Jeff Carlson (.Thought)

Two New Articles Posted this Week

My latest Seattle Times column is online, which is about when my wife's MacBook drive exploded and how I recovered her data: You can't have too many backups for Mac hard drives.

In my most recent iMovie column for Macworld, I look at several methods for stretching the boundaries of iMovie's editing interface: Maximize Your iMovie Editing Space (26 October 2009).

Organize Your iMovie Video Library

Macworld has published an article of mine: Organize Your iMovie Video Library. Learn how to mark video as favorites, assign keywords, and get your video library under control.

Snow Leopard Pocket Guide Now in Stock

I received my first author copies of The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Pocket Guide this week, and they look great! I also checked Amazon.com this morning and saw that the book is now in stock and available (and still costs only $10, with free shipping for Amazon Prime members!).

Peachpit has also posted an excerpt from Chapter 2, which covers installing Snow Leopard (here's a direct link to the PDF) if you want to get a sense of the book's content.

My Seattle Times Review of Snow Leopard

...is now posted: "Snow Leopard: The big improvements come under the hood". Choice paragraph:

How often in software do you get something that fundamentally makes something better instead of just making it bigger? When you're talking about operating systems, that answer is once — now.

Also, Peachpit confirmed that my book, "The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Pocket Guide," will be available when the operating system ships tomorrow. I love this little book, and am anxious to get it out to everyone.

Pre-Order My Snow Leopard Pocket Guide!

This has definitely been a busy book year for me, and my latest title is about to hit store shelves (online and physical) soon: The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Pocket Guide! The book will be available when Snow Leopard arrives, and is available now as a pre-order.

The Snow Leopard Pocket Guide is 240 pages of everything you need to know to use the new version of Mac OS X. It's a tightly-written $15 guide that Amazon currently sells for just $10!

Amazon also has Snow Leopard itself available for pre-order:

• Upgrade from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: $29
• Get the Family Pack upgrade (5 licenses): $49
• If you're upgrading from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, you need to buy the Mac Box Set (Snow Leopard, iLife '09, iWork '09): $169

(If you buy the book or Snow Leopard using those links, I earn a small referral fee.)

New Article: Five Cool and Useful Techniques for iMovie '09 and iDVD

Peachpit.com has posted an article I wrote about iMovie and iDVD: Five Cool and Useful Techniques for iMovie '09 and iDVD.

And remember: You can download the iDVD portion of my book for free here (PDF).

My Seattle Times Review of the iPhone 3GS

My review of the iPhone 3GS is now live on the Seattle Times Web site, a day ahead of when it's scheduled to appear in print. I like the new iPhone quite a bit; Apple sent me a review unit, but I had also ordered one the day it was announced.

I skipped the iPhone 3G last year because the iPhone OS 2.0 software provided all the improvement I needed; I did buy one for my wife (see my TidBITS article "iPhone 3G: On the Line in Seattle"). But partially due to the fact that I write about Apple and technology for a living, and due to new features like the compass (which many people will tell you I need) and the improved speed overall, I decided it was time to move up.

Here's a link to some of the photos and videos I took to demonstrate the camera: iPhone 3GS Review Seattle Times. (I also discovered a bug: when uploading a photo or video to MobileMe, the first album it lists can't be deselected; so in my case, anything I upload goes into a password-protected album I set up for a photo client, which I then have to move to the album I want using the MobileMe Gallery interface on my computer.)

How Not to Write Article Leads

Macworld Editor Jason Snell (@jsnell) posted a quick series of "Editor's laments" today on Twitter that are a great reference for how not to start articles. If you've had any journalistic training, you should know these and avoid them, but I still see them all the time. (And as Jason posted them, I tried to think if I'd broken any of them. I'm sure have at one point or another, especially #3.)

I have more trouble writing leads (or "ledes" if you prefer that spelling) than any other part of an article; I trip up on writing conclusions, too. I'll typically run through a dozen or more leads when I write, sometimes rewriting the same ones over just to get my brain into gear. This always frustrating process is part of what inspired me to come up with TextRedactor for this year's TidBITS April Fools issue (see "FrownOnMyMac Fills New Mac Niches," 2009-04-01).

So, as you're struggling to compose that first paragraph of your next article, keep these "don'ts" in mind:

Editor's Lament #1: The dictionary definition lede. "Webster's defines baseball as a sport played with four bases and a ball..."

Editor's Lament #2: The "under a rock" lede. "Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that the French Open final is Sunday."

Editor's Lament #3: The ol' if-then. "If you're a fan of pencils, then you'll love Virtual Pencil from the app store!"

Editor's Lament #4: The common thing that isn't. "We all know that when you're trapped in a bathysphere, you'll need to kill some time!"

Recover Erased Photos from a Memory Card

Have you done the bone-headed thing I did recently? I erased a memory card in my camera, and then realized I hadn't transferred the latest photos to my computer. Fortunately, they're easy to recover as I write about in an article at TidBITS: Recover Erased Photos from a Memory Card (2009-06-03).

I look at four programs that can get the job done, each with their pluses and minuses: Data Rescue II, Klix, Photo Recovery for Mac, and Image Rescue.

Download the iDVD portion of my book for FREE!

Click here to download the PDF (6.2 MB).

When Apple revealed iMovie '09 at Macworld Expo this year, I was thrilled to see so many new features compared to iMovie '08. (You can read my Macworld review of iMovie '09 here.) But that also created a problem: my publisher needed the book to stay within a certain page count to avoid increasing the price of the book—remember, this is a full-color book printed on good paper. I knew I couldn't fit everything into the book.

As it turns out, Apple made my job easier. iDVD wasn't updated at all, so I made the decision to do something unusual: I removed the iDVD section from the printed book and am offering it as a free download to anyone who wants it. That freed up the pages needed to cover all of iMovie's new and changed features (and, in fact, the book's retail price is lower than the previous edition, now $24.99 compared to $29.99!).

Don't worry, the printed book still contains all the essential information you need to use iDVD. I added an iDVD Overview chapter that walks you through the steps of creating an iDVD project, and the "Archiving, Encoding, and Burning" chapter is there, too.

So what's in the free download? More than 70 pages of all the ins and outs of creating and editing an iDVD project, including:

• Customizing themes
• Customizing individual elements such as buttons, backgrounds, and text
• Creating DVD slideshows
• Using the Map, drop zones, OneStep DVD, Magic iDVD, and more.
• A full index to the addendum, to make it easy to find the information you're looking for.

If you don't own the print book, this free iDVD addendum will give you an idea of what the book is like: easy, step-by-step walkthroughs of how to do everything, with lots of color screenshots.

The PDF also includes a deal in the back to buy the book at 35% off when you order directly from Peachpit Press!