Me And My Macbook

Since I’ve got Microsoft Office 2004 installed (see this post), I can use the Microsoft Messenger that comes with it to connect to the Office Communicator service that Fontys has setup for all its employees.

What I didn’t know was that there is also a browser based version (in our case located at http://im.fontys.nl/). It has limited functionality in that it only handles chat, no video, no audio. But it works on a Mac in Firefox without a problem.

I know, it is of limited use if you don’t work for Fontys or if your company doens’t Office Communicator. But otherwise it is something to remember not just when using a Macbook without Office 2004, but also if you’re not at your own PC and want to see if your colleague is available to answer a question.

This is something that I posted about on in Dutch on the IT and Education blog last week but I thought it was something that should be mentioned here also:
On Windows you can add Flash animations into a Powerpoint 2003/2007 presentation. So you could for example create a screencast demonstrating something, export that to SWF and add it to the presentation. Take it a step further and you can embed a FLV player (which in itself is available as SWF file) and have that play video downloaded from YouTube or other Flash video sites.

But not so in Powerpoint 2004 for Mac OS X. Even the workarounds that existed no longer work. And according to this post it isn’t going to be fixed for this version either.

One of the things that I always thought was that on a Mac you couldn’t view WMV files or streaming WMV video. I could understand that because both iTunes and Quicktime Player on Windows can’t display WMV. This is the most important reason why I’ve always tried to at least provide a WMV and Quicktime version of screencasts that I create.

But it isn’t true. Mac users can view WMV files and live WMV streams on their Macs if they want to. So they apparently just don’t want to! And yes, you need to install two additional tools for it to work, but they’re free, not created by Microsoft and it is not as if those are the first two tools you need to install.

Flip4Mac
There is a Microsoft Window Mediaplayer for the Mac. But as you can read on the Microsoft website, they are no longer doing any further development on it. Instead they point you to a free alternative called Flip4Mac.

After I’d installed that, Firefox had no problem displaying the WMV version of the Google Earth screencast available here (post is in Dutch, but the video is in English).

It played the file in-line without complaining about the fact that it is a WMV.

VLC player
Another free player that I think every Mac user should install is VLC player. It will play just about any format that you can encounter online.
And it also was able to deal with mms:// links containing live WMV streaming video like is being used by SURFnet TV in the Netherlands.

Miro
And if you can’t find your favourite videoblog in iTunes because it doesn’t offer an Quicktime RSS feed, you should definitely check out Miro. I haven’t installed it on the Macbook yet, but have used it before on the XP laptop and it is great. Is has the VLC player integrated in it thus combining all the great playback features from the VLC player with RSS capabilities, torrent downloads etc.

Is this going to change anything?
I’ll probably will keep on creating Quicktime versions of my screencasts, but no longer just because it would otherwise mean that part of the readers/viewers wouldn’t be able to view them without that version. I don’t really care about the format wars in this. I’m not convinced either of them is going to be around in say 5 years time. But that is not the life span of my screencasts. Because applications change and within say a year or say the screencast, like any other instruction, will become outdated.

If you remember the “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” commercials (if not go here and watch them now!), you know that a PC is dull and boring and a Mac is funny and cool. That probably is the reason why there are tools like CyberDuck, Chicken of the VNC, Smultron (named after a strawberry) and Seashore.

But forget about the funny icons for a second and download and install them, because you’ll need them. At least I did.

CyberDuck + Smultron
I need to be able to connect to my FTP server to upload files, screencasts, podcasts etc.
CyberDuck does just that. It support sFTP so that you’re not sending stuff like username and password in clear text over the Internet. To edit (text-)files directly from within the FTP folder view, you need to add an external editor. I choose Smultron, a free editor that works fine.
With those two combined I just click on a PHP file in CyberDuck, select to edit it and CyberDuck downloads the file, opens the editor and re-uploads it afterwards.

Chicken of the VNC
As you might expected from the name, Chicken of the VNC is a VNC client. I use VNC a lot to connect to my servers at home. Those are stowed away in a closet without screen.
Chicken of the VNC works, but not as fast as the TightVNC viewer on my XP box does. Biggest difference I think is that in TightVNC viewer I’ve got the option Track remote cursor locally. In Chicken of the VNC the server mouse lags behind often and can’t keep up with my mouse movements.

Seashore
It took me a long time to find an image editor that I found actually useful. The major requirement was that it had to be able to blur out parts of an image. I needed that to be able to create screenshots like above for CyberDuck. Seashore does all that. But it is strange that a lot of the others that I tested (including Image Well which was recommended to me) either not provide that option or hide it too well for me to find.