Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

 

 

 

TidBITS Watchlist
 
iMovie '09: Speed Clips up to 2,000%

iMovie '09 brings back the capability to speed up or slow down clips, which went missing in iMovie '08. Select a clip and bring up the Clip Inspector by double-clicking the clip, clicking the Inspector button on the toolbar, or pressing the I key. Just as with its last appearance in iMovie HD 6, you can move a slider to make the video play back slower or faster (indicated by a turtle or hare icon).

You can also enter a value into the text field to the right of the slider, and this is where things get interesting. You're not limited to the tick mark values on the slider, so you can set the speed to be 118% of normal if you want. The field below that tells you the clip's changed duration.

But you can also exceed the boundaries of the speed slider. Enter any number between 5% and 2000%, then click Done.

Visit iMovie '09 Visual QuickStart Guide

Share your own tip! | Search TipBITS

 

 

Published in TidBITS 801.
Subscribe to our weekly email edition.

 

 
17 Oct 2005 | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

Instant Messaging World Coalesces, a Little

by Glenn Fleishman Send Email to Author

Send Article to a Friend

For a technology that enables people the world over to communicate easily, the current instant messaging (IM) networks are surprisingly close-mouthed. Currently, users of the three major IM networks - MSN, Yahoo, and AOL (which Apple uses for iChat) - cannot chat between different services. However, that limitation will start to disappear within the next six months, as Microsoft (MSN) and Yahoo announced last week that they would have interoperable instant-messaging networks by the second quarter of 2006.

<http://www.eweek.com/article2/ 0,1895,1870365,00.asp>

The two networks together represent about 44 percent of users, but eWeek points to research showing that AOL, with 56 percent of the market, has about 40 percent of regular usage. For years, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL have sparred over interoperability, and occasionally one has tried to build a temporary bridge between the networks. But it was clear that only a top-level agreement could pull together the pieces.

Basic shared features between MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger will include buddy lists, computer-to-computer voice calling, and emoticons (thank goodness ;-}).

It's possible that this consolidation will eventually force AOL to join the club and allow interconnections as it will be increasingly frustrating for their IM users to not be able to reach the combined Microsoft/Yahoo networks.

In the United States, cell-phone based SMS (short messaging service) text didn't take off until the several cellular operators cleaned up their act to allow simple cross-network messaging. SMS and more advanced multimedia messaging caught on here only after that. Text messaging users in the rest of the world, already able to communicate across networks, were addicted years before.

Windows users who subscribe to multiple instant-messaging networks have had a leg up with the Trillian application for some time. Though Trillian can't bridge different chat networks, it consolidates your login for multiple networks into a single program with additional features. Mac users can look at Fire 1.5 or Adium (in pre-release development). Both support all the major services, including Yahoo, MSN, and AIM, though they don't resolve the issue of a subscriber of one service being able to contact a subscriber of another.

<http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/>
<http://fire.sourceforge.net/>
<http://www.adiumx.com/>

 

Get more productive with software from Smile: PDFpen for
editing PDFs; TextExpander for saving time and keystrokes while you
type; DiscLabel for designing CD/DVD labels and inserts. Free demos,
fast and friendly customer support. <http://www.smilesoftware.com/>