Capture a single frame of video in Windows Media Player

Turning off hardware acceleration will let you take stills of video

Just a quick one today, but a very useful one. Ever needed to grab a still out of a video to use as a placeholder graphic or something? Playing the video in Windows Media player and pressing print screen then pressing or paste in your favourite image editing application, will only get you the Windows Media Player frame with a big black void in the middle of it.
The solution is to turn off video acceleration as in the image above.
Simply go to Tools -> Options, then under the performance tab, slide the arrow all the way to none.
Now when you play your video and hit print screen, your resulting screen cap will actually have a still of the video.

Testing multiple versions of Internet Explorer

We all know how completely un-awesome Internet Explorer 6 is and how un-wonderfully it complies to all those standards and stuff. As website designers, the world would be a much happier place if everyone was using Firefox or at least IE7, but unfortunately the world is a miserable place with millions of people still trolling around the internets with the now very outdated Internet Explorer 6.

Unfortunately for us, each verison of Internet Explorer uses the same resources to get the job done which means installing multiple versions is impossible. Or so I thought.

Standalone browsers

These look to be fantastic as they don’t overwrite any of the system files that your main browser uses. What this means is that you are effectively testing a fresh copy of IE6 (or earlier if you really feel the need) on the same system as IE7 or IE8.

You can grab the standalone installers from here -> http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

A note on Vista

After fishing around for a very long time, it apppears that the only way to test in IE6 on a Windows Vista machine is to run a Virtual System. Microsoft has a full set of instructions on how to set this up.

Still hoping for a June release for 3G iPhone

Adding to my previous post which speculated that we may be seeing a 3G iPhone before th end of the financial year, Engadget has once again posted speculations that include a June release date. The exact quote from the article reads:

Apparently, a record label executive “familiar with the discussions” states that the Cupertino gang is hoping for a “big launch in June” which includes OTA music downloads, ringtone sales, and ringback tones

Australian Apple website MacTalk is also throwing in it’s own speculations on a June release adding many details about contracts, availability and ideas for who you might be able to buy one from (which I read to indicate it will be anyone with an Apple Reseller sticker in their window which may include big players like Domayne, Harvey Norman and Myer as well as the telcos). The main selling feature of the credibility of the MacTalk article however is its quoted source – Apple itself!

Resellers were informed over the past few days by Apple – the Australian Apple reseller community is like a little mothers club, so word travels fast

Now once again these are just rumours, but when so many rumours keep suggesting the same timelines who knows, maybe we will see the fabled 3G iPhone released next month.