Sponsor: Sendy


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My thanks to Sendy for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week.

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that delivers your emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).

Compared to hosted newsletter services, Sendy is an app you can install on your own server. That means, you don’t have to pay monthly fees just to maintain your account. As Sendy uses Amazon SES as the sending engine, deliverability is high at a very low cost.

Sendy uses multi-threading to deliver your emails to Amazon SES, Amazon in turn enable your emails to pass SPF & Sender ID policy checks enforced by many ISPs & DKIM-sign all outgoing emails to ensure high deliverablity rate.

The features you get with Sendy are what you’re familiar with other hosted services, like lists & subscriber management, giving your client access, beautiful reports, custom fields, autoresponders and so on.

Find out more about Sendy or get your copy at sendy.co.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

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Pixar Shorts

Those little shorts Pixar puts before for each of their movies are fantastic. I love watching these things. My kids’ favorite is probably Jack Jack Attack, the back story of what happened with the baby-sitter during the Incredibles movie (though Presto is a close second). I think my favorite is Boundin’, which always sets me right when I start feeling sorry for myself. The short from Brave, La Luna, is now available online. As a dad, this one gets to me every time I watch it.

As an aside, the I was pleased to see Disney put a short at the beginning of Wreck-It Ralph, Paperman which is, in my opinion, Pixar caliber.

Sponsor: Dozeo

My thanks to Dozeo for sponsoring MacSparky this week.

dozeo is a young and innovative team of developers and online media experts from Stuttgart, Germany. Together we are excited about redefining videoconferencing and providing a hassle-free solution for people to meet online and communicate live and interactively with each other.

dozeo represents a new kind of social video conferencing. It combines powerful features into an intuitive and stylish design that can easily withstand a comparison with the established online conferencing tools.

Upcoming integrations of dozeo into existing social media platforms will increase the fun factor and improve the effective use of online collaboration tools. With the existing integration for Github we have already made a start: developers get the chance to avoid lengthy plain text discussions and join a video conference directly from GitHub.

Check it out for yourself and sign up for a free dozeo account.

Happy meetings!

Try hassle-free video conferencing with Dozeo today.
Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

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iStopMotion 3


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As a dad and a geek, I’m always looking for ways to interact with my kids and technology. It’s probably a selfish thing but why not mix the two things I love so much?

For several years now, I’ve been using iStopMotion with my daughter. With it we make little movies with Lego, dolls, and whatever else strikes our fancy.

This most recent version from Boinx Software includes some really great improvements:

iPhone and iPad Support

No longer do you need to tether your camera to your Mac. Instead, you can now set up your iPhone or iPad and use its camera to take pictures for you. This used to be a huge problem for me since we use iStopMotion on an iMac and it was really difficult setting up our “shoot” anywhere out of USB cable length. Now we can have the computer in one corner of the room and are “set” at the other end of the room. This is really useful.

Final Cut Pro Export

The new version also lets you export directly to Final Cut Pro X straight from the application. If you want to get more serious about this stuff, this could be a big help. To be honest, we do most of our editing right in the application.

More

iStopMotion includes many additional features including Onion Skinning, which lets you see the animation before you capture the frame, and Chroma Key, letting you put your scene anywhere you want using green screen or, alternatively, inserting a live actor in your animation scene. There is also a tilt shift filter which can turn your scene into a miniature.

With the holidays coming up, a great use for this application would be to set up your iPhone on a tripod and point to your Christmas tree while you decorate it. Then have iStopMotion capture a frame every few seconds and at the end you have a really nifty time lapse video. We do this at the Sparks house and it’s a lot of fun watching later.


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A Sad, Lonely Man and his Lego Yoda

At some point, my kids will get too old and too “cool” to be fiddling with stop motion video with their dad and then I’ll just have to suck it up and admit I enjoy doing this for my own benefit. The good news is at that point, I can just jump into it whole hog and buy myself some really cool Star Wars Lego.

You can download iStopMotion from the Mac App Store for $50 or buy directly from the website. If you’ve ever had any interest in this stuff, you should really give it a try. It is a lot of fun.

Timeline 3D for iOS


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One of my favorite software developers, BeeDocs, just released their first iOS product, Timeline 3D (Website) (App Store) for iOS. I’ve written about BeeDocs’ Timeline 3D application for the Mac before.

This new version brings many of the same powerful tools to iOS and that alone makes this pretty spectacular. I am increasingly walking in meetings and presentations with just my iPad. Before, the only way to include a BeeDocs caliber timeline in my presentation would be to generate screenshots or movie files on the Mac and save it out to the iPad. The interactivity and ability to make changes on the fly were both lost.

In short, this gives me all of the interactivity I normally enjoy sitting behind my Mac on my iPad. The whole thing works with AirPlay Mirroring so I can build a timeline while talking to the client and wirelessly beam it the conference room (or courtroom) screen through an Apple TV. It is like magic and makes me look brilliant. Another useful feature is the ability to email a PDF of the timeline right from the iOS device.

I definitely see myself giving future presentations with a complementary timeline running on my iPad. I can then switch between Keynote (or any other presentation tool of choice) and Timeline 3D right in front of the audience. I’m thrilled that BeeDocs has come to the iOS platform with this software and I plan to take advantage of this application in courtroom and conference rooms immediately.

Adam Behringer, Timeline 3D’s developer, has been laboring at this product for some time and it shows. Adam made a video showing off the application .


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