Archive for April, 2009

Generally, setting up a personal domain to point to your Mobile Me website is quick and easy.  Recently, however, we discovered that following this process with a domain at Network Solutions requires a few extra steps, but is still as easy as falling out of a banana tree.

The first thing you want to do open iWeb and select File>Set Up Personal Domain on Mobile Me.  This will lead you to the place in your mobile me to enter your domain name, type it in and click Continue.  You’re going to get a screen telling you to go do some stuff at your registrar’s website and this is where Network Solutions gets a little tricky.

First, press COMMAND+T to open a new tab in your browser and use that new tab to log in to Network Solutions, then click ‘Domains’ in the sidebar on the left and choose ‘Manage Domain Names’.  This will give you a list of all the domains you have registered with them, put a check next to the one you want to point at MobileMe and click the ‘Edit DNS’ button below the list.

On the next screen, click the button that says ‘Manage Advanced DNS Records.’  Yes, it sounds scary, but its not, trust me.

The first thing we need to change is in the first section called ‘IP Address (A Records), click the Add/Edit button in that section.   On this screen, you should see the first three lines directing your domain to an ‘under construction’ page,   Delete first three items by placing a check mark in the DELETE column and then clicking the CONTINUE button at the bottom of the column.  Save changes when prompted.

Now were back at the Domains page; go down to the section called “Host Aliases(CNAME Records) and click the Add/Edit button on the right.  We’re going to create two aliases.  In the first line, the ALIAS name is * and the OTHER HOST is web.me.com. (please note the . afterwards, it is important and necessary).  In the second line, the ALIAS name is www and the OTHER HOST is web.me.com. (again, don’t forget the period aftwards.  Now, click the radial buttons next to OTHER HOST on both lines so that they are blue.

I know this is complicated to type, so here’s a picture of what it should look like:

Click the continue button in the bottom right corner, save changes if prompted and you’re all done!  The site warns that this process could take 24 hours to take effect.  In my experience, its more like 2 hours.

Now, flip back to Mobile Me (forgot you had it open, didn’t ya?) and click the DONE button.  In a few hours, traffic will be directed to your Mobile Me through your personal domain and you’re ready to go!

There are several short cuts that I use everyday, but trying to learn a lot of them at one time can be a little daunting.  With that in mind, here are 5 keyboard shortcuts you can start learning, and using, today and add to your repertoire in the future.

COMMAND+W – Close a Window

COMMAND+Q – Quit an Application

OPTION+COMMAND+W -  Close all Windows

COMMAND+SHIFT+[ (or ]) – Move Forward (or backwards) Between Tabs in Safari or Firefox

COMMAND+EJECT – Show Shut Down Dialog

As a bonus, here’s one that’s not really ‘handy’ but good to know.  This bonus tip was inspired by a friend’s frantic FaceBook message to me yesterday telling me that her cat had ‘done something’ to her computer and now the screen looked like an x-ray machine.  Its actually a fairly common problem (especially if you’ve got animals or children touching the keyboard) but you might be hard pressed to find the solution.

COMMAND+OPTION+CONTROL+8 – Invert colors on monitor.

Once you’ve done all the heavy lifting by creating Keywords and Smart Albums, sharing photos to your iPhone is quick and easy.

To share your photos to your iPhone, we actually need to be in iTunes.  Plug in your iPhone and iTunes should launch automatically.  Once the Sync screen is up, look for the Photos tab, it should be the fifth tab across the top of the page.

To sync all or part of your iPhoto library to the phone, put a check mark in the box next to ‘Sync Photos from:” and make sure the next box says iPhoto.  Then, choose whether you want to sync all your photos or just some of them. 

Although its nice to have your entire photo library at your fingettips, I think its very cumbersome to flick through thousands of pictures looking for a specific I want to show to my friend, so I highly recommend using Smart Albums to organize this process so that you can find specific photos quickly.

To sync specific albums, click the button next to ‘Selected Albums’ and then put a check mark next to the albums you want to sync.  You can also click on the Album titles and drag them to put them in a specific order. 

Once you’ve gotten all the albums selected and arranged, just click the ‘Sync’ button in the bottom right corner of the iTunes window and iTunes will sync up the photos to your iPhone.

Now you never have to be caught without a photo of your new grandchild, puppy or spouse again!

