can also move some of the Pixelmator windows / tool boxes and so on, over on the second screen.

Although I have spent much of this article complaining about Pixelmator 2, I do think that it is a worthwhile application to have on your Mac, if you are any sort of a graphic artist. I would say though, that as it is not perfect, it is best used in conjunction with other applications. Pixelmator version 2 on its own is not quite good enough to be the only tool in your creative toolbox. I really do love using Pixelmator 2 and I think it has a superb, very Mac like interface, despite some of its failings and idiosyncrasies.

Go and get your FX Factory set of filters to enhance Pixelmator 2 . Here is a Quartz Composer drop shadow filter. Go and buy ArtText 2 also to do some really fancy logos. You can do a Pixelmator download from the Mac App Store and get your Pixelmator license to run it on all of your Mac computers. No there isn’t a Pixelmator for Windows – Go and buy a Mac. For photography work then you can do some photo editing in Aperture, but Pixelmator has more to offer for image manipulation so in the Pixelmator vs Aperture contest there is no contest, having both softwares is a great plan.

If you are a person that blogs, then it is a good idea to have the best and most efficient way to get your writing online. For quite a long time now I have been very happy with the MarsEdit blog posting software from the software company called Red Sweater. Before that I was using an application called Blogo and the main attraction for using that software was that it allowed me to post to a web service called ping.FM. It wasn’t quite good enough to do all I wanted for general posting to blogs though. I have not used that Mac blogging software for some time now and if you are looking for a blog application to buy right now, then it might be worth your while to also look at Blogo as well as MarsEdit.

Blog software download possibilities

If you are looking for blog publishing software then the first place to look is in the Mac App Store. Following that you may do as well with a Google search for blog software Mac. Also look through the Mac20Q website search for Mac blog software reviews. The Mac Store is a good option for getting your weblog software because you can put it onto more than one machine that you own. It is also very handy to have all of your software from one place for updating purposes. It is very easy to just open up the Mac App Store application once a week and see if anything needs updating. This is better than having to open an application in order to find if there are updates available.

Now you can blog Mac style with MarsEdit 3

So what do we need from a blog editor? For the most part, making a blog post is simplicity itself with text and one or two images, but other things to consider are the meta tags that you add to the post and also to any images you put in your blog posts. For example when you are adding images you have created in Pixelmator to your blog article, for SEO purposes it is a good idea to add the search term that you wish to be listed for in the title tag for the image. With MarsEdit it is easy to do this although it is necessary to make some adjustments within the default settings to get it to work exactly right. Once you have set it up within the MarsEdit Mac blog software, then it is very easy to have it work the way that you want, without having to think about it.

Editing your blog post in your Mac software for blogging

Within MarsEdit you have two choices for editing your blog posts in the blog editor. There is a rich text editor which is completely WYSIWYG, so that you can see exactly how your blog posts will look once they are published. Personally I prefer to use markdown to write my blog post and that would be a feature I would like to see in MarsEdit at some time. The way that I do it now is to write my blog posts in Dragon Dictate, which I then move into Scrivener. I use Scrivener for the editing because I just like the full-screen mode and it just feels better for editing the text after I have dictated it. I would dictate directly into Scrivener but unfortunately Dragon Dictate doesn’t let me do that successfully. No worries though, I don’t mind doing a little bit of copying and pasting, just so long as I have a good writing workflow.

After using Scrivener for Mac, I will then move the text into Textmate. The reason that Textmate is the app that I prefer to use for that part of the workflow, is because I use Keyboard Maestro shortcuts that work well in that application. I use it to put in links to other pages on my Mac OS X blog or any of the other blogs that I write for. With a couple of key strokes, I am able to create a markdown referenced link and the text is perfectly set up to be converted into HTML. Another reason for doing it that way is because I like the format of the HTML as it is converted out of Textmate.

The HTML formatted text is pasted into the MarsEdit blog application in the HTML editor. Now it is time for me to add the images to the blog post and even though I am using the advanced HTML editor within the Mac blog software of MarsEdit, I am still able to see how the post will look by using the web preview window. Either that or I could use a keyboard shortcut and swap briefly into the rich text editor of MarsEdit. I like being able to see the HTML code and also to be able to see the finished article at the same time. Within MarsEdit html you do have syntax highlighting with different colours for the attributes, keywords and tag structure which makes it easy to spot any syntax errors within your blog posts.

Adding pictures to your blog post in your favourite blog editor

There is built-in support for adding images to your blog posts within the MarsEdit Mac blogging software and I will look at that in a moment, but often I prefer to use the drag-and-drop method. Often I will add images that I have selected with a screen grab by using Skitch. This is particularly useful when I am adding annotations such as arrows, extra text or various shapes. Working with images to get them ready for publishing on the Mac 20 questions weblog using Skitch is handy, because I can crop images and resize them before I get anywhere near to the blog editor.

Using the MarsEdit media manager

To open up the media manager you can tap on the media icon in the toolbar and this gives you access to your various images in three main places. If you want to use images that all ready have been published to any of your blogs, then you can see all of them by tapping on the Published tab. Then if you wish you can filter down to specific blogs and then there are also search facilities allowing you to find images by name.

The next place that you can go looking for your images will be ‘On My Mac’. Once you select this tab within the Media Manager you have access to any images on your computer within whichever photo libraries you have, including iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom. You can also go searching on a folder by folder basis.

The other place to go looking for your images will be at Flickr.com. You do have to authorise MarsEdit to be able to use Flickr, but no worries as that is a very simple process and it will remain authorised until you do you de-authorise it.

