MacMost: Making the most of your Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi! This is Gary. Well, Spore is finally here and it’s on the Mac. Let’s take a look in this episode of MacMost Now.
    Well, Spore is a long anticipated game from Will Wright, the creator or SimCity and the Sims. And this is the successor to those games. This is the all-in-one game where you take a single-celled organism all the way through civilization up to colonizing the stars. It’s really five games in one. Let’s go and take a look.
    Well, the basic idea is you play a simple life form and make choices to help it evolve. In this first stage here, you float around in a primordial ooze and eat and evolve. This plays like a simple arcade game and doesn’t last for too long. But it is visually rich and it can be challenging at times. It’s really just a quick introduction to how you use the creature creator and how you move around.
    The second stage moves your creation onto land. This part plays like a 3D platform game. You run around the landscape and eat plants or other animals. You can make friends or just kill anything that gets in your way.
    The third stage puts you in charge of a town of your creatures. At this point you’re biological evolution is over and you concentrate on building on and expanding your tribe’s influence. This plays a little bit like the original WarCraft game.
    In the fourth stage you’re in charge of an entire modern city. You also grow to take over other cities by force or influence and, eventually, the goal is to rule the entire planet. This part’s a little bit like the real time strategy games, such as Age of Empires or Rise of Nations.
    The fifth and final part of Spore puts you in outer space. You create a space ship and then travel between the stars looking for a planet to colonize, invade, or to trade with.
    At the very heart of Spore is the creature creator. At the beginning you use this to modify your single-celled life form. Then you continue to use it to modify your land creature in the next stage. You also use this interface to create outfits for your creatures, design the buildings in your city, the vehicles, the sea ships, the airplanes, and eventually, even the space ships.
    The game’s two best assets are the interface and the graphics. The game looks spectacular. Every little piece of it is a work of art; every creature you create, the landscapes, the planets in outer space, everything. And the interface is extremely intuitive, considering that the game is very complex.
    The game has a lot of hidden depth, as well. For instance, in the fourth part when you’re actually controlling your city and taking over the planet, you can modify your nation’s national anthem. There’s a little anthem composer interface in there that’s extremely easy to use to create a piece of music.
    Now, some problems with the game are that it may be too easy for hardcore gamers. I was able to easily get through all the levels without any difficulty at the normal setting. Now, for casual gamers, it might be a little bit too complex. And there’s this goal driven thing in the game where every level you’re driven to accomplish the next goal and some parts of the game seem to tell you to stop and smell the roses, and other parts of the game are telling you to hurry up and get to the next part.
    And there are a lot more details on this game that I’m not even going to get into here. Like, for instance, the creatures that you create are uploaded to a central server and may actually make appearances in other players’ games.
    As a Mac game, I was really impressed by the stability. The game only crashed once in about ten hours of game play. That’s really something for a 1.0 version of a game that hasn’t been patched yet. And I was even able to switch to Windowed mode and check my email and surf the web while playing my game in another window without any problem.
    So if you’re into real time strategy or you want to see what all the hype is about about the most anticipated game in years, go and check out Spore.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig bringing you a rundown of today’s apple announcements in this episode of mac most now.
    Steve jobs took the stage this morning and made some announcements of some new products. First of witch was itunes version 8 which will be a free update of itunes. First thing that he mentioned is that it is going to have high definition TV episodes to download for a buck more then standard episodes. In addition NBC is going to return to iTunes now all the NBC shows including the ones they produced even if they weren’t shown on an NBC station were removed from iTunes due to disputes between pricing and other things, but all of these shows are going to be coming back soon. In addition to that Jobs talked a lot today about a new feature called genius. What genius does is it makes suggestions about music and artists that you may like based on music that you currently selected, music in your playlist. And it does the same thing for music and movies as well. In addition to being in iTunes 8 it will be available on some of the ipod products, that we are going to talk about next.
    So there are updates to three parts of the ipod line and the first part is the ipod classic. The descendant of the original ipod. Now the ipod classic will go to a single model and it will be available in 120 gigabytes. For $249. But it is going to have a thin form factor of one of the two previous ipods. Now as expected the ipdo nano is getting a major update. It is getting an entire new look. It is going to be thin, and it is going to be tall. It’s going to have the same exact screen that the current one has, but in a different orientation. So what’s new in it is it’s going to be the accelerometer, the same ones that is in the iPhone. So it can detect when it’s turned on it’s side or when it’s turned upright. and it can adjust when the screen looks like according to that video will be shown in the wide format. The prices are going to be $149 for an 8 gigabyte version and $199 for a 16 gigabyte version.
