Adobe announced at their annual MAX conference that the next version of Flash CS5 will include the capability to publish iPhone apps, and in fact that there are several games in the App store already that were created using a pre-release version of the software.

There's been a lot of commentary on blogs that seem to think that Adobe have added this feature because they think that they may never get Flash as a plugin on the iPhone, indeed that this is some kind of 'backdoor' route for Flash on the iPhone. However, I disagree, I just don't think that there's any reasoning like that at all.

While it is great that Flash developers will have a way to get content onto the iPhone now I think that the ability to create iPhone apps is a much better opportunity for them than having native Flash on the iPhone.

Why? One simple reason: Money. A lot of people are willing to pay money for an iPhone app, but people are far less willing to part with money for Flash games that run in the browser. It simply presents a much better business opportunity for Flash developers.

I've blogged a few times about Flash and how it seemed like an obvious tool for the job of a cross-platform means to provide protected streaming video, in particular for the BBC's iPlayer in the UK. Many of the things I'd thought in those old posts have actually happened now, streaming Flash video is now used to provide access to the BBC iPlayer content on many platforms such as Mac OSX, iPhone / iPod touch, Wii, PS3 and other devices. Streaming Flash video is also used forHulu.com in the US.

In addition to the streaming option Flash is now used to provide a cross-platform downloadable iPlayer service via Adobe AIR's protected runtime, so it's all come a long way really. Of course no-one really likes DRM but at least it does provide a way to make all of this content available (geographic restrictions aside) without any major restrictions - apart from not being able to download directly onto the iPhone / iPod touch I suppose!

Adobe Flash Access 2.0

Adobe has just announced a new version of a software developer kit called Flash Access 2.0 (previously known by the snappily named 'Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server'). One of the main features is that it will enable protection of files that can be played directly within the Flash player instead of requiring it to be wrapped within the Adobe AIR runtime. This will offer a lot more flexibility in that files can be played directly within the browser. The technology supports MPEG4 H.264 content as well as FLV files so the quality of video provided via this technology has the potential to be very good.

Example of Flash Access 2.0 workflow.

I'm not sure if this has any real impact for services like BBC's iPlayer as they already have a downloadable option via the AIR based iPlayer. It's an interesting situation with distribution of digital video content really, DRM was a complete failure when it came to audio but there's no sense that content creators are about to take the same approach as the music industry.Of course the big missing piece to the digital media distribution puzzle is that none of this Flash based content can be used or distributed to Apple's iPhone and iPod touch platform.

Time for Fairplay DRM to be broadly licenced?

I'm not holding my breath waiting to see Apple add Flash support to their devices and I understand that in many ways. However, the main benefit I'd see personally for support for Flash video on the iPhone is to be able to access more of the streaming video content that is out there as most of it is Flash based, and only the likes of Youtube have the means to offer content in multiple formats. Asides from accessing Flash format streaming video I'm not bothered about accessing any other kind of Flash content on my iPhone (I think the Javascript / HTML / CSS3 / WebKit stack is much more suited, that's maybe something for another blog post).

Although there's some sense in supporting Flash video on the iPhone I think what could be a solution is for Apple to make their Fairplay DRM licencing available for others to use on their own websites, media stores etc. If we're not likely to see media become completely DRM free then what is at least needed is any easy, cross-platform, cross-device method to distribute digital video content to whatever device is desired. At the moment the whole digital video distribution system is full of restrictions, dead-ends and political manoeuvrings by big media companies.

I wonder if it's going to take greater consumer unrest to finally force the various companies to work together for the greater good, to simply be able to play video content that you've paid for on any device you want? Especially if that device is an iPhone or iPod touch? At the moment it's just "a bag of hurt".

P.S. Don't anyone suggest Microsoft's Silverlight as a solution, we don't need yet another format for video distribution!

Apple's 09/09/09 Media event introduced some new things both expected and unexpected, many expected an iPod touch with a camera but instead there was an iPod nano with not only a camera but FM radio and a built-in pedometer! I was surprised about the FM radio as I never expected that to be added to an iPod. Here's a few of the things Apple introduced today along with some thoughts / notes etc:

iPod shuffles - shiny rainbows

Now in multiple colours as well as a special edition stainless steel model. There were rumours that this tiny little iPod was going to be ditched but that didn't happen. They also announced a new 2GB model along with shuffle-compatible third party headphones and controller peripherals. I'm not sure how much smaller you could make an iPod shuffle really. (iPod shuffle →)

iPod nano - complete with camera

At first I didn't think an iPod nano with a camera was that big a deal but after watching one of the video clips demoing the video features I found myself wanting one to carry around so that I could film things again. I've missed being able to film stuff since getting my iPhone 3G, however, there's no way I'm buying yet another iPod so I'll just have to look into getting an iPhone 3GS at christmas time instead! The nano's video format is 640x480 pixel h.264 video and looks to be pretty good quality, it almost makes me wish Apple would just make a dedicated camera but I don't think that will happen. (iPod nano →)

iPod classic - memory bump

There's nothing that different in store for the iPod classic, just a simple storage bump from 120GB to 160GB instead. I still like the classic iPod and the scroll wheel, it's a great interface for accessing files. The iPhone / iPod touch's touch screen is great but the scroll wheel is still very efficient I think. I wonder though how much time is left for these iPods? Probably still a fair bit, but once flash memory gets into at least 128GB sizes I think the iPod classic will be assigned to the history books. (iPod classic→)

