The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

If you haven't checked out last week's show yet, by all means grab a copy. We were joined by Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux from Iconfactory, who gave us the lowdown on the history of the company, the origins of Twitterrific, the coevolution of Twitter with the now-dominant Mac client, and the promise of the upcoming iPhone development explosion. Download direct, listen in your browser or subscribe to the TalkShoe feed in iTunes.

Speaking of iPhone... We are live tonight (Sunday 3/9) for this week's talkcast, 10 pm ET, talking about iPhone for enterprise and the SDK -- featuring a taped segment with Erica Sadun and Apollo IM developer Alex Schaefer, who couldn't make the regular Sunday night show but felt they had to say something after 72+ hours deep in the SDK.

Join me, Scott, Dave and Mike Schramm tonight for the social. Bring your own ice cream!

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Sometime yesterday afternoon, as soon as her download finished, our friend and colleague turned up her iTunes, closed her office door and tore into the iPhone SDK with all the excitement of a kitten attacking a new skein of yarn. 24 hours, not much sleep and a diet of flat food later, she emerges with her quarry: a shiny new application for iPhone and iPod touch, ToDo App.

This marathon initial effort provides basic todo list features -- adding, listing and deleting. Here's the catch: for now, the only place you can run it is inside the Aspen simulator in Xcode; as soon as Apple starts delivering signing keys to registered and paid developers, those will allow the app to be loaded and tested on physical phones.

In addition to the coding frenzy, Erica found the time to revise her iPhone frameworks documentation and header notes to version 1.2, which reflects the SDK edition. After a long sojourn in the wildnerness of the community toolchain, the iPhone devs can see what appears to be the promised land. Here's to the crazy ones.

Couldn't stop refreshing the various liveblogs covering the Apple SDK event? Neither could we. Fortunately, in case you missed any key details, Apple has now posted a streaming video of the entire presentation. Just the thing to watch while you wait, and wait, and wait for your copy of the SDK to download. (Seriously, developer.apple.com is getting hammered like a steel drum at Carnival in Rio.)

If you spot anything in the video that you think we missed, let us know below.

Steve Green's free and fascinating video effect utility CamTwist has been updated to version 1.7, including fixes for several bugs, adding AppleScript support and Flickr slideshows, as well as an entirely new tool called CamTwist Studio for live mixing. If you've got any curiosity about video effects on the Mac, you are in for a real treat with CamTwist.

The new piece of the puzzle, CamTwist Studio, lets you take preset effects, overlays, slide shows/canned video and camera mixes and do on-the-fly, multicamera previewing and switching, with only a couple of clicks -- a "television studio in a box." CamTwist leverages Quartz compositions to do its graphic magic, so it does require 10.4 or better and a reasonably speedy Quartz Extreme-capable machine (not to mention a video source like a webcam or iSight). While it isn't directly compatible with iChat, it works with almost every other live video service, including Skype, uStream and Yahoo! Live.

CamTwist can be a little bit sparse on first glance, but if you want to ramp up quickly to getting RSS feeds, lower thirds or fancy effects on your video with professional aplomb, check out Ben's excellent training clip on the documentation page. Our buddy Chris Pirillo did a walkthrough of CamTwist's functionality in his production setup ("I tried all the [video effect] software for Windows, and they all suck -- there's nothing close to CamTwist on Windows"), and Metacafe has a thorough rundown.

If you're having fun exploring CamTwist, you might also be interested in Stone Design's Videator ($49), Varasoft's Wirecast 3 ($450, cross-platform) or CamCamX from blackop ($59 for a one-year subscription). All three have a following for VJ and live mixing use, and are commercially supported. Still, for sheer mix-it-up fun you can't beat CamTwist.

[via Download Squad/MacUpdate]

The Daily Show, recently returned to full writer strength, apparently decided that the best way to say "high tech" for its March 5 Election Center feature was by getting a bunch of MacBook Airs on the set. Five of them, to be precise, arrayed before correspondents like Aasif Mandvi, Samantha Bee and Rob Riggle.

Does putting an Air onscreen automatically make these fake journalists more credible and authoritative? Maybe not... but that isn't stopping some other jokers from using them in slightly more official newsrooms.

Thanks to Kevin for the screen capture and Jesse for the Karl Rove tip.

In the first half of our iTunes movie rental debate, Mike stakes out the "Pro" position on extended-duration rentals with an appeal on behalf of tired, stressed parents everywhere.

Let me just say it: there is a perfect market for iTunes movie rentals. It's the same market that Netflix or VOD sales addresses, the same audience that prefers (or is limited to) staying at home rather than a night out at the movies. You know who we are -- the stroller patrol, the breeder bastion, the Momfia... the parents. We crave entertainment, and we're willing to pay for it, but our evenings are squeezed to the point of nonexistence. By the time the offspring are fed and watered, tucked away in their beds, we might only have an hour or two's worth of 'we' time to enjoy a feature film. If someone wakes up and needs 15 minutes of settling back to bed, well, forget it. With the 24-hour watch time limitation on iTunes movies, tomorrow night, when we might have another chance to view our movie, it's too late.

