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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom + Flickr Uploadr
Fraser Speirs already released a Flickr plugin for Aperture, but what about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users in the crowd (John Gruber has a nice piece on the ridiculousness of adding the 'Photoshop' prefix to Lightroom's name)? As it turns out, through a little trickery, Lightroom can be tweaked for uploading your images to Flickr.This Mac OS X Hints post describes the simple setup, as well as a couple of drawbacks, to using Lightroom and the official Flickr Uploadr tool in conjunction; one simply needs to change the external editor preference to the Flickr Uploadr, then chose the Uploadr as the option from the Post-processing page during an export. Check out Mac OS X Hints though for more details and possible inspiration for asking Mr. Speirs (nicely) for a true-blue Lightroom Flickr plugin.
FlickrExport 2.0.1 released with bug fixes, API update
Fraser Speirs has updated his fantastic FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto to 2.0.1, ushering in a few key bug fixes an an API compatibility update. The specific bugs that Mr. Speirs squashed (murderer!) are the 'Waiting for Flickr' hangup the plugin could sometimes experience upon finishing an upload (I've been personally bitten by this one on occasion), as well as a nasty iPhoto crash upon upload.You can grab the update from Fraser's update post on his Connected Flow blog, or from the main Connected Flow product page.Thanks Nik Fletcher!
ShapeOnYou - a basic 3D tool with lots of integration
ShapeOnYou is a 3D tool for drawing and rendering basic 3D objects that can play nicely with other 3D-friendly applications like Keynote and OmniGraffle 4. It features an iWork-like inspector to give you an intuitive interface right out of the box, and it comes with over 20 shapes, as well as the ability to create your own. ShapeOnYou also supports the LinkBack framework, so if you embed a ShapeOnYou project in other LinkBack-enabled apps (such as Nisus Writer Express, Curio, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and more), the object will be updated in those apps if you make any changes from within ShapeOnYou (a genius framework, really). Finally, ShapeOnYou can export to a wide variety of formats such as PDF, EPS, SVG, VRML, X3D, TIFF, PNG and JPEG.However, since I'm really not that versed in the realm of 3D, I'll stop pretending and just let you check ShapeOnYou out for yourself. ShapeOnYou is a Universal Binary and is available as donationware here.
Rip, mix, save and convert YouTube videos for your iPod with TubeSock
If saving YouTube videos as favorites and making your own playlists online with their services isn't enough to quench your thirst for their literal flood of content, TubeSock lets you take things one step further by allowing you to save the videos and even convert them for your iPod. It's a small utility that allows you to enter a YouTube URL or simply a video ID, and it can show you a preview of the movie and offer a couple of saving and export options including H.264, PSP, audio-only and even a plain Flash FLV file. TubeSock can also install a bookmarklet in Safari for speedier delivery, and it can even send exported videos straight into iTunes to complete the ultimate YouTube-to-iPod workflow. After playing with the demo, I'm impressed. Compression is impressively speedy, and for bonus points it automatically cleans up the Flash file it dowloads once exporting is done. The demo is limited to exporting only the first 30 seconds of any video until you fork over the $15 registration fee. TubeSock is a Universal Binary and available from stinkbot.[via digg]
FlickrExport 2 is done, shipping soon
Fraser Speirs announced on his personal blog today that FlickrExport 2, his fantastic iPhoto plugin for uploading to Flickr, is done and will be shipping soon. Yes, we know that since it isn't available right now, this post becomes a little less useful, but we thought y'all might appreciate hearing when a beta product has actually been announced as 'finished' (*ahem*, Google). As Fraser's original beta 2 post states, pricing for this vastly updated and improved version will be announced when the FlickrExport product page goes live with the new version. Stay tuned.[thanks Nik Fletcher!]
