Have you been driven absolutely out of your ever-lovin’ mind, because you recorded a video using the fabulous and free Jing, only to discover that now you can’t convert it to MP4, Youtube, Amazon S3, or anywhere else because NOTHING will open Jing SWFs??

I know I sure have, and I’m sick to death of it. I looked high and low, and despite finding many programs that can indeed open and convert SWF files, NONE of them can open or convert a Jing SWF in specific.

So what’s the solution? Well it may come as no surprise that the ONE PROGRAM that can actually open a Jing SWF, is Techsmith’s own Camtasia Studio program. In fact in Jing, there’s a button you can click to “Edit in Camtasia” which will actually open the Jing SWF in Camtasia, convert it to an AVI, and then import that AVI into Camtasia for your editing/publishing pleasure.

But you don’t have to then output it with Camtasia. By default, the converted file will be stored in:

C:\Users\[YOUR USER NAME]\Documents\Camtasia Studio\

You can simply grab the AVI file, drop it into Handbrake or whatever else you’re using, and convert away.

The only downside here is that Camtasia Studio isn’t free. But there is a 30 day trial, and if you can’t afford to buy it and you’re clever you can run it in a sandbox forever and just keep using the trial endlessly.

I hope this helps someone else who’s been as frustrated by needing to convert Jing videos as I have been!

JVC

OK so is it just me or is the new Firefox 7 seriously screwed up?

I’ve had loads of issues with Firefox for years, in particular around memory usage.  I’m an admitted “tab whore” and so I’ll easily have 4 or 5 windows open each with 10 to 20 tabs in them at any given time.  But my machine is running 64bit Windows and has 4 cores with 6gigs of RAM so I don’t really see that as too much to ask.  Yet FF has constant problems once the memory usage climbs over the 1gig mark (which doesn’t take long).

But Firefox 7 takes this to a whole new level of suck.  At least twice per day, sometimes more, it will just completely freeze.  Nothing will load, and you’ll never even get a 404 or any other timeout type error message.  It just locks up and the CPU usage for it climbs to 15 to 20% and stays there indefinitely.  You can select tabs and do anything you want with the program, you just can’t reach any websites.  IE and Chrome are just fine.

The only remedy seems to be quitting & restarting the browser, but then it just happens again after a few hours.  Total madness!

For the moment I’ve gone back to Firefox 6 as I found other complaints of this issue and they said downgrading was the only solution.  I can’t switch to Chrome as my primary browser because of all the development related adons I use in FF.  I do tend to use Chrome a lot more now though for general web surfing.

Firefox team – I understand you’re on a new kick with this “major version number updates every few weeks” thing, but they’d better be STABLE!

JVC

In case anyone reading my blog has run into this, I thought I should share the only “solution” (workaround) I found.

On the iPad, using the iPod app (how confusing is that anyway??), you may notice that the silly little album artwork thumbnail, actually COVERS UP some of your playlists if you have more than a few, and you can’t scroll down to get to them no matter what you do.

Essentially, you LOSE 4 or 5 playlists forever!

Turns out, if you tap in the search field to bring up the keyboard, then close the keyboard, it will allow you to scroll to the bottom of your playlists.

Took me a while but I finally found the solution on the Apple support forums.

Hope this removes some frustration for someone else as well!

JVC

P.S.

I went to an event this weekend and didn’t pull my laptop out even ONCE!  The iPad was able to do absolutely everything I could have needed to do on the laptop, and then some.  FaceTime is AWESOME!

Well here I am again finding myself in the unenviable position of having to be a “typical consumer” and being utterly overwhelmed by the information I find by googling.

I was recently given an iPad 2, and I’m really trying to give it a fair shake in being something that’s more than just a cool toy, and is actually USEFUL to me on a daily basis.  So far, I think it has real promise after adding a few apps and a stylus.  But I’m struggling with being able to take it with me wherever I go.

For that, I need a case.  But holy crap there are a lot of them out there!

I already know I don’t want a “pouch” type case – I don’t want to have to take my iPad completely out of the case in order to use it.  I prefer the “folio” style cases, where I can just flip open a cover and start working.  Still there are so many of THOSE and boy do they range in price.

I’m pretty price conscious – I don’t like to spend a lot on accessories if I can help it – and so I first went over to eBay.  Found a zillion sellers (mostly in China) with all sorts of cases, including many exact knockoffs of some of the expensive brand-name cases for a lot less money.

