10 tips for using Mac OS X like a pro. Here is a collection of 10 tips that are slightly more advanced than usual.
They are aimed at those who want to become more expert Mac users - and of course those who think they already are experts... In general these tips will help you save time and effort when carrying out day to day tasks and hopefully introduce some concepts and applications you may not have come across before. 1. Download Quicksilver This is really the most important pro app for Mac OS X. 2. This may seem like a really simple tip, but far too often I watch supposedly experienced computer users take forever performing simple tasks like copying and pasting. For the more adventurous, you can create your own keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard and mouse section of System Preferences. 3.
This is often a problem that comes from working in Windows a lot, where drag-and-drop doesn't quite have the same power. 4. 5. VLC is a multipurpose media player that can play pretty much any movie file you throw at it. 6. 7. Introduction to MPEG – from IP Television Magazine. Blocks Blocks are portions of an image within a frame of video usually defined by a number of horizontal and vertical pixels. For the MPEG system, each block is composed of 8 by 8 pixels and each block is processed separately. Macroblocks A macroblock is a region of a picture in a digital picture sequence (motion pictures) that may be used to determine motion compensation from a reference frame to other pictures in a sequence of images.
Typically, a frame is divided into 16 by 16 pixel sized macroblocks, which is also groupings of four 8 by 8-pixel blocks. Slice A slice is a part of an image that is used in digital video and it is composed of a contiguous group of macroblocks. Frames A frame is a single still image within the sequence of images that comprise the video. To compress video signals, the MPEG system categorizes video images (frames) into different formats. Frames that use both spatial compression and temporal compression (predicted frames). Intra Frames (I-Frames) Introduction to PHP. Integrating QuickTime with Cocoa. By Douglas Welton 08/15/2003 This is the first in a series of articles about integrating QuickTime technology into your Cocoa applications.
My intent with this series is to provide the introductory steps for those of you who are new to QuickTime, to cover many of the common tasks and issues that may crop up during your development cycle, and to share my experience so that, hopefully, you can avoid some of the mistakes I've made along the way. I'll start out by providing an overview of QuickTime, then some insight into the interfaces between Cocoa and QuickTime, and finish up with an example of a "simple" QuickTime Movie Player that you can include in your own applications. What is QuickTime? In the early 1990s, Apple introduced QuickTime, a collection of application programmer interfaces (APIs) and components that support the creation, manipulation, and playback of multimedia and interactive content.
The QuickTime API is quite extensive and beyond the scope of this article.