Author Archives: ian

Creating Command Shortcuts in Textmate 2

Usually when you want to record a keyboard shortcut for Textmate, you just click in the “Key Equivalent” box and type the shortcut. However this seems to be currently broken in Textmate 2 (which is in alpha, at the time … Continue reading

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Retrieving Photos From an iPhone Backup

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. … Continue reading

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DuckDuckGo

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 … Continue reading

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Steve Jobs

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 … Continue reading

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Ease and Wizz: Mixing Easing Types

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 … Continue reading

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After Effects: Auto Fade Text Preset

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 … Continue reading

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My After Effects 5.5 and ExtendScript Toolkit Imbroglio

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 … Continue reading

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Better Bouncing in After Effects

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 … Continue reading

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Presentation Best Practices, With a Keynote Bent

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 … Continue reading

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MenuMeters 1.4

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 … Continue reading

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