Blogs

I have had a ton of trouble today getting a rented Sony HVR-Z1U HDV Camera to work with iMovie '11 - I was having trouble both importing pre-recorded footage (in VCR mode) and importing live footage (in Camera mode). QuickTime Player would allow me to import video from the camera at DV quality, but I couldn't get HD.

I found that the camera was downconverting the video to regular DV (squeezing the pixels so it would still be a 16:9 widescreen picture) when using the i.Link (FireWire/IEEE 1394) port. After trying out a variety of settings, I was finally able to set up the camera so it would import (both in VCR and in Camera mode) HD video, directly into iMovie '11.

You simply need to set the following settings in the camera's menu:

The transition from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 has taken a bit of time, and I (like many others) simply haven't had enough time in the past few months to do D7 testing while in the midst of tens of other D6 projects.

I've committed, though, to building out three Drupal sites in Drupal 7, now that we're at beta-3, and I will be posting a few reflections, mostly from a themer's perspective on some changes—the good, the bad, and the confusing.

A New Default Theme - Bartik

Just like Drupal 5/6's default theme, Garland (which is in use on this site right now :-/), Bartik will be seen on thousands of quickly-built sites around the web, and I think the theme is robust enough for this purpose. I'm actually building one site's theme directly on top of Bartik, just modifying CSS through a single stylesheet added by a custom module.

But it's nothing amazing, in my opinion. I think it would've been awesome to have some sort of dropdown menu support in core by this point—but it looks like that will wait until Drupal 8 at least. This is probably the number one most requested feature I get on a lot of the smaller sites I'm asked to build, and having the feature in core would be über-cool.

Every once in a while, I see a demo for an app that I truly believe will be a game-changing app for a certain field. This video is definitely like that, for the iPad and for DJs. Could you imagine ditching your laptop in favor of an iPad—not just out of convenience, but because the iPad actually does a primary computing function better than your laptop?

One can only hope for interesting and refreshing apps in every field (I'm personally waiting on Coda for the iPad...).

I recently upgraded Transmit using the in-application Update functionality, but after that, whenever I tried emptying the trash, I received a warning that I couldn't delete the "Transmit Favorite Importer," because it was still in use.

Well, the Transmit Favorite Importer ties into the mdworker process on a Mac, which updates the Spotlight search index. Knowing this, I went into Activity Monitor, found the mdworker process, Quit it, and then emptied Trash. Voila! No more Transmit Favorite Importer!

A simple restart will do the trick as well, but if you are like me and have twenty applications open and don't have time to get back into the groove after a restart, this is a quicker way of getting your trash emptied.

For a few of my community-based sites, I wanted to give Organic Groups group members the ability to easily see all the content in their group, regardless of published status, content type, etc., in a list form. Kind of like the universal site Content List, except for each group, and only visible by that group's members.

I've created the view I attached below to do just that—and it has an added bonus of letting users filter their content by published status, content type, or by searching in the title. After importing the view into your own Organic Groups-enabled site, you should be able to modify the view to show links and information custom-tailored to the content on your site.

Example Screenshot:

The view simply adds a tab titled 'Content List' to any group node's home page, and allows group members to see it based on their roles... you may want to edit the view after you import it to make sure only the appropriate users have access...

My feeble attempt:

I've seen a few others in the Planet feed, and this year I had a really nice round pumpkin, so I figured, 'What the heck?' I've done a couple Apple-logo pumpkins in the past. Next year I may go for a more carved approach - with different depths of carving for a more Death Star-like effect.