From the Media Manager you can select an image on your Mac and have it uploaded to your blog. Generally you will do this when you are placing an image on a blog post and you can set the alignment, file name and the alt text as well as the size of the image for your blog posts. I would suggest that the best thing to do with regards the size of your images for your blog post, is to decide beforehand the size that you want. Better that you have the correct size before it arrives on your post. If you have images the right size, you will find that the webpage will download faster for your readers.

Dragging and dropping images into MarsEdit

Generally I found that this will work quite well, although on occasions I did have small difficulties. This was due to MarsEdit not realising where the cursor was and inserting a picture in a place where I didn’t want it. I have found that if when I click on a place with a cursor then hit the return key once or twice, then I don’t have the problem. The image goes where I want it to be.

Getting started with the MarsEdit blogger editor software

Setting up a new blog is pretty easy, you just put in the URL of your blog and MarsEdit will detect the settings for that blog. Either during that process or when you post your first weblog post, you will enter the username and password for your blog. That’s about it, after that, all you have to do is to write the words, get your pictures in there and publish.

MarsEdit – Easy to use Blog Editor for Mac

If you post a blog post without using MarsEdit, then you can use the refresh button in the toolbar of the Mac blogging application to have all of your blog posts in front of you. It is also possible for you to edit a post that you have already posted, even if you completed that post on the website. MarsEdit works well with WordPress blogs, I have also used it with Blogger.com. It will work with other blogging platforms too.

When you are posting a new blog post to your Mac software for blogging, MarsEdit, you can choose the category and also add tags. On my blog site I use the All In One SEO plug-in for WordPress and unfortunately I can’t access that from within MarsEdit. Even though I do have to go to the website to fill in the details for the SEO, I still prefer to use MarsEdit to do my blog posting. It is very easy within the application to split a blog post and edit the main part of it or the extended entry. If you are a podcaster also, you can add your details for your podcast using this blog publishing software.

Configurability of the blog application MarsEdit

When I add in a link to a blog post, I need to have two different types of link. If the link is to an internal page on the weblog then a straightforward HTML link is just fine. If I am linking to an external page from my blog, then I need to set it up so that it will open up in a new tab or a new page. Within MarsEdit I have been able to create formatting configurations that will allow me to have the right sort of HTML code for external links. It is also possible to edit the HTML5 code of the preview template in case you have specific settings on your blogging site and you wish to have the webpage preview look as much as possible like the real thing.

If there is some HTML code that you put in many of your the posts you can set up a mark up macro, so that with one click you can enter the code from within MarsEdit. One such use for this could be if you have specific code that you use for a pull quote. It is simple to create new HTML macros or to edit the macros that are already there. Not only that, but you can also assign keyboard shortcuts to these macros. You can have the macro either paste in a URL or ask you for one while the macro is in operation.

From MarsEdit you can set the status of the post from draft to published, you can set whether the comments are open or closed and whether you wish to accept trackbacks.

Don’t forget to look at the Wizardgold Mac20Q Channel on YouTube for videos showing how to do things with the Mac.

It is perfectly possible to use the inbuilt tools within OSX Lion to do your Mac screen capture. You can capture a full-screen and you can capture a section of the screen with using a marquee selection otherwise known as a crosshair snapshot. With Mac OSX Lion there are also the capabilities to capture screen recordings that you might perhaps use if you were to do a screencast. You would do this by opening up Quicktime. While it is superb that Apple did put these tools in for all the basic things of this nature that you might like to do with a screen capture or screenshots on Mac, for quite a few users there is going to be the need to use something a little bit more powerful.

Skitch for screenshot in Mac

For me there is only one application that is on my list for applications that will do screen grabs and that is Skitch. The Skitch application, which is now owned by Evernote has been for a long time, one of the applications which just has to be on any machine that I own or set up. I am constantly grabbing sections on screen, perhaps from a website and Skitch is perfect for this job, because of the extra tools you get. Being able to do quick annotations on an image that I have grabbed from my computer screen with Skitch is invaluable. I can draw freehand on top of an image or I can use tools to do straight lines, circles, squares and even arrows using Skitch. I would say that the tool I would use mostly would be the arrow tool closely followed by the text tool. It is really very handy to be able to use the arrow tool and then add text to label the point that I wish to make.

Screen shot in Mac – Different types of OSX screenshot

I use the keyboard shortcut of Shift Command 5 to use the crosshair snap tool in Skitch. Or if I wished to snap the whole of the screen I would use Shift Command 6. At present those are the only ones that I have set up a keyboard shortcuts for, but I can also in Skitch do a snap from Safari or a snap from a link. Then there is also the frame snapshot or a cam snapshot. The big limitation with Skitch as I see it is that if you want to combine more than one image then you need to use another application. For me that is not a problem as I have Pixelmator version 2 on my computer. Pixelmator is an inexpensive bitmap editing application for the Mac which will do all of the requirements of a normal user (Up to what you might call a Prosumer.). It would be quite unnecessary to pay the exorbitant amount of money required to buy any Adobe products such as PhotoShop.

Screen capture on Mac using the iSight camera

If you do a screenshot from the iSight camera on your Mac you will be disappointed to see that the size that Skitch gives you is only 160 pixels by 120 pixels. The camera is capable of much better in terms of resolution than that. I was so surprised at the size of the snap from the iSight camera that I checked in the preferences for Skitch to see if there was any possibility of getting a larger snap from the camera, but it looks like there isn’t. And then I found that there is a button to the bottom left-hand corner of the Skitch window, when I clicked on that, I was shown the full-size image of the capture. Obviously I was doing something wrong or just didn’t understand exactly how the application worked with the snapshots from the iSight camera.