FlickrExport 2.0 beta 1
FlickrExport has entered a 2.0 beta phase, ushering in some really, really cool new features including: FlickrExport now supports uploading to existing sets. Uploaded photos can be added to a group pool after upload. FlickrExport now displays a list of your tags used on Flickr which can be added to photos before uploading. This list can be filtered using regular expressions. FlickrExport can copy the title and description back to iPhoto if it has been changed inside FlickrExport. This feature is turned off by default. If a photo's date has been modified in iPhoto, FlickrExport now communicates this to Flickr. It is now possible to specify description text for a new Photoset as well as its title. The one catch in this new version, however, is that Fraser Speirs, its developer, has decided to turn FlickrExport into shareware. While I can't find a price anywhere on the FlickrExport 2.0 beta site, I personally am not surprised, as this is a powerful plug-in that Mr. Speirs has obviously spent quite a bit of time on. I know I'll be happy to buy a license once he announces a price - but what about you, loyal FlickrExport users? Do you mind offering up some of your hard-earned cash for some of Mr. Speir's hard work?
WouldjaDraw illustration software
Dave Caolo showed you an open source image editing tool, so I thought I'd pick up another end of the spectrum with an illustration tool by the name of WouldjaDraw. While it isn't open source, WouldjaDraw does have a healthy array of illustrating features and tools. Inspector palettes, gradient tools, a nice selection of export formats and a strong toolset should make WouldjaDraw a satisfying alternative to the illustration mega-suites.A demo is available, and a license will run you a mere $29.95.[via Daring Fireball]
Create an OPML from Safari RSS feeds
MacOSXHints has a simple trick for creating an OPML file, completely with folder structure/groups, from your RSS feeds in Safari. The tip basically involves downloading an XML stylesheet the author created, and using it in a Terminal command to generate the OPML file.I'm glad someone found a way to put this together, but with the open standards and portability of RSS and newsfeeds, I think it's kinda bad form on Apple's part to not have baked this ability into Safari already. Nevertheless, MacOSXHints has come to the rescue, yet again.
Flip4Mac breaks QuickTime export?
Some users, myself included, are reporting that the 3rd party Flip4Mac plugin Microsoft recently purchased and offered for free seems to break QuickTime Pro's ability to export movie files. This morning I was trying to compress and export to H.264 some AVI files I shot with my Canon digicam over the weekend, but was met with relentless "error -2126" messages. Some research revealed a few articles and Apple Support threads, like this one, that have found this and various other buggy issues with the WMV plugin, but most of them pointed to this Flip4Mac support topic on the grubby process of uninstalling and/or Flip4Mac. A future release of the plugin promises a true, automated uninstaller option, but for now: if you're having QuickTime issues like this after installing Flip4Mac, try going through their uninstallation process to reclaim the software's abilities.
Automator action: Export movies to iTunes/iPod
Since the 5G iPod landed, an army of scripts and mini-apps have answered the call for a simple, painless way for getting video into iTunes and ready for your favorite little music video player. Since I'm always up for more options, here's an Automator action that accomplishes the same task for Tiger users. You can select a group of files, run the action (it's meant to be installed as a Finder plugin), and it will use QuickTime to export the video and add it right into iTunes for you.While I haven't tested this out yet, I'm excited about being able to do with with an Automator action as it opens up the possibility of adding more steps to your workflow, such as batch renaming files, or anything else Automator can do. Plus, just like one of the reigning favorites - iSquint - the Export Movies to iTunes action is free.
Safarilicious updated to 0.77
Just over a week after Scott blogged Safarilicious, it's already been updated to version 0.77. This minor update fixes a couple of bugs, namely one that caused an "Index Error" crash and another that caused a crash upon receiving an Error 500 from del.icio.us. "Initial" Unicode support has been added as well, as the author states over on the PimpMySafari.com page that Unicode titles and tags display properly in Safarilicious and *seem* to export properly as well.I snagged this app the second I saw it in our newsfeed, as I've been dying for a way to get my extensive collection of bookmarks - 1044 to be exact - archived out to del.icio.us for easier sharing. The first time I ran Safarilicious it crashed on me (though I don't know what the error was), but in defense of del.icio.us, I was exporting my mammoth collection of 'marks right around the time they had some server issues and a power outage. If you've been on the fence as to whether you want to play with Safarilicious, I'll vouch that it does the trick, and well, so get sharing!