If you found this info helpful, you may also want to check out these other, related articles:

Using Keywords to organize your iPhoto library

Organizing Photos Using Smart Albums

Creating a ‘Speed Dial’ on your iPhone using Favorites

Making New Things with the + Button

Smart Albums are really cool because they update themselves based on a set of criteria that you define and now that we’ve created and applied Keywords to our important photos, we can use Smart Albums to organize them for us!

Create a new Smart Album using the + Button at the bottom of the left side of to window, when the New Item box pops up at the top, click Smart Album and give it a name, preferably one that corresponds with one of your new Keywords.  Now in the Conditions row, we want to set the first two boxes to be KEYWORD and IS then, in the third box, select the appropriate Keyword.

Now, anytime we add this keyword to a photo, the photo will automatically be added to this Smart Album.  Repeat this process of making Smart Albums for all the loved ones in your life. 

Repeat these steps for each of the important Keywords you’ve created and you’ll have a collection of Smart Albums that help you quickly find the photos you’re looking for.  Also, you could use these Smart Albums to easily sync your favorite photos to your iPhone.

iPhoto provides many great ways to organize photos for showing off the new photos of your favorite monkey to family and friends, but the continuous process of updating albums can be a little cumbersome: keeping track of which new photos have already been dragged into an album can get confusing and time consuming.  Fortunately there’s a simple way to keep all your photos organized using Keywords!

Keywords add identifying tags to photos to help us find them more easily.  To assign keywords to photos you should first make there’s a checkmark next to View>Keywords in the Menu Bar; next, go to Window>Show Keywords (Command+K).  Show Keywords will bring up a list of pre-existing keywords you’ve got in iPhoto already; most of these were probably built in to iPhoto when you got it.  We want to add some Quick Groups to help organize your photos; click the Edit Keyword button and then use our old friend the + Button to make new Keywords.  I have always recommended making a Keyword for each of your kids, your pets and, maybe, for places you’ve gone on vacation.  Once you’re done, click the OK button to return to the Keywords list.

Now, go through your iPhoto library and add keywords appropriately.  When you put your mouse over a picture, you’ll now notice a place to ‘add keywords’, click on that space and start typing in your keyword and iPhoto will fill it in for you based on your list of Keywords.  Too lazy to type?  Me too!  We can also add keywords by selecting one or more pics (remember the Shift and Command keys for multiple selections) and then just clicking the appropriate keyword in the Keyword window.  We’ll see it turn blue to let us know its been applied.  You can apply more than one Keyword to each photo, so if both kids and the dog on in the picture, apply all three Keywords.

Once you’ve applied all the Keywords you want or need, you can quickly look up those photos by using the Search field at the bottom of the screen.  Before searching, click on the little magnifying glass and choose Keyword instead, quickly move your mouse over the keyword buttons that pop up to keep them in view.  If you miss them the first time, its pretty quick, just click on Keywords again in that search field to get another try at it.  

Click on the Keyword you want to look up and iPhoto filters your library to only include that keyword.  You can also click multiple buttons to further filter your results.  For example, to show only photos of Dr. Zeus choose the Keyword with his name, to only show photos of him on vacation, choose both DR.ZEUS and VACATION keywords.

1. Make Ringtones for your iPhone – That’s right!  You don’t necessarily have to go to the iTunes store and pay the extra money to have awesome, personalized ringtones on your iPhone, you can use any DRM-Free music you have and make it yourself.  When you open GarageBand 09 there are a few choices for what kind of project you want to start; in the left sidebar, select iPhone Ringtone and click Choose.  GarageBand will set up the whole project for you, all you need to do is pull a song from your iTunes library using the media browser, trim it up and send it back to iTunes as a ringtone using Share>Send Ringtone to iTunes!  EASY!

2. Sync up the soundtrack for your iPhoto slideshow – There are a lot of times where it would be nice if the music in an iPhoto slideshow would sync up with the picture to help evoke mood or to help establish different chapters, but when adding music in iPhoto you can’t trim or edit the music at all; not true in GarageBand!  To make awesome soundtracks for your Slideshow, skip the music in iPhoto and use File>Export>Slideshow to send it to the Media Browser.  Jump to Garageband, use Track>Show Movie Track to make a track for the video and then use the Media Browser to pull the movie in.  Now you can use additional tracks to carefully craft your soundtrack and clip, fade and overlap songs as you like.  You can see the video in the Movie Track, so you’ll know how to get the pieces lined up.  Awesome!

3. Create a soundtrack for your short film.  You can use the same technique coming out of iMovie to make a really polished soundtrack for your short film as well.  Add sound effects using the Sound Effect Library in the Podcast section of the Loop Browser and put theme music on the beginning and end and you’ve got a short that’s ready for Sundance.