If you don’t like your OSX screenshot annotations you can rub them out.

There is a way of erasing items that you have put onto your picture. So if you have put an arrow on there or a line and you decide you don’t want it then you can rub it out or just get rid of a part of it. With the text tool you can change the font and the colour of the text and you may also choose whether to have an outline and or a drop shadow. One of the most used tools for me that is included with Skitch is the resize tool. I will use this often to reduce the size of an image that I have captured so that it will fit better onto a web page for me.

Then there is ScreenFlow to capture video from screen

ScreenFlow is a marvellous application which lets me make screencasts that I can post to YouTube. Not only can you capture video from screen in the Mac OSX, but you can also edit that video with surprising ease. Even though I have Final Cut Pro 10 and enjoy using that application, I do quite often do the editing of a screencast in ScreenFlow. It is very easy indeed to be able to insert transitions, video actions, callouts, add shapes and also add text within this screencasting application. The cost to buy ScreenFlow is $99, but you do get many more features and benefits from using ScreenFlow over using the built-in Mac OS X Lion tools that you would use to capture video from screen. At least if you only want to do simple screen capture on Mac computers, of simple flat non-video images then using Skitch is a no-brainer with it being free.

Learn how to use ScreenFlow from my YouTube screencasts

Go to the YouTube Mac20Q – Wizardgold channel and have a look at the screencasts I have published showing how to use and get the best from ScreenFlow.

I have been using ScreenFlow for Mac for some time now and I was very pleased with the updates that I found in the latest version, version 3 of ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow is without a doubt the best screen recording software for the Mac. The ScreenFlow download is made by Telestream, who also make other good video software such as Videocue. Screen recording software is what you need for creating those screencasts in which you show your viewers how to do things with whichever software you want to show off.

ScreenFlow is also useful for making a copy of videos. In my case I have downloaded video from the BBC iPlayer and I would prefer to watch it on my television rather than on my computer. The best way for me to be able to do this is to play the recorded video on the computer and record it using ScreenFlow. I can then push the video out to my Mac Mini which I have connected to the television. You could do something similar if you had an Apple TV which is connected to your iTunes.

ScreenFlow for Mac – Editing video in ScreenFlow

Capturing the video from your computer is very easy once you have used the configuration heads up display to say which screen you want to record from. You can also specify if you want to record from your iSight camera in your Mac, very handy if you want to appear in your screencast video on YouTube. Then you also are able to choose whether you want to record the computer audio and say which of your microphones you want to record from for the voice-over.

When you have captured your video in ScreenFlow for Mac you will want to decide whether to show the full screen which has been captured or just part of your desktop. I have a very large 27 inch iMac monitor and depending on the video, I might want to just record a small part of that. If I decide that I want to show a small part because it is enough for that application I am demonstrating, then I will set the application to fit within 1280 x 720 pixels. I have an application called Mercury Mover which will create an application window of just the right size. Sometimes I will set it to record a video at 1600 x 900 if I need more space to show that application. When I get into ScreenFlow with this full screen video, I can then use the crop tool to set the size of the exported video to the exact size of 1280 x 720. On the other hand there are occasions when I would leave it at the full-screen setting and then when I export I would set it to export to 50% of the working size which gives me the correct size for my videos that I send to YouTube.

How to use ScreenFlow on Mac

When your video has been captured you have the option of sending it to a new document or adding to a document that you have open already. If you are adding the video and audio captures to a new document, then that video and audio will also be placed on the timeline ready to start editing. One of the features that I use most frequently, is the one where I set in points and out points for areas of video that I want to cut out of the timeline. After setting the area I wish to delete I can press command backspace to do a ripple delete.

When you use video actions within the ScreenFlow for Mac application you can create an animation using the settings for the video. The animation could be a change in size or opacity or you can set the position, rotation, saturation brightness or contrast. Also, there is no reason why you can’t combine a number of the settings such as, where you could have an object spinning into the screen with adjustments to opacity and scale happening at the same time. In this way it is possible for you to create your own transitions that you can apply to either video or still images. Within the same settings you are also able to set a reflection or a shadow.

When you use video actions within the ScreenFlow for Mac application you can create an animation using the settings for the video. The animation could be a change in size or opacity or you can set the position, rotation, saturation brightness or contrast. Also, there is no reason why you can’t combine a number of the settings such as, where you could have an object spinning into the screen with adjustments to opacity and scale happening at the same time. In this way it is possible for you to create your own transitions that you can apply to either video or still images. Within the same settings you are also able to set a reflection or a shadow.

The available tools in ScreenFlow for Mac

In the tool section of ScreenFlow for Mac you have seven tabs to choose from when you are editing your video. The first is the video properties and it is within that tab that you are able to add your video actions. The next one is the audio properties. Within the audio properties you can add an action to the audio which will change the volume of the audio over a period, allowing you to create either a fade in or a fade out. Then you have the screen recording properties and there you are able to add screen recording actions which will show a click effect, zoom the pointer, add sounds to clicks and you may also show keys that have been pressed on the keyboard.

