Disable Growl pop-up notifications via AppleScript
This happens to my friends and I all the time ... you're giving a presentation, watching a movie, or whatever, and the Growl notifier starts popping up with your gChat messages or messages from GMail. I finally wrote an AppleScript to easily toggle the two notifiers for such circumstances; I hope this is helpful for others! Here's the script: tell application "System Events" set isRunning_Growl to (count of (every process whose name is "GrowlHelperApp")) > 0 set isRunning_Google to (count of (every process whose name is "Google Notifier")) > 0 end tell if isRunning_Google then tell application "GrowlHelperApp" set the allNotificationsList to {"Growl Toggler"} reg...
published today, 2 hours 28 minutes ago, macosxhints
Netflix streaming for Mac leaves beta
All Mac owners with a subscription to Netflix should now be able to stream select movies online, the company has announced. Though best known for mail-based DVD rental, Netflix also offers a bonus "Watch Instantly" service, which primarily lets Windows PCs (as well as various set-tops) stream some 12,000 movies and TV shows. To stream movies on a Mac, users must have Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later, 1G...
published today, 2 hours 33 minutes ago, macintosh-news-network
The Best of 2008 on iTunes
Where can you find the best movies, best albums, and best new artists of 2008? On the iTunes Store, of course. We?ve collected your favorites ? the best-selling audiobooks, Apps, TV shows, songs, music videos, and podcasts ? and combined them with our staff picks. The result: a huge collection of music, movies, and other digital diversions to enjoy.
published yesterday, 21 hours 31 minutes ago, apple-hot-news
Set QuickTime Player icons for non-standard file types
I found this great QuickTime component package callled Perian that includes codecs for pretty much everything VLC does, thus making it possible to use QuickTime Player for all my media. The problem with Perian is that files with extensions like MKV or DIVX aren't given a preview or icon, even though they open nicely from the Finder. The solution is to add those extensions to QuikTime's plist, which will associate a nice QuickTime 'Movie' icon for such files. Here's how: In the Applications folder, Control-click on QuickTime Player and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Open the Contents folder, and then open Info.plist in a pure text editor of your choosing. Press Command-F and find the string Movie-Quicktime. Now add the wanted extensions to the array of strings above the line you found. For example, I added mkv in the following example: <array> <string&g...
published on Tuesday, the 2. December 2008, macosxhints
One Woman's Story as Told by Shuffle Mode
If someone were to ask me what the movie soundtrack for my life would be, I'd have absolutely no idea what I could tell them. I'd probably stutter for a couple minutes trying to think of the songs that summed me up better than any other. When I discovered I couldn't come up with anything, I would probably hand over my iPod and tell them to see for themselves.
published on Tuesday, the 2. December 2008, macnewsworld
Joost deploys TV app for iPhone, iPod touch
Onilne service Joost says it has published a native supporting application for iPhone and iPod touch owners. The app lets users view hosted video, which is normally restricted for Apple handhelds due to the latter's incompatibility with Flash. Joost claims to have over 400 TV shows and 1,200 movies on its network, as well as some 18,000 music videos. Content is divided into genres such as anime...
published on Monday, the 1. December 2008, macintosh-news-network
Use a custom video converter for iMovie HD projects
If you ever wish iMovie HD had more export options, like your favorite converter app (mine is MPEG Streamclip), there's a very simple way to use your third party converter app on an iMovie project. Control-click on the project file in the Finder and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Navigate into Shared Movies » GarageBand, where you'll find a tiny .mov file. Use this file as the input for whatever converter you want to use. You can also simply double-click this file if you wish to watch your video without opening up iMovie HD. [robg adds: Note that this hint applies to the older version of iMovie, not the new iMovie '08.]
published on Monday, the 1. December 2008, macosxhints
A pair of scripts to simplify posting videos to YouTube
We have had a few video cameras, but it was always a real pain to submit short video clips to YouTube. Basically, I would need to create a short movie in a program like iMovie or Final Cut Express and then export it. This is something that is too complicated for my wife, so she asked me for some way to simply drag and drop a video onto an icon in her dock. I put together these two scripts to automate that process. Just install youtube into /usr/bin/local, and youtube.app into /Applications (and then drag it to your Dock). First, here's the youtube shell script: #!/bin/sh URL='http://www.youtube.com/my_vide...' BROWSER=/Applications/Firefox.app VIEWER=/Applications/QuickTime\ Player.app ...
published on Monday, the 1. December 2008, macosxhints
iSkysoft releases Video Converter 1.8.1.0
iSkysoft on Friday released the latest version of its video conversion program, Video Converter 1.8.1.0. The update adds support for MKV, WMV, MOD, ASF, MOD and MP2 input formats, as well as MKV and MKA output formats. The program allows users to crop video to remove black sides, trim the length of files, extract audio, or capture pictures while previewing a movie by pressing a snapshot button. Vi...
published on Sunday, the 30. November 2008, macintosh-news-network
Black Friday at Amazon: cameras, GPS, hard drives, and more
In addition to its 66% off sale on Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, Amazon has slashed prices on a range of digital cameras and HD camcorders, GPS navigators, hard drives, flash drives, blu-ray players, LCD displays, and movies.
published on Friday, the 28. November 2008, appleinsider