Mariner Software released Montage 1.3 beta this week. The public version is scheduled to be released in November. Montage 1.3 is a Mac-only screen writing software, and now supports exporting to Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter, giving Montage more compatibility with industry standards.

Montage 1.3 now supports French, Italian, Spanish, and German, as has made improvements to it’s importing from Final Draft feature. Other changes include minor speed enhancements and bug fixes.

Though I personally haven’t used Montage, it sounds like an easy software to learn, yet powerful enough for professional screenwriters to use effectively. With it’s intuitively Mac-like interface, and pre-formatted themes for television, movies, and theatre, it’s a great tool for writing your next script.

Montage also has the ability to link with Apple Address Book, and includes hundreds of industry contacts, making it easier to submit your work.

If you would like to find out more about beta testing Montage 1.3, you can find information at Mariner Software.

Montage 1.3 will sell for $139.95 US, or can be acquired by a free upgrade to current Montage 1.0 owners. Montage 1.3 will also be sold onlne by Mariner Software as well as at retail stores, including: Amazon, CompUSA, Apple, Fry’s, MicroCenter, and The Writer’s Store.

My pre-ordered new Wireless Keyboard arrived, and I can say easily that my first impressions are very positive.

I have owned a Core2Duo MacBook for about a year, and become very accustomed to the keyboard style and layout. As a result, more and more when I sat down at my iMac to do some work I became annoyed at the bulky, blocky keyboard that came with the iMac. I even replaced it with the Wireless one that was previously released, which had little effect on my appreciation of the keyboard.

When Apple announced the new keyboard design I felt as if my mind had been read- for awhile now I had been thinking that it would be great if the keyboard for the imac was identical to that of the MacBooks. In fact, I’m considering an upgrade to a MacBook Pro, but am waiting for it as well to be upgraded to the recessed, square key design of the MacBooks and now iMac keyboards.

The New Wireless Keyboard is very, very compact. I don’t think it’s clear in the photos just how small, thin, and well-designed it is. It’s width and profile are exactly that of the MacBook’s- to a tee.
Continue Reading »

One of my previous posts pre-iPhone, I wrote about how there were ways to work around the iPhone’s limitations, and how you could use email to send your photos to Flickr. Well now, thanks to some hacker/tinkerers, we have a 3rd party native iPhone app that does the job splendidly!

The app is called iFlickr. It can be installed via the Installer.app hack which is really the only (read: easiest) way to install 3rd party apps on your phone. New and improved applications are finding their way to the iPhone every day—from an old-school NES game player to IM applications, a webserver, one-off iPhone-unique games like Lights Off and Tap Tap Revolution, all among many others. No, they’re not all perfect, some in alpha or beta in quality, but these apps are diverse in function and imaginative.

Continue Reading »

Having recently purchased in an Xbox 360 I was disappointed to find out there was no native support for streaming content to your 360 from your Mac. One of the major selling points of the 360 is its ability to act as a media center, even allowing Mac formated iPods to connect via USB. Windows users can stream a wide array of media to their 360, but Mac users have been left out. This is where Nullriver Software comes in with Connect360.

The concept behind their software is to allow all of your iLife content to be streamed directly to the 360, and it works as simply as it sounds. Requiring minimal setup and only $20 USD for the full version, Connect360 is a must have for Mac and 360 owners. The only notable downsides are not the fault of Nullriver, but of DRM and Microsoft’s limited codec support.

There is a generous free trial version available that allows you to stream a limited number of photos, music, and videos at a time. For more information about supported content see this blog post from msdn.com

Microsoft, on Monday lost it’s three year long appeal case (full extremely long document can be read here) against the EU anti-trust order which was imposed in 2004. The order will make the enormous fish pay a record fine of $613 Million, sell a version of Windows which does not include its media player, and force them to share code relevant for allowing devices of different operating systems to communicate with Windows devices.

This is a landmark case for the European Commission (EC) who seems to be actively pursuing large US companies with large market share in their respective fields, and it appears that Apple is next on the EC’s radar.

Apple and some of its music partners are currently facing investigation by the European anti-trust officials for the pricing of items in the iTunes store. The commission wants to discover the reasons for different pricing in different territories of the European Union (for people who aren’t in Europe, you can only purchase from the country which your credit/debit card address is located. Apple also has different prices in the different stores). This is no joke for Apple as the EC has power to fine a company up to 10% of there worldwide revenue.
Continue Reading »

If you recently upgraded to iLife 08, no doubt you’ve noticed some rather dramatic changes in how the updated applications look and work. One particular change to iPhoto is starting to annoy digital photographers used to diving into the iPhoto Library folder to directly access images imported into iPhoto. The new iLife 08 version of iPhoto’s Library is no longer a standard folder, but is instead a package. This new format prevents users from easily viewing and opening images in the iPhoto Library in the Finder or applications like Adobe Photoshop. But there is a simple solution.

