Check your child's toys for recalls & lead

Given all the recent attention on various toy recalls from major manufacturers relating to toxic chemicals in children's toys I wanted to post the following links that help parents determine if the child's toys are safe:

Healthy Toys a volunteer organization that is doing testing on toys and reporting the results on their website.

US Consumer Product Safety Commission The U.S. government agency charged with testing and regulating consumer products where you'll find the official announcements regarding mandatory toy recalls.

Mattel Product Recall page. Mattel lists the various products and product numbers from its brands that have been recalled and what consumers should do.


Let me know other sources and I'll update this list.

What Mac apps broke under Leopard?

I started thinking about which applications broke under the migration from Apple's Tiger operating system to the newest release Leopard. In general my transition to Leopard has been fairly pain free given past operating system migrations that I've undertaken on the Mac and under Windows.

At this point there are still a number of applications that I use that haven't fully made the move to Leopard including:

• SuperDuper! While I am running TimeMachine, there is still a place for ShirtPocket's SuperDuper! backup program. This is the program that I'm looking forward to having updated by far given the importance of having full back-ups.
  
  
• FetchArt - This is a freeware program that allows you to automatically update your iTunes library for missing album art automatically from Amazon's music store.
  
  
• Adobe Creative Suite 3 Lots have been said about this elsewhere in the blogosphere in terms of Adobe's lag time in releasing this application suite.
  

I'd blame most of the lag in having applications Leopard ready on Apple since it sounds like they made fairly major changes to the final gold master release from prior developer releases. It seems from reading most of the sites of the affected applications that the independent development community is hard at work seeking to address the changes required to run under Leopard.

What apps do you use that didn't make the journey to Leopard yet?

Addicted to iMovie08

As I mentioned in an earlier post I've started to experiment with iMovie '08 and have been having a blast editing and building my own videos. At this point I'm using short video clips taken from our camera (a Canon SD800 IS - the image stabilization is well worth it). While I know that some traditional iMovie users are less then thrilled with the 2008 version I must admit that it seems like a great application (albeit this is the first version I've used).

I wanted to highlight a few of the features that I've been spending the most time with outside of editing

• I'm by no means a master video editor but the ability to quickly drop in a nice title, create slick transitions between clips and overlay music or sound effects (either from iMovie, Garageband or iTunes) is a winner in my books.

• The synchronization feature with iTunes which enables the user to select the quality of the output and enables you to export to an iPod Touch or iPhone. Previously I'd used iSquint to convert the files from .avi files to movies that could be played on my Touch.
  
  
• The built-in synchronization with either YouTube! or .Mac for video sharing that enables one-click publishing to the web is a major plus when you just want to create the content and push it out there. I am currently testing YouTube! as an alternative to .Mac given the relatively hefty price $109 that Apple wants for a one-year subscription. There have been a myriad of complaints from people about the hefty price tag and relatively light feature set for .Mac. My take is that after trying the .Mac trial for the past 60 days they're justified complaints since the service is of limited value to those of us that already have alternate email addresses. I will admit that the one-click publishing from iPhoto and iMovie are the main reason that I'd consider signing up for .Mac. Drop me an email and let me know the online services you're using for photo and video sharing and your experiences.

For those that want to get into iMovie in more detail have a look at Unlocking iMovie '08 a great site with tons of tips and tricks for producing your own movies.

My machine does lag a little when importing the video from my iPhoto library and this may be helped by bumping the RAM on my Macbook Pro up to 4GB. I'm planning to upgrade over the next month and will post an update on the improvement in video processing that bumping the RAM makes. Given that video processing is fairly processor intensive I'm hoping that extra RAM will help free up some more space in managing the conversion process.