Daniel Ward, living in Greece, discovered iStopMotion and put up a short movie captured with the iStopMotion demo version on his blog. "I downloaded a copy of iStopMotion last week, and have been making little videos using the Playmobil and stop motion photography. Indeed, my webcam sucks, but the results are pretty good - and I am getting better."

A while back, we got a pointer that the video to Australian rock band Speedstar's "Unbreakable" had been created with the help of iStopMotion. Now, finally, the EP is available at the iTunes Music Store in Europe. See the iStopMotion "Pro" page for more information on how to use iStopMotion to help animate with a film camera. Unfortunately, the music video does not seem to be available on the web.

Amazing what kids today grow up with. This is Leo, Achim's son who lives in Leoben, Austria, chatting with his aunt Sandra which lives in Munich, Germany. He is already quite used to using iChat, but sometimes it is very amusing to watch him.

Sandra is hungry.	Wipe the nose.
Where is the nose?	Byebye.

What will the technology be like when he's grown up?

Download Achim's "Pit Stop" movie for your iPod at iPod scrubs.

Proud digiDAD writes: "Invasion from Space" "is a stop motion animation created by the digiKID along with two of his friends. They made heavy use of Apple's iMovie ‘04 to create most of the special effects. They used Boinx's iStopMotion to create the animation."

Kudos to Matthias Krauss for releasing a patch to macam 0.8.3 so that more cameras are supported now and that it works with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. macam is a nice open source project to provide QuickTime Image Capture Components for cheap USB webcams which had unfortunately fallen into some state of disrepair the last couple of years. Used to work with iStopMotion (where we used it to connect with the camera in the Lego Moviemaker set) but we haven't tested it in a while. It seems to pick up momentum again as you can see from the news on the macam project page.

Cat © by iPod scrubs.

A nice new thing for your iPod: iPod scrubs. Sort of like a digital flip book. A thing for iStopMotion. iPod scrubs offers a $29.95 service for converting your movie clips to a podscrub and a gallery of submitted files.

Apple and the local government of the German NRW province have openend a contest looking for short films by young people. German schools and individuals can participate at "Act & Jam". You can win three iPods and an iBook. Entry is open until Sept. 30th.

This is something I discovered during this year's trip to WWDC. I always love to shop for new music when travelling, and San Francisco offers a few good stores.

Niyaz - a group hosted by the great Six Degrees Records - uses influences from Persia and India to produce great melodic, intense and upbeat music that reaches far from the usual coffee shop Buddha Bar and Cafe del Mar stuff. Read more about the group at the Six Degrees site.

Check out Niyaz
(available at least in US and German stores)