Calling out from ScreenFlow

The next tab is for the callout properties. You will use a callout if you want to highlight a certain part of your application. I most often use this to select a certain area and zoom it up to make it bigger. Most often this is when I am showing a mouse click or if I am showing a menu item that only takes a small part of the screen normally. In this latest version of ScreenFlow for Mac, version 3, I like the fact that I can now set to have a callout, which I can have as a default. It would be nice if in the next version there is the option to save multiple default callouts. I like to set my own default to have a reasonable amount of border and zoom. I prefer to have the opacity of the background set to around 40 or 50% and usually with a small amount of blurring. I don’t tend to use the shadow or the outline, but I do like to set the feather to make a softer highlight. The other setting that I change within the callout properties would be the build setting for the in duration and the out duration. Those duration settings make the callout arrive more smoothly in the video.

Annotations properties a new feature for ScreenFlow 3

From the annotations tab in the ScreenFlow tools area it is possible to add arrows and lines as well as rectangles, either filled or open and also an ellipse or a circle. Any of these annotation objects can have a thickness and a shadow and you may also set the colour of the object or of the outline of the object. There are only a small number of line end points that can be used, I would hope that this would increase in the next version of ScreenFlow.

Text annotations within ScreenFlow

For the most part with ScreenFlow I tend to set up text to occur within images that I have worked on within Art Text 2 or Pixelmator 2, as it is possible for me to make those bits of text looking more attractive by using those applications. There are occasions though where I just need a small area of text and I can use the text properties tab in ScreenFlow to add this text. Within this area I can set the font, the size and the alignment for the text. It is also possible to set whether you want an outline around the text and also a backdrop for that text. Both for the text itself or for the backdrop you can choose from either a solid colour or a picture. When you are setting the backdrop for the text, you get a rectangle and you may set rounded corners of the rectangle and also whether you require a margin. That margin will effectively set the size of the text box. For being able to work quickly, it is also super that it is available within this text properties tab to make yourself a default text setting.

The media tab for ScreenFlow Mac

It is in this area that you can select the video and audio that you have recorded, that you want to drag and drop into your timeline. You can get the media into this ScreenFlow media bin by dragging and dropping it in there or you can use the add media button. You may also add still images to this area. There is a button for adding a recording and I would tend to generally use this if I needed to record some extra audio for a voice-over, but I can also use this button for starting a new screen recording. When you tap on this button you get a number of options for creating new media for your screencast.

An overview of the screen recording For the Mac – ScreenFlow

It was indeed, a fortunate day when Don McAllister of screencasts online told me about ScreenFlow for the Mac. That was about three years ago and I have been using it ever since to create screencasts of my own for Mac 20 questions. I did have two other screen capture applications that I used before ScreenFlow and have not touched either them since getting ScreenFlow.

The editing capabilities of ScreenFlow are easy-to-use and intuitive, so much so, that when my wife wanted to do some video editing that would be quicker and easier if I started her off with ScreenFlow. It is possible for you to open up an empty ScreenFlow document and add video clips from a camcorder, so it is not just for something you have recorded off your computer. It is a piece of cake to add transitions or to create Ken Burns type of animations and when it is time to export your finished video, that part of the application also works very well indeed. The finished quality of the video that is exported out from the application is excellent.

While it is possible to have many tracks within your ScreenFlow documents there is only so much that you can do with ScreenFlow. If you need to have blend layers or other fancy professional video effects then you would need to start looking to Final Cut Pro X. iMovie is a good Mac video editor, but if you like to have a proper timeline and don’t want to get Final Cut then using ScreenFlow would be a good option. There is a Screenflow free 30 day trial and then you can buy the Screenflow serial

Exporting out from ScreenFlow

You can go to the file menu in ScreenFlow and choose to export your finished video. It will be exported out and will be able to be opened in QuickTime. You can adjust settings for the exported video and the included audio within the video file. I do find it annoying that the default setting for the size of the video is set at 50% of the file size that you have been working at. While is okay if I’m working with a full size recording, if I have set the crop of the video to the size I want of 1280 x 720 then, I have to change that to the actual size I need.

You can export out of ScreenFlow 3 to two of the main video sharing sites, that is YouTube and Vimeo and while exporting direct into YouTube I have had mixed success. There have been exports into YouTube that have worked perfectly well and others that have stalled at around the 90% mark. Lately I have found I prefer to export to my own computer and then use the YouTube loader. That does mean having to split the process into export and then upload but I have found that it works better that way. Here at Mac20Q we are complete fans of ScreenFlow and heartily recommend ScreenFlow vs Camtasia or any of the other screen capture software. Go now to the Wizardgold Mac20Q channel on YouTube and have a look at the other videos showing how to use ScreenFlow. There is no Screenflow for Windows – Buy a Mac! Here is the first one of the ScreenFlow tutorials.

Getting down and dirty using Hype HTML 5 web creator

Hype is the extremely easy to use Mac application for creating HTML 5 webpages. On account of the fact that Flash is not much longer for this world, well in particular not really going to be for this world of mobile computing, we need to get into HTML 5 coding for our webpages. I bought this Hype html 5 app from the Mac App Store and I didn’t really get doing much with it initially. The application was in a very early stage and has needed to have a couple of upgrades to bring it up to a state where it was much more usable and fully functional. Yesterday I decided that is was high time that I created a web page or two using the Hype html 5 editor application.

Hype HTML 5 quick and easy to get creative

To get started, you don’t even have to learn html 5. The application gives you a nice canvas to begin with to add your web page elements. Below that canvas you get the timeline. In some ways creating HTML 5 webpages using Hype is a little bit like using a video or animation application, like Motion or After Effects. One of the things that makes Hype so easy to use is the fact that you can record what you do on the screen and it will automatically create keyframes for you. So if for example, you choose and click on an element, after you have hit the record button, then move the play head to 3 seconds down the timeline and change the element in some way or other, Hype will create the keyframes and save your animation. All you have to do then, is to turn off the record feature, move the play head to the start of the timeline and press play to see your webpage element do its stuff. You have your first html 5 demo made without having to do any coding.

