soundingblue

Final Cut Studio 2.0.1 now supports AVCHD in Final Cut Pro 6. However, if you’re using a PowerPC Mac, you’re shit out of luck as this only works on Intel Macs.

OS X 10.4.9 has improved support for many Nokia phones but if you find that the model you have is not supported, check out the Nokia Europe page where plugins for the E50, E60, E61, E61i, E65, E70, E76, N93i, N95 can be downloaded.

After yesterday’s Boot Camp excitement, I tried installing Parallela Workstation today. This will also allow me to install Windows on an Intel Mac, but instead of having to reboot into Windows, Parallels Workstation works just like VirtualPC, you run Windows within a virtual machine environment from within OS X.

The advantage over the solution offered by Apple? No need to reboot your system. This will be handy if I want to fire up Windows just to run a quick application or to lodge my tax returns. Parallels Workstation also supports other flavour of Windows and Linux.

Since it runs in a virtual environment from within OS X, the performance is far from running Windows natively on the machine using Apple’s solution. However, the performance is still very good. On a dual core Intel iMac 1.83Ghz with 512 MB of RAM, Windows XP is still very usable. I have not installed any programs so far, but general OS navigation, opening files and web browsing using Internet Explorer have been very pleasant so far.

Apple announces Boot Camp today. Now booting into WinXP on an Intel Mac is possible and officially sanctioned by Apple. Smart move this one. With the possibility of booting into Windows, Apple’s hardware sales will just sky rocket.

The guys here at work were excited. We started installing WinXP using Boot Camp on 17″ Intel iMac with a 1.83 Ghz processor and 512 MB of RAM. The installation process was very painless. This Mac is fresh out of the box, so we updated it to 10.4.6, downloaded Boot Camp and followed the instructions in the readme. About less than An hour later, WinXP was booting up. I timed it and from the moment of the Mac start-up chime to the Windows desktop appearing, it took 45 secs. The first thing we installed? An anti-virus.

I found this somewhere but can’t remember the source. This allows you to do a software update via Terminal. The plus? No more windows prompting you to restart your Mac.

sudo softwareupdate -i -a

The problem with PDFs is that when you get a form online, it’s seldom editable, which means that you’ll have to print it out, fill it in, scan it back to your computer before e-mailing it back.

Formulate is a neat freeware that solves this problem. You load in a PDF, type what you want in a little text field at the bottom of the page and then click on the PDF where you want the text to appear and voila, instant neatness.

[via FreeMacWare]

Technorati Tags: freeware, osx, pdf

Yes! I managed to get Quicktime’s Sequence Grabber working in my application. It’s not rocket science, but coming from someone who has no formal programming training, I’m mighty proud of myself. Right now, it works only in preview mode and draws the video input of the firewire camera to an NSQuickDrawView in my Cocoa application. The next step is to figure out how to save the movie as well as implement some sort of dialog box to control the input source. I don’t think I can access the Quicktime settings dialog box from Cocoa so I’ll probably have to do some more reading up on Carbon event handling.

Programming is more fun when you actually get somewhere.

iLounge writes about iShop 21, one of the latest Apple retailers in Singapore. Unforuntately, I’m unable to find a link to their site. Think my Googling skills need a bit more polish. Personally, I have never had good experiences with the larger scaled retailers, preferring small ones with more personal service (like SGL Marketing in Sim Lim Square), however, reviews for iShop 21’s service seem pretty ok.

If I’m back in Singapore, I would defintely drop by to have a look.

Finally, Goole Earth comes to OS X. There’s a pre-release floating arounding. More about it at UNEASYsilence.

Flurry is nice but here are some others you might want to check out

1. Soundstream reacts to your Mac’s microphone input.

2. The Electric Sheep