1) Right click in the ‘Events’ panel at the lower left of the iMovie screen and make sure ‘View Events By Volume’ is checked. This will list all volumes available for archiving/reading events.

2) Just drag the events you want to archive to your backup volume (USB drive, Time Capsule, etc.) and iMovie will move them for you nicely.

One disadvantage of this is that anytime you want to work with or play projects that depend on the events you moved, you’ll need to make sure your backup volume is accessible. You’ll see a little yellow caution sign on any project that uses event clips that are not available.

I was tempted to move all my files via the Finder but I’d recommend staying away from this method as iMovie is not aware that you’re moving the files.

Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.

Just found this via http://fixoutlook.org. Nice to see someone trying to bring HTML email up to standards.

After watching the introductory video I decided to take a chance and plunk down my $30 for Fever. Setting up an account and purchasing Fever was fairly easy although there were more steps involved than most people would be used to when purchasing an app online.

The install for Fever went pretty well. Although there were a few different steps to be followed the instructions were laid out nicely and easy to understand. The install is similar to Wordpress in that there is a check to make sure your environment can support Fever and after you’ve purchased your license an automated install program sets everything up for you.

My first task was to import my list of feeds and that worked nicely as well. For reference, I only have about forty feeds so we’re not talking a large number here but I didn’t see any flaws with the import process. All imported feeds are put into the ‘Kindle’ category which designates them as “must read” or important feeds. I moved some of the lesser read feeds and link based feeds to the ‘Sparks’ category. Fever uses feeds in this category to help determine which feeds are “hot”.

The user interface in Fever is fantastic. It really moves the bar up a notch for rich web applications. Keyboard shortcuts are nicely integrated into the app which makes the switch from a desktop reader to a web reader much less painful.

So far the only bad thing I’ve encountered with Fever is that I really don’t have enough feeds for it to work as it’s intended. Fever depends on having many feeds to formulate which ones are hot and only having forty feeds is kind of limiting Fever’s ability to tell me what I should be reading. Over time I anticipate accumulating more feeds, though, as I’ll be less hesitant to subscribe to a feed to avoid clutter.

Most of the complaints I’ve seen so far have had to do with the fact that there is no online demo and that the application needs to be hosted on one’s own server. These are fair complaints as plunking down your $30 without actually being able to try the app is a bit disconcerting. There is a nice introductory video up on the Fever site that shows how Fever works, but most people (myself included) want to be able to “try before you buy”. I’d also anticipate that there will eventually be a hosted version. As far as I can tell, Shaun is running this whole deal by himself so initially offering only a self-hosted version may be a smart move to avoid having too big a launch that he wouldn’t be able to handle.

I’ve taken a few screenshots of Fever in action if you’d like to get an idea of what it looks like.

I’ve only been using Fever for a couple hours now but it’s growing on me steadily. The move from a desktop reader to a web based reader was a bit uncomfortable at first but I’m getting used to it. From a user experience perspective, Fever really shines and as I accumulate more feeds I expect the application to become more and more useful. The goal is to have Fever become less of a reader and more of an advisor in terms of what I should devote my time and attention to. We’re all pressed for time and the habit of poring through your reader to examine every unread item is growing increasingly inefficient. I’m impressed with Fever so far and I’m going to give it a shot as my main reader for the next few weeks.

The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it had contacted the social networking service Twitter to urge it to delay a planned upgrade that would have cut daytime service to Iranians who are disputing their election.

I’m glad to see that Twitter postponed it’s downtime to help facilitate the growing number of protests and related communication about the recent Iranian election. While fascist governments have found effective ways to bend mainstream media to their will, social media is a far more difficult tiger to tame.

The example has a basic premise: we have a log in page and a secured page. The user cannot view the secured page until he authenticates via the log in page. Conversely, the user cannot view the log in page if he has already been authenticated. If he logs out then he will be taken back to the login page.

A working example of this can be found right here. You can also download the code for this example right here. You’ll need a local web server that will run PHP 5 and MySQL.

The example will try to authenticate a user against the database. If the authentication is successful a session key is written and the user is redirected to the secured page. Most of the code is self explanatory but I wanted to highlight the following:

< ?php
 
session_start();
 
//check if person is already logged in and if so redirect to index page
if(isset($_SESSION['email']))
{
	header('Location: login-example-index.php'); 
}
?>

This code is on our log in page. It’s basically checking to see if the person has already authenticated. If so we want to forward them to the secured page.