4. Print sheet music – Yes, you can actually print the sheet music for the super-cool song you just wrote, even if you only used Loops to write it!  Once your song is complete, just go to the Menu Bar and select File>Print, its that easy!

5. Add Chapter Markers to a DVD – Once you’ve finished up in iMovie, take a moment to share the project to GarageBand.  Using Edit>Add Marker, you can add chapters to your movie.  Use the Movie Markers section of the Track Editor to name them properly and then send the project to iDVD.  iDVD sees the chapter markers and will set up a menu for them with thumbnails and everything using the titles you gave them in GarageBand.  FANCY!

Cover Flow is such a cool tool that missing album artwork in my library becomes a big drag.  Fortunately, it is really simple to find and add missing artwork in iTunes so your library can be complete and beautiful.

The easiest way to get missing artwork is to go up to the menu bar at the top of the screen and select Advanced>Get Album Artwork, then click the ‘Get Album Artwork’ button on the window that pops up.  Now, at the top of the iTunes screen, you’ll see a status of iTunes inventorying all the artwork and, hopefully, filling in the blanks.  This process is going to run for a few minutes and when it is done, you may get a screen that tells you that iTunes was unable to get some artwork.  If so, then you’ll need to find the appropriate art yourself and add it to iTunes.  Fortunately that’s a pretty easy process as well.

The first step to manually adding album artwork is to get the artwork you want for the album.  Amazon.com is a great resource for this.  Go to the site and search for your album in the Music section, when the search list comes back, select your album from the list by clicking on the album’s title.  When the album’s page comes up, you’ll notice an image of the album cover on the left side of the screen, sometimes this is accompanied by two or more smaller images below it.  These images are all different versions of the album cover/art; Amazon loaded the big one, and other Amazon customers have added the smaller ones.  Move your mouse over each of the smaller ones to determine which one you like best and select it by clicking it.

Once the larger size image has loaded, either in its own pop-window or in the same window you selected it from, control+click (right click) the image and select ‘Save Image As’ and save the image to your computer. 

A few notes on saving those images:  Firstly, I’d make a folder for them somewhere and put them all in one place instead of having artwork files strewn about the desktop or downloads folder.  I have a folder called Album Artwork inside my Music folder and I save them all there.  Secondly, RENAME THE FILE when you’re saving it!  The file name is going to be something lengthy and meaningless and, if you’re doing more than one album at a time, it will be difficult to know which file is which.

Once you’ve downloaded the artwork, go back to iTunes and select the song, or songs, you’re adding art to.  (Don’t forget about the Shift and Command keys for makng multiple selections.)  Once selected, choose File>Get Info (or Command+I) to bring up the info screen about the track(s).  (If you’ve selected multiple songs, you’re going to get a warning asking if you really want to change multiple tracks at the same time, sure we do!)  Now, look for the Artwork section, if you’ve only chosen one song, Artwork is the last tab across the top; go there, click the ADD button and add the file we just downloaded.  If you selected multiple tracks to add this art too, you’ll see the artwork well right there on the right side of the screen; double click in the well to add a new image.

Either way, the artwork is added to the file and will now show up in Cover Flow and on our iPod or iPhone!

‘Green Screening’ (also called ‘Chroma Keying’) is a technique used in the film industry to use a certain shade of green as a key for removing unwanted portions of an image in the compositing process.  One of the new features of iMovie 09 is the ability to Green Screen effect on your own home video.  This is really great news if you’re making short films and need to have a scene at the Eiffel Tower or on the moon.  The other great news is, its really easy!

If I want a shot of my main character standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, I’ll need two pieces of media:  the video of my main character (standing in front of a solid green wall) and a shot of the Eiffel Tower, either video or still will work although video will result in a more convincing result.  The green wall can be an actual wall you’ve painted green a paper sweep or, in a pinch, a green sheet or other fabric that’s been ironed really well.  Your local filmmaker’s rental house will probably sell ‘chroma key’ paint you can buy if you want to paint a wall, but if you don’t want to spend that much money, just get a good quality paint in bright green and apply it really evenly. 

When shooting the video of the main character, keep in mind that the subject (actor) and the background (green wall) must be lit separately to make sure there are no shadows being cast on the wall and that the green is as evenly lit as humanly possible.  It is also essential that the character NOT be wearing anything green, otherwise, parts of his/her body will disappear in the compositing process.