    The accelerometers will be used for more then just orientation, for example there will be a shake to shuffle feature where you can actually shake your ipod nano and it will skip to the next song.
    And also the iPod touch is getting a makeover it’s going to have a mirror design to match that of the iPhone. In addition it’s also going to add volume control on the side and a speaker. There will also be built in functionality for Nike Plus. Which basically puts a sensor in your shoe and you can get all sorts of statistics about your running. In addition to that the new prices are going to be set at $229 for an 8 gig version $299 for a 16 gig version and $399 for a whooping 32 gigabytes of storage space.
    What’s even more interesting is there is even more talk about games at this event. There are three game demos all using the iPod touch. And a new commercial for the iPod touch that basically shows it off as a gaming devise so it looks like once and for all Apple is really competing with the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable in the portable games space.
    Now Jobs also announced iPhone software update 2.1. This is going to get us fewer crashes, better battery life, and fewer dropped calls, and also will speed up the backup procedure which happens just about every time you syhc your iphone.
    Jobs also mentioned some interesting accessories for all of the different ipods. One was a microphone for the iPod nano, that will allow voice recording. Which should make it a really useful devise for especially students who could use it to record lectures and such.
    It looks like a lot of these new devices will be shipping by the end of the week or by this weekend. Including the software updates. So check them out and until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let’s do the impossible and add a video blur in iMovie 08.
    Now iMovie 08 is a bit of a disappointment to most people and I hated it when it first came out. But I’ve grown to love it over the months and I use it to edit every episode of MacMost Now. And it still frustrates me that there are a few things I can’t really do that I could do in previous versions of iMovie and can do in other editing programs like Final Cut. So when I’d see one of these I’d really want to figure out if there was a way to do it all. One of these is adding a video blur. This is say, you’ve got a picture of a license plate or somebody’s email or even somebody in your video that you want to blur out, you don’t want them to be there but you don’t want to have to re-shoot the entire thing. You just want to create a blurry area in your video. In more advanced editors there’s functions to be able to do this and even in something like QuickTime Pro there’s some tricks to be able to superimpose images on top of your video to do this as well. In iMovie 08 it seems to be very tricky, if not impossible. So I set myself a goal of having to figure out a way to do this and I did come up with a solution. It’s not pretty but it does work and it doesn’t require you to use any other video editors. All it needs is iMovie 08 and some image editor, like Photo Shop, Fireworks, or anything that you’ve got. Let’s go and take a look step by step of how to create a video blur in iMovie 08.
    So here in iMovie I’ve got a simple movie here. There’s simply one thing here in the library and it’s a video of me giving a presentation. What I’ve done in the presentation is I wrote my email address up at the top here and I don’t want that to appear in the video so I’m going to fade that out, blur it. So I drag it into my iMovie project here at the top. Notice that the camera is completely still, on a tripod, so that’s great because this email address remains in the exact same area the entire time. So what I need to do is I need to take a copy of this and it doesn’t really matter what frame of the video I take because the email address is always going to be in the same spot. But what I’m going to do is take a screen shot as large as possible so I’m going to go ahead and enlarge this iMovie window here and I’m going to do command shift three, which is my keyboard shortcut for a standard Mac screenshot and I’m going to grab the area. You don’t have to be perfect, just within a pixel or two. And there you go. I’ve grabbed the area so now I have a picture that I can paste into a graphics program. I’m going to use Photoshop because it’s very popular. You can use Fireworks or Graphic Converter or anything else that you have because we need to create a blur effect here so I’m going to go ahead and create a new document and it will remember that I’ve got something on the clipboard and allow me to paste it in there. Great. So now I’ve got this in a Photoshop document. I’m going to go ahead and create an oval around the area I want to blur and then apply a filter. Let’s do a calcium blur and okay. So now we’ve blurred that area out. That’s great. So now what we want to do is we only want to have that area so I’m going to invert the selection. Select and inverse and then hit delete. So now we’ve gotten rid of everything, we’ve made everything else transparent except for this blurry area. I’m going to go ahead and save this is as a, we’ll call it ‘blur’ and we’ll do it as a png is a really good format for this. So blur.png. And we’ll just choose the regular options and we’ll save it out. So now we’ve got blur.png.
