When Apple releases an update, those participating in the hacking festivities have to decide whether or not to upgrade. With the iPhone 1.1.1 update, we got a slew of new features including home button double-click, the double space shortcut, additional SMS notification tones, and the iTunes Wifi Music Store to name a few. This makes it harder for hackers to lag in their upgrading.

So, now, it’s up to the hackers. They’ll get back to work on breaking into the iPhone and iPod Touch. That goes without saying. And as the dance continues, Apple will need to continue to push out new features and provide other compelling reasons for users to upgrade their device software.

So, the reason hacking matters is because it’s good for users. And not just for the intrepid users who are making use of the hacks. Hacking puts pressure on Apple to provide compelling reasons, i.e. new features, for users to upgrade, and that is good for all users.

[I]t does look like a true, calls-over-WiFi VoIP client for the iPhone could be just around the corner.

In my opinion, this is precisely why Apple is so aggressively guarding the iPod Touch from hackers.

The quality of VoIP and the ubiquity of WiFi in many areas makes this a clear choice. It’s not just about the price difference between the iPhone and iPod Touch (which is likely only a minor consideration if you’re considering one or the other). I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t jettison an AT&T relationship (and its associated bill, of course) for a free or dirt cheap VoIP option.

This may relate to VoIP explicitly, but I see it more as a general rule of protecting their interests. In the wake of yesterday’s flurry of applause for Amazon’s new MP3 sales service, I can precisely see where Apple wouldn’t want a native version of Amazon’s Downloader for iPhone or iPod Touch as that would put at risk their most long-awaited feature for any iPod as well as the cash cow that is the home base iTunes Store.

In this respect, I see a certain degree of paranoia coming out of Apple. Maybe it’s a result of dealing with music and movie publishers. (I would also add mobile phone companies to that list.) Whatever the reason is, it’s unbecoming of Apple.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

I think we all know that in iTunes > Preferences > Playback you can specify how you’d like to shuffle. iTunes lets you specify to shuffle by Song, Album, or Grouping. I noticed today that Party Shuffle was selecting items by album. When I changed my Playback preferences to by Song, Party Shuffle obliged and reselected by song. Here are some screenshots.

MobileiChat

This is the one that seems to make everyone’s list. My main reason for wanting this is that I want my chat transcripts to sync back to my Mac. This can’t be done easily with Meebo or any of the other chat apps to my knowledge. I don’t think I would use this that often, but when I do, I’d like it to sync my transcripts back.

iScrobbler

This is the one place where I don’t really care about the mechanism. What I want is iPhone to post the listening I do from iPhone to my Last.FM account. The standalone app on Mac OS X is iScrobbler. On my MacBook, however, CoverSutra handles my Last.FM postings. I don’t care how it gets done, but this needs to happen. And in the background, please people.

Shopping

Earlier today, David Chartier posted his desire for a shopping app for iPhone. I, too, would like to see a shopping app, and I would like to see a feature that would make it a native app exclusively: barcode scanning. Delicious Library brought barcode scanning to the Mac via iSight. It would be steak sauce to scan the barcode with the iPhone camera for even faster searches.

Jumsoft Money (or similar)

This is the one app that would actually make my life better. The others are nice, but this one is where life starts to actually improve. Some sort of way to manage financial transactions while on the go would be choice. Jumsoft Money is my app of choice for this on my MacBook, so I’d like to see a mobile version of it so that my data would sync back to home base.

Skitch

This is one that can’t be passed up. I love Skitch. The UI is very intuitive, so much so that you might actually miss some of the features like how easy it is to crop a picture. But Skitch is essentially fingerpainting. A few small buttons or a popup list for switching tools, a size selector like the desktop version, and two buttons for save and clear is all that would be needed for hours of fun. Then, the user could publish their creations to .Mac Web Gallery or Flickr.

Those are the apps that I have found myself wanting over the past two plus months of life with iPhone. Where have I missed it? Let me know in comments.

There is a new sort column for purchased tracks that can be converted to ringtone. Of course, this won’t show for songs not purchased from iTS, so if you have much non-iTS music in your library, sort on this new column in your Purchased playlist to get an accurate picture.

There are of course other solutions for making ringtones, but unless you bought it from the iTS and it’s ringtone capable, no editing in iTunes. ¹

When you click on the bell icon next to a song that is ringtone enabled, you will be presented with a panel below the song listing, i.e. where the Mini Store shows up if you haven’t disbaled it, similar to this:

There is a lot of powerful stuff going on here. The top pane is the audio of your track. The blue selection is what would become your ringtone. Also in the selection are simple checkboxes for fading the ringtone in and out. The pane below the audio contains the track information to the left, a control for the time delay when looping (In my brief tests, 0.5 second gap is great.), a preview button, and then a button to cancel or buy the ringtone. Everything you need.

Editing your ringtone is as easy as dragging the blue pane around. Seriously, that’s it. Move the starting point by clicking anywhere inside the blue selection area and dragging to your desired position. Change the length of the ringtone by clicking and dragging the edge of the blue pane or using the resize handle on the bottom right of the selection area. Preview and adjust as necessary. Once you are satisfied with the result, click Buy to purchase the modified audio as a ringtone.

Here’s the rub: You are purchasing your modified audio and not a “ringtone right” to the song. If you create another ringtone from another section of the same song, you’re going to have to pony up another buck (You see what I did there?) for the new ringtone. So, Apple (and the record companies) are potentially receiving $.99 for the same song many times over. Not a bad racket if you can keep it to yourself. But as for me and my house, we will make our own.

I almost stopped reading Mike’s post. I enjoy his writing, but the length was off-putting. I stuck with it though, and this, the very last nine words of the post was the reward. Truth. Profound truth.

(Via motherfucker.)