Shoot the video of your actor and acquire the footage of the Eiffel Tower, if you don’t happen to have the media of the Eiffel Tower, you can check out places like iStockphoto for royalty-free images and video at a really reasonable price.  If you’re making a short film or music video that’s going to play at film festivals or other pubic screening, it is absolutely essential that you know you have legal rights to use the images in your film so DO NOT just copy images out of Google or other websites as those are NOT public domain images or free to use as you want.

Ok, now the hard part is over!  We’ve got our character, we’ve got the Eiffel Tower and we’ve got both pieces imported into a project in iMovie 09.  The first step is click on ‘iMovie’ in the menu bar and select Preferences.  Make sure there’s a checkbox next to ‘Show Advanced Tools’.  Close the Preferences window.

Next, in the Library, select the clip or still image of the Eiffel Tower and drag it into the Project.  Then, select the clip of your main character and drop in directly on top of the Eiffel Tower, select ‘Green Screen’ from the resulting pop up menu.

iMovie automatically goes through and removes all the green from the foreground image, resulting in a picture that looks like your main character standing in front of the Eiffel Tower!  AWESOME!

iWeb and Mobile Me provide a quick and easy way to make beautiful web pages and host them easily, but the resulting URL can be a little unpleasant.  In this age of web savvy people where everyone and their grandmother (literally) has a personal domain its great to know that you can map your own domain name to your Mobile Me web page.

The first step is to acquire your domain name.  There are about a million places to do this like Network Solutions (Setting up a Personal Domain in iWeb using Network Solutions) and Dotster.com , but our favorite is www.GoDaddy.com the mail is terrible (POP only) but the domains are super cheap.

Once you’ve got the perfect domain name acquired, let’s say “monkeyluv.com,” head over to iWeb.  Click on File in the Menu Bar and select Set Up Personal Domain.  This is going to launch a Safari window and take you to the Account section of your Mobile Me membership.  In the sidebar on the left, you’ll see Personal Domain, down near the bottom of the list, click on it.

The resulting screen is the Add Personal Domain screen, just type in your domain name in both sections here and click continue.  When finished, you’re going to be asked to go back to the site where you bought your domain and update the CNAME. The CNAME for your domain is “web.me.com”.   FYI, in my experience, this process is much clearer and easier using www.GoDaddy.com

Once you’ve got that part done, go back to iWeb and click the Done button on that  screen.  You’ll get a message that says it could take up to 48 hours for changes to occur, but mostly I’ve seen it happen in minutes rather than hours.

Now, when people visit your domain, they will be forwarded to your Mobile Me webpage and there’s no need to remember the web.me.com/somelongname address for your Moblie Me site!

For detailed instructions on setting up Network Solutions for your mobile me web site check out Setting up a Personal Domain in iWeb using Network Solutions.

Making a copy of a CD with your Mac is simple and easy using Disk Utility which is built right in to Mac OS X.  First, insert the disk you’d like to copy and open Disk Utility.  Disk Utility is located in the Utilities folder which is inside the Applications folder.

Once its opened, you’ll see that there’s a sidebar on the left, very similar to other applications in OS X.  In that sidebar, you’ll see all your hard drives, external drives, and disk drives.  If you’ve already inserted the CD, you should see the disk listed there as well.  Click once on it.

What we’re going to now is to make a ‘Disk Image’ of the CD.  That basically means we’re going to take a picture of exactly what’s on the disc and save it so we can use it in the future, sort of like lifting comic strips up with Silly Putty.  To do this, we just click the New Image button at the top of the screen.  Its going to open a dialog box asking us where we want to save this image.  If you’re only copying this once and will never need it again, you can just put it on the desktop and delete it later, but if it’s a disk that you’ll probably want to copy over and over again down the road, save it in Documents (or other meaningful location) so you can access it later.  Click Save and here we go.

This part might take some time, so feel free to grab a coffee or something.  Let’s say you’ve got 10-15 minutes.

Once that step is complete (and we’ve had our morning Latte) we can eject the original disk and put in the new, blank disk that we’re going to copy to.  Your blank media should be a CD-R or DVD-R and (in my opinion) not made by Memorex.

Once the new disk is in, it will show up in the sidebar, but what we really want to look for is the image we made a moment ago.  It should also be listed in the sidebar now with the name we gave it ending with ‘.dmg’.  Click once on the name and click the Burn button at the top of the screen.

Go get another coffee and you’ll be finished when your return!  Don’t forget to delete the Disk Image if you’re not going to need it again and, for the love of bananas, label your new disk!