We are in the middle of the preparations of the Macworld Expo booth that we will have in San Francisco in January. I've opened a new category on this weblog to collect all postings associated with the Macworld Expo appearance.

This is what the booth looked like in January 2005. The booth in 2006 will be roughly the same. We hope to feature hardware that is a bit more sexy, but details still need to be worked out. Currently we hope to have two iMac G5s for presentation, a Power Mac G5 running the display at the top of the booth and a Mac mini for taking a time lapse of all the people passing our booth and stopping by to get some info.

Three people will be at the booth: Achim and Oliver Breidenbach and Werner Nieke will answer your questions.

We are looking forward to meeting you. Watch this space on information on how to get a ticket for the expo.

We changed the requirements for the Cocoa Programmer job slightly. It is no longer required to speak German. Native speaker level skills are required in either English or German. Read the updated description...

While preparing the artwork for the previous story, I had this really weird experience: I saved my work to the Trash.

Here is how it happened: I use Photoshop for resizing and retouching the images for this weblog. To save the newly edited image, there is the "Save for Web..." command. The Save dialog box automatically navigates to where the last exported image is. This I had moved to the trash just a couple of minutes before. So, the File choosing dialog box pointed to the Trash instead of the Desktop. Expecting that it would point to the Desktop I simply hit the Save button without really looking at the path.

Andy Reynolds of CeolNua worked with 9 kids aged 6 though 11 from West Cork, Ireland on the stop motion short "Sock Story". The filming with a Sony Handycam and iStopMotion into a PowerBook took two sessions of two hours each at teh West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereeen, West Cork, Ireland and a bit of finishing and editing in Final Cut Pro. Especially noteworthy are the credits at the end of the movies which the kids did for themselves. Nice idea.

iCreate (german Magazine for creative Mac users) and DIGITAL STOCK present the "youCreate" photo contest. Send in your photos before Feb. 28th, 2006 and win a number of prices, among them a FotoMagico license. Check the terms and conditions (in german).

A warm welcome to Werner Nieke (his blog), who joined our team on monday. Werner will answer your questions and put our software through the roughest tests we can imagine. I am sure he will also put his many talents to good use in a variety of other ways, like writing tutorials, tips and tricks pages and so on. Werner has a strong background in the Apple community where he worked since 1992, among others for Apple, Microsoft, FileMaker and has written for the german Mac magazine MacUP.

"I was contacted to create an animated open for a popular kid's quiz TV show called "Smarty Pants" that is produced by HTV22 in Tampa, Florida USA. The theme was an animated "Mr. Brain" character that would explore the contents of a library. I created the brain character using a homemade armature and flexible polymer clay." writes Ben Eytalis. "This was my first experience using iStopMotion and I was extremely impressed. It was so easy to use and produced fantastic results. Additionally, it worked seamlessly with my PowerBook G4 and my editing software, Final Cut Pro. I am very pleased with the software and can't wait to start a new project very soon."

Very cool! Watch the movie...

Michael Fromm is one of those extraordinary Apple Distinguished Educators (ADE) that Apple is able to attract to the good cause. He has a short introductory movie about himself on his website, of course done with iStopMotion. Also on his website, two samples of his stop motion animations: Goethe 1 and Goethe 2 from the ATI in Weimar 2005.

We are very excited by the cooperation with Application Systems Heidelberg. As a result, the first Apple resellers in Germany start to carry iStopMotion. For example, Arktis.de now has iStopMotion listed.