TalkRhubarb

Since switching to mac I’ve been looking for an easy way to edit photos to remove the background from images. Photoshop Elements has this ability, and it’s certainly possible with Gimp, but none of the other apps I’ve tried worked and that includes Seashore, Graphics Converter and a host of others.
So when I saw that Keynote ‘08 had an “instant alpha” function I got quite excited. I downloaded a trial version right away only to discover that while the instant alpha function works pretty well in Keynote, copying and pasting that into anything else just doesn’t work. You end up with either the whole image or a white background. Back to the drawing board.

Or maybe not. Ken Drake at KeynoteUser.com has a simple workaround:

Add a shape and set the fill to “none” in inspector.

Then copy both shape and picture and this preserves the transparency when it’s pasted.

To use the image on a webpage, I opened up iWeb, pasted the image into one of the drop zones and published the site to a folder. Opening that folder up in finder the image was called Droppedimage.png. You can then do with that as you please. Here’s on I made of my wife:

The original image is on Flickr here

UPDATE I submiited this hint to MacOSXhints.

Work continues apace to ready the new Glasgow Apple Retail store in Buchanan Street for business. Although the date has yet to be announced, someone working on the site confirmed this morning that the grand opening will be on Saturday 25th August. That’s just a month after the July date originally mooted when planning permission was granted.

I’m looking forward to the new store. I was in the building several years ago when it was “the Pier” and one of my daughters accidentally knocked over some glass trinket. Although they didn’t make me pay for the breakage, I’ve not been back since.

Hopeflly, history won’t repeat itself as I’d hate to have to shell out for a broken Macbook Pro…

Just when I thought I’d got away with it, Ian’s found the picture of me stuffing my face with pizza in Macformat magazine, here.

Next Glasgow Mac User Group meeting is at 7pm at Uisge Beatha Woodlands Road on Tues 14th August.

Apple have released Safari 3 (beta) for Windows. Up until today it’s been a Mac OS X only web browser. You can download it from Apple’s US website. But I have to ask myself why would you bother? It doesn’t have all the great extensions of Firefox. And it STILL doesn’t support the beta version of Yahoo! mail. (Which is funny, because they have a great picture of Yahoo! on the main download page). On the Mac the new version does feel a bit quicker, but on Windows it didn’t feel much nippier at all, and even a hefty speed bump wouldn’t make me switch from Firefox on windows, when you lose so many features.
My bookmarks were automatically imported from Firefox and IE on Windows, but I didn’t realise it had done that as the bookmark bar in firefox didn’t overwrite Safari’s. All the firefox shortcuts were in a “Mozilla Firefox” folder. It all seems a bit of a waste of time. Particularly when there’s more than a few bugs still in Leopard that those developers could have been sorting out instead.

This post comes to you from a Safari browser on a Mac. Don’t you just love irony.

I downloaded this game last night and have found it strangely compelling.  It’s taken me back 20 years to when I doodled similar sketches in 2nd year physics at high school - only sketchfighter brings those doodles to life.  It gives it a weird mix of nostalgia and novelty I really like. What does that say about me?

There’s multiplayer competitive or co-op options too, both of which have you tethered to another player.  Unfortunately my firewall stopped me finding internet players, but even sharing a keyboard works quite well.

You can get Sketchfighter here

Some people have incredible ingenuity which flies in the face of much more obvious and simple solutions. Here’s someone explaining how they use a torch and their iSight webcam to switch on and off iTunes on their mac.
MacOSXhints.com article

As the editor of the site above says - it’s a lot easier to go and buy a remote control! And did I mention that all new macs (with the exception of the high end mac pro’s) come bunded with a remote control? Alternatively with bluetooth on the computer you can use your phone as a remote, with the salling clicker software. This is also available for Windows users too.