When Apple released iChat I was pretty happy with it. Of course back then I often only chatted with one or two people. These days it's not uncommon for me to have 2-4 chats going off and on throughout the day. Enter Adium and tabbed chat windows. I loved it as well as the ability to customize the interface with themes. But there is a downside: file transfers. Recent builds have gotten better but i still have problems transferring files. Enter Chax which adds new features, most notably, tabbed chat windows to iChat. I've been using it for a couple weeks now and iChat has returned as my favored chat client. Nice to have the choice of course but I'm happy to be using iChat again.


Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, iChat, Chax

One reason I love working with FileMaker Pro is the potential for creating aesthetically pleasing interfaces. I'm in the process of creating a set of themes that can be easily applied to future FileMaker projects. Pictured is "Blue Silver". Others are Sunflower, Green Apple, Milk and Steel, and Blue Sky. None of them are complete yet but I've got a good start!

As a side note I uploaded the screenshot to my Flickr account using Flicksilvr which is a new Quicksilver plugin for easy upload and keyword tagging. Worked perfectly!

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, FileMaker Pro, Flicksilvr, Quicksilver

For over a year I've been seeking a way to host QuickTime movies on my iMac which I could view, via the network, on my PowerBook. Seems simple but the problem is that encoding at high quality results in a file too choppy to play back via QuickTime. With iTunes 6.02 Apple finally included the ability to share the files via iTunes which is what I wanted in the first place. The great benefit of iTunes enabled movie sharing is that the movie is buffered as it is played which means that playback is smooth. No stuttering playback!

But not all is rosey just yet. We're now at iTunes 6.04 and there are still a few bugs in the process.

The first problem I ran into was seeing videos that had been imported into iTunes previous to version 6.02. After reimporting them I was able to see them in the shared videos in the iMac shared library but not able to play most of them. Upon double clicking I was treated to the spinning beach ball and had to force quit iTunes. Dealing with this second problem requires a program called Lostify which "is a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It runs on Mac OS X, and the tags it produces aim to be compatible with iTunes." It is beta software and only works with MP4 files but it seems to work. The developer warns that it is beta software so be careful.

Here's the process. Again, from within iTunes delete the movie from the host Mac's iTunes library but do not delete the file(When you select the movie in iTunes and hit the delete key you'll get an iTunes dialog box that will ask if you "want to move the selected items to the Trash, or keep them in the iTunes Music Folder", choose the button labeled "Keep Files"). Open Lostify and drag the MPEG-4 file (from within the Finder) to the Lostify icon in the dock which should bring up a window with all sorts of metadata options. Once you've entered your data Lostify will produce a second copy of your movie in the original directory which will have "temp" in the filename. My suggestion is to rename the original file or trash it (but don't empty the trash yet!) and then rename the temp file to the original name. Then hop into iTunes and reimport the new file. Play the movie in iTunes to confirm that everything is good (you chould compare the files in the finder too and confirm that the sizes are the same or very similar). After you've confirmed the file is good you can safely empty the trash. This new version of the movie should work on any Mac that is accessing the shared movie via iTunes.

Make some popcorn and enjoy your movies!

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, iTunes, iTunes Video, iTunes Sharing

MailTags 1.2 has been released and it's quite a doozy. I agree with Tim over at HawkWings that it is the best plugin yet for Apple's excellent email client. Tim has posted a great summary of MailTags and the 1.2 release.

The one real problem I have with MailTags is that it pulls me away from using Action Tracker, my own GTD oriented FileMaker task and project tracker! As much as I love FileMaker Pro, and am happy with Action Tracker, I've got a strong tendency to use Apple's solutions because they are so highly integrated. MailTags makes those connections even better.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, MailTags, Apple Mail, iCal

I recently wiped my drive and reinstalled OS 10.4 as well as all my apps. I keep an up-to-date back-up so putting all my files (This included my fully intact iPhoto library) back in place was fairly easy. However, after reinstalling iPhoto and using it I happened to notice that my photos no longer showed up in Spotlight keyword searches. The keywords are still there in my iPhoto library as were all my smart albums. So, within iPhoto everything seemed fine. The problem seemed to be that the Spotlight indexing process was not seeing the iPhoto data.

I tried several different "fixes" such as assigning a new keyword to all the photos in my library, closing iPhoto, re-opening it and then deleting that keyword. The idea is that it would force a re-index of the iPhoto Spotlight index. This seems to work for some users though it did not work for me. Also, assigning a new keyword to 2000+ photos takes a few minutes as does removing it. The whole process had my computer's processor pegged at 100% for 20 minutes and during that time it was unusable.

What did work was similar in concept but much easier, faster, and did not make the computer unresponsive: Open iPhoto, select the main Library, select all photos in that library, control click on a photo to get the contextual menu, navigate to the rating for the photo and assign it a rating. Wait a few seconds to let iPhoto do it's thing and then shut it down. Within the few seconds of iPhoto shutting down and writing changes to your iPhoto library Spotlight indexed the changes. Fixed! Optional step, open iPhoto back up and select all your photos and remove the rating.

The downside of this is that if you use the iPhoto rating system and you have already rated your photos this will void that. I do not use this rating system at all so it was not a problem.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, iPhoto, iPhoto Keywords, Spotlight