March 2009 Archives

Courtesy of buggy-as-hell Soundtrack Pro:

An Unexpected Problem

CNSExceptionWrapper type = 16777216, error = 0, message = REFERENCE WAS SOMEHOW RELEASED TOO MANY TIMES

… somehow released too many times? Like a repeat offender?

Some very handy hints on creating a tutorial screencast over at AETuts.

John Nack over at Adobe is waxing lyrical over the new tablet from – who else? – Wacom. The Intuos 4 has a click wheel, à la the old style iPods. Now if only they’d fix that clunky system preference pane …

An amazing demo of Zoetrope, which allows a user to navigate a webpage back in time and use “time lenses” to link disparate sources, thereby detecting correlations and trends. OK so my explanation makes no sense. Just go and watch the video, already:

Zoetrope: Interacting with the Ephemeral Web

The code-bunnies at MacRabbit have released Espresso 1.0, an HTML and general purpose editor. It’s been in beta for some time, and it looks very promising.

(They’re also the creators of CSSEdit, which is so tasty it hurts.)

Codec? What the hell kind of word is codec?

Well, it’s a contraction of the words “Compression” and “Decompression” (in much the same way modem is a conjunction of “Modulator” and “Demodulator”, but that’s another long, boring story). When you watch a video on your computer, a codec is being used to play it back.

ProRes is the name of a nifty codec Apple came up with – it squishes the file size, but keeps the visual quality more or less intact. It comes with Apple’s pro software tools, but if you’re a puny amateur wanting to play back a movie that uses a ProRes codec, you’re out of luck. Until now*. Thanks to the wittily named “Apple ProRes QuickTime Decoder 1.0”, anyone can enjoy the soothing effect of many, many images displayed in rapid succession.

• Apple ProRes QuickTime Decoder 1.0 for Mac

• Apple ProRes QuickTime Decoder 1.0 for Windows

* Actually until last August, which was when Apple published this plugin.

So, advertising behemoth The Google* will start showing ads targeted at you. Up until now, ads placed by Google reflected the content of the page they were in – if you visited a page about the history of the pogo stick, you’d be greeted with ads for pogo sticks. That, however, is about to change. If you’ve been visiting a bunch of sites regarding deep-sea diving, then visit a page about pogo sticks, Google will figure “this potential ad-viewer is into deep-sea diving”, and show you ads related to decompression chambers instead of pogo sticks. That is, they’ll collect information about your browsing habits, and advertise accordingly.

It’s a smart move, and so far they’ve gone about it the right way. They’ve been transparent, and you’ll be able to opt-out – and even access the information they’ve collated on you. If the advertising truly is relevant, it won’t be irritating; it’ll be helpful.

(I’m hoping it might actually bring in a few bucks for my humble attempt at online advertising. So far the ads on the Ease and Wizz page have earned me the jaw-droppingly insignificant sum of one cent.)

* “The Google” is how a former managing director I worked with referred to the world’s preeminent search engine. My colleagues and I enjoyed this immensely.

From none other than the Adobe Illustrator team themselves … a blog called Infinite Resolution. Because you can, erm, zoom in on it. Forever.

Via John Nack on Adobe.

For some reason Safari 4 Beta broke the CSS on our intranet’s Rails app. On closer inspection, it appeared to have been confused by the “cache killer” – the random number appended to external CSS and JavaScript urls. This tip from rubyonrails-talk seems to have fixed it up.

I’ve long been a customer of Mac Centre in Sydney, and now it’s moved to a perilously convenient location: the corner of Foveaux and Commonwealth streets. The lure of software and sandwiches from Taste may prove my downfall.

I’ve been trialling Safari 4 beta. It’s great! Although – I do find the tabs at the very top of the window a bit bizarre. That said, you can turn them off. Here’s a handy reference for all the hidden prefs. Tweak tweak.