Lestini Designs blog

HD quality videos are finally making their way to YouTube.

Some of the content on the site is being offered as these new mammoth size files. YouTube hasn’t exactly publicized this with great fanfare yet, but they are there if you look for them. Any good message board or blog will steer you to them as well. If you find the “watch in high quality” link underneath the player, check it out.

This new format is a big move for YouTube, as the video size is over 80MB. Most likely they are probably the same H.264 encoded mp4 files available in the iTunes store.

The new high quality vids have been available for a few months now, and a small hack can upgrade any video taped at a high enough quality. You tube has confirmed this is part of their efforts to test out different video formats.

I know this has been around a bit, but I honestly just discovered it. I just reset my YouTube playing preferences to play the high quality videos when available. It has made a mammoth difference in my enjoyment of the content there.

By default, all YouTube vids embedded on other sites (like this blog) load at normal quality, which as we all know is usually not so hot. But there is a way to embed your HQ videos as high. If you need to link to a high quality video on your blog, add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 onto the end, like so:

That is something very sweet indeed! By the way, this is now my FAVORITE video on YouTube. Brilliant video and Matt is very cool!

Panic has updated its Web site development application Coda to version 1.6.

The latest version adds new features, including a plug-in architecture that extends Coda’s already pretty robust text-editing functionality. With Coda Plug-in Creator, almost anyone can create plugins, which follow a similar format to TextMate’s command bundles. You can script Coda to extend its functionality, either by writing your own or by downloading other users’ plug-ins. The plug-in functionality mirrors that of up-and-comer Espresso, with its Sugar plug-ins.

An Open Quickly window now lets you easily find and open a local file you want to edit from your site. Coda improves spell check support (you can spell-check non-code text). The search bar now lets you find and replace text across multiple local files.

I have always used Dreamweaver (I know, I hear groaning from the “hard-core” group) and the new DW CS4 looks fantastic, but the more I see Coda, the more I think I want to jump right in with it. If you haven’t heard of it before, check it out. The price difference alone between Coda and DW will make you want to check and see if this could work for you.

In Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004, Wired (which is probably the best example of something with so much potential not living up to it) emphatically says that blogs are so passé. That’s right, forget that nobody reads Wired anymore, but that is the skinny.

Basically the gist of the article is that your feelings may be hurt by comments that are not found to be helpful. Clearly you should only use Twitter to express your 140 word thoughts because nobody can respond to you (which is silly because they can anyway). What is the point of having an interactive online community if you can’t take the comments anyway? And you can’t have any deep thoughts that you can’t express in 140 words or you are fried. That would be too taxing, wouldn’t it?

Or better yet, you shouldn’t blog because there is no economic future in it. Why express yourself if you can’t be made instantly wealthy, right?  And what is the deal that Wired deems that you can’t blog, or read blogs and yet use Twitter and Facebook et al. Do you know anyone who has a blog that doesn’t use Twitter, Facebook, Flickr et al? It is so ridiculous I can’t stand it.

Not to mention that in the past year, the quality of the blogs in the web design/development community has exceeded expectations. It is a giant community of love. Really. I have read so many thoughtful, insightful comments and analysis of trends and code that if I had gone to school to pay for it, my loan would take me forever to pay back. And these guys and gals love what they do. They do it because they love it. Wow. Novel idea.

No, sorry, Wired is useless. The time I spent reading the article would have been better spent informing the world of my thoughts in 140 words or less.

Photoshop CS4 is the 11th version of Adobe’s industry standard imaging application. It’s hard to imagine that Adobe can continue to make big changes to Photoshop. But once again, Adobe has found ways to take an application and improve it. Some new features make their way into this release, including the following below.

First up, and a Windows only feature, is support for very large files thanks to running in 64-bit (with a 64-bit version of Windows). Mac users will have to wait for a future release for 64-bit power. It’s a shame that the bread and butter users on Macs will have to wait for this feature. When I watched the live video of the CS4 release, no mention was made of this being a Windows only feature. Obviously how long this will take to migrate to a Mac will probably determine how soon I update.

User Interface Changes

Photoshop CS4 has changed the main work area and now supports tabbed documents. The main tool bar across the top of the window has changed with many of the most common tools, like selection, zoom, rotate, and views placed on the title bar for immediate access. You can also choose to float one or more windows if you want to view images in the CS3 and earlier style, or compare images.

Seam Carving

Hidden away under Edit > Content Aware Scale (I had to watch the demo three times to see where this was hidden) lies a new and very powerful tool. Content Aware Scaling lets you resize an image without changing critical visual components, like people and buildings. This is great for those times when you need to fit a specific size but can’t afford to crop the image.

Photoshop CS4, is being marketed as a solid upgrade to one of the most popular image editing programs. With a good mix of new features and improvements to old favorites, it most probably is a worthwhile upgrade. It’s still a big and complex program that probably does more than most people will ever need. And again, I am bummed that the 64 bit run isn’t available for Mac users at the start of the release. But for sure, Photoshop CS4 isn’t a program I will ever outgrow.

Lexar ,a provider of memory products for digital media, is giving photo buffs the opportunity to go totally wireless with the introduction of its Shoot-n-Sync™ Wi-Fi® memory card - a wireless solution for uploading digital photos to computers as well as sharing them via social networking and photo-sharing websites.

The first introductory card will be 2GB. It will be compatible with SD-compatible digital cameras, and it records and stores digital photos in a camera just like a standard memory card, but adds the time-saving convenience and simplicity of wireless uploading from camera to computer -and directly to the Internet.

With its Wi-Fi connectivity, the Lexar Shoot-n-Sync Wi-Fi memory card is a great product for a wide range of photographers from bloggers, web surfers, and social-networkers. Instead of removing the memory card from a camera, transferring it to a reader, connecting the reader, and then dragging each individual photo onto the computer, the memory card offers users a much simpler solution.

How It Works
As an Eye-Fi Connected product, the Lexar memory card features Eye-Fi technology and connects to Eye-Fi’s web service to wirelessly and automatically upload photos from a digital camera to the web and to a computer. After the brief initial installation of Eye-Fi Manager software, the card is ready to wirelessly download copies of any photos stored on it, automatically to your computer, as soon as it comes within range of your home computer’s wireless network.

The card is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems.