Retrieving Photos From an iPhone Backup

Posted on November 17, 2011 by ian

My iPhone 3GS died after trying to install iOS 5 on it. Really, it just gave up the ghost completely. I had managed to jailbreak it and get it to the home screen, but then it would just spontaneously reboot. It was like watching someone drowning in a sea of esoteric console output, only to make it to the surface for a breath … and slowly sinking back into the inky depths of monospaced jargon.

However, what I didn’t realise is that when you perform a backup of your iPhone through iTunes, it copies your photos too – I thought it just copied apps and settings. So the pics that I thought were gone forever were hiding in obscure, encrypted files right there on my hard drive (I had performed a backup of the iPhone before the attempted upgrade, of course).

So after reading this this MacObserver article, which gives you two options for rescuing pics, I downloaded Picturescue (a measly five bucks) and now I have 592 MB of photos back on my hard drive. No movies, but I’ll regard that as penance for not keeping on top of my backups.

The original link was courtesy of the excellent MacTalk.

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DuckDuckGo

Posted on November 5, 2011 by ian

Recently I’ve been using a search engine that provides a compelling alternative to Google. It’s called DuckDuckGo, and its main selling point is, simply, privacy. They make a very good case as to why your online privacy is important.

Google remains significantly faster, and has features, such as autocompletion in Chrome, that DuckDuckGo doesn’t currently match. But if you’re concerned that Big Internet is compiling a dossier on you, and you aren’t quite prepared to forgo your digital lifestyle by becoming a goat herder in Kazakstan, this is a great alternative. (They even have an iPhone app.)

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Steve Jobs

Posted on October 6, 2011 by ian

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

The world would be a very different place were it not for Steve Jobs.

I was fortunate enough to begin my love affair with all things Apple back in 1990, at my first job. I’ve praised, cursed, coveted, fucked up, fixed, dropped, lusted over, and spent my entire adult life using their products ever since. I fended off advances from Windows users to join them and rule the galaxy together, even when Apple was in the wilderness and on the verge of bankruptcy. Something about their products – and their philosophy – felt right.

The key to Steve’s success, it seems to me, is that he remained focused on the user. Right back at the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984, its tagline was “The Computer for the rest of us”. When Apple’s competitors were covering their laptops with stickers and pre-installing useless software, Steve’s vision of simplicity prevailed: what would the user want? Jobs described a computer as a “bicycle for the mind”, which sums it up, for me. A computer is a tool for people to create with, not an end in itself.

He upended the entire planet. He was a genius, and the world is a richer place having had him.

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Ease and Wizz: Mixing Easing Types

Posted on October 1, 2011 by ian

Ease and Wizz is useful for quickly applying preset motion curves to your keyframes. However, it only lets you apply one easing type per property (expoOut to position, for example). What if you want to have expoOut at the start of the animation, and expoIn at the end?

There are a couple of alternatives:

  • Split your layer, thereby duplicating it and getting a fresh set of properties to apply an expression to.
  • Parent your layer to a null (or more than one null), and apply the easing to the null’s properties.
  • Apply an instance of the “transform” effect, and apply the easing to that.
  • Use ExpressionTimeline to mix and match your expressions.

Alternatively, it’s possibly to hack together an Ease and Wizz expression to allow more than one easing type on a single property. And that’s what I’ve done here, as an example:

ExpoOut then ExpoIn.aex.zip

Create an expression on the property you want to apply it to (option/alt-click the stopwatch), then paste in the contents of this document. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can go into the source of Ease and Wizz and paste in any easing function in place of expoOut or expoIn.

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After Effects: Auto Fade Text Preset

Posted on July 14, 2011 by ian

This little text animation preset will fade in text, word-by-word, then fade it out again. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t use keyframes – it’s based on the in-point and out-points of the layer itself.

Auto fade text.ffx.zip

Throw it into your Presets folder next to the After Effects application so it’s easy to find, create a text layer, and choose Apply Animation Preset from the Animation menu. It adds a “text fade duration” slider to the layer as an effect. It’s handy when you’ve got a lot of text and you’re feeling allergic to keyframes.

There’s a lot of power hidden in the text animation Expression Selector … I’ll endeavour to upload a couple more examples down the track.

