Far From Perfection

Tweetie for Mac Suggestion

Scott — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:32:13 +0000

I've been using Twitter a lot lately, and my client of choice is Tweetie for Mac.

Saved searches are a pretty cool feature, and you can open a search into a new window by going to Window > Open In New Window. It's not as convenient as it could be though, so I came up with the following idea, based on Safari's "drag tabs to a new window" feature.

1. Click and drag saved search out of window

2. Saved search resizes and fades to a preview of the results

3. Let go and it resizes to the full size of the window

Let me know what you think of this suggestion in the comments, or tweet @FFPerfection

SMF 4 iPhone 1.0 Released!

Scott — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:52:39 +0000

Go here for the official SMF4iPhone page.

How to play VP7 video files on a Mac

Scott — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:23:29 +0000

I recently downloaded some video files from the internet. After downloading, I opened one of the videos in Quicktime, only to be greeted with a black screen and jerky sound.

I then tried in VLC and received the following error:

main: no suitable decoder module for fourcc VP70. VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.

From its official website, VP7 is…

Perhaps the world's most advanced video compression technology, award-winning TrueMotion VP7 can be experienced in Skype2.0, AOL AIM, Move Networks, Viewpoint Media Player, and Tencent Messenger/QQ, among others.

For the first time, achieve high quality video at low data rates - as low as 20kbps, and play back 720p HD on 1.5GHz Pentium M and 1080p HD on 2.5GHz Pentium M.

VP7 brings all the benefits that have made TrueMotion codecs industry leaders - from quality and efficiency to flexible implementations and licensing.

While it was hard to get the facts beneath all of that marketing-speak, I'm pretty sure they neglected to mention that there is no official VP7 support for OS X.

Every site I came across on the internet told me I was out of luck and that I had to use Windows. That was, until I came across a post on a forum, on page ninety-twelve of Google, mentioning the possibility of MPlayer for OS X having the ability to play VP7.

I went to the download page for MPlayer and downloaded the MPlayer OS X 1.0rc2 binary along with the the codec package for OS X.

MPlayer played the videos just fine.