    So now back in iMovie we go to our directory where we’ve got the original screenshot and there’s the blur as well. Now if we click on the blur you can drag that right into iMovie and if you drag it after the clip it will actually create a still image for about four seconds in your movie. But if you drag it right over the video, you can actually drop it on top of the video and it will superimpose this image on top of what’s there. Release. And there we go. We actually have this image superimposed on top which this is the only part of it, the rest of it is transparent so as I scroll back and forth I can see the rest of the video plays normally and this part now has the static area there. So now, that’s all good. Except for one thing. If I go to the beginning of the video you can see that the graphic fades in and the same thing at the end, it fades out meaning at the very beginning and very end you can read my email address. Now that’s no good so we have to go and solve this problem. As you would expect there is a way to adjust the fade in and fade out if you right click or control click on the movie and choose Project Properties you get a bunch of properties, including the Title Fade Duration and you can set that to be longer or shorter. The only problem is you can only go to a quarter of a second and that’s still too long, we need it down to zero and there’s no way to actually get it down to zero. So there’s only one thing for us to do, trying all other options, we’ve got to actually export this movie and once it’s exported we’ve got to go in and re-import it in. This is a big pain but it’s the only way to get it done. So we’re going to export this as temp, as a media movie — actually let’s do it as large so we have it as full size for the movie that we’re making. And once we have this we’ll be able to re-import it and trim the front and back of the video.
    So now we have our new movie so we want to use file import movies in iMovie 08 and click on temp and it will bring in this copy basically of the original movie and it will go ahead and put it in our library. So go ahead and select the clip and the blur effect, there we go. And we’ll go ahead and take the second copy of it, bring it in here and now we’ve got the blur effect already there and we’ve also got of course you see we have that fade in and the fade out at the beginning and end. So we select the clip, we do Trim and we’re able to go ahead and trim just a little bit off the beginning and a little bit off the end. Done. And now we get rid of that transition there at the beginning and end and there’s no way to read the email address. Now we can go ahead and add more things to this movie, export it and we’ve completely, successfully blurred out the element that we wanted to blur out.
    So as you can see here the solution’s a bit convoluted having to export your movie halfway through and re-import it in. But it does work. So if you have the occasional need for something like this and you don’t want to invest in a more advanced video editor this is a solution for you. Hopefully in a future version of iMovie we might get some more advanced functionality or at least Apple will once again let third party developers create plug ins as you could for earlier versions of iMovie.
    Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I am going to show you how to shorten URL’s for e-mails, and even how to shorten your e-mail address.
    So you’ve probably been in the situation before: You go to a webpage that’s really cool and want to send it to a friend so you copy and paste the address of the web page into an email and send it to your friend. But you get an e-mail back from them saying “Hey, it didn’t work when I went to the web page, I got an error message.” What’s probably happening is that your URL, or address of the web page was so long that their e-mail program cut it into two lines and then when they clicked on it, it only gave them the first line in their web browser. So what you need to do in situations like this is to shorten the URL. Now you can do this with any URL no matter how long it is. Let’s take a look at an example.
    So here I am at google maps. And I want to show my friends an address. So, I go and I find exactly where I want. And then I want to send it to them so I click on link and I get this little paste link in email or IM thing here. I copy it, now you can see here this URL that I highlighted, this is huge! It’s massive so I paste it in my browser to see how long it is up here. Then what I want to do is I want to send this to them in e-mail. So normally I would open my normal e-mail program and I would paste this in there. But it may wrap on them and not give them a valid link. So I look at it a better way to do it. I’m going to copy it and then go to another website called tiny URL. And when you go to tiny URL.com it gives you a little prompt here at the beginning to enter a long URL so I paste that URL in there and that entire thing’s in there and I say make tiny URL. And, it tells me, hey this was the original URL, you can see how long it was; this is the new one. Now if I copy and paste this one into the web browser at the top I can see I actually get redirected to exactly what it was I was looking at before. So this is great so now I go ahead and create an e-mail and paste in this really tiny path to the web page. I can do this with any URL anywhere on the internet. Now this can be done even easier if your using firefox, there is several different plugins for firefox that will allow you to quickly create a tiny URL from the current page your on. There are also lots of other competitors to tiny URL.com so you may want to check them out and maybe find one that you like better. So here’s another website that’s similar, its called tinymail dot m e. And at this website, instead of doing URLS you can do e-mail addresses. And you may have a long e-mail address but that’s not the point here. The point here is to protect your e-mail address. Say you want to post your email address on a web page but your afraid that spammers are just going to read the web page and put your email address in a spam list. well you can enter your email address out here and click on protect it. And then what you’ll get is you’ll get a link like that or even just something to really quickly embed this into a web page. if you go to this short tinymail.me link, this is what you get. You actually get something called a captcha which is one of those things where you have to type in the word you see. This is potentially made hard for computers to be able to interpret so spammers can’t go out and grab all sorts of information from web forms like this. So when somebody goes to you e-mail you they get this thing, they enter in the words they see there, and then are redirected to sending you an email, just like they would normally do with a normal e-mail address inside of a post or a web page. Thanks to the captain for the tinymail.me tip. Til next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
    Today let’s take a look at three games I like for the iPhone. So it’s been less than two months since the release of the iPhone Apps store and there’s already a ton of games for you to purchase and some for free. Let’s take a look at three of them.