iPod touch - 64GB model and price drop

There was no rumoured iPod touch-with-camera announced, just a price drop on the existing model as well as a 64GB model announced. I think a new version with a camera is in the works, it just doesn't make sense for the nano to have it and not the touch. Also the lineup is now 8GB, 32GB and 64GB, I'd expect to see it become 16GB, 32GB and 64GB when the new model is announced. That's just my speculation though. Update: This press release from Apple about the new iPod touch updates paints a slightly different picture though, it indicates that the 32GB and 64GB iPod touches have the same internals as the iPhone 3GS, "The 32GB and 64GB models also include up to 50 percent faster performance and support for even better graphics with Open GL ES 2.0". Interesting.(iPod touch →)

iTunes 9

An expected announcement and one that took up the majority of the media event. iTunes 9 introduced a revamped interface (with it's usual introduction of unusual / new interface aesthetics!) and a few other new features. One thing that's disappeared though is the shopping cart feature, now you have to either add it to the also newly added Wish List feature or you have to use 1-Click purchasing! That's a little bit scary.

There's now also the option to share items on the store to either Facebook or Twitter, I was hoping for more integration with social networks, particularly last.fm but alas it's not to be. One other thing I noticed is that iTunes now finally behaves like all other good Mac apps and will actually maximise when you click the maximise button! Previously this would toggle iTunes into it's Mini Player mode, I'm really glad they've changed this.

Here's a rundown of some of the new features of iTunes 9:

• iTunes LP - Intended to introduce the digital equivalent of album covers complete with liner notes, lyric, videos etc. This is something that is long overdue, I look forward to checking out some of these. Another question though is how are these made? I'm pretty sure they won't involve Flash but I'll be keen to find out how they're produced.
• Home sharing - This basically allows you to easily share tracks between up-to five machines that you can authorise to play back songs. This seems really handy for households with more than one computer, drag and drop songs between shared libraries.
• Redesigned iTunes Store - Improved navigation is one of the main tweaks, it now seems more like a web page with consistent navigation along the top of the window. You can also set an option in the preferences to use the full window when browsing the store, this basically gets rid of the list of options on the left hand side. It's quite handy to get a bit more space when browsing the store.
• iTunes Extras - Another long overdue feature! I'm not that impressed with the iTunes store's video offerings, many movies are not available to rent until long after many other rental stores have had them. So these movies are only available to purchase, what's more they're a bit expensive too compared to picking them up in DVD format from somewhere like play.com or even at your local Tesco supermarket. Ok, rant over. iTunes Extras basically adds a bit more value by including the special features that you'd get on your regular (and cheaper!) DVD purchase. I'm a tiny little bit more likely to buy one now (I still probably won't though).
• Genius mixes - An interesting new feature, it finds songs that go well together and automatically makes mixes out of them. One thing to point out though is at first I couldn't see where this feature was, you need to choose 'Update Genius' from the Store menu in iTunes in order to update and activate the feature.
• Improved syncing - Undoubtedly one of the most sought after features by anyone who owns an iPhone or iPod touch and has a lot of applications on it, you can now organise the layout of all of your apps inside iTunes itself.It's not quitehow I'd proposed itbut close ;)

iPhone OS 3.1

iPhone OS 3.1 for iPhone (and 3.1.1 for iPod touch) were announced too. It introduces a few new features that tie in with iTunes 9's new features, nothing massively new but then again it is a point update. Amongst the various features shown on the iPhone OS software update page a couple of little tweaks caught my eye:

• Remotely lock iPhone with a passcode via MobileMe
• Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing)

Being able to lock an iPhone remotely enhances the already brilliant MobileMe feature of locating your iPhone via GPS and also remotely wiping a lost iPhone. Anti-phishing support in Mobile Safari is a great feature too, something all browsers need these days.

Anyway, enough writing about it all, I'm going to go and re-organise my iPhone apps :)

The Shedworx guys are always busy working away on improving their applications (VoltaicHD, FlamingoHD, RevolverHD) for working with AVCHD video. In a recent blog post on their site they highlighted the fact that Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard doesn't bring any changes in support for the AVCHD video format, basically OSX 10.6 still can't natively open or edit AVCHD video so it needs to be converted in order to be edited within apps such as iMovie or Final Cut Pro.

This lack of native support has encouraged the Shedworx guys to bring some simple trimming and editing features into version 2 of VoltaicHD which will hopefully be out in October. This will be a really handy feature as it will allow some very quick editing of files without the need for conversion. It will be especially useful if you just want to grab a small section of a clip and convert that for editing in iMovie or Final Cut instead of having to convert the entire clip.

So far they've got basic trimming features working and have published a demo movie showing how it works, all in all it's looking to make VoltaicHD an even handier application!

I thought I'd compile a few notes / points of interest of things I've noticed after installing Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard on my development Mac. I'm going to keep updating this page and adding things to it as I come across them.

I use the default install of Apache & PHP and install MySQL from the installer from MySQL.com, I guess I should custom build and install these but it's easy enough to work with the defaults anyway.

PHP under Snow Leopard

PHP under Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard is version 5.3.0 and thankfully has the GD libraries enabled by default. Especially good for Wordpress installs so that it can do image resizing for thumbnails etc.

I noticed I was getting an error relating to timezones on many of my sites, along the lines of:

Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function.

