Month: September 2006

Perian is a FREE QuickTime plugin that greatly expands on the formats that QuickTime can play.

For me, the coolest thing is the ability to play Flash Video (FLV) files through QuickTime. I tend to save a lot of videos I find on YouTube, and until now I’ve had to either convert them to another format, or use FLVThing to play them. With Perian, QuickTime can play those files directly.

Check out the site for the complete list of formats Perian can play. I didn’t see installation instructions on the site, but all you have to do is copy the plugin to /Library/QuickTime or your-user-folder/Library/QuickTime. You may need to create the folder if you decide to place it in your user folder.

For some reason, the download links on the Perian site aren’t working, but you can get the plugin over at Cool OSX Apps.

UPDATE (11/05/2009): QuickTime X (part of 10.6 Snow Leopard) seems to play flv files without the aid of Perian. So, unless you need Perian for another format you should be able to uninstall it. Thanks Lee!

Are you shooting your digital images in RAW format? If you use iPhoto to organize them, there is something you should know.

I was under the impression that whenever you edited a RAW file in iPhoto, iPhoto created a jpg copy of the image. As it turns out, that’s not really the case. iPhoto actually makes a jpg copy of EVERY RAW file imported into iPhoto. It doesn’t matter if you edit it or not. Two copies (RAW and jpg) get stored in your library folder.

If you shoot a lot of RAW, this could start adding up quickly. It’s something to consider if you have limited drive space.

By now we all know about Coverflow, the new album browser in iTunes 7. But, did you know that you can navigate Coverflow with your keyboard?

With Coverflow active (you may need to click inside the Coverflow window), you can use the left and right arrow keys to navigate back and forth within your albums. Tap the keys to scroll by one album at a time, or hold them down to quickly scroll through you library.

You can also use the letter keys to jump straight to that letter. How this works depends on how your list view (under Coverflow) is being sorted. If you’re sorting by artist, tapping on the letter D will take you to artists names that start with D. If you are sorting by name, tapping on D will take you to songs that start with D, etc… You can refine the scrolling by typing multiple letters. For example, if you’re sorting by artist, you can type DEP, and you’ll go straight to Depeche Mode, and skip over other artists that start with D.

Hitting the Return key (not Enter) will start playing the frontmost album / song.

Need more power than Apple’s built in calculator Widget? Try Pemdas.

found via DashBoardWidgets.com

As of version 7.1.3, QuickTime’s built in Export function, Movie to iPod, now uses 640 x 480 (instead of 320 x 240), just like the videos available through the iTunes store.

One other good point is it now respects the source file’s frame rate. I can’t remember for sure, but I think QT 7.1.0 automatically set the frame rate to 29.97, even if the source had a frame rate of 15 or 24.

Unfortunately, Apple still doesn’t give us any options when using this setting, like changing frame rates, or quality levels.

found via MacOSXHints

You may have already noticed this, but I thought it worth mentioning, just because it freaked me out for a moment.

I listen to a fair number of podcasts, and I really like the chapters feature. In iTunes 6 you skipped to different chapters via a button near the top of the iTunes interface. iTunes 7 doesn’t have that button, and at first I thought they got rid of that feature.

Luckily, they didn’t get rid of the feature, they just got rid of the button. You now access chapters via the menu bar. I personally liked it better as a button.