    The first is a no brainer for me,it’s Scrabble. It’s an official version of Scrabble and I love this game. I love it as a computer game, I’ve owned versions for the PC, the Mac and even for the iPod. So let’s take a look at the iPhone version of Scrabble.
    So you’ve got various options, you can do a quick play or a custom play where you can set the difficulty with various options and you can even set it to play against a real opponent rather than a computer opponent.
    When you do the normal version of the game you go ahead and you start and you get your tiles and then you get to go ahead and place them on the board. Now the board’s pretty small on the iPhone so what it does is it zooms in as you’re placing tiles. So for instance here we want to go ahead and place axe in the middle of the board, it will zoom in like that. Then it calculates your tally. It’ll tell you if your word’s invalid and then the computer will move and then it’s your turn again.
    You get to do all the normal stuff like trading letters and things like that and you get to watch your score here at the top of the screen. This game is very similar to the computer versions of Scrabble and it plays very well.
    One of the complaints I’ve got is that the difficulties are too far apart. The normal level is too easy for me, and the hard level’s impossible as the computer guesses words you’ve never even heard of before. So there needs to be more tiers in there. Besides that it’s a pretty good game, not only for Scrabble players, but it’ll help you improve your game. It will set you back the full ten dollars though, so it might just be for Scrabble lovers.
    So next here’s a game from an independent developer. It’s good to see that independent developers are doing will with iPhone apps, just as well as the large publishers. This game is called Galcon and it’s basically a strategic conquest type of game in a space setting. But it’s more than that because it’s played at an arcade pace. Let me show you.
    So there’s many different levels of game play and game variations. But the basic level is classic, it looks like this. You get a bunch of different planets. You’re the green one over here and then there’s the orange enemy over here. And what you do is when you start you send your ships to other planets by simply tapping and dragging. When you do that you take over the planet. The larger the planet, the quicker you’re going to be able to produce ships and your goal of course is to eliminate the other guy completely. You can do this by sending your ships to his planet and taking it over. Once you’ve done it you’ve won.
    So, Galcon is a great twist on a strategy game, played in real time. It’s simple enough that it’s quick and easy to play, but with the higher difficulty levels it can be quite challenging and there’s plenty of game variation as well. It’s also ten dollars from the iPhone Apps store.
    Another game that’s quite interesting by an independent developer is called Aurora Feint. Now this is kind of an adventure game, role playing game, but with a lot of puzzle game elements to it as well, and there’s an online portion.
    Let’s take a look.
    So, the main part of Aurora Feint includes this big map and from the map you can go to several different places. You can go to for instance, the mine and the mine has the main game in it, where you can actually go ahead and earn points by playing this simple block moving game. What you need to do here is basically move the blocks in such a way so that it lines up three in a row like so and you continue to go ahead and do this to earn points here and then you also play the same game to be able to put together skill sets for yourself.
    It’s a fairly complex game and I haven’t gotten too much into it, there’s a lot to see here. But once you’re done with the basic mine, you can go right back to the map and you can also go ahead and look at other statistics about your character, that you’ve created in the game.
    It’s actually tough to explain this game in a short review, so you’re gonna have to try it yourself. Now trying it yourself is easy because the game is completely free. Just choose it from the iPhone Apps store and download it and you don’t have to pay a penny, and it looks like the developer has a lot more in store because this game is called “The Beginning”, meaning that there are going to be more episodes and there’s going to be much more of an online component, playing against other people. So look for a lot of great things from this developer. and try out Aurora Feint.