Clean and simple working space in Hype

The application is deceptive at first, in that due to the clean and well-designed working space, you don’t get to see all of the things that you can do with Hype at first a look. For instance, when you’re looking at your object in the timeline and you use the disclosure triangle to see all of the things that you can set and adjust as part of your animation you see just five options. These are going to be the most used options of opacity, and the four measurements that determine the size and position of your element. If you look at the right hand side of that area though, you also see a huge long list of other things that can be set and changed with the animation. In there you have everything from inner HTML, rotation, word spacing and even the angle of the gradient that you’ve used.

What sort of HTML 5 elements can you add to a Hype webpage

You have a button on the toolbar at the top and from there you can choose from a drop-down list. In the list you have boxes, text, video, two types of button and images. When you have the text in the text box you can make whatever changes to it necessary. Very easy to use the handles of the text box to change the size of it and to adjust to position it on the page, where you want it. Not only that, but you can also select text or portions of your text and alter the formatting to suit your design.

Giving your buttons created within Hype, that little something extra

You can have a button whatever size you like and format the text on the button to suit your design also on your html 5 page. You can also give the text on the button a shadow to make it stand out from the surface of the button. When you have finished altering the text so that it looks spot on, you can then start work on the actual shape of the button. You may add an outline to the button and also change the look of the outline. There are a number of styles of outline you can choose from. Maybe have a dashed outline or one that gives the illusion of a ridge. Apart from being able to have a flat colour on your button you can also have a gradient which might a simple gradient going from one colour to another. Then again you might choose to have an image created in Pixelmator 2 as a background for your button.

Within a web page, if you’re using a button then why not use an image from ArtText 2. You can make it more obvious to the user that it was a button by having the button change its background when you hover over it. So you could do this where it changes from one image to another for its background, or go from one colour to another colour. It is quite handy that the facility is built-in to put a drop shadow onto your buttons although you will see a warning to say that those drop shadows are not supported in Internet Explorer.

Beautiful looking webpages

While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is easy to see that with this Hype the Mac HTML 5 editing application you can create some really very nice looking websites. As is often the case with design, less is more and if you don’t overdo it with the elements and movement or animation on the page, then you will have something that is both great looking and effective as a webpage.

The Hype HTML 5 editor can be used for making complete webpages or can be used to design an element to go within another website or web page, that you have already designed. If you want to put it into your other webpage then you copy the three lines of code from the HTML that is produced by Hype and you paste it into your other webpage. The only other thing that you have to do, is to make sure that the resource folder is placed in the same folder as your webpage.

By placing the Hype HTML 5 code into another web page you could use hype as a way to have animated banners for your webpage. If you look in the gallery on the website for Hype you will get more ideas about how you could use hype to create elements for your websites. What would be a nice feature in a later version of Hype would be to have templates that you could use, that would have a drag-and-drop area so that you could drop in images or text. With such a feature it would be possible to quickly create popular types of features very easily and with a minimum of fuss. It is still early days with this application and certainly I would expect it to get more proficient as time goes by.

What is missing from Hype?

Another thing that I find is a glaring omission within this early version of Hype the HTML 5 editor for Mac, is the ability to add audio to your webpage. When you use the insert elements drop down list you have your text, buttons, images and even video and I just find it amazing that audio has not been included within that list. One of the problems with including audio using HTML 5 is that you do need to have your audio in either two or three versions to cover all of the web browsers. Easy to make the audio all the versions that you need in AmadeusPro 2.

Hyped timelines

It is possible with Hype to create numerous timelines and with this you could have your main timeline which works across the whole of the webpage. Then there could be other timelines which only works when a certain button is pressed and only on a specific element within the design. With this feature and your imagination you could create webpages that are interactive as well as animated. You could possibly have your main timeline which gives you the animation that happens when the page is first opened to put things into place. Then there could be secondary timelines which cause things to happen when the mouse hovers over a button or an image. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to make some amazing looking webpages with this Mac HTML 5 editor.

Video three of the tutorial series to finish things off with the making of the animated banner.

Editing your sound files using Amadeus Pro 2

If you are podcaster, then you’re undoubtedly going to want to edit your sound files when you are making recordings. You do have a number of choices for applications to do audio editing for Mac and if you are a Mac user then most probably, you will start by using Garageband. There are advantages to using Garageband in that if you want to make the enhanced podcasts with artwork embedded into the podcast and chapters, then Garageband is just the job for that. If you are using other systems or if you are using a Mac and don’t like using Garageband for editing your audio for the podcast then quite likely you might look at Audacity. This is a free audio editing software that will work across all platforms. It’s been awhile since I tried it and it may have improved, but the last time I looked there were a couple of things I didn’t like about it. The application I prefer to use for professional audio editing software is Amadeus Pro Mac. What is Amadeus Mac audio software.

Amadeus Amadeus Audio – Upgrades and the Mac App Store

I have used Amadeus Pro to make more than 200 podcasts. I’ve Amadeus software used it to edit the audio for video podcasts, as well as for the audio podcasts. I haven’t made so many podcasts this year and so I’ve not had the pleasure of using the latest version of Amadeus Pro, version 2 quite so often to be able to see what improvements have been made. Since Amadeus Pro has been made available in the Mac App Store with version 2, I see that is has also gone up in price, so now it is time to have a look and see what actual improvements we have. Does the App still look like great value. With other applications that have become available in the Mac App Store, quite often we have seen a decrease in price rather than an increase. With Amadeus Pro, audio editing software for Mac,  even at the new price of $60 it is still a bargain and good value for money for what it does.

