Newton’s Lore

A lot of people who used features like transitions between scenes, or cool 3rd party plugins in iMovie 6 have been complaining that they can no longer use these things in iMovie 7 (transitions are removed when iMovie 7 imports the projects from iMovie 6 HD).

Conveniently Apple has provided iMovie 6 HD for free download to those who wish to ‘downgrade’ to the original functionality they had. [Edit - According to comments on Macintouch, the downloadable installer will only install if you've got iMovie 7 installed as well]

• QT-Java is now using JNI instead of jdirect. Thus QTJSupport.jar is no longer installed on Windows
• Picts now no longer have negative dimensions on Macs (an endian fix)
• Colour problems related to endianness have been fixed
• Installation can break prebinding and thus all PowerPC only apps that run on Intel Macs (ie it breaks Rosetta). Instructions on fixing this are on Apple’s site.

mostly via the quicktime-java list.

If you need it for your next iMovie/iDVD/Final Cut project the iStockPhoto people now offer royalty-free video at iStockVideo.com. Includes footage up to HD resolution.

If you had the Apple Developer Technotes Hypercard stack (am I dating myself here?), you may have discovered the technote 31 easter egg about Clarus. Today whilst looking for QuickTime VR stuff, I discovered Technote 1031.

From a a post to the QuickTime-Java mailing list, Apple’s response regarding QuickTime exception -1409=Unknown:

QuickTime for Java currently provides no B-Frame sample-level support. The movie FigtreeChurch.mov, as provided by you, is encoded using H.264 (Main Profile) which utilises B-Frames. As verification, replacing FigtreeChurch.mov with a movie of another codec type functions with the your application as expected.

Chris Adamson (author of QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook) says:

QuickTime 7 adds new image compression API’s, which were necessitated by the addition of the frame-reordering H.264. These API’s, like ICMCompressionSessionEncodeFrame, were never wrapped by equivalent QTJ calls, and sending the new codec to the old image compression API produces an error.

I was looking for the little green light that tells you you’re “on air” on the new MacBook Pro’s inbuilt iSight camera. Whilst the MacBooks and iMacs have a little black spot for the LED there’s no such LED obvious on the MacBook Pros. So I fire up iChat and sure enough, a green spot appears, apparently through the aluminium.. Sure enough, turn off the camera and there’s no sign of the LED at all, just brushed aluminium. There are photos on Nobilog. Insanely great engineering.

Apple has announced the availability of a Developer Snapshot (Beta) version of Darwin Streaming Server 5.5.5b1.

Apple are moving the code to MacOSForge

The iPhone “Hello” ad screened during the Academy Awards is now available. It doesn’t mention the name “iPhone” anywhere though. Clips used include

1. Unknown, although I suspect Hitchcock
2. Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy
3. Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners?
4. Humphrey Bogart
5. Unknown
6. Jerry Lewis
7. Marilyn Monroe
8. Clark Gable
9. Peter Sellers
10. Steve McQueen (in Bullitt?)
11. Richard Dreyfuss
12. Burt Reynolds in “Boogie Nights”
13. Betty in The Flintstones
14. Michael Douglas in The Fugitive
15. Michael J Fox in Back to the Future
16. John Cusack in High Fidelity
17. Audrey Tatou in Amelie
18. Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential
19. Dustin Hoffman (in Meet The Fockers?)
20. Will Ferrell in Anchorman
21. Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and The City
22. Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski
23. Billy Crystal
24. Cameron Diaz in Charlie’s Angels (2?)
25. Samuel L. Jackson
26. John Travolta
27. Robert De Niro
28. Ben Stiller in Zoolander
29. Michael Douglas in The American President
30. Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles

With some help from the MacMerc forums.

Calculating the iPhones minimum Bacon number is left as an exercise for the reader.

Apple has added Lionsgate films to the iTunes Store which includes titles such as “Terminator 2,” “LA Story,” (Both yay!) “The Blair Witch Project” “Basic Instinct” and “Dirty Dancing”, along with “Total Recall” and “Rambo,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Chaplin” and “The Boys From Brazil.”

Except if you’re in Australia, of course.

Apple press release available here.

I’m hunting QuickTime for Java bugs on an Intel Xserve, so I’ve got this loop dumping out 100 copies of a hinted 3gp movie. I’ve got a Finder window in list view open on the machine to check that the files are being written out. Of the 100 movies dumped out, 18 of them are 160k, 3 of them are 4k, and the rest are 100k bytes in length. Bizarrely all the movies play properly, and are the same length in bytes (via the Get Info window). “ls -l” also lists them as the same size.

Closing the Finder window and refreshing it now shows me all the file sizes as 100k. Sigh.

On the plus side, the test case has crashed Java at least once