    Of course, I should mention that you can also play more iPhone games by using the Safari Web Browser and plugging into MacMost.com/iPhone games.
    Until next time, it’s Gary Rosenweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I’m going to show you two different extensions to iPhoto that will make it easier for you to get your photos up to the internet. iPhoto is a great program for editing and managing your photos, but it doesn’t really make it any easier for you to get your photos up to a website. It does do this through mobileme, but if you don’t want to pay the extra money for mobileme, or you want to actually put it on a website where people can share information about photos, then there is really nothing in iPhoto for you. You have to export your photos from iPhoto and then do a separate upload procedure. However, there are two extensions for iPhoto that make this easier. One of them is for Flicker, and the other is for Facebook. Let’s take a look at them. Alright, so here we are inside of iPhoto, and I have some pictures that I took yesterday at the DNC here in Denver, walking around town. So I can select one or all of these photos, and then, I don’t go to the “share” menu, which you would think it would be the place to go, but instead I go to file, export. And this is where the plugins allow you to do different things with your photos. So I’ve got two new plugins here, one is FFExporter, and FFExporter then comes up with this dialog here (if I’m not logged in to flicker at the time, I can click here to login, it will take me to a webpage, using Safari or Firefox, and I will then log in and then return to this page). Once I do that, it knows who I am, as you can see, and even lists some of the photo sets that I’ve got in Flicker. I can then go ahead and choose some things to do about this photo set that I’m going to upload, so I can, say, I want anybody to be able to see this, I can restrict the photo size, I can change the safety level if I want, I can even change the type of content. And then I can go ahead and, when I’m done with that, hit export and what will happen is, it will upload all the photos that I’ve selected to my Flicker account, and it’s as easy as that. You can get this free Flicker exporter at “dustin.li”. Now, I guess you can say this is beta software, because its version 0.41, but it seems to work fine. The next step we’ve got a way to export your iPhoto photos into Facebook. Of course, you need a Facebook account for this, and you do the same thing, just select your photos, and then you ahead and do File, Export, but this time you select Facebook, and you go ahead and log in, and I’ve done the same thing here, I’ve logged in, and it goes to a website, and for Facebook, and then you go ahead and do your login, and then it knows you’re logged in back here at iPhoto. Then you can do a bunch of interesting things. You can choose which album you want to upload to, so you can go ahead and choose an album on Facebook, or you can create a new one right here inside the exporter. Then you can select your photos, and you can select them and add a caption right here. So the FreeFlicker exporter, that was actually taking your title tags from iPhoto, so you want to set them up in advance, but this here won’t take those but it will allow you to create the captions right here for each individual one. So you can create a little longer description than you normally would put in a title. Another cool thing that you can do is you can go ahead and you can tag people in a photo. All you need to do is click on the photo in any area, like that, and it will create this tag area, and you can go ahead and select from your friends or type in any name as a tag for the person in the photo. So that’s pretty cool, and then we’ll go ahead and upload all of these photos and they’ll appear in Facebook. Now, one thing that’s not cool about this is that then you have to go into Facebook and approve these photos, because they won’t automatically be available to everyone. Get this Facebook iPhoto plug-in for free by going to developers.facebook.com/iphoto. I love these types of plugins because they make it so easy to share photos with others, and I really whish there were more for more of the photo sharing services. Until next time, this is Gary Rozenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi. This is Gary from MacMostNow. Today I’m going to show you two ways that you can use your Wii with your MAC. Now, if you’re interested in sharing photos, movies, and music onto your Wii, the program for you is called “Wii Transfer” and you can find it at riverfold.com. Now, this program, what it will do is take your photos from your iphoto library, it will take your music from itunes, it will take special moies that you select, and actually make them available for your Wii that’s on the same network, for you to be able to view them. Let’s go and take a look.
    So, Wii Transfer is just an application you download and run. When you run it, it’s going to create a little web server on your MAC. It’ll give you the IP address, right here, of that web server, and you turn it on. Now, once you do that, you’ll be able to access things via your internet connection on your Wii. So you’ve got several options here. One is music and you can select it to share all of your music in itunes. also pictures, all of your pictures in iphoto. You can also select movies. Now, movies are a little different. What you need to do is drag and drop movie files, like mp4 files or m4v files into this window and it will convert them into flash videos. Because, you see, the Wii doesn’t actually have a media player to play back just any type of video. It can only play back video through the web browser which uses flash. So it can play back flash video. What Wii Transfer does it converts all this video into a format that this Wii web browser can play. So after you’ve set things up the way you want, you go back to sharing here, you note the IP address of your MAC, Then you go over to the Wii, and enter that in.