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My After Effects 5.5 and ExtendScript Toolkit Imbroglio

Posted on July 13, 2011 by ian

I run a lot of After Effects scripts using Fastscripts, so I can attach keyboard shortcuts (hello, ladies). These are always single purpose, simple scripts that don’t have a user interface.

However, since installing the CS 5.5 update to the Adobe Production Suite, my poor computer doesn’t know which version of After Effects to run the scripts with. I have two versions of AE on my machine, and ExtendScript Toolkit gleefully fires up version 5 when I’m using 5.5, impelling me to slowly bonk my head on the keyboard several times. Associating the .jsx extension with the correct version doesn’t seem to help, either.

Fortunately the goodlooking boffins at Adobe have allowed us to target specific versions of After Effects in our scripts. Pre-5.5 I was prefacing scripts with:

#target aftereffects

… but evidently that’s no longer specific enough. However, by changing the magic incantation to:

#target aftereffects-10.5

… the correct version fires up when run with FastScripts, or upon double-clicking in the Finder.

Extra for Mac users: I wrote this little command line, erm, command to change all your headers in one fell swoop. Run it in the top level directory of your After Effects scripts, in a Terminal window. But warning – you run this at your own risk. Caveat scriptor.

grep -rlZ '^#target aftereffects$' *|xargs -0 sed -i '' 's/^#target aftereffects$/&-10.5/'

(Here it is on Pastebin, if that’s your hot beverage of choice.)

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Better Bouncing in After Effects

Posted on December 22, 2010 by ian

Ease and Wizz has a preset for “bounce”, adapted from Robert Penner’s easing equations. It’s useful for basic simulations, but it doesn’t give much flexibility when it comes time to customise it. Fortunately, most everyone on Earth has plugged their computer into The Internet, so a solution is never far away.

Dan Ebberts gives a great introduction to After Effects expressions on his site, motionworks.com, including a slew of articles on physical simulations. I’ve taken the example that Dan provides for a basic bounce, modified it a little, and made it into a preset for you (hey, it’s that time of year):

Ebberts bounce.ffx.zip

There are sliders to adjust amplitude, decay, and frequency. By tweaking these you’ll be able to achieve a variety of effects. I recommend reading Dan’s original post about this expression too. If you don’t have time to peruse the original post, at least check out what Dan has to say about choosing the frequency:

Note that you need to choose your frequency carefully to sell this effect. For example, at 30 frames per second, a frequency of 2.0 will cause the first bounce to occur half way between frames 3 and 4. So it will look like the ball never quite hits the “floor”. To have it occur exactly at frame 3, you would need to change your frequency to 2.5, and to make it occur at frame 4, you’d change the frequency to 1.875.

Now: having quoted Dan’s sage words, I’m going to encourage you to screw it all up by tweening the frequency. In real life, frequency increases as the amplitude gets smaller (think of a ping pong ball, and the way the bouncing speeds up). By tweening the frequency (say, starting at 1 and ending at 2), I find I’m able to get it to look a little more convincing.

Note that this expression does not use keyframes – it only uses the values defined on the sliders.

If you’re still with me, I’ll go into a little more detail after the jump. Continue reading →

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Presentation Best Practices, With a Keynote Bent

Posted on November 10, 2010 by ian

In response to this article on MacTalk, I thought I’d post a short guide to presentation-building with Keynote I made a while back, at my old job.

From my original post:

I used to use Keynote a bit in my last job, and put together a short document on some presentation-building best practices from a Keynote perspective (with a nod towards PowerPoint). It’s a few years old now, and geared towards a graphic design audience, but might prove interesting for would-be Keynote aficionados. If nothing else, it has a picture of David Hasselhoff.

Download Preso best practices here (zipped PDF, 692 KB).

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MenuMeters 1.4

Posted on October 7, 2010 by ian

See what rogue process is mashing your precious 12-core Xeon processors to a pulp with the newly updated MenuMeters. It indicates processor, disk, memory, and network activity at a glance, and even tells you if you’re having a good hair day or not.

n.b. I may have made up that last bit.

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And We’re Back.

Posted on September 25, 2010 by ian

Well that was relatively painless. Please leave a comment if you notice anything that got borked in the transition, such as links, images, RSS feeds, or if your house is on a lean that wasn’t there yesterday.

Update: just in case my redirect didn’t work for you, the new RSS feed is http://ianhaigh.com/blog/feed/

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