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I’ve bought iStopMotion Pro for HD time lapse recording to use with QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac. It works great, the camera is set to record in 720p and it’s really good in low-light conditions. iStopMotion makes it really easy to setup a time lapse recording. However, there’s one feature I miss and that is the possibility to have a schedule for starting and stopping the scripts. There’s no need to record anything after the workers have gone home for the day, and the output file becomes big enough as it is. So I’ve connected the MacBook to a mobile broadband modem that let’s me connect to the Mac with ScreenSharing and manually stop the recording. (The Mac is placed in a store and I can’t get to it outside regular opening hours.)

I asked the Boinx developer about the possibility of a schedule for time lapse and he replied that it’s possible to use AppleScript and iCal to stop and start the recording. So I brushed up on the ol’ AppleScript and created two very simple scripts.

One starts, the other one stops the time lapse recording. Create an iCal event for when you want it to start/stop, set “alarm” to “Run script” and select the script.

This saves me a lot of time since I no longer have to count on the broadband modem being connected and the setup can just run on its own.

iStopMotion-Apple Scripts

Edit: 30. april 2010:

It fixes many things, like not displaying inserted images in labels when merging to new documents, which caused much gried and was highly time consuming. It also enables custom motion paths in Powerpoint and double-clicking anywhere in a slide will let you start typing. And the general application launch times are much improved.

BUT:

Office 2008 still handles networks saves the same though. I just posted this on the Office Mac SP2 blog post, it’s awaiting approval:

Thanks for many great fixes and features!

Especially the bug that made images disappear when merging labels in Word. Saves me so much time! Question: Office 2008 still seems to handle saves to network volumes the same way, using the .TemporaryItems/folders.501/TemporaryItems hidden volume way, 501 being the user id of the client-Mac.

Pretty much all other Mac applications seems to handle this a more logical way, like just having a lock file in the same directory as the document. This issue has been around at least since Office 2004. There’s no plans for changing this? It causes much headache in businesses where many users share one drive using AppleShare.

If I could get a response from someone who can tell me why this is, I’d be very happy.

Thanks, Willy T. Koch Norway

Maybe not the right place to post something like that, it might not be approved, but I had to ask them. This issue has been driving me crazy for years. I just really want to know why they can’t change this. Adobe InDesign puts a ~file in the same folder as the .indd file. Plain and simple. Why do Microsoft need to bring in the user id of the Mac user? In most cases this number is 501 since that’s the first user created on the Mac.

Every time an update is released for Office 2008, I prey that something has been done with this issue. And now with SP2 out and no fix, it will probably be a long way comin’.