The solution I used to this was just to restore the previous php.ini file, this showed in the /etc directory as 'php.ini.default-5.2-previous'. Just rename it to 'php.ini' (replacing any existing php.ini file if it exists, it didn't for me). You'll then want to edit php.ini and look for the 'date.timezone' setting and put in your timezone info (PHP.net timezone page) and then restart Apache. Hopefully it should be fine after that.

I also started getting a lot of warnings on some of my development sites along the lines of:

PHP Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in...

These are warnings about old deprecated PHP4 era code, recent versions of PHP5 enable these warnings, but you can switch these off by adding an additional error reporting element to your php.ini file in the error handling section:

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_NOTICE

Just add the E_DEPRECATED part and then restart Apache and the warnings should be gone.

Apache

The version of Apache is 2.2.11, the latest available from Apache.org is 2.2.13 so it's fairly up to date. If you think this is an issue then check out the release notes for 2.2.13.

MySQL

MySQL isn't installed by default in Snow Leopard so you need to install it yourself. I simply downloaded the latest 64 bit Intel version from MySQL.com, they only show version for Mac OS 10.5 at the moment but it worked fine for me. The installer provides a startup item to make MySQL run at boot time and also a System Preference to control it, it's worth noting that this is only 32 bit so it will make System Preferences restart itself into 32 bit mode, not a big deal though.

Booting 64 bit

There's been a fair bit of discussion about Snow Leopard and it being 64 bit. By default Snow Leopard boots into 32 bit mode, however this doesn't make that big a difference as 64 bit apps will run in 64 bit and access all the memory available on your system. One thing to note though is that the original unibody MacBook (which I have!) can't startup in 64 bit mode, I'm not sure if that's a big deal or not though really.

If you want to get into a really in depth examination of Snow Leopard's 64 bit capabilities then check out John Siracusa of Ars Technica's comprehensive review, beware though, it's a lengthy read but it's a great overview of the new technologies that are under the surface in Mac OSX 10.6.

Flash plugin out of date

The Flash plugin needs updated as the version that comes in Snow Leopard is an old version (10.0.23.1) which has some security vulnerabilities, just go to http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayerand download the latest version. There's been quite a bit of coverage of this online, the gist of it is summed up in this post over on Daring Fireball. Basically the most up to date version of the Flash plugin was probably released after Snow Leopard's final release version's features were frozen, so basically Snow Leopard overwrites the newer version with an older version upon install.

It's easily fixed by downloading the latest version, although I don't know why Adobe don't make the autoupdate feature of the Flash plugin a bit more aggressive. I can't think of the last time I saw any prompts to update it, you can actually adjust the autoupdate settings via the Flash Player Settings Manager page on the Adobe website (which you probably never knew existed!).

Quick Look from Print progress dialog

I'm not totally sure this is a new feature to Snow Leopard, I may just have never noticed it before! If you hit space or double-click on a print job in the print progress you get a Quick Look preview of your document, even if it's not new it's quite a handy feature!

