Linked List: January 27, 2009

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

iMovie ’09 Image Stabilization Examples 

Nice before/after example from Beau Colburn, with footage from a Flip Mino HD. And here’s an example from Neven Mrgan. Update: And an example from Jason Snell here.

What I’ve found is that iMovie won’t apply any stabilization at all to a clip that contains any portions which are too shaky to stabilize. Like, say, a single clip where you shoot pointing north for a few seconds, then quickly whip the camera around to point south for another few seconds. But if you break that clip up into two separate clips — editing out the blurry “whipping around” frames — iMovie will then stabilize the separate clips. iMovie helpfully indicates the “too shaky” portions of a clip with red squiggly lines. Here’s the relevant portion from iMovie ’09’s help:

A red squiggly line underlines any video in the Project Browser or Event Browser that was too shaky to stabilize. To play a clip stabilized in a project, you must remove any parts underlined with a red squiggly line.

But I’ve found that iMovie will stabilize some clips which contain the red squiggles, if the squiggled segments are short.

Amazon’s Kindle 2 to Debut February 9 

At a special event hosted by Jeff Bezos.

Apple Gets Patent for Multi-Touch 

Very broad language — taken at face value, Apple effectively owns the IP rights to multi-touch in the U.S. This sucks.

To be clear, my beef is with the U.S. patent system in that it allows something like this. Given the state of software patent law in the U.S., I don’t blame Apple or any other company for pursuing the broadest patent claims they can. And just because they hold an apparently broad patent doesn’t mean they’re going to use it as a weapon. Here’s to hoping they don’t.

Mark Papermaster to Begin at Apple as Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering on April 24 

Apple:

The litigation between IBM and Mark Papermaster has been resolved.

Wonder why he doesn’t start until April, though? I suppose that’s part of the settlement. (Via Dan Moren.)

Update: Yup, according to IBM, the April start date is part of the negotiated settlement.

iPhone OS 2.2.1 

Fixes the image-resizing bug introduced in 2.2.0 and “improves general stability of Safari”.

John Updike Dies at 76 

As good a prose stylist as there ever was.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottle, if I had to,” Updike told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

Softwear by Microsoft 

These are actually cool. The problem for Microsoft is that nothing they’ve done recently is cool. (Via Alissa Walker.)

Muxtape Is Dead; Long Live Muxtape 

Muxtape is back, reborn as “a minimalist platform for bands to promote their music and listeners to create mixes”. Great idea, well done.

Macintosh 25th Anniversary Reunion 

Guy Kawasaki’s photos from a reunion of the original Macintosh team at Apple.

ClickToFlash Is Dead; Long Live ClickToFlash 

So it appears the original project page at Google Code for ClickToFlash is no longer accessible, for reasons unknown. That’s OK, though, because the project was open source, and it’s already been forked and slightly improved. Wolf Rentzsch is now maintaining a forked version hosted at GitHub, and it now supports Option-clicking to add the current domain to a whitelist so that Flash content will subsequently load automatically. You can add domains to the whitelist manually with the following command-line invocation:

defaults write com.apple.Safari ClickToFlash.whitelist -array-add 'vimeo.com'

Most of you probably just want the binary installer, not the source code. There’s a download link for the installer at the bottom of the page.

ClickToFlash’s original author took care to remain anonymous. Whoever you are, thank you.

‘The Auteur Theory of Design’ 

Video of my presentation at Macworld Expo earlier this month, from the new Macworld Pulse program.

Podcaster, Renamed and Rejiggered, Now Available From App Store 

Now named RSS Player, and without the built-in directory of podcasts. But it still allows you to download podcasts larger than 10 MB.