The scheduler feature

It is now possible to tell Amadeus Pro audio edit software to quit and to launch automatically later, to start recording at a specific time and date. This could be very handy if you want to record an Internet radio program on at a specific time or perhaps there is a webinar that is taking place while you are out. You can set the time and date plus the duration and see whether you want to repeat the scheduled recording or not. You may say where you want the file to be saved to and the format you would like the recording to be made in. That could be in the native Amadeus Pro format, MP3, a wave file or any of the other file types possible within Amadeus Pro. The source for the recording can be from the line in, the internal microphone or if you have Soundflower installed, then you could set it so that it will record from whichever application you have on your computer.

Splitting Tracks on the same timeline

Now we can split tracks into multiple clips on the same timeline. I think this is a very big change for Amadeus audio editor Mac and makes it work in a way that people might be used to working with in Garageband. What I used to do before was to insert areas of silence in between sound clips so that they were in the right position within the overall sound file. So this new feature of the multiple clips will be very valuable to me for organising sounds within a podcast. I can see that I will be using it an awful lot in this audio editing software Mac.

Smart editing – A new feature of Amadeus Pro 2

There is a new thing called smart editing which will smooth out your sound for you. The smart editing feature is switched on by default, but you can switch it off if required. When you copy a clip of sound, the application will copy a slightly larger piece. Then when you past it into another sound clip, the slight extra that was copied is used to create a smooth cross fade between the copied sound and the recipient sound. Without this smooth editing you can get a crack sound which is a result of a discontinuity in the waveform.

Audio Editing Mac – In the version before version 2 of Amadeus Pro, when I selected a portion of sound to copy or cut I would use the extend to crossing function in the selection menu. By doing this I would ensure that I didn’t have any artefacts introduced when pasting into the track where I wanted it to go. With smart editing in version 2, I won’t need to use the extend to crossing function. That function is still there for use at times when you might have the smart editing turned off.

Editing soundtracks in movie files

Previously with Amadeus Pro software audio editing, if I took a .MOV file, a movie file, to edit the sound, then I would first have to make a copy of the movie file because editing the sound would strip out the video. I have made a test of this new feature, editing the sound in a movie video file. I deleted sections of the sound from the video and I was still able to open up the video file in QuickTime. It is possible that I would have messed up the timings by deleting sections of sound. For example in a video of a person talking then the lip sync following that edit point might have been messed up. At least the video still is in a working video format, following the sound edit and steps can be taken during the editing of the sound to keep the synchronisation working properly.

Other improvements to Amadeus Pro

• Real-time audio effects.
• Automatic start or end of recording triggered by a volume change.
• Direct recording from Internet streams.
• Improved level meters.
• MP3 and M4a / AAC files are not re-encoded if only the meta data is changed.
• Amadeus Pro is fully 64-bit if you’re using in Snow Leopard or later.
• Multiband denoising.

Overview of version 2 of Amadeus Pro

Now that Amadeus Pro, the Mac audio editing software is functioning properly on OSX Lion for me, I am more than happy to recommend Amadeus Pro for podcast editing. It is an excellent audio editor and the new features that are included in this latest version, certainly make it well worth the money, $60 in the Mac App Store. The non-destruction of the video in movie files while editing sound in Amadeus Pro is excellent as an addition to the software. The ability to have multiple clips on a single timeline will be extremely useful for when you want to add jingles and bumpers to your podcast. Smart editing will help you ensure that you get the best quality from your sound editing. It is very useful now to have the graphical interpretation of your sound wave files shown in the waveform in the timeline. Overall I would say that Amadeus Pro is an excellent tool to have in your arsenal of sound editing software. In fact, it might be the only sound editing software that you need if you don’t need to make the enhanced podcasts. If you are looking to do some audio recording Mac style then you can’t go wrong with Amadeus Pro from Hairersoft.

If you are a Mac user of any sort, then at some point in time it is quite likely that you are going to want to make for yourself a logo, or be asked by someone else to make a logo. How do you go about it if you want to create your own logo? It is not absolutely necessary that you spend hundreds of pounds or dollars to buy the latest Photoshop from Adobe. There are a number of very inexpensive graphics applications that you can use as logo maker software. Applications such as Pixelmator, Vector Designer, Picturesque, Acorn, the free one Gimp or my favourite, Art Text 2.

Less expensive alternatives to photoshop

One of the reasons that you will not necessarily want to buy software like Photoshop is that an application like that is more for the professional, who will be using it on a daily basis. Pixelmator is the alternative to Photoshop that is extremely affordable and you can get it from the Mac App Store. I have tried out Acorn and Picturesque, but Pixelmator 2 is the bitmap graphics app that gets my recommendation. This latest version also has a certain amount of vector graphics functionality, which is helpful but by no means any competition to Illustrator.

Art Text 2 is a specialist logo creator software

The output from Art Text 2 is a bitmap but you can do some really fancy effects with your text within the program while it is still a vector graphic. The ability to do this within Art Text 2, means that when you do export out from Art Text 2 you do get very good quality bitmap images. I do find that Art Text 2 does have an interface that is a little idiosyncratic or strange. When you get used to it though, you will be able to quickly create your own logo. If you want to know how to make a logo, I would suggest that you use this application, especially if you want to end up with a logo that is good looking and of professional quality.