    So here we are on our Wii. Now what we need to do with this, is we need to go ahead and select the internet channel. This uses a version of the Opera web browser that runs inside the Wii. The Opera web browser is capable of playing back flash.
    Now what you need to do is you need to enter in a web address. Now the web address should be what you saw earlier on your MAC, inside the Wii Transfer program. So here is what it looks like on your Wii. Wii Transfer is basically a series of web pages. You can choose between movies, music, photos, and bookmarks. Lets look at music. It’ll go ahead and list, by artist or album, all the stuff in your itunes library. It’ll play it for you using it’s own little player. Keep in mind this is not some sort of Wii interface or something from your MAC, this is what the Wii Transfer server kind of gives to you. You can go back and look at pictures and view by events or albums. Kind of the same type of thing that you see in iphoto. You can also go and look at movies. Now these are the movies you selected to convert. Here’s an episode of MacMost that I selected to convert. The video quality isn’t that great, but the Wii has an older version of flash with an older video player in it. One of the cool things you also have is access to all of your bookmarks from Safari or Firefox. So, this gives you a shortcut for entering urls into the Wii browser. You don’t have to type them all in using the Wii remote, you can actually just access bookmarks using Wii Transfer. So when you click on one of these bookmarks, you’ll actually just jump right onto a regular page inside the Opera browser in the Wii.
    You can do two other things with the Wii Transfer program. One is that you can grab your Miis, or your avatars, from your Wii. You have to do that by using your Wii remote. You actually transfer them to the remote using the Wii’s interface for doing that, then you can transfer them from the remote using the Wii Transfer. You can do the same thing with saved games, so you can save a library of saved games if you wish.
    Now, since Wii Transfer is just creating a little web server, you can actually access this from anything. You can potentially access this from another MAC or a PC or any internet enabled device. It’s not just for Wiis.
    So where Wii Transfer wins, is it’s a way to get some of your media onto your Wii. Well, not really onto your Wii. It stays on your MAC and you actually play it through your Wii. Where it loses is it doesn’t really act as a true media browser except for maybe photos and music. The video stuff, you are basically converting it for playback on the web. So, it’s not a great solution, and it’s nowhere near as good as the solutions for the Xbox360, but the Xbox360 has media players in it. The Wii does not. Still, it’s only nineteen bucks so if you don’t have any other way to playback media in your living room from your MAC, like an Apple TV or Xbox360, this might be a good option for you.
    Another cool thing you can do with your Wii, or your Wii remote with your MAC, is use this thing to control your mouse. So let’s go take a look at an open source piece of software called darwiin-remote. (sourceforge.net/projects/darwiin-remote) So what you do with this is you actually go ahead and find your Wii remote by pressing the “1″ and “2″ buttons while the “Wiimote” program is running. What it will do is find it and add it as a Bluetooth device. This is actually really hard to do. It took me tons and tons of tries and tweaking to finally get the Wii remote to connect. Once you do get it to connect though all you need to do is to turn on the Motion Sensors and then you can basically see, through all those lines, all the motion of the WiiMote. If I hold it steady, all the lines are straight. If I move it in one direction, obviously blue, green, there’s red. There’s a lot of different things you can do. And the cool thing is turning mouse mode on. Then, the cool thing is to be able to go ahead and control the mouse using the WiiMote. So I find the best thing to do is just hold it steady, rotate right to go right, left to go left. Tilt up to go up, down to go down. IT takes a little getting used to, but once you do, but once you do you can actually control it and it becomes this kind of wireless airmouse that you can use. Might be kind of neat for presentations. There are also lots of customizable functions so you can set all the buttons to do all sorts of different things. So, for just going through slide shows, you may not even need to use the motion sensors. You can just use the forward buttons, the backwards button, home buttons, and things like that.
    So go ahead and check out those two alternatives if you are both a Wii player and a MAC user. Until next time, This is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMostNow.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I’m going to show you how to use a really cool organization tool called VoodooPad. It’s hard to explain what VoodooPad is. To get it, go to flyingmeat.com and download the trial.
