Recently in Product Problems Category

As you all know, I was one of the many who went out on Snow Leopard day and installed the system upgrade. So far, there have been two updates, and I am relatively pleased. However, more recently, I discovered a problem that really puts a damper on my Snow Leopard enthusiasm.

After installing Snow Leopard, I installed Adobe Master Collection CS4. Up until now, I haven't really had a reason to use Media Encoder at all. However, when I needed it, it failed on me. On my laptop, Media encoder refuses to boot. I don't know why, but it works fine in Leopard. I've heard about similar problems, but never not starting. I have reported this bug to Adobe, however I am not expecting any updated before the release of the next Creative Suite. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to use Final Cut Express instead of Premiere for a while.

All for Now!

Snow Leopard,Media Encoder,Adobe Media Encoder,Problems,Bugs,Adobe Bugs

So here's your situation:You are working on some video tutorials and find yourself in need of a decent Screen Recording tool. Well, in this post, I'll review 3, and give you a good idea of which one to use.

QuickTime Player X

Price: $29 with Snow Leopard

Almost hidden in the new version of Mac OSX is the function for the new version of the QuickTime player to do Screen recordings. It records the screen videos at full resolution, and can save into almost all fo the QuickTime formats. Pros: Comes with Mac OSX, many exporting formats. Cons: Does not record system or microphone sound.

Jing

Price: Free

Jing is an okay screen recording tool. It, like QuickTime player, does not record sound or system sounds. It does upload your videos to it's website. Pros: Free. Cons: Only saves files as SWFs, leaves it's recording window open in your recordings.

  Snapz Pro X

Price: $69 from Ambrosia Software

Snapz Pro is one of the best tools for Screen Recording that I have used in a very long while. It does everything from screenshots to recordings, and it takes in the system and microphone sound. It encodes all of it's videos to QuickTime .mov files. It has teh capability to only take a video of a selection of the screen, rather than the whole thing. This is the best one that I have used out of all of the ones that I have reviewed.

Some of you may be saying, "What about ScreenFlow?" Well, ScreenFlow is good to, however I made an investment in Snapz Pro, and didn't want to spend the $100 on a screen flow license. If anyone would like to contribute a review of ScreenFlow, I'd gladly post it and give you all the internet cookies you can handle.

All for now!

Free Screen Recording Tools,Screen Recording Mac,Screen Recording

Let me start by saying this to everyone who reads my blog.

If you use Movable Type, DO NOT UPGRADE TO LEOPARD SERVER!!!

The reason that I haven't blogged for the past month is due to the fact that Leopard server has more bugs than the first release of Windows Vista. It is missing almost all of the MySQL headers that allow Perl to talk to it. You have to go and download all of the MySQL header files from Apple website. That is a pain.

Once you have all of those installed, you'd think that the DBD::mysql modules required to hook perl up to MySQL would install correctly. Well, they wouldn't. Neither would DBI or any other of the data connection modules for Perl. So, after fighting with this for weeks (this is not an exaggeration. It actually took us weeks to get this to finally be useless) we decided to downgrade back to Tiger server.

After running a few basic commands, our server was back up running again in Tiger. Later on this week, I'll post a detailed instruction on how to get MovableType working on Tiger server with no hitches.

Again, if you know what's good for you, stay away from Leopard Server. Later on this year, we hope to have a working instance of Leopard server. We have another G5 tower, and will attempt to get leopard server working on that. Until we can figure out how to get it working, we'll be staying with Tiger.

All for now!

Well, I have a PowerBook G4 from a few years back. I put leopard on it, an seemed to have no problems. that is, until I tried to do a time machine backup. For a while the backups worked fine. then on one day, they just stopped working. I let it sit for several hours, ad nothing happened. It wouldn't go beyond the "Preparing Backups" phase. So, I stopped backups and deleted the backups off of my backup drive.

This seemed to fix the problem for a while, until it stopped again. I did the same steps, only it took a lot longer to delete this time.

I am at a point now where the time machine backups will not finish. It will get almost done and stop. It actually quits the utility and says that it executed fine, except it is not a complete backup, as far as I can tell. It is not big enough for it to e complete. I tried to delete it, but the trash will not go above 3 items to delete, no matter how long I let it sit there. When I do a secure empty trash, it tallies up about a million items in the trash and starts deleting them. The only problem with this is that it will take about 24 hours to delete, and I don't have that time. So, I guess that I will have to do it over the course of several nights, just letting it sit there.

I really wish I had multiple cores. It would make this whole thing so much easier.