My wife and I have been wanting to purchase a video camera for a while now. We knew we wanted digital and that we wanted it to play nice with iLife. Other than that, I was open to anything.

One of the cameras that had some promise was the Sanyo HD1A. (Pictured above.) It has small and clean and it records 720 HD videos. I searched around the web looking for some nice sample footage from a real user. I found some on HD1A.com and it looked pretty good.

The other thing I wanted to know was how it played with a Mac and iLife. I wasn’t able to find that anywhere. I ended up ordering the camera from Amazon.com and it was here the next day. Long story short, the video I shot in regular day to day things wasn’t as impressive as what I saw online. I think you are sacrificing function for form. The videos I took in our home were quite grainy and my wife had a hard time holding that little camera still enough to really enjoy the HD product.

The videos do import to iLife 06. You just have to be sure to start your project with the 720 HD option. At that point, you drag and drop from the camera to the iMovie window. It imports at about real time.

I understand that this review isn’t really in depth. I guess I wasn’t really going for that. I just wanted to let other shoppers know that it does indeed work fine with iMovie. I ended up returning the camera for a full refund because the HD picture just wasn’t that great for everyday use. I think we’re just transitioning to real HD cameras for consumers, but we’re not quite there yet. I do think it would work ok if you were planning on having it on a tripod or standing totally stationary at a zoo or sporting event.

One of the first thing I do on all Macs (my own or the ones I’m working on) is enable tabbed browsing in Safari. It’s a quick change and makes me so much more productive while using the internet.

Just the other day, I realized that as soon as you enable the tabbed browsing, there is a new keyboard shortcut in your “Window” menu of Safari. It’s a keyboard shortcut to jump between tabs. By default it is “Command+}” to go to the next tab and “Command+{” to go the previous tab. That sure makes it easy to change between tabs while using the internet.

Personally, I made it one step better. I changed it to “Command+Option+Right Arrow” and “Left Arrow”. Now I’m jumping back and forth with a very natural keyboard combination. Hopefully this will help some of you.

I was just cruising thru the global Keyboard shortcuts and I saw an option for activating Apple’s Front Row with the keyboard. I wasn’t aware of this so I thought I’d post it here.

To activate Front Row, press Command+esc. From there, you can navigate the menus with your arrow keys and use the space bar to select an item.

Have you used Google Checkout yet? I have used it a few times and it is wonderful. The nicest thing about it is that you don’t have to make all these different accounts with all these different online retailers. You just use your Gmail login to login and pay. And what’s better, Google makes it easy to unsubscribe from future mailings when you buy from a company. It’s very nice.

If you haven’t tried it, now is the time to find a good gadget deal. Google Checkout is subtracting $10 off of any order of $30 or more. There are quite a few good stores that offer the Google Checkout including Ritz Camera, Sport’s Authority, and Buy.com. There are more stores too.

(I know this isn’t Mac related, but if you’ve been waiting to buy something, this is a good chance to get a deal.)