Continue Reading »

After a short summer hiatus, in part Final Cut Pro Studio re-certification, we return with more Stuff, Guts, and Video.

One way to a more efficient Final Cut Pro workflow is to re-use bits and pieces created during the course of a project. Motion effects, transitions, and filter settings that you’ve spent valuable time adjusting, tweaking, and finessing, can easily be re-used by turning them into favorites. There are a number of ways to create, store and organize favorite effects in Final Cut Pro and I outlined several of those in Stuff, Guts, and Video 008. The problem with storing all these cool items in the Favorites Bin of the Effects Tab in the Browser is, if Final Cut Pro’s preferences ever go bad, get replaced, or if you reset FCP’s preferences. . . boom . . . there go all those favorites.

Here are a couple of ways to protect those cool favorite effects, filters, and transitions.

First, back up your FCP preferences. I talked about how to do that in the last episode, Stuff, Guts, and Video 012. That way if preferences die, it’s easy to restore those lost settings. Be sure to back up the preferences regularly so that any new favorites that are created are preserved.

Second, create an Effects Bin in each project and copy the favorites that are used in that project into the Effects Bin (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Create a bin in each project to preserve motion effects, filters, and transitions.

This keeps a copy of the motion effects, filters, and transitions used by each project with the project, so that even if preferences die, the effects will still be there. I often make a copy of the entire Favorites bin in the Effects Tab in a project as another way of preserving all my effects. Then if something happens to the favorites I can quickly restore them by opening a project and copying them back to the Effects Tab.

No one expects that catastrophic events will happen to them while editing a project to a tight deadline, but the better prepared you are the faster it is to recover and keep on editing.

Next time on Stuff, Guts, and Video we’ll look at some cool editing keyboard shortcuts you definitely need to know.

This tip is good for all versions of Final Cut Pro.

Ad-Blocking has been a subject of much debate since its conception. On the one hand we want to support the free sites we enjoy, yet cannot stand obnoxious ads. All the more so when they disguise themselves as application windows to mislead the uninformed user. Being on OS X has been a safeguard against these types of ads for people like my parents, who switched this time last year.

This may not be anything terribly new, but it appears at least one company has put a half-hearted attempt at misleading Mac users. While looking up guitar tabs this morning I came across this:

You might say that including both a Windows interface and a Mac interface would be ingenious, except for it’s fatal flaw. The first giveaway is, of course, the large Fisher Price looking buttons sticking out like a sore thumb. The second is it not being an actual window you can interact with. You might say the ad is doing more damage to itself by alerting Windows users that something is up.

However annoying it is, I couldn’t help but chuckle when I saw the attempt. At the very least we can say Apple is finally getting more attention, maybe not the kind we want, but it’s a start.

Even on an 802.11g network you can achieve some pretty fast transfers between your Macs & PC’s, provided one detail: one of the computers you’ll be transferring to or from is hard-wired via Ethernet.

Every wireless network has a threshold of bandwidth available on it which is somewhat in flux, due to the distances the connections are made at; the variety of devices on a network and their respective transfer speeds; and the amount of traffic on the network at the time you make a transfer.

Making a transfer of a 1.18GB video file from my Core2Duo Macbook wirelessly to an Ethernet wired Core2Duo iMac through my 802.11n Airport Extreme, I achieve wireless speeds of around 11.3Mb/sec. In terms of time, that 1.18GB video file took less than a minute to complete.

Making the same transfer with both computers wirelessly connected to the Airport Extreme, the transfer speeds were more than sliced in half. Why?
Continue Reading »

The Fuji Finepix Z5fd is a compact 6.3 megapixel digital camera. This baby is really compact, small enough to fit in your shirt pocket. The 2.5-inch LCD screen is pin sharp too, which is a good thing, as you use this for framing up your shots as well and viewing playback of your photos.

A quick rundown of the specification of the Z5fd will help you to see just how featured packed this camera is. As previously mentioned you get a 6.3 megapixel resolution, a 2.5-inch LCD screen, picture stabilization and natural light modes, face detection, up to ISO 1600, 3x optical and 6.2x digital zoom. The camera has 26MB of internal memory, but no xD memory card supplied. It also has 14 quick scene modes, for things like portrait, night, and sports shots.
Continue Reading »