That's my thoughts / experiences so far, I'll add more to it as I come across things of interest. Anybody noticed any other new features / issues? Drop a comment if you want and I'll maybe add it to the notes.

~~~~~

Microsoft's Mac Office team recently announced that the next version of Mac Office 2010 will replace the Entourage email client with a purpose-built for Mac version of Outlook. This is interesting as it suggests that Microsoft see the forthcoming Exchange support built into Mac OSX 10.6 as bit of a threat.

The current email client in Mac Office, Entourage, is a poor citizen of OSX 10.5 due to its single database that is not very compatible with OSX 10.5's Time Machine back up function. So Entourage was at least due for an update, however, bringing Outlook to Mac at least makes things a bit more consistent between Windows and Mac Office suites. I dare say a number of Windows to Mac switchers will be quite happy to see the addition of Outlook.

Will Outlook for Mac's HTML email support suck like it does on Windows?

With the announcement I think many web designer / developers might likely have the above question in mind! If you're not in the habit of creating HTML format emails then you may not understand what the problem is, basically since the release of Office 2007 for Windows the rendering of HTML emails in Outlook took a turn for the worse. Outlook 2007 uses Word's HTML rendering engine to display HTML emails, effectively taking several steps backward in regards to rendering support in modern email clients.

Due to the poor HTML support in Outlook on Windows, developing HTML email newsletters requires using HTML formatting that hasn't seen the light of day since the heady days of the late 90's, table based markup, very little support for CSS markup. If you want to read more about this then head over to the Email Standards Project for lots of good information, and in particular this post:"Microsoft to ignore web standards in Outlook 2010 - enough is enough".

The Mac Office team have indicated they will make Outlook for Mac from the ground up as a true Mac application:

Outlook for Mac is being built from the ground up as a Mac OS X application using Cocoa. It will have a new database that delivers a reliable, high performance, and integrated experience with Mac OS X. Users will be able to back-up with Time Machine and search email, calendar and contacts with Spotlight.

So I'm reading from this that as it's using Apple's Cocoa frameworks that it will make use of the WebKit rendering that Cocoa provides to render HTML emails. As such it should have excellent HTML rendering capabilities, which incidentally the current Entourage application already has. So Mac users should have a good experience regardless of whether they use Apple's Mail or Outlook email clients.

However, there's a potential problem. The Windows Outlook team have so far stubbornly denied any need to fix the problem with HTML rendering in Outlook on Windows and indeed seem intent to release Outlook 2010 with the exact same rendering support. As the Outlook team seem to think that the Word HTML rendering engine is appropriate, will they mandate that Mac Outlook should render emails exactly the same way that the Outlook for Windows does? Will they make Word the rendering engine for HTML emails in Outlook for Mac?

If they don't then basically they'll have a potential lack of interoperability between Outlook on the different platforms, Outlook for Mac will offer good support for HTML email (as it already does with Entourage), and Outlook for Windows will suck. I'm not sure that Microsoft will be happy with that seeing as Office is one of their flagship products and will want to make the experience the same. The question is, if that is the case then which side will yield?

Email Standards are Web Standards

Regardless of your opinion on HTML emails* it's a big issue, whether you like or dislike HTML format emails the reality is that they're here to stay, support for web standards and good layout practices should be encouraged, regardless of whether that HTML is rendered in an email client or a web browser. The recent Fix Outlook campaign hopefully sent a strong message to Microsoft about how the development community feel about it. Let's hope Outlook for Mac doesn't come with the same support as it's Windows counterpart and that the discrepancy between their rendering engines forces Microsoft to step up and make Outlook 2010 for Windows include improved support instead of dumbing down Outlook for Mac!

Update:
There's a new site launched by a couple of employees from Microsoft, "Make Office Better", it introduces it's purpose stating:

Hi! We're two Microsoft employees looking to collect customer ideas on how to improve Microsoft Office. If you've got a new feature idea or an idea on how to improve Microsoft Office, please share it here...and vote on other ideas you agree with. Through the magic of crowd-sourcing the best ideas should rise to the top.

What's great about the 'magic of crowd-sourcing' in this case is that the number 1 Office issue that people want to see fixed is "Improve the HTML support in Outlook". Well, they asked for feedback!

~

* And don't say "HTML emails suck, everyone should just use plain text emails", HTML emails will stop being used around the same time that everyone adopts XHTML 2. If you don't like them then you can always use a mail client that can force the display in plain text!

In the process of using jQuery on a website revamp I encountered a problem I've experienced once before - flashing background images when using jQuery hovers in IE6. It turns out the problem is that IE6 does not cache images properly.

If you're a web developer then you have probably set IE6's Internet Options to check for newer version of stored pages every time you visit it in order to see all the incremental changes you make during testing / debugging. If that's the case then you're very likely to encounter the IE 6 flashing background problem. A typical situation would be using jQuery hover code on an element with a background image specified in the CSS. In this situation you may find that each time you hover over an element the image is reloaded resulting in a flashing effect in IE6.

One solution to this problem is to change the default of 'automatically', however, you have no way of knowing if the end users of your site will have the same settings so it's possible they experience the same issue.

Upon hitting this issue recently I endeavoured to find a solution rather than adapting my HTML / CSS to fix it as I have done in the past. I also knew that IE6 users would be reasonably common for my client 's potential website user base so it needed fixed one way or the other. A bit of googling came up with an article entitled "Dear IE6: Please Cache my Images.", the article's solution was a bit of jQuery code that makes use of a specific IE javascript command to force background images to stay cached regardless of settings used in Internet Options:

if(jQuery.browser.msie && parseInt(jQuery.browser.version, 10) == 6) {
  try {
    document.execCommand("BackgroundImageCache", false, true);
  } catch(err) {}
}

Add this code to your page and it will fix the flashing image issue with hovers in IE6! Quite a simple solution to an annoying problem that has previously caused me to change my HTML code to fix, I'm glad that I decided to Google a solution this time!

One other thing to keep in mind that is pointed out in the aforementioned article is that this script will enable the caching in IE6 until you quit the browser and restart it so it will affect all sites that you visit in IE6.

