Shootout: Free Screenshot Apps Reviewed!
Quick, what’s the built-in OS X screen capture keyboard shortcut? All I know is that it involves twisting your fingers like a pretzel and hitting at least three keys at the same time. It also saves in a weird format as a default, and doesn’t have many options.
This is why I’m glad that there’s so much high-quality freeware in the Mac world. If you have serious screen capture demands, you should go right ahead and buy the market leader, the $29 Snapz Pro X 2 from Ambrosia Software (non-video version). If you only need to capture web sites, you can use the free Paparazzi. Otherