Scott Bourne www.podcastingtricks.com and www.podcastgearguy.com
Derrick Story www.thedigitalstory.com Colleen Wheeler digitalmedia.oreilly.com
John Foster pixelcorps.tv and Beer School
Kenji Kato Kenjikato.com
Craig Syverson Grunt Media

We're back with part 2 of our Tip Monster show!

Here we go...

Scott: One of the easiest ways to do a screencast is with iMovie. When picking a format, you're also selecting the size of the final movie, and in order to get the best output, you should start with originals that are the same resolution as the format you choose. Scott's tip is to make sure your imported original material is 720 x 480 (for DV) so that iMovie won't resize it.

Kenji: If you want to use Keynote's "Export to Quicktime" within iMovie, change the Custom Output from Keynote to 720 x 534 and when you bring it into iMovie, it'll rescale it appropriately. Scott points out that you can also pick out pixel shape in Photoshop now.

John: In iTunes, sometimes things go missing and you get exclamation points in your library. To get rid of that, John recommends one of the scripts from Doug's Applescripts for iTunes instead of doing it manually. John also wanted to add on to an iChat tip from last time, and recommends using BonJour on your network if the person your chatting with is inside your network. Derrick also points out that you can use the same techniques mentioned before. BonJour is an open standard that's supported by a lot of different equipment (printers, routers, etc.)

Derrick: Liked the YouTube Zoom tip from last episode. In iPhoto, when editing a photo, you can double-click to enter edit mode. You can zoom into 100% by pressing the 1 key. That brings you up to 100%. Fit in Window is 0, 2 gives you 200%. In Aperture, the keys are different. It's the Z key to go to 100% and back out. You can point the cursor at an area and hit Z to zoom in on that spot. (Works for Lightroom also)

Kenji: TextEdit for the Mac will read Microsoft .DOC files and even preserve some of the formatting. You can see the Word property settings of a document by going into Show Properties Settings in TextEdit. Craig points out that Pages also does open Word documents with more formatting than TextEdit. Colleen pointed out to Derrick that you can e-mail an Excel spreadsheet to your Gmail address and open it with Google Docs (Vinny's tip: You can also upload it directly to Google Docs without e-mailing it.)

Craig: Loved the old days of ScrapBook on the Mac. He now loves iClip which lets you collect clippings, text, etc. You can find it at inventive.us . Scott points out that you can still get a free version from Inventive but the new version is worth it.

Scott: In Preview, if you want to work with a document (ie: anything Preview will open) you can select the information and copy it and paste it somewhere else. You don't have to take the whole document, though. If you press option, then drag over the part of the document you want to copy and let go of the mouse, you can copy that selection to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else.

John: John likes to play classic games. If you plug a USB game controller into a Mac, it does nothing. You need to get USB Overdrive . You can then map the keyboard to the various buttons on the control pad. Craig points out that you can also reprogram a multi-button Logitech Mouse in the same way.

Derrick: If you've purchased QuickTime Pro and you think you wasted your money, have no fear. In Pro, you get the Present Movie mode. Click View, Present Movie. It will take the rest of your Mac black and you can enjoy your movie distraction free.

Kenji: If you use Mail.app, and you don't want to figure out a bunch of rules, you can create a new Smart Mailbox. If you're on the person whose mail you want to filter, click New Smart Mailbox in the Mailbox menu, and you will have a new Smart Mailbox in your sidebar with that person's messages in it.

Craig: Recommends an app called Audio Leak (available here ) for podcasters and music afficianados who want to keep track of overall loudness when recording. Scott also recommends The Levelator to do mass compression on audio.

That's it for our Tip Monster episode!

This episode was sponsored by Rogue Amoeba and ShieldZone .

The next show lands on March 20, 2007. For more information email us at info@ilifezone.com.

Thanks to Pixelcorps for production assistance with the iLifeZone and Libsyn for hosting services.

Thanks also to Vincent Ferrari for the shownotes!

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