I settled on a very thin, no-frills case from a US seller, for a whopping $7 shipped.  At that price I figured I could take a chance.  It looked good “on paper” (i.e. on the screen) and I felt it should do the job.

Well it arrived this morning and I have to say – it’s pretty much a piece of junk.  I’m not sure I’ll bother returning it as the postage and time involved might not make it worth the effort.  But this is definitely not “the one”.

For starters, the iPad doesn’t even stay in the thing.  It has a felt-ish backing that is obviously supposed to hold the device in place and keep it from slipping out, but it barely does anything.  There is nothing really holding the iPad in, so it could easily slip out in normal use.  Also the case opens “backwards” with the iPad on the left and the cover on the right!  I expected it to be like any normal folio containing a pad of paper, with the heavy pad on the right and a cover that you flip over to open.  Also due to the iPad slipping, you can’t use the “kickstand” mode at all or the device will fall out the bottom.  Oh and the cutouts for the buttons are a joke – you have to fumble way too much to try and find the button inside the cutout.

OK so those are my complaints.  But now I appeal to the rest of the world (or at least those that actually read my blog…) – what is truly the best iPad folio case, and why?

My only absolute requirements are:

1. It come in black/grey/silver/something plain and subtle
2. It hold the iPad firmly in place without any risk of it slipping out
3. It have workable cutouts for the buttons & such

Ideally I’d like it to be under $30.

Let the suggestions and opinions fly!

Jonathan

For anyone who’s been trying to reach me for the past 2+ days, I’m sorry to have disappeared.  My main computer has been acting worse and worse for months and finally got to the point where it was SO messed up (don’t know what… antivirus & whatnot found no problems… no fragmentatino, etc.) that I had no choice but to backup, format, and reinstall windows from scratch.

I’m sure you know how insanely painful that can be if you use Windows! it’s taken me totally offline for just over 2 days and counting.  Hope to be back up by tomorrow…

So if you have a support ticket or email that has gone unanswered by me, that’s probably the main reason.  I’ll be in touch ASAP!

Jonathan

Just a note to anyone who’s emailed me recently (I’m obviously hoping you see this! LOL) that I’m going through the emails as quick as I can amidst everything else I’m working on.

After the 2.5 hour webinar Gauher & I did (I still can’t believe we went that long!!) I have a TON of emails and I absolutely WILL answer them all, it’s just gonna take a bit as I’m also juggling some other really big stuff.

So please be patient, hang in there and I will get to you just as fast as I can.  Promise!

Thanks everyone…

Jonathan

P.S.

I need a good autoresponder that I can use for my personal responses to incoming emails.  Anyone got one they can suggest?  My criteria:

1)  It MUST NOT send a reply to every single email every single time.  This is the big problem with the CPanel autoresponder.  It needs to be smart enough to only reply once every few days or so.  Just like the GMail vacation autoresponder.

2)  I can’t use the Gmail vacation autoresponder because it will reply to ALL incoming emails from ALL accounts, and I have different business entities feeding into one Gmail account, so I can’t use the same autoresponder for all of them.

3)  There is no rule #3.

4)  It’s got to support both my Gmail as well as the POP3 accounts that feed into it.

5)  Do not talk about fight club.

(In case you missed the start of this InfusionSoft Review, have a look at this post first!)

OK if this isn’t just par for the course with these knuckleheads.

On January 16, 2009 when InfusionSoft so politely accepted my “request” for cancellation, they also stated this:

You will receive no further invoices from Infusionsoft.

Well I’m a little bit behind on a lot of things as the last few weeks have been really crazy for me.  I decided it was time to take care of January banking stuff… I log into one of my business accounts (the one that InfusionSoft was debiting for my service) and what do I find???

1/26/2009 MC-INFUSION SOFT 866-800-0004 $199.70

UNBELIEVABLE!!! They have charged me AGAIN for another 200 bucks!!!  I guess technically I didn’t receive an invoice, they just took the money…

OK no more being too busy, I have to call these idiots tomorrow and raise some hell. This is so far beyond reproach I don’t even know what to call it.

Jonathan

Check this out… WAYYYYYY cool!!!!!

You can now get Skype for your iPhone, Palm, Blackberry, or similar device!

Jonathan