Silvermac

While Stacks are cool and easy to use, many Mac users feel robbed by not having an option of Applications folder being placed in the Dock. This is where Ross Carter comes to the rescue.

Ross has put his heart, soul, brain and, of course, his fingers to work together, and came up with an application that sits in Dock and provides the content of Applications folder, just like it used to be in Tiger and earlier OS X versions.

Sounds interesting? Head over to Ross’ website and download the DockAppsMenu to try it yourself.

For some reason the brightness control on the new silver iMacs won’t let you dim your screen beyond certain point. While this is OK during the daytime, I find myself quite annoyed sometimes when using my computer late at night, when the only light in the room is a small table lamp. I’d like to reduce the screen brightness even further, but it doesn’t work.

I just came across this handy little application conveniently called Brightness Control, and it does exactly what I need, it lets me reduce the brightness of my screen even further.

Another thing that I love about it is that it adjusts the low light gamma of your screen. When I reduce the screen brightness on my iMac to the minimum, the contrast and the colours become somewhat pale and not so vibrant, when comparing to those at the higher brightness level. However Brightness Control takes care of this automatically and the contrasts and colours are still OK even when the brightness is all the way down to the wee hour levels.

Interested? Then go to the Splasm Software website and download the Brightness Control, it’s free.

iMovie HD (06) has a nice little function that splits the video clip at any point you want.

With iMovie 08 there is very little reason you would want to split the clip, so the oh-eight doesn’t have this option. But if you really want to do it, there is a way around. The entire work is done in the event pane, the lower half of the screen.

Here is a clip that we want to split in two.

First, we need to spread the clip wide in order to enhance the selection precision, continue reading…

iMovie 08 has finally got its own file management system, or rather the library management (just like iPhoto and iTunes), and things look better than ever before. You open the iMovie and all you need is right there.

But there is one problem with this – the size of the library. Try importing half a dozen of your DV tapes onto your hard drive and you’ll see what I mean. One hour of digital video takes about 10GB on your hard drive.

Thankfully there is a way to get around this. Nik Friedman has developed a script that will compress your videos down to approximately 30% of its original size, with a minimal loss of quality.

Head over to iNik.net and get the script, it’ll cost you only a thank-you-Nik line.

These are the most popular iPhoto exporters that have been tested and work fine with iPhoto 08.

• Flickr Export
• Facebook Exporter
• Picasa Web Albums exporter
• iPhoto to Gallery
• LiveJournal exporter

For any additional exporters available, please feel free to add a link in the comments section.

In iPhoto 08 (iPhoto 7) you can preview the photos contained in an Event by slowly moving the mose pointer left-right while hovering, somewhat similar to the coverflow in iTunes. But if you have many photos in an Event, it may be a bit tricky moving your mouse pointer pixel by pixel.

So what do you do? You select the Event thumbnail and then preview the contents with the left and right arrows on your keyboard.

While previewing photos this way, you may want to change the key photo as well. There are two ways of doing this, one is to right-click and select ‘Make key photo”, or simply press spacebar and the current photo will be set as a key photo.

I’ve just noticed a strange change when in edit mode. When editing a photo, you can always preview the original and compare it to the edited one before saving.

In iPhoto 06 you do this by pressing Control key. In iPhoto 08, for some reason you have to press Shift key. I wonder why.