MacTricksAndTips.com

Quite a few people over the last couple of days have asked about video capture on your Mac. I particularly like video capture since it can show more detail and steps than a text tutorial can alone, I may introduce it in a couple of new posts. This post is going to be an introduction on how to use video capture so you yourself can do it. Video capture is really useful if you want to do time lapse movies of your desktop, or you want to show family members and friends how to do something specific on your Mac. Its really simple to set up and you can be producing a video in no time.

I use SSH a lot, it stands for Secure Shell and its main purpose is to connect to other computers, or servers, over a secure connection which you can use to manage the remote computer. For a general overview I recommend reading this Wikipedia article. For this article you do need to be a little tech savvy with Terminal, but if you are way from your computer, or you want to manage another computer this is a very useful technique.

In the previous post on this site I mentioned about 99 Amazing iPhone Wallpapers, most of the wallpapers were specifically designed to be iPhone wallpapers. In this post I want to show you how easy it is to turn any image on your Mac, into one designed and set up correctly for the iPhone. This tutorial is designed to take a picture of your favourite car or family member and crop it to the right size.

This trick today comes in part from Ethan, he found a cool way to make Site Specific Browsers (SSB) which can displays websites as if they are applications. For example, say you are a big fan of this site and you want to easily view it without all of the clutter of menu bars, toolbars and all of the other as all of the other grud that is associated with web browsers.

Continuing on with Quartz Composition I am going introduce a couple more patches for you to play around with. If you haven’t already, I suggest you check out the Introduction and Image Reflection, both of these are a good complement to this tutorial. This tutorial today will go through the method of pulling a live video through an iSight camera and then letting you apply some funky effects to it. I will explain in detail what each of the patches will mean and what they do. As always you can download the source if you get stuck, or don’t want to follow the tutorial. We will create something like the image below.

As a new series that will take place over the next coming months, I am going to post tutorials on Quartz Composer. They are designed to be simple and easy to follow, and over the coming months they will get more and more complex. We will start easy and gradually get harder and harder to produce cooler effects. If you haven’t already, I would suggest you look through An Introduction To Quartz Composer, it will show you all of the basic principles to quartz, including how things work. If you haven’t already guessed this project will show you how to create a fading gradient reflection. It is very basic but it will show you the ropes. An example of what we will be creating is shown below. You can click on any of the images for larger version with more detail. All connections between Patches use double arrows, for example height on one Patch would connect to Crop on another Patch would be represented like this. Height >> Crop.

After my recent post about cool hidden screen savers I have been fiddling with the Quartz Composer more and more. This post will serve as an introduction to the application as well as the pre post to a tutorial that I will posting in the next couple of days. As with all of the images posted on this site you can click any of them to see a larger version, it helps understand some of the explanation given.

Widgets are great, but how do you make them? The answer is use Dashcode. Dashcode is Apples answer to a super simple, yet super powerful way to drag and drop code for widgets. It really doesn’t take long to make a widget. In this tutorial I am going to show you the basic steps in how to create an RSS widget for use on your site. I have been playing around with it for the last couple of days and as a result I have got to know how the program works. Soon I am also going to produce a widget for this site, cool.