Art Text 2 the best logo design software for the Mac

When you first open the application you get to look in the template gallery. This is a very good way to start your design as you can take any of the parts of the design and change them to suit your own logo. You may choose from a number of templates for headings, buttons, icons and of course logos. You might select a design which has a certain number of shapes or design elements contained within that you can use. You can delete any parts that you don’t want and do some editing with any items that need some work.

A century of headings in the gallery

Many of the 100 templates in the heading section you could easily use as a starting point for your own logo. The large creative variety available within the template for headings give you different sorts of foreground elements in terms of shapes and treatments of text. There are also a number of backgrounds which you could use in this logo creator software. If you jump into this logo maker software not having any idea of the logo that you would like to see, then looking through these templates is certain to stimulate your creativity.

But there is more in Art Text2

When you double click on the text that you have entered within Art Text 2, up pops a layer content editing box. This is where you type in the text that you actually want to use or choose to use a shape instead. You have tabs for shapes, text, icons and access to the Finder. The other tab is called custom, within this custom tab you will see text and shapes that you have customised while using this logo design software. This is where the Art Text 2 gets really interesting, in the bottom right-hand corner you will see an edit button. Click on this edit button and you can edit any shape you have chosen including the shapes that are text. I could for instance take a letter N and choose some of the nodes that make up the shape and pull them in whichever direction I wish. With this it is really easy to change any text and turn it into almost any other shape.

Logo design software layers

With Art Text 2 you do get layers that you can use if you want to have a complicated design. You also get the blending modes when one layer is on top of another, that you would get in an application like Pixelmator 2. You do get some facilities such as union, subtract, intersect and join. These are operations more specific to vector design ways of working. Also within these layer settings, you can also split a word into letters or extract a letter.

There have been a couple of occasions where I have created something in Art Text 2, copied it and pasted it into another application and the sizes have been off. Not too large a problem but I have had to find another way round that workflow. You can export out as a TIFF file, a JPEG, a PNG file, a PDF or a GIF and surprisingly also as an EPS file. I have not tried that yet, but I would expect that to be a vector version of your design.

I wouldn’t use this application for general photo editing or bitmap editing work, but it is a brilliant application to have in my toolbox for editing graphics. When the emphasis is on creating a logo, then Art Text 2 is the best.

I was delighted to get the new app SCO Tutor for Lion to review from Don McAllister on account of the fact that I met the bloke a couple of times and he is a really good guy. He does some really excellent tutorials for Mac users that he produces every week. Most tutorials go to members because Don does this for a living, but he does make one tutorial available to the great unwashed of the Mac community each month. The SCO Tutor for Lion is a video series which highlights all the new things in Mac OS X Lion. Well done Don! What a super idea.

Doing a video series about Lion, seems like a very good idea to me because of some of the perceived Mac OS X Lion problems. I have seen in Mac news and heard on a number of Mac podcasts that there are a number of people that are not so keen on the latest big cat from Apple. Instead of embracing change and the new and shiny there are some Mac users that are opting to stay with previous versions of the operating system mostly with Snow Leopard and one or two with the Mac OS X Leopard. I have been using OS X Lion since it became available and not really had any problems with it myself. There have been a number of changes that may seem a little drastic because they enforce a new way of doing things and maybe that is what has caused some of the resistance. Is OSX Lion the Vista of the Mac operating systems?

SCO Tutor for Lion a timely product

So given that there is this resistance to Lion, this video series explaining all of the new things within the latest operating system should be very successful for our friend Don in Liverpool. Certainly Apple are not going to move backwards with their operating system development and all new computers from Apple do have Lion installed. Old users of previous operating systems from Apple will eventually gets moved towards the latest and greatest and Don’s explanations will have some effect I think in helping people to move forward. There are some handy features in Lion. When you see what you get then I say, move on and get over it!

Top quality video tuition

When you open up the application you go straight into viewing the introduction to the video and the topic of OS X Lion. When you mouseover the top of the video you will see the usual video controls and to the right of those you’ll see a couple of extra buttons. The first button takes you to the menu system and on my first look at the menu system, seeing the topics covered – I was amazed to see such a long list. There are 15 chapters in total covering just about everything you are likely to need to help you with your conversion to Lion.

I have been using Lion on a daily basis for a few months already and after only a few minutes using Don’s SCO tutor for Lion, I had already learned two new things. I was able to pause the video and I went into Safari browser and also had a try in the Chrome browser of a double tap with three fingers. I really hadn’t realised before that doing that sort of tapping on my Apple Magic Trackpad with the cursor over a word, would give me direct access to the dictionary and thesaurus. I can see that I will have to make one or two notes as I watch these videos of all the new things as I discover them. Of course the other good thing about having tuition like this in a video is the fact that you can watch a video more than once. In fact in the video controls there is a button you can click to take you back 30 seconds for a quick repeat. How handy is that, then? In the bottom right-hand corner of these video viewing controls you may also change the speed of the playback of the video. You can go from half speed, three-quarter speed on through to double speed. Personally I think it is more useful to use the go back 30 seconds and to use that in conjunction with the pause button. It would have been good if the pitch of Don’s voice could have been changed to suit the faster or slower speeds.

