VideoDrive: Review and Giveaway
Organizing digital videos isn’t easy. The vast majority of music files have been in MP3 format since the digital music explosion, but videos are a different story: MP4, H.264, DiVx, Xvid, WMV, M4V, MOV, AVI containers. When you download a movie, you never really know what to expect, and neither does iTunes, which only plays a limited number of video file types. So users who download movie files are forced to use QuickTime or third-party software to convert them to another format, which is always a lengthy process. Fortunately, though, there is an alternative:
SimplifyMedia: Share Your Tunes over the Web
iTunes has many often-forgotten features. Among them are the web radio, visualizer, and (what I think is the coolest) shared music libraries. iTunes users on the same wireless network can share their entire music libraries (or only specific playlists) with each other by turning on “Sharing” in iTunes’ preferences (in either the Mac or PC version of iTunes). Once both computers are setup to share libraries, users at both ends can browse each other’s libraries and stream each other’s music. However, there is no way to download the music; users can only listen.
PlugSuit: Say Goodbye to SIMBL
Last year there were rumors being spread about the end of InputManagers in Leopard. The rumors contained horrifying details about the end of InputManager and SIMBL. One developer, Emanuele Vulcano, developed PlugSuit, a new way to apply SIMBL InputManagers. This guarantees that these plug-ins would not meet their demise. Although the rumors turned out to be false, this development ensures the existence of application plug-ins for years to come.
BetterZip Giveaway Results
Last week I reviewed BetterZip, the great file compression and archiving app. MacItBetter was nice enough to give us five licenses to giveaway! We had a whopping 50 entries, and now we have five winners.
The winners are: Zealot, Jeff T, roderick, Dice and MJ Valente
If you won, the developer has been notified with your emails. Thank you to everyone who entered, and congratulations to those who won. Remember, if you really liked the trial of BetterZip and didn’t win, you can always buy it for only $19.95!
Pzizz: A Great Way To Get some ZZZ’s
A lot of the time, most of us are completely busy with work and other daily activities. It can take a lot out of you, and sometimes we need a way to regain energy during the day in a short period of time. There are not very many Mac applications that can help you do this, but there is one that stands out amongst the rest: Pzizz.
WhoIs Analyzer Pro Giveaway Winners
Last week I reviewed WhoIs Analyzer Pro, a fast, easy domain lookup application. The developers offered two licenses to commenters who listed a domain they looked up, how the experience was, and anything surprising that they learned while looking up the domain/IP/email/ASN.
The winners have been chosen, and licenses will be sent shortly. The winners are:
1. Abubaker Shamlan
2. sinbad
Congratulations, and enjoy WhoIs Analyzer Pro!
Master Kick: Review and Giveaway
It seems like every medium has tried to recreate the world’s most popular sport. There’s the interactive table version of soccer, called foosball. And then there are tons of soccer video and computer games that try to realistically imitate the sport. However, few computer games have attempted to emulate the look and feel of table soccer, but that’s exactly what’s been done with Master Kick. And there’s one really good reason why it might be a better alternative: a decent foosball table can cost more than $100, but you can get Master Kick free if you win MacApper’s giveaway.
Safari-esque Firefox: Themes, Extensions, And More
On the Mac, there are many web browsers available. Mozilla Firefox is a great cross-platform browser, but until recent betas it hasn’t been very efficient or overall good-looking on the Mac. Apple’s Safari is simple and elegant, but lacks any official plug-ins, making it difficult to do the kind of advanced work that you can with Firefox extensions. For today, we’re going to be focusing on these two popular browsers. Many people seem to like the simplicity and integrated interface of Safari, but wish that they could have the wide array of extensions available for Firefox at their disposal.
Flashmount: DMG Mounting in a Jiffy
The DMG file format dates as far back as Apple System 7. In Mac OS X 10.3, Apple “wow”ed the world, including me, by creating a faster way to mount disk images upon one’s desktop. As of not so long ago, Apple released Mac OS X 10.5, but this almighty revision of the Mac operating system did not include any faster ways to mount disk images, so a developer at Liquid Lunch decided to take matters into its own hands. He created Flashmount for this generation of “multi-taskers” and “speed demons”.
YummySoup! Giveaway Results and a Special Surprise
The giveaway of YummySoup! licenses has come to a close. You may recall that I shared some of my favorite YummySoup! features, and Hungry Seacow Software was gracious enough to giveaway three licenses to those who shared an improvement suggestion. It turns out that your comments and suggestions blew the developer’s mind. Ken from Hungry Seacow was so excited to have his mind blown that he sweetened the deal. Jump with me to the goodies.
First, HSS decided to throw in two more licenses for the giveaway! This means that we have 5 winners instead of 3. Let me congratulate the following randomly selected winners:
Quick Look Plug-ins: Save More Time
With the release of Leopard came over 300 new features. Some of these new features includes Time Machine, Screen Sharing, and Quick Look. I find Quick Look to be the most useful addition to Mac OS X. Upon installing Leopard, Mac users had one gripe — they complained that Quick Look could not handle all of the file extensions that they used in their daily lives. To solve this problem, developers created plug-ins for Quick Look in order to make it more compatible with different file extensions.
Baseline: There’s Nothing Baseline About This App
Have you ever wondered why one day you have 132 GBs free, and the next day you only have 32 GBs free? With Baseline you can see what files are taking up all that space in a nice and easy-to-use interface. You may ask, “What makes Baseline different from the rest?” Well, there are many features that make Baseline better than OmniDiskSweeper and WhatSize.
MacUpdate Bundle Adds New App
As you all probably already know MacUpdate is having a huge bundle sale right now with a $474.76 value of apps going for only $64.99. A new app, WhatSize, has ben added to the bundle — but only for the first 3,500 buyers. WhatSize helps you find out what files are taking up your disk space and then allows you to remove/move them. In addition, the first unlock goal for Sound Studio is to be lowered today along with the goal for BannerZest. The unlock goal for Parallels will be set high, however, it is rumored that it will be unlocked by early next week along with the addition of a few more apps.
CyberDuck 3 Flaps Wings, But Does it Fly?
Early last year, we compared several well-known Mac FTP clients. Though we established that Transmit was King, CyberDuck always stood out as a cheap, no-frills version.
However, that was version 2. With Leopard now well into it’s third iteration (10.5.2), CyberDuck has also been flapping it’s wings once again, but does it fly? Let’s take a look.
GrabUp: Screen Sharing at the Next Level
Recently I published an article describing all of the cool things one can do with Apple’s built-in “Grab” application. The article included the majority of the modifier keys available while taking a screenshot, and I also described what uses there are for taking screenshots. The one explanation I did not go into enough detail about is the fact that screenshots can be used to teach someone far away how to complete a task on their Mac. GrabUp makes screenshots one hundred fold easier to share.
