Posted Friday, May 20, 2005

Friday Fun: Comic Life Goes Tiger, More About Podiobooks, New .Mac Templates for Widescreen Movies, and More

It's Friday! The rains have stopped, the sun is shining, and a weekend awaits. Here are a few things to explore over the next couple of days.

Comic Life adds Tiger Features
This site was one of the first to sing the praises of Plasq's Comic Life program. (Read my post.) The Plasqies are at it again: they've updated Comic Life to add some Tiger-specific features and more.

Comic Life 1.1 taps into Tiger's Core Image technology to enable you to add cool special effects to your images. Brilliantly, the effects are nondestructive: they don't affect your original images.

Comic Life 1.1 also lets you grab still images using an Apple iSight camera. Snap a shot with your iSight, then add a wacky effect to it. Fun!

More About Podiobooks
Yesterday, I posted about podiobooks: serialized books delivered as podcasts. A reader kindly wrote to let me know about a directory of podiobooks on the forums area of the iPodlounge site. Keep those ears busy!

.Mac Goes Wide
Do you create widescreen movies? Do you publish them via Apple's .Mac HomePage service? If you answered yes to both questions, you'll be glad to know that Apple has added some HomePage movie templates that fit the 16:9 aspect ratio of widescreen movies.

Whether a Web page is the best place to view a widescreen movie is a debate I shall bypass for now.

A New iTunes Page: Now Go Buy Something
I've been toying with the idea of tweaking this site's resource pages: the ones accessible through the buttons at the top of this page.

Fresh from the toy box: a new iTunes and iPod resource page. I've rearranged the page in a way that I hope makes it a better resource. I've also taken advantage of the delights of RSS syndication to add some frequently updated news headlines and software downloads.

And I've added more me-commerce: more opportunities for you to spend, spend, spend. So far, I've resisted the urge to muck up this site's pages with Google ads. Nor will I hold forth my hand and ask for PayPal donations. This site's business model, if you can call it that, is simple: if you like this site, please consider buying my book. And maybe something else while you're at it. Amazon throws a few pennies my way when you do, and that helps put the Milk Bones in Sophie's bowl.

I plan to extend this new design to the remaining resource pages on the site. Any comments or feedback? Shout it out.

See you next week!