Don gets a universal translator or a Rosetta Stone

Don speaks very clearly in his Liverpool accent, although he must come from the posh part of Liverpool. He doesn’t have the accent of Cilla Black or John Bishop. In any case for those that English is not the first language, there are choices available for subtitles in five different languages. You have subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Don is obviously going for world domination here. I can imagine him sitting in his large leather office chair with a large white cat on his lap. He is stroking the large white cat and saying things like “No Mr Bond I expect you to die. – Now, now then… “ Followed by a typical arch-villain evil laugh. Just joking Don, honest…

Great value for money – Start learning about Lion

There are 60 topics covered in these videos and is quite likely that it will cover most, if not all you need to be convinced to upgrade to the latest operating system from Apple, the king of the jungle. The SCO tutor for Lion is well worth getting and a steal at only £3.99. Even if you have already been using Lion then you may well still get some mileage from these videos from the screencast guy Don McAllister. As I already mentioned I learned two new things in the first five minutes of watching and I fully expect to learn more about Lion as I watch the rest of the series. Nice one Don – Very good video tutorial product about OXS Lion.

Now that I have finished working on NaNoWriMo, that took up quite a lot of my November, I can get back into creating web content using my 27 inch iMac. This morning I created a movie using ScreenFlow, which has to be the best screen recording software for the Mac. I have lately been using Google Chrome as my web browser and I think it is a marvellous application and it gets even better when you add extensions to increase its functionality. The use of ScreenFlow, Google Chrome and another application called Keyboard Maestro, is really what makes using a Mac such fun. Every Apple owner could be having fun with Keyboard Maestro, it is not just for the Mac insider users.

The Evernote Google Chrome extension

I have installed an extension into Google Chrome that allow me to clip either whole pages or sections of text and images have them put into Evernote. Evernote is what I use to collect all sorts of information from the web pages I visit. I know that some people like to use Instapaper for this, but for me, Evernote is just perfect. The extension also will do a search through my Evernote captured notes at the same time as it searches using the Google.com webpage. That is quite a useful facility, to be able to easily see previous notes

Amplification of Web Content

Another extension tool I use an awful lot in Google Chrome is Amplify. Amplify is a web service which allows me to share either my own content that I post to my websites, or content that I have found on other websites, I just want to tell my followers about. I can share something to about 15 sites very easily, I only have to add a title and a bit of a description and I am done.

In Chrome I also have an extension for Bit.ly. This allows me to create short URLs that I can track the usage of. As you can imagine, for a content creator it is important to know which promotion tools for telling the world about the articles I write, are working the best. Bit.ly also gives you a QR code for each URL that you shorten using the service. Maybe I will get a T-shirt with a QR code printed on it one of these days.

Letting it all hang out

Another super little extension is called Hangout Canopy. What this extension does is to allow me with one click to be able to see the hangouts that are taking place in Google plus in real-time, as in right now. After clicking the button, I see list of hangouts and it is very simple to click and join any hangout that takes my fancy. There is also a button within this drop-down extension which allows me to create my own hangout. I don’t tend to do the hangouts very often, because I have such a poor Internet connection. I get less than 1 MB down and only around 200 kb going out.

Listening to podcasts for application suggestions

During the week I was listening to the Mac Power Users podcast. This podcast is run by David Sparks and Katie Floyd and originally when it first started was far too insipid to be properly suited to power users. It has got better over time and in the latest episode they were talking about a tool called Keyboard Maestro. While listening to it, I did wonder if Keyboard Maestro really was going to be useful or not, seeing as we have AppleScript and Automator is available within OS X Lion. I was able to download a trial version of the software and I have been able to find a use for it. Perhaps I would still have not bought the application except for the fact that there was a discount code available from the Mac Power Users podcast which brought the price down by 20%. This made the application good value for what I wanted to do with it.

Automating your Apple experience

I have in the past tried to use Automator and I also looked at AppleScript and one of the things that Automator is not very good at, is recording what you do and being able to play it back. So far with Keyboard Maestro, I have found it to be much better at recording keystrokes and mouse clicks. It also has a range of actions that can be used within macros that work across applications. As you would expect I do an awful lot of work with text and there are a number of things that I would like to be able to automate, in order to save myself time. Simple things such as when I export a list of keywords from Keyword Strategy, I need to take it so that they are changed from being each keyword in a line by itself to being separated by commas in one single line. I have been able to create a macro which lets me do that with a hot key, rather than having to deal with it in a very tedious way. It is also possible to have Keyboard Maestro use automations created in Automator and AppleScript as well as with other programming languages such as Perl.

Automating with Keyboard Maestro and using Markdown

Keyboard Maestro lets you bring in macros completed by other people and I was able to find one which helps me to do some markdown text manipulation. I had already been using an automation technique within Textmate to make a reference link with Markdown, but this new way of doing it with Keyboard Maestro is even faster and more convenient. It takes the URL from the Safari web browser and puts it into the correct place at the end of the document in TextMate and presents me with a dialogue for a name for the reference. It works a treat and I could also use it in other applications in which I could write using the Markdown syntax. You can find out more about Markdown by looking at the John Gruber website, Daring Fireball. The reason that you should be using markdown or multi-markdown is because of the longevity of the syntax. Markdown uses simple plaintext without any weird proprietary codes or formatting, that might work this year and not next year. Anything you write with Markdown now will be available to be read in any text type editor in perpetuity.

Other Markdown Editors coming

There are a number of text editors that are becoming available for both the iPad and also for use on the Mac, that allow you more easily to write in Markdown and also give you an instant view of what the Markdown text looks like when converted to HTML. At the moment I am using an application called Marked in conjunction with either Dragon Dictate or Text Mate. There are other applications such as iA Writer, which are fairly new on the scene and do a good job of Markdown editing, as well as showing you how you getting on while you’re doing it.