Thus, opinionated folk such as David Pogue, Rob Griffiths, Glenn Fleishman, and our reader Marshall (his open letter to Apple is reproduced at the end of this post) all concur that some form of extension past the 24-hour limit makes great sense to parents and great sense to Apple's rental market. I join my voice to theirs, and offer this modest proposal: Add a $0.50 surcharge for a 6-hour extension, or $1 for a 12-hour bump. Make the extra time optional -- you'd still have to decide and pay for it at rental time, not add it on after renting the movie, as the DRM challenges of a shifting finish line + multiple playback devices are probably too much to handle. I bet that parents of young kids, or families with variable evening schedules, would fork over the extra spare change to extend their rental times, and let's remember that those couple of quarters are pure profit (it costs the same in encoding and bandwidth for a 36-hour movie to download as for a 24-hour movie). I'd gladly take the extra time for free, but if you've got to add a modest surcharge I'll swallow my pride.

Give me a 36-hour rental and I promise this: I will buy an Apple TV and I will start renting movies on it. That's $225, cash on the barrel, plus what I'll spend on the flicks. Who's with me?

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Archiving your Entourage mail is a chore that varies in ease and effectiveness, depending on how much time and tweaking energy you're willing to put into it. You can drag messages to Finder folders to export them, or pull out entire folders as MBOX files; you can also export folder sets to Entourage's proprietary idiosyncratic RGE format... neither particularly appealing. You can streamline this process with Paul Berkowitz' multifaceted Import/Export Entourage script, but it's still a pain.

For an easy, one-step archiving option in Entourage, your best bet is Entourage Email Archiver X (EEAX), just updated to version 4 -- now Leopard and Entourage 2008-only, with v3.6.1 still available for Tiger/2004 users. Along with the companion Entourage Email Optimizer product that Scott mentioned last week, EEAX can streamline your archiving to six different target formats. You get Spotlight-searchable archives, a FileMaker template for database storage, and .eml native-format messages in case you need to bring things back to the mothership. A single-user license of EEAX is $30, and upgrades to v4 for existing users are $10.

If you've got scores, hundreds or thousands of mail accounts to archive, or you're converting from one mail format to another (say, from Outlook Express to Entourage), that's a job for an industrial-strength email exporting and conversion tool. You might want to check out Emailchemy, which has a pretty good track record; it's the only tool I know that can go directly from Outlook 2003 PST files to Entourage RGE archives. The latest version supports Entourage 2008 and includes a Google Apps migration tool as well. Emailchemy is $28 for a single-user license.

Sunday night's talkcast was a delightful discussion, as we were joined by the personable and knowledgeable duo of Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux from Iconfactory. Ged and Craig gave us the lowdown on the history of the company, the origins of Twitterrific (it's amazing what inspiration comes to you in the shower), the coevolution of Twitter with the now-dominant Mac client, and the promise of the upcoming iPhone development explosion.

We even gave away a few copies of Frenzic to our lucky listeners, courtesy of our guests. Great questions and contributions from Brett, Christina, Dave, Cory, and last-minute contributor Erica rounded out an extra-long (1:15!) show. Download direct, listen in your browser or subscribe to the TalkShoe feed in iTunes.

Join us again on Sunday night for our next live show, 10 pm ET, where we'll be reviewing Thursday's press event and the upcoming roadmap for iPhone development. Assuming that UPS gets its act together, I should be able to offer some impressions of the new MacBook Pro as well.

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Even though the Mac BU is targeting March 11 as the ship date for the first official update to Office 2008 (12.0.1), there's groundwork to be laid and preparations to be made. It's in that spirit of watchful readiness that we note the appearance this afternoon of Microsoft's AutoUpdate 2.1.1 updater, available through... well, through Microsoft AutoUpdate 2.1.0, part of the base Office 2008 install. After that, you know, it's turtles all the way down.

Other than the criticality of the update and that it's 2.0 MB in size, we don't know much else, but it's safe to say that this updater updater is a prerequisite for the real updater coming soon. As an Entourage 2008 user who is suffering consistent crashes each time the main window is closed and auto-reopens, I'll count myself among those eager for some fixes as rapidly as possible.

Thanks Kyle

The shiny goodness that is the Iconfactory's Twitterrific has been officially revved to version 3.1, adding new features and bugfixes to the $14.95/ad-supported freeware Twitter client for the Mac. The new version has added 'teh snappy' to improve performance and reduce user kvetching, always an important design goal.

If you've got comments or questions about Twitterrific, or indeed any of the Iconfactory's projects or products, then you'll be happy to know about this Sunday's talkcast -- IF dudes Gedeon Maheux and Craig Hockenberry will be our special guests, live at 10 pm ET March 2nd on Talkshoe. For everyone who wants to know the secrets of icon design, iPhone development or how to make things pretty, this is an opportunity not to be missed. Register at our TalkShoe page for updates and notifications (or just follow @tuaw on Twitter!).

New features in Twitterrific v. 3.1 include:

• Growl notifications are now sorted correctly and summarized
• New keyboard shortcuts and action menu on tweets
• Changing logins on Leopard will no longer hang
• Status message updates now work correctly with Adium 1.2
• Plugged memory leaks that slowed Twitterrific down over time

Full change list is here.