Well, it’s the time of year for “year in review” videos. I came across one from Google today that was excellent and I thought I’d go ahead and post it here. It starts a bit slow, but it’s worth the whole 3 minutes.
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Image Optimizer
In the last month, I’ve found myself doing an increased amount of work that involves uploading images online. Part of my workflow has been ImageOptim.
Drop an image and it automatically crunches it down and optimizes it for you. Usually you can hit the “Again” button another time or two to further results.
If you add any images online. Run it through this first.
ImageOptim is free for Mac OS X. Download it here.
Christmas Ringtones
In order to spread some Christmas cheer, I decided to make some ringtones for the faithful few who still follow my blog. Unlike last time, I’ve included mp3 versions, so my friends without iPhones aren’t left out.
My hope is to make some more throughout the season, so if you have any requests, just let me know in the comments.
1) The First Noel (Phil Wickham) – iPhone | mp3
You can buy Phil Wickham’s Christmas album on his website at philwickham.com. The album has quickly become one of my favorites. It’s traditional, yet he adds just enough to keep these songs fresh. Buy it for someone. Add it to your Christmas list. Just get this album.
2) It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Andy Williams) – iPhone | mp3
This is one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs. You can buy the song
3) Wizards in Winter (Trans-Siberian Orchestra) – iPhone | mp3
I added this one…well I’m not sure why. It became famous a few years ago in a video where the song was synced to some Christmas lights on a house. You can buy the song
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iPhone users, download the .m4r file and drag it into “Ringtones” in iTunes. Then attach your iPhone, check your sync settings and then sync.
Grab these while you can. I probably won’t be leaving them up for very long.
Merry Christmas!
Parker Fighter 2
Yesterday I convinced Parker that we needed to make a movie. He was not thrilled about it. Probably because he really didn’t know what he was getting into. After some arm twisting, I got him to agree.
In my garage, I have a coin-op arcade version of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition. I spent hours on this machine, working on combos and special moves. I love this game.
Fortunately, Parker and Kent have picked up an appreciation for it (though they haven’t quite figured out how to do the special moves yet). Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make a SF2 movie. Since Kent expressed ZERO interested in dad’s crazy idea, I decided to just use Parker.
The following video is the result of a few quick takes and a couple of hours of editing. It’s VERY rough (bad green screen, line down the middle, etc.), but I want my boys to catch a glimpse of the potential of what we can do. I want them to explore their creative sides and expose them to the creative process in general (from concept to completion). The idea is that I’ll add more elements in the future (character select screen, life bars, timer, etc.) if they want to continue with it.
Anyway, here’s our first take: Parker Fighter 2 (Round 1)
(By the way, the image attached to this post is a super-rad abstract display of the characters in the game.)
automator
I love Automator.
It’s a powerful program that comes bundled with OS X that allows you to automate tasks and actions on your mac. I’ve just started playing around with it, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool that can enhance your workflow.
For instance, every Friday I need to send out an email to our staff to remind them to get me their agenda items for our next staff meeting. I used to just try to remind myself each week…and that didn’t really work out. So then I went to the next step. I created an iCal alarm for 10am each day. This was effective, but I still had to respond to the alarm. I had to open Mail.app, create a message, choose the recipients, type my message and then send it.
Not hard, but a bit tedious.
So I created an Automator action that would accomplish this whole task for me on it’s own.
Here are the steps I took:
1. Open Automator.
2. Create a new “iCal Alarm”
3. Select “Mail” in the left column to only show Mail.app specific actions. Then drag “New Mail Message” onto the window on the right.
4. Enter the information for the email recipients, subject and message. You can also select which email account you want to send the message from (if you have multiple accounts).
5. Now select “Send Outgoing Messages” and drag it beneath the “New Mail Message” action.
6. Save the Automator file.
7. iCal will open. Set the parameters of the iCal event. (I created a separate iCal Calendar named “Automator” for all of my Automator events). Notice that the alarm isn’t a noise. Instead the alarm is to open the Automator file. Make sure to set the “repeat” setting in the iCal if you want this to be a reoccurring event.
If you’ve done this properly, Automator will create your email and send it off for you at the time you specify and at the repeat value you set (i.e. every Friday at 10am).
This is just scratching the surface of what Automator can do. I’ve automated several different tasks on my mac (like backing up folders to my Dropbox account).
If you’d like to explore it a bit further and get an idea of Services (new to Snow Leopard), check out this video with Sal Saghoian from PixelCorps.tv.
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