The Parameters of the Project

Before I get into the particulars of iMovie, it’s probably helpful to set out the requirements of the project.

1. The project is a mix of still photos and video clips.
2. The final product should be around eight minutes. Video clips have to be cut. Times for cuts provided by client.
3. Musical soundtrack for stills only.

So, keeping those requirements in mind, let’s talk about how iMovie performed.

Mixing Video and Stills

Getting the media all in order in the timeline is simply the easiest and most enjoyable aspect of working in the new iMovie. Importing photos is as simple as dragging and dropping onto the project. Video clips have to be imported through iMovie’s File > Import Movies… menu. This is slightly problematic since the project window says “Drag media here to create a new project.” Perhaps this is a bug that will be fixed in an update.

Adding transitions is very easy. Simply click the Transitions browser and drag your transition between elements in the project. Done. You can edit the duration and such, but just dragging the transition is sufficient to get the transition into your project. iMovie can even add your transitions automatically, but if you go this route, it’s one transition for all, which gets boring pretty fast. I prefer putting them in manually.

Timing of the Final Project

Changing the timing of a still in iMovie is pretty easy. Just control click on the still and select Set Duration. Simple. You can also set the default still duration in the project properties. For video clips, setting duration involves trimming the video. Control click on the clip and select Trim… Here it’s easy to trim your clip. Just scrub the beginning of the clip forward to the beginning of the cut and the end of the clip backward to the end of the cut. Easy. The problem is that if you know the times of the cuts, there’s no way to see the time of the video where your cursor is located. So, I used QuickTime to find the time for the cut and then located the corresponding content in iMovie’s trimmer. Needless to say this could easily have been avoided if Apple would just add a simple time display to the trimmer. The only other gripe about the trimmer itself is that it doesn’t let you see a very detailed view of the clip for precise trimming. This can make delicate cuts quite frustrating. There is also no way to trim out portions of a clip in the trimmer. This can be accomplished in the main project view, though.

It’s worth noting that if you add a transition, it will shorten the length of the clip or still that follows the transition. I recommend adding transitions and then setting durations so that you are getting what you expect.

Adding a Music Soundtrack

This is quite possibly the most frustrating aspect of creating a video project in the new iMovie.

There is no way that I was able to discern to control where a soundtrack starts in the project. When you drag an audio clip from the Music and Sound Effects browser to the project, it applies to the last time in the project with no soundtrack. No options for moving it around. This was problematic as I needed to not have my music soundtrack play only on the stills and not on video clips that had their own audio. I simply popped the music track in again, trimmed it, and set its volume to 0%. Sort of kludgy. [UPDATE: In playing with iMovie again for this article, I found out this is possible. It's still not obvious that this is available, however.]

By control+clicking on the audio file in the project, you can select Trim Music… This is a nice way of trimming your soundtrack. You can trim down to a certain length and then move that span of time around the audio clip to find a suitable cut. It’s much more elegant in practice than describing it in prose.

Finishing Touches

Adding titles to your project is drag and drop dead simple. Bring up the Titles browser and drag your selected title style onto the clip you want to display the title. Edit the text, set the duration and drag the title around on the timeline to place it in the chronology of your project. There is a wide variety of styles to choose from, and you’re sure to find one to fit the tone of your project. If nothing else, the Transparent titles will be generic enough for any project.

Closing Thoughts and Caveats

When adding music from your iTunes library to the project, if you delete that song from your iTunes library, it also makes it unavailable for your project. So, if you move your project to another machine that doesn’t have that song in the iTunes library, your project won’t have a soundtrack. Not very cool. iMovie should copy the sound file into the project.

It’s not possible to open an iMovie project that is not in the iMovie Projects directory of ~/Movies. Also, if you delete an Event Library item, it will show a yellow exclamation point triangle over clips in the project that use that item. The clips still work, but the Trim option is no longer available.

Some have lamented the lack of integration with iDVD, but I was able to simply drag my project file from Finder into iDVD to create a DVD of the project.

So, those are my thoughts on the new iMovie after completing a real-life project with it. It wasn’t the smoothest experience, but I don’t think it’s as tragic a situation as others have declared. Admittedly, iMovie ‘06 did have more powerful options for some things, but the new iMovie is pretty powerful in its own right. And I think that this latest version will serve the consumer market very well for quickly cobbling together a video that doesn’t suck.

It’s worth pointing out that I don’t see this with the other icons of the iLife suite. Keynote and Pages don’t show this perspective thing either, but the new kid Numbers does. Looks like Apple is slowly redesigning their icons to fit with the new 3-D Dock and the new apps iMovie ‘08 and Numbers are the first. I suspect other developers and designers will have to do the same thing soon. Maybe this need for redesign is why the perspective effect looks like crap in most of the screenshots I have seen. Rosetta anyone?

Well, not so fast my friend. As this Macworld article notes, there is a bit of a glitch in getting this working. Read about the glitch at Macworld. Their workaround is a bit kludgy, but it certainly works.

But there has to be a better way, right? I’m glad you asked. In iPhoto ‘08, make a web gallery from an event. When the configuration options pop up, be sure to select “Allow photo uploading by email” and “Allow visitors to upload photos.” (Don’t worry, you can disable this later if you want.) Click “Publish” and let it do its thing. Now, on your iPhone, select a photo to upload. Bring up controls if they aren’t visible already and tap the Share button on the lower left. Select “Send to Web Gallery.” Now you should see your Web Gallery listed. Select it and then craft your posting email in the resulting window.

At this point, it is safe to disable visitor uploads in the Web Gallery properties in iPhoto. Subsequent Web Galleries created in iPhoto do not need to go through this process; you may create them without visitor uploading enabled. Now, your Web Galleries should be good to go on your iPhone. Comments welcome.