    Now, it’s kind of like a notepad, but a notepad on steroids. See, it’s built like a wiki, so you can actually create a couple of words and link it to a whole other page inside of the wiki. But it’s not a wiki like on the web, like Wikipedia, where everybody can contribute to it; it’s just something on your local computer that you can add things to. So you can add as many different pages as you want and link between them. Let me show you.
    So here’s a very simple VoodooPad document that I’ve created. I’ve typed a couple of lines in and I’ve created links. So for instance, the To Do List line actually links to a page that has To Do List items on it. I can navigate kind of like a web browser, going back like that.
    So if I wanted to actually create something new like typed notes on a phone call, I can actually go ahead and select that and click ‘link’ and now it creates a page that I can type anything I want on it. And I can add a link in here as well. So for instance, say if I am taking notes on a phone call, I can actually later on go back and if I type the person’s name in there, I can decide, I want to take notes on specifically this person, so I create a link to them, and I can type notes about them here. So basically I can create an intricate set of links to other things. And everything doesn’t have to be a link, I can go ahead and type in various information that I want here, anything I want, and I can format it like I want too.
    But I can go a lot further than that; I can include all sorts of different things in here. So for instance, if I get an idea here, I can go ahead and create a new page for that, and I can do a sketch instead of typing. So I can sketch my idea here and insert it in.
    You can also record audio notes into VoodooPad. You can even embed files, any file you want. Another cool thing you can do is you can encrypt pages in VoodooPad with a password. So of course you can copy and paste from other applications. You can also print as a PDF into VoodooPad, so for instance, if I’m at the webpage here and I want to save a copy of it in VoodooPad, I hit Print and then the PDF button, say VoodooPad, and I actually create a PDF and save it inside VoodooPad. You can also export from VoodooPad in various ways, including as html, so you can create some simple web-pages this way too.
    I use VoodooPad in places where other people use other organizational software. I like VoodooPad’s freedom. I can go ahead and create a To DO List on one page but on another page create a single page for an entire project and then link to various pages about people or pages with e-mails or print-outs or even notes about phone calls with that project. I can re-arrange them at will, print out what I want, and even go ahead and export it and put it somewhere where I can get to it like on a private website for external viewing.
    I’ve been using VoodooPad for more than a year now and I love it. I find that it does things that I just can’t accomplish any other way. There are 3 versions of VoodooPad. There’s a light version which is free, there’s a $30 regular version, and there’s even a pro version for $50 that’ll do advanced features like encrypting the entire thing, or allowing you to serve the entire thing up as a website. So go to the website flyingmeat.com and give it a try.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now. On today’s episode lets take a look at something called Wallpaper Clocks.
    [music]
    Now a little while ago, I set up an old iMac to be my alarm clock. I put some alarm clock software on there and I customized safari so I can access things like weather and news. I also installed something called Wallpaper Clocks. Wallpaper clocks is something to turn your desktop background into a very artistic clock, which shows things like time and the date. Lets take a look.
    So here is a wall paper clock. Here is my desktop , you can see files here and the doc at the bottom. I’ve got the time displayed here. The time and the date. You’ll see in about five seconds, it will actually update with the new time, so it’s a live clock. There it goes.
    The place you go and get wall clocks is vladstudio. This is where you go ahead and get the application which is call just WallPaper clock Mac OS 10, and you can also download a whole bunch of different free, and some you have to pay for, wall clocks. Make sure you click on the wall clocks tab at the to just to see the wall clocks. You can go ahead browse the different wallpaper clock artwork. You can also get information here about how to make your own wall clock. You can install a new clock by simply downloading it and double clicking on it, or you can select the wallpaper clock’s icon from your tool bar at the top. This will bring up a change wallpaper clock dialog and you can switch between them. You can see a lot of the designs are very whimsical.
    As I said before you can go ahead and create your own wall clocks as well. If you’re an artist it’s just matter of creating a ton of bitmap images and then naming them correctly. Now the great thing about these desktop wall clocks is that they make your desktop a lot more interesting. It’s changing all the time. The clock is changing , sometimes things like moon phases are shown, sometimes that background changes a little bit according to the time of the day. It’s a great way to make your mac a little bit different than everybody else’s. Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let’s look at how to get every bit of battery life out of your iPhone. So let’s say you’ve got a really long day ahead of you. You’re going to be getting up early and going to bed late. You know it’s one of those days that’s going to stretch the battery of your iPhone. You’ll be lucky to have it working when you finally get home at night.
