Disk Utility of Mac OS X 10.6

Everyone seems to say Mac OS X is user-friendly and you need not go through pages of user's manual. Most of the case, yes; but sometimes it isn't. Just now I'm trying to duplicate a non-copyrighted DVD. I opened Disk Utility, choosed File > New > "Disk Image from Folder...". So far so good. Then I created a disk image, burned it, and put the duplicate in a DVD player. It didn't play the DVD. What's wrong? I went to Apple's support page. Here is the answer: You need to choose "DVD/CD Master" before you click "Create" to create the image. Why shouldn't there be a prompt, such that I wouldn't waste my time to burn a few unreadable DVD before I learned of my mistake? Is this because Steve Job wants to discourage pirating? But my DVD is just my friends' non-copyrighted home movie!

iMovie '09 -- tips and tricks

There are good tutorials on Apple's website about iMovie, but it only tells you how you can follow the Apple's way of doing things -- clueless even if you just deviate from it slightly. For example, I am now trying to re-arrange my iMovie events, iMovie projects and iPhoto libraries to more logical locations when upgrading from my old MacBook to my new iMac 27". But eventually I found that I could not do so manually. It's now a mess, and I think I have to put them into the original folder structure, let iMovie recognise them, before I rearrange them within iMovie. Apple just doesn't tell you that.

Fortunately I've found some informative sites on iMovie '09:

• iLife Tips and Tricks -- a comprehensive site
• Unlocking iMovie -- it's what the title suggests
• iCreate -- the official blog of the magazine
• Jim Heid's site as supplement to his book
• 40 iLife tricks -- where I'm reminded not to move iMovie projects manually
• Wondershare Mac iMovie -- it's basically a site selling Wondershare software, but it also contain some useful information