Adobe have added a lot of new projects to their Labs page over at http://labs.adobe.com since I'd last checked it out. In particular there's a new service / product called BrowserLab that allows you to test web pages in various browsers along the lines of Litmus, Browsershots or Netrenderer. Adobe describe BrowserLab as:

BrowserLab provides web designers exact renderings of their web pages in multiple browsers and operating systems, on demand. BrowserLab is a powerful solution for cross-browser compatibility testing, featuring multiple viewing and comparison tools, as well as customizable preferences. Since BrowserLab is an online service, it can be accessed from virtually any computer connected to the web. Also, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software users have access to additional functionality such as testing local and active content.

This service / app has been in development for some time, Adobe actually showed a sneak peak of it back in November at their Max Conference under the code name 'Meer Meer'. So although this might seem like Adobe playing catchup with Microsoft's recent 'SuperPreview' release it's actually nothing of the sort. If you compare BrowserLab with SuperPreview you'll see that they're quite different apps - primarily that SuperPreview is a Windows app that only let's you preview IE6 and either IE7 or 8 depending on which is installed - and of course requires you to be running on Windows to use it whereas BrowserLab is a browser based application that simply requires the Flash plugin and therefore works on both Windows, Mac and Linux.

Browser and OS versions currently supported in BrowserLab at this time are:

• Firefox 2.X and 3.X (Windows XP and Mac OS X)
• Internet Explorer 6.X and 7.X (Windows XP)
• Safari 3.X (Mac OS X)

So a good range of browsers are covered, although IE8 really needs to be there along with Opera as well to really cover all the main desktop browsers. Although there isn't yet as big a range of browsers to test in compared to other services like Litmus, BrowserLab has a benefit in that it provides some additional tools to help you compare the preview of your site in the different browsers.

Browser Sets in BrowserLab - Only preview preferred browsers.

Browser Sets in BrowserLab basically let you create groups of browsers that you want to have rendered when testing. This can save time over just having every browser preview rendered for your site, if you only want to see IE6 and IE7 then you can create a BrowserSet with only those contained in it.

2-up View in BrowserLab

You can view a 2-up layout that lets you compare the differences between rendered previews. This creates a side-by-side view displaying two different browsers which you can quickly switch between to compare different browsers.

You can also zoom up to 200% to compare the previews more closely and also zoom out to 75% to get a more overall comparison.

Onion Skin view in BrowserLab

The Onion Skin view lets you compare two different previews but overlays them on top of one another. You can then use a slider to fade between the two selected browser previews, if you're trying to work on something quite pixel accurate then this can be quite useful - although it has to be said that exact pixel placement accuracy of page layouts isn't necessarily something to worry about. It's still a pretty useful feature though.

Preview directly from Dreamweaver CS4 in BrowserLab

One other feature benefit that BrowserLab has over other services such as Litmus is that there is a Dreamweaver CS4 extension that allows you to test your site layouts directly from within Dreamweaver. The added benefit here is that this avoids the step of having to make your entire page live on the web before testing as it works with just the local files on your system.

As a beta release BrowserLab looks pretty good, although it does have some hot competition from services like Litmus and Browsershots - especially in regards to Litmus' push towards supporting mobile Safari on iPhone / iPod touch.

To checkout BrowserLab for yourself, read more about it over at the BrowserLab pages at Adobe Labs website.

After a few years of being available there are now many hard-disk based video cameras that use the AVCHD format for video, support for the format in video editing software is well supported now on both Mac OS X and Windows by apps like Final Cut Pro / Express, iMovie, Adobe Premiere, VoltaicHD and more. This all leads to a much simpler experience for users of AVCHD cameras than it was a couple of years ago.

AVCHD Lite - Throwing a spanner in the works?

More recent digital stills camera have started coming with the ability to shoot HD video, for many of the small compact cameras there became a need for high-quality efficient video format that could be used in small compact cameras with less capable hardware. The solution to this was a variant of the AVCHD format called AVCHD Lite.

The main differences between AVCHD Lite and the regular AVCHD: a maximum resolution of 1280 x 720p in AVCHD Lite compared to 1920 x 1080p in regular AVCHD and a less-intensive compression method - both of which make the format more suitable for less powerful camera hardware.

Why can't I edit AVCHD Lite in iMovie or Final Cut?

AVCHD Lite throws a spanner in the works because many of the existing AVCHD editing packages are incapable of supporting it without an update to the software. At the time of writing none of Apple's video editing applications such as iMovie, Final Cut Pro or Express support the AVCHD Lite format. Adobe's Premiere and Premiere Elements applications also do not appear to support AVCHD Lite at this time.

The only solution for AVCHD Lite on Mac OS X at the moment is the one that saved many an early adopter like myself a couple of years or so ago when AVCHD cameras first came out - VoltaicHD by Shedworx. This is a $35 app that will convert your AVCHD Lite footage to the Apple Intermediate Codec format that can then be used in any of Apple's video editing applications.

Some Handy Links / References...

Here's a few links to some handy information about AVCHD Lite:

• AVCHD Lite and that50p format - Shedworx.com
• AVCHD Lite - Shedworx.com
• Panasonic AVCHD Lite cameras
• Apple Support article re: AVCHD Lite / iMovie 09
• VoltaicHD for Mac / VoltaicHD for PC

Update:

As of 04/06/09 iMovie now supports editing of AVCHD Lite files with the iMovie 8.0.3 update!

I wrote a review of FlamingoHD a couple of months ago of their new media management application for Mac OS X called FlamingoHD (made by Shedworx, the makers of VoltaicHD).

At the time of the review FlamingoHD was available for sale as a beta version (for those early adopters!), however, Shedworx have reached their first milestone and have now released version 1.0 of FlamingoHD to the world!

The main new feature in the final version 1.0 release is a new filmstrip view that lets you see keyframes from the video clips in your library. This is really handy and lets you see what scenes are within your various clips:

For a more detailed overview read my previous post:FlamingoHD - Helping you manage your AVCHD mediaor checkout the FlamingoHD page on the Shedworx website.

I'm writing this as much to remind myself as for anyone else really :) I generally run databases running on my MacBook which I use for sites in active development, I then transfer these databases over to a staging server which are then use by other people in the team and sometimes clients to input site content. Last week I imported content from the staging server and overwrote my local database thinking that the staging server was the most up to date, but as it turned out I was incorrect!