    So let’s look at some techniques that will stretch the battery life of your iPhone out as much as possible so you get as many hours from it as you can. So there’s some settings that you can play with on your iPhone that’ll conserve battery life. If you go into the Settings, one of the first things I’m going to check out is Brightness. You want to turn off the Auto-Brightness and turn down the regular Brightness as much as you can stand. That’ll save some battery life.
    Another thing you can do is you can go ahead and turn off the Push and Fetch. This will reduce the amount of times that your iPhone is calling out to the Internet to go and look for new data — new e-mails specifically, but also new calendar events and also changes to your contacts. This will save a lot of battery life as well over the long term of the whole day.
    You can also go ahead and turn off WiFi. That will save a lot of battery over the long-term and you can also reduce your Network connection from 3G to the Edge Network, like that. Edge Network is going to use a little less power than 3G Network. If you want you can turn off your connection to the Internet completely but quickly switching on the Airplane Mode. It’s very easy to switch the Airplane Mode on and off and this will allow you to basically control when your iPhone is calling out to the internet and when it’s not. So only having it calling out to the net when you really want it to will save a lot of battery life over the long-term.
    Another Setting under General Settings is for Bluetooth. If you’re not using any Bluetooth devices you want to turn that off and that way it’s not going to be constantly looking for Bluetooth headsets and connections to cars, things like that.
    While you’re there you may want to go ahead and set the Auto-Lock time to 1 minute, so basically it’ll put your iPhone to sleep much quicker when you forget to put it to sleep yourself. There’s also a switch here for Location-based services which if you turn that off should use your GPS chip less, depending upon what Apps you already use GPS with. This may save some battery life too.
    But there may not be any substitute for some manual controls, like for instance if you’re trying to get through a day with as little battery use as possible, you may want to just remember to click that top button to put your iPhone to sleep immediately after you’re done doing something. Don’t rely on your iPhone to go to sleep by itself because you’re going to lose some extra battery life while it’s sitting in your pocket.
    Another thing you may want to consider doing is turning it off completely for some periods of time when you know you don’t need it. For instance, I don’t like to answer my phone when I’m driving on the highway, so if I know I’m getting on the highway and I’m going to be driving for more than 15 minutes or so, I may turn off my iPhone completely and just turn it on again and check my messages when I arrive.
    Now if you’re App-crazy like me and you’ve a ton of Apps on your iPhone, you may want to really get to know which Apps suck battery life. There’s some that definitely deplete your battery life. Playing games, of course, is one of them. So you may want to avoid using Apps completely unless you know that a certain App is really good to your battery.
    Now that you’ve conserved as much battery as possible, you may want to consider giving yourself boosts during the day. The new iPhone adapter that comes with the 3G iPhone is really tiny and easy to carry with you, so you may want to bring it with you. You never know when you might be sitting in a restaurant or at a friend’s house or something and have just 15 minutes to plug in your iPhone. Those little boosts throughout the day can really help your iPhone get through a long day.
    Another thing you may want to do is get a car charger. These power inverters you can pick them up at just about any store and they’re really cheap. This one I got for less than 20 bucks and you can plug in any AC power adapter to it, like this iPhone adapter. So it’s very easy to charge up while driving. Another great thing about that is you can use battery-intense services like GPS while driving without draining your battery.
    Now this has a USB plug in it so you’d think I’d be able to plug in the iPhone dock directly to that, but in fact it doesn’t produce enough power to charge the iPhone, so I have to go the full AC adapter route. There’s also some external battery packs for the iPhone; it charges up separately and you plug your iPhone dock into them while traveling. So if you find yourself in a situation where you need to get through a long day a lot, you might want to invest in one of these.
    Now some of the built-in applications also suck a lot of battery life and there’s no greater culprit than GPS. I find that if I turn GPS on using Google
    Maps and follow my little blue dot wherever I’m going I can run down an iPhone battery sometimes in less than a half an hour. So for me it’s important to actually plug it into your car if you’re going to go ahead and use the GPS function for more than an instant.
    Accessing the web over 3G or WiFi is also another big battery drain. I once drained an iPhone battery in less than 30 minutes just following a baseball game and having the website refresh every 10 seconds or so. So there are some tips for getting through a really long day with your iPhone.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.