A similar snippet is on the secured page and it checks to make sure the user has been authenticated. If not it’ll send them back to the login page.

Hope this simple example will help anyone trying to put together some basic authentication. Please note that this is a very simple example and something a little more secure and robust should be used in a production setting that has sensitive data.

Creating a photo slideshow DVD is easy enough with iDVD. But Automator can make it even easier. The following steps will walk you through the process of creating an Automator workflow that will scan through a folder structure of files, extracting any JPEG images, and creating an iDVD slideshow containing those images.

Found a nice tip on the Apple site today about creating a DVD slideshow from a batch of pictures. Obviously this would be nice to automate and this article shows you how. You’ll have to download the ‘Create Magic DVD’ automator action to get this to work. Once completed, you can just drag a folder full of images to the Automator app and it’ll create a nice DVD slideshow using iDVD.

Whether you’re a Web developer, Web designer or blogger, you’ve probably had to deal with the headache of converting many images to different sizes and formats. It’s not much fun if you have to convert all of them by hand. Batch image processing can reduce this process from hours of work to just a few simple clicks.

Nice article from Smashing Magazine on batch image processors. I’m looking for one right now as I have quite a few images that I’d like to turn into web galleries. I’m going to give a couple of the Mac ones in the list a spin and see how they do.

On the downside, the browser is still very slow, taking almost twice as long to render pages as Safari or Firefox. That’s OK, though. Get the rendering engine right first, then worry about speed.

Update: I just found this page that offers a sneaky little plugin to trick users into upgrading from IE6. Very clever and I can’t say I’m against using it despite the trickery.

I’ve created a simple example that shows how to make an AJAX request to a PHP page and return results using the Prototype library. The first step is to download the latest version of Prototype (for this example it’s 1.6.0.3). It should be a single file that you can drop into a directory to use for this tutorial.

Next, create a file named get-person.php in the same directory as the Prototype file you downloaded. Open up your favorite editor and paste the following into the file:

<html>
 
<head>
 
  	<title>PHP / AJAX / JSON / PROTOTYPE</title>
 
  	<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="prototype-1.6.0.3.js"></script>
 
  	<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
 
		function getPerson(id, target)
		{
			//create new ajax request from prototype library
			new Ajax.Request("get-person-handler.php", 
			{
				//inline function to handle success
				onSuccess: function(transport) 
				{
					//get json object from transport
					var person = transport.responseJSON;
 
					//use object properties to populate element
					$(target).innerHTML = person.name;
				},
				parameters: { personId: id }
			});
		}
	</script>
 
</head>
 
<body>
 
 	<input type="text" id="id" name="id" style="width:35px;" />
 
 	<input type="button" value="Get Person" onclick="getPerson($('id').value, 'personDisplay');" />
 
	<div id="personDisplay"></div>
 
</body>
 
</html>

This is a simple file that has one Javascript method we’ll use to invoke Prototype’s Ajax object. The Ajax.Request method will send a POST containing an ID to our PHP file and it will handle the request and return a response formatted in JSON.

Create another file in the same directory called get-person-handler.php and drop the following code into it:

< ?php
#this needs to be first!
header('Content-type: application/json');
 
#create array of person objects
$people[1] = 'John Doe';
$people[2] = 'Jane Smith';
$people[3] = 'Steve Johnson';
 
#get the id from the post
$id = $_POST['personId'];
 
//create return array and populate with id and name
$return['id'] = $id;
$return['name'] = $people[$id];
 
#return json string
echo json_encode($return); 
?>

As you can see, this file handles the POST request, get’s the ID from the posted data, looks up the person in the array we’ve created, and returns the data formatted in JSON.

You should be able to load the get-person.php file into your browser, enter an ID (either 1, 2, or 3) into the text box, and click ‘Get Person’ to populate the screen with the person’s name. Note that since these are PHP files, you’ll need a local web server running on your machine.

It’s a pretty simple setup, but I’ve found that you need to start simple when working with new languages and frameworks. The next step might be to create a Person class in PHP and return person objects to the client via JSON. We could also put in some database code to fetch the data from MySQL instead of using our static array.

You can download an archive with the three files in the example by clicking here.

A working example of this tutorial is right here.