Fortunately I'm running Mac OS X's Time Machine backup on my MacBook so I didn't see a problem as I could just restore it from that. However, in reality it wasn't quite as straight forward to do, so here's what I had to do in the end to restore this database from my Time Machine backup.

Step 1: Find your local databases

Navigate to the location of your MySQL databases. For my MySQL install this is found at /usr/local/mysql but depending on how you've installed MySQL it might be elsewhere.

As you'll probably see that's not a location you can just regularly view in the Finder on Mac so you'll need to use the 'Go to Folder...' option within the 'Go' menu in the Finder.

Once you've got to that location you'll see the MySQL data folder which shows up with a red no-access symbol on it so you can't actually navigate straight into it via the finder. Seeing as we can't access the folder to restore a specific database we'll just restore the whole folder from the Time Machine backup instead.

Step 2: Shutdown your MySQL server

It's important that you shut down your MySQL server process before you continue. How you do this depends on how you've got MySQL installed. If you installed MySQL from the official installer for OS X downloaded from the MySQL website then you may have the a System Preference which you can use to stop it.

If you've installed MySQL another way such as self-compiled or via Mac Portsor you just want to use the Terminal then you can stop it from the Terminal instead. The following command can be used:

sudo mysqladmin shutdown

If you don't have MySQL configured in your path in Terminal you may need to use the full path to the mysqladmin command:

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin shutdown

The path to those files may vary depending on how you've installed MySQL so if it doesn't work then you'll need to check the correct location. Note that I've also used 'sudo' in that command in case you need root privileges to stop the MySQL process. Check the MySQL documentation for your version of MySQL for further help.

Step 3: Rename your MySQL data folder via the Terminal

The next step is to rename your MySQL data folder temporarily to avoid any clashes when restoring the data folder from the Time Machine backup. First you need to get into your MySQL directory:

cd /usr/local/mysql

You can then list all the files to check you're in the right place:

ls -al

You should now see all the files including the 'data' directory where the databases are located. We can now use the following command to rename the data directory:

sudo mv data data-bak

Once that's done you should see your directory happily renamed in both the Terminal and the Finder window.

Step 4: Enter Time Machine to restore your MySQL data directory

The next step is to enter Time Machine mode and restore the data directory from the backup. I'm sure you probably know how to enter Time Machine mode but make sure you enter whilst focused on the MySQL Finder window.

Go back in time a sufficient amount so that you'll definitely be getting the version of the data that you want, highlight the data folder and click Restore. Because we renamed the data directory Time Machine will simply restore the data directory without any prompts. You should now see both the restored data directory and the renamed data-bak directory.

Step 5: Copy the database from the restored data directory

You can now copy the database from the restored data directory, this is done via the following Terminal command:

sudo cp -R data-bak/my_database_name data/my_database_name

The database is actually a directory containing other files so you need to use the '-R' flag to recursively copy all of these across with the directory itself.

Step 6: Delete the restored data directory and rename the data-bak directory

Now that the database is restored and copied you can safely delete the restored data directory as it's no longer needed at this point. Note: Be very careful using the 'rm' command! Bad things can happen if used incorrectly!

sudo rm -R data

You can then rename the data-bak directory back to it's original name 'data', note that the 'mv' command doesn't require the '-R' flag:

sudo mv data-bak data

Step 7: Check file permissions / ownership

You may need to check the file permissions and ownership of the database that you have just restored to make sure that it will be accessible by MySQL when it is running. These may vary depending on your MySQL install method but they should be something like this:

drwx------ 60 _mysql wheel 2040 8 May 12:14 my_database_name

Basically the directory is owned by the user '_mysql' and in the group 'wheel'. If you need to change the owner then use the following command:

sudo chown -R _mysql data/my_database_name

Step 8: Start up MySQL

Once this has all been done, you can then start MySQL again using either the System Preference if you have it or via the Terminal command:

sudo mysqld_safe &

or with the full path:

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe &

Step 9: There is no Step 9!

Hopefully you should now be able to access your newly restored database. As I said at the beginning, this is the method I used to restore a database myself recently, there may be other ways to do it but hopefully these steps might be of use to anyone else in the same situation.

Clipstart is a newly released application that is designed to complement Photo applications such as iPhoto or Picasa. It offers a streamlined interface that lets you import video footage from video cameras, tag them and then upload them to either Vimeo or Flickr.

That's Clipstart's features summed up in one paragraph but the application does what it does really well. There's been a growing need for applications like these to manage the ever increasing amount of consumer video that many people have on their computers these days. iMovie is great for editing video and iPhoto can import video into it's library but neither of them are up to the task of file managing the quantity of video files that users of digital video devices (e.g. Flip, Kodak Z series and mobile phones such as the Nokia N series etc) tend to produce.

Clipstart lets you manage all these files simply and easily and lets you upload either whole clips or only specific sections of clips directly to both Vimeo and Flickr. There's currently no YouTube support though, I'm not sure if this is because Apple's iPhoto already supports YouTube directly but I could see YouTube being another location that users would like to publish too so perhaps this will come in future versions. Update: I remembered that the upcoming Snow Leopard Mac OSX 10.6 also features an updated version of Quicktime Player which can upload straight to YouTube, perhaps this is one reason why Clipstart doesn't include it?

You can find out more about it over at the Clipstart website where there is a screencast that takes you through the workflow and features as well as a demo version that you can use to try it out for yourself. It costs $29 for a single user licence.

Working with HD video on Mac OSX? FlamingoHD is another good option to check out...

If you're working with HD video then you'll want to check out FlamingoHD which is a similar application to Clipstart but is more specifically focused on HD workflow and in particular providing support for the AVCHD format of HD video used on many hard disk based cameras. FlamingoHD does also support all other video formats supported by Quicktime so video from Flip and Kodak Z series cameras can be imported as well as digital stills.

