photo booth posts

One of our readers informed us that he was seeing some strangeness with Photo Booth time stamps. Photo Booth is the built-in Mac app that lets you grab stills or video from your iSight or attached USB or Firewire camera. It does the job dutifully, and with no issues... until now.

Beginning on or about December 27, the app started creating file names that are exactly one year in the future. It's not getting the creation date wrong, that's just fine. But Photo Booth is now giving files names like 2010-12-29 at 11.00.

It's not the end of the world, but if you are looking to find a file by date in the name, you're sure to be confused. The bug appears in Snow Leopard, and I haven't been able to determine if it appears in other, older versions of the OS.

If you want to check the bug for yourself, take a snapshot with Photo Booth, and then look inside the Photo Booth folder inside the Pictures folder in your user directory. Let us know what you find.

Perhaps Apple should re-name the app "Time Machine II."

[Thanks to Oliver for the tip]

What do you get when you mix a MacBook, a US$99 printer, some Ikea shower curtains, and lot of wedding guests?

In the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen's recent wedding, Cline looked into renting a wedding photo booth that would take pictures of guests, save a digital copy, and then print out a strip of photos for the guests to take home as a keepsake. The cost for the rental was prohibitively expensive -- about US$2,000 a day.

David quickly decided that by combining his Mac, a special Automator workflow that he created, an Epson PictureMate Dash printer, an old wardrobe frame, and colorful shower curtains from Ikea, he could inexpensively re-create the functionality of the expensive rental.

His Automator script prompted wedding guests for their names, took 3 photos, arranged the photos in a vertical strip, displayed the photos on the screen for the guests to view, printed out the photo strip, and then saved the individual photos and photo strips in digital form onto the Mac. After the wedding, the photos were uploaded to an online photo album.

From the looks of the happy wedding guests, the Do-It-Yourself Photo Booth was a success. I'd venture to say that David Cline is ranking high in the standings for the "Brother of the Year Award."

QuickTime 7.6 is in the wild. Released today via Software Update and on Apple's support site, the new version "includes changes that increase reliability, improve compatibility and enhance security." It also makes your whites whiter and your brights brighter while helping you avoid embarrassing social situations.

More details via the update page:

Video: Improves single-pass H.264 encoding quality; Increases the playback reliability of Motion JPEG media

Audio: Improves AAC encoding fidelity; Audio tracks from MPEG video files now export consistently

Application Support: Improves compatibility with iChat and Photo Booth

As far as the security updates are concerned, the word from Ryan Naraine at ZDnet is that this patch closes several potentially serious holes that could have been exploited by malicious URLs or custom-payload movie files to execute code on target machines. Four of the seven issues addressed in this update were reported to Apple via the Zero Day Initiative, which encourages responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities by providing cash bounties for the researchers involved.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

We covered FlickrBooth a while back, when it was first released. FlickrBooth is a plug-in for Apple's PhotoBooth that allows you to instantly upload your creations to Flickr after taking the snapshot. The best thing about FlickrBooth 1.2 is that it now runs on Leopard. Some of the new features include:

• Automatic photo uploading now strips .jpg from the title
• SIMBL updated to 0.8.2
• Growl updated to 1.1.2

FlickrBooth is available as a free download from the developer's website.

Wishingline, a web design studio, has done .Mac members a favor and collected most of the QuickPicks that are available on the web for Apple's Backup 3. There are quite a few QuickPicks out there for everything from ecto to PDF documents, Photo Booth pictures to Shiira bookmarks, OmniOutliner documents and much, much more. Wishingline went so far as to list a number of the QuickPicks individually, or simply offer an encompassing package of everything they could find (scroll down about midway on the page for these goodies).

The QuickPicks package is offered free from Wishingline, but remember: they didn't have anything to do with creating these (as far as I know); they just tracked them down and zipped them. If you want a QuickPick for one app or another, you should probably consult the app's author or check out these resources for creating your own.

[UPDATE: Scott from Wishingline dropped us a comment to let us know that the QuickPicks linked from Wishingline are, in fact, home grown. Thanks for some rockin' QuickPicks Scott!]

Here's a useful tip for those that want to test the batteries of their Frontrow remote, or any IR remote for that matter. Use your iSight! Just fire up Photo Booth (or a test video window in iChat), aim the remote at the lens and press a button. The iSight can detect the infrared light just like other video cameras.

I inevitably ended up playing around with Photo Booth for a while. As much as I wanted to hate it as a frivolous bit of code on my new iMac, I have to agree with Scott. It's a cool little app.

I also have to ask... why doesn't Apple release this for everyone? I mean, it's not a part of iLife (nor is Front Row). Why is Apple only offering these programs with new hardware? I'd think giving them away for free would be good karma for Apple.