Results tagged “applescript” from Missing Manuals Blog

There are a ton of great apps out there designed to snag, convert and shovel big heaps of video onto your iPod and iPhone, and I talked about a few of them at this year's Macworld Expo 2008 in San Francisco. Among my absolute favorites:

QuickTime Pro. Apple's own multimedia powerhouse lets you convert a ton of different formats into iPod-ready video with just a simple menu command. It's only $30 and well worth the price.

TubeSock. This nifty little app converts your favorite YouTube videos from the Web and save 'em right into iTunes, where they're only a sync away from going with you on your iPod or iPhone. There's a free demo version that converts the first 30 seconds of video, and the full version is only $15 -- much less than a single movie ticket and a small stale popcorn in most cities.

Handbrake. If you've got a DVD movie from your collection that you'd like to take along on your iPod or iPhone, this little open-source wonder will convert it into a Pod-friendly file quite nicely.

And even though I talked about these in the O'Reilly booth at *MAC*world, all of these programs have Windows versions as well.

Problem: I do a lot of writing. I go through notebooks furiously, filling them up with notes, thoughts, stories, and shopping lists. My family has recently caught on, and begun buying me notebooks for gifts, so that I have quite a store of them, and should I misplace a notebook I can just open up a new one until I find the old, half-full notebook lying under a stack of unopened mail, and try to figure out a way to combine everything written in the new book into the old book, even though I'm really too lazy to copy it all over.

Solution: I'd much rather have an electronic notebook - just a pocket sized gadget, about the size of an iPod, with a keypad and a text editor, on which I can write and store all of my notes. And I don't mean just a sticky-note type program - I want full scale writing capabilities. I want to be able to write a whole story in one note if I should so desire, and then go back and edit the file, and save it again.

Even better would be an application for my iPod Touch, to turn it into a text editor. I wouldn't have to buy a new device, and since I already bring my iPod everywhere and look after it furiously, the chances of damaging or misplacing it are slim. The iPod Touch has already got the touch screen keyboard and the ability to store information, so I hope that with the new DevKits Apple has released, this isn't far off.

Are you listening programmers? Build me a TypePod!