It's that time of year again when many websites suddenly lose their inhibitions and let their inner-html run free!!!

Well, kind of, it's CSS Naked Day 2009 so that's why Suburbia is appearing the way it is for a 48 hour period (it's an international 'day' so the site stays naked for 48 hours so that both east and west get to see the naked sites!).

What's the point of it all?

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good 'ol play on words. It's time to show off your <body>.

Until fairly recently if you were a Mac user and you wanted to use a version control system like Subversion you didn't have much choice as far as client apps went. If you didn't have the terminal skills to work via the command line and wanted use something with a nice GUI then you had to choose from apps that were either incomplete or not particularly Mac-like.

However, the latter half of 2008 brought a lot of change in regards to Subversion client apps for OSX. It's kind of like with buses, if you wait long enough several of them come along at once ;)

Subversion clients from A (Adobe Dreamweaver) to Z (ZigVersion)

To give the various apps available thorough overviews is beyond the scope of this article, so I'm just going to list the various apps that are available and point out some of their features.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

Dreamweaver CS4 added support for the Subversion version control system,something I've long thought would be a great feature and one which via an extension was available to Windows users. However, I don't think the implementation of it in Dreamweaver CS4 is as good as it could be.

One issue in particular is that the commands for Checking out and committing to a repository are the same as those used for the regular Checkin / Checkout functions of Dreamweaver which I think is a bit confusing as they are very different features. Using these terms is a problem as they don't match up with the correct terminology used in Subversion. Dreamweaver is often the first app (rightly or wrongly) that people who are learning how to make websites use so there's a bit of a responsibility for it to teach people correctly and to encourage good habits.

I consider Dreamweaver CS4's SVN integration to be a good first step but it could do with improvement to make it more usable.Unless you use Dreamweaver already then you're probably not going to start doing so just to get access to its Subversion integration.But if you're already a Dreamweaver user then it does offer some useful functionality, and if you're a DW user but have never used version control then it's a good enough place to start!

Dreamweaver CS4 costs $399 for a commercial licence but there are also educational licences and there is also a 30 day trial.

→Go to the Dreamweaver CS4 website

ZigVersion

When I first started using SubversionZigVersionwas the best solution for OSX that I tried. It wasthe most user friendly / easy to use out of all the clients available at the time such as SVNX, Syncro SVN and SCPlugin. I've always used a hosted Subversion repository ever since I started using Subversion so I was needing an application that would allow me to easily connect to an external server. ZigVersion made it pretty easy to do that, and to an SVN noob it was fairly easy to understand what was going on.

Once connecting to my SVN repository it was quite easy to create a working copy and update it from the repository files. After working on files it was easy to find the updated files with a simple click on the 'Changed Files' icon in the menubar. Only the new or updated files would be shown which could then be selected and checked in to the repository with appropriate comments added at the same time. It was also easy to get access to revisions of files via the 'Revision Viewer' button.

It's a pretty straight forward application and does the job, one criticism would be that the interface is fairly unexciting in appearance. I mainly say that as this is a review ofMac OSX Subversion GUI apps so the visual appearance is important and the main reason why I'm not including SVNX or Syncro SVN amongst these applications.

ZigVersion costs $99 for a commercial licence but is free for non-commercial use. There is also a 30 day trial period.

→Go to the ZigVersion website

Versions

We're now getting into the mac-daddy territory of Mac OSX Subversion apps. Versions was the first of the new wave of Mac SVN apps, despite showing as "coming soon" for over a year and feared by many to be vapourware.

However, although it was delayed the app was launched and it delivered on its promise of providing a much more Mac-like app for dealing with Subversion repositories and the tasks involved with working with them.

Versions' main tool bar provides buttons for Update, Commit, Checkout and other options, just under the main toolbar there are three tabs, Timeline, Browse and Transcript. The Timeline tab gives you a timeline in the form of a list of revisions and accompanying notes which makes it easy to view the changes made over a period of time. The Browse tab allows you to view the repository files and view history of individual files as well as comparing, managing blame and also a Quick Look option for quickly viewing the contents of files.

There is a quick setup button that will get you setup with an account atBeanstalkapp.com who provide online SVN repository hosting, there's a free account offering one repository to get you started with various tiered pricing options after that.

Versions deserves credit for really raising the bar for Mac SVN apps, the teaser page had me longing for months for them to launch the app! Although in the end I had give up waiting and buy ZigVersion instead in order to get some kind of GUI access to my repository.

Versions costs€39 (approx $50) for single user licence, there is a 21 day trial period.

→Go to the Versions website

Cornerstone

This is the Subversion app I've been using the most out of all of them recently, although it's a pretty close race between it and Versions. Cornerstones' interface is well thought out and well designed and by that I don't mean just good looks but that it provides a great feature set for working with multiple SVN repositories.

You can easily filter the working copy files in different states such as Changed, Modified, Conflicted, Unversioned and Locked. The ability to filter files this way is an essential feature in an SVN app, finding changed files in order to commit them to the repository is one of the most things I do.

Cornerstone also offers a great horizontal timeline view that displays the various revisions which is great for quickly reviewing the details of each revision such as dates, times, Revision notes and changes made.

Cornerstone costs $69 for a single user licence but you can use a trial version for 14 days to check it out.

→Go to the Cornerstone website

Coda

Coda is a text-editor for web development, its main strength being the integration of several aspects of the common web development workflow: text editor, FTP, CSS editing and Terminal. In a recent update the application now has integrated Subversion support which adds it to this growing list of OSX Subversion clients.

Coda's SVN integration adds a simple source control status window that quickly highlights changed files making it easy to find updated files and commit them to the repository. There is also easy access to a Source Control menu option offering committing / discarding changes, refreshing, comparing and updating the repository.

It is smoothly integrated into the workflow of Coda and rounds out the feature set of the application and it's aim to provide a one-window web development environment.

Coda costs $99 for single user licence, there's a 30 day trial period.

→ Go to the Coda website

Closing - Rise of Git

Ironically as all of these Subversion apps start to appear many people are starting to switch to using Git instead of SVN! There are a couple of Mac GUI apps for Git available so far such asGitX and Gitnubso check them out if Git is more your thing.

FlamingoHD is a new application by Shedworx (the guys that make VoltaicHD), with the purpose of helping you manage all of your AVCHD video footage. Although AVCHD has greater than ever support these days it still presents a challenge when it comes to managing all of the video that you've shot, especially as the convenience of shooting straight to disk or card kind of encourages you to record a lot more than you would when using tape!

FlamingoHD provides a solution to this problem by enabling direct import from your AVCHD camera or alternatively importing AVCHD clips that are already on your hard disk. It does this by providing a preview thumbnail of the video footage before you import it, this saves a lot of time compared to iMovie or Final Cut Pro as you can choose only the clips you want without having to convert the footage first.

The user interface is easy to understand as it features a left hand menu very similar to iPhoto or iTunes which contains sections for Devices, Events and Projects, very similar to the iLife applications.

Importing AVCHD footage into FlamingoHD:

The basic process is to select the source of your video footage. You can either connect your camera to your computer which will automatically show up inFlamingoHDas a device, or you can select 'Import Media' from the File menu to select either a single clip or a folder containing clips from a location on your hard disk, once selected they will show as a device in the 'Devices' section in the left hand menu. It's also worth clarifying that FlamingoHD will actually import video, audio and images from your source device or location and can manage all of these assets within Events and Projects.

Setting Preferences and Creating Events:

With a device selected ready for import you can then choose which clips you want to import into FlamingoHD, the imported files will automatically become an Event, or more than one Event if there are multiple clips shot on more than one day.This can be controlled by a preference which allows you to switch off this feature if you just want to import everything into one event.

The application preferences are worth checking out as there are a couple of other important preferences to consider. The first is 'Hide media already imported' which is enabled by default, this is useful when there are a lot of clips on a camera that you have already imported as it hides the ones you've already brought in.

The second important preference is 'Copy imported media to Library area', it's important to set this appropriately because if it is ticked any clips imported from a folder on your computer will be copied to FlamingoHD's Library which will take up more space and will result in duplicate files. Clips imported directly from a camera will be copied to the library regardless of this setting, the location of the Library for FlamingoHD can be set in theBase Locationpreference under the General tab.

Creating Projects:

Once you've imported clips into FlamingoHD you can then group clips together into Projects, these projects can then be sent to exported in via several methods, either ready for editing or as final output.

Projects are created by selecting 'New Project...' from the File menu, this adds an entry under the Projects section of the left hand menu which you can name to suit. Once the Project has been created you can drag and drop clips from any of the events that you previously created.

Exporting / Converting Projects:

After creating a project you can then choose to export or convert your files. FlamingoHD has options to send files to VoltaicHD, RevolverHD, iMovie and also to the assets folder of other editing applications such as Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro.

You can export by either right-clicking on the Project name or by selecting the Project and clicking on the 'Media' option from the main menu. The four options at the bottom of the menu allow you several choices for your project:

Send to VoltaicHD
This option will send your footage to VoltaicHD and it will be queued up and converted ready for use in whatever application you want.

Send to RevolverHD
Selecting this option will send your AVCHD files to RevolverHD where they can be burned as either AVCHD DVD or Blu-ray DVDs that can be played back on Blu-ray players such as the Playstation 3.

Send to iMovie...
This option is specifically for sending your project to iMovie, it creates a new project in iMovie and sends your clips to VoltaicHD for conversion, once converted you can open iMovie and all of the clips will be there in the new project.

Send to Editor...
Using this option will send files to a folder in the assets location of your preferred editing software, you can set this option in the Preferences of FlamingoHD. The AVCHD clips will be converted in VoltaicHD and copied to the folder. You can then open your editing software and bring in the files that are ready for editing.

In Beta and available now!

FlamingoHD has worked pretty well for me so far but it is worth pointing out that (at the time of writing) that it is a 0.1 version, as such it's beta software and still being actively developed. However, the developers Shedworx have made itavailable to purchase now for the reduced price of $29.99 while it is in beta, the price will increase after the beta period.

FlamingoHD already provides a very useful application for managing all of your AVCHD media, but one aspect I haven't mentioned is that it will also handle any video format that is supported by Quicktime so it can also be used for cameras that don't use AVCHD as the video format. For me this is the key to the application's potential, it fulfils a function that Apple's own iLife suite doesn't provide, that of being a specific video asset management tool.

The only criticism I can see is that it currently doesn't provide direct playback of the video clips that are imported into it, instead the files are opened into Quicktime player. The biggest drawback of this being that Quicktime player doesn't currently support AVCHD clips. However, Apple's next release of Mac OS X, 10.6 'Snow Leopard', is supposed to support AVCHD so that will be one solution, but in the meantime perhaps enabling AVCHD clips to open in the open source VLC player could be integrated as this already provides playback of AVCHD footage. The next release version 0.2 will provide a film-strip view of clips which will at least make it easier to examine the clips in more detail without needing to open them.

Give it a try for yourself, there's a demo version that is limited to amaximum of 2events, 2projects and 50clips, this gives you enough to try it out and kick the tyres. There are also demo versions of VoltaicHD and RevolverHD so you can test out the whole workflow. Finally, don't forget to give feedback to the developers via the FlamingoHD contact form, they're keen to consider people's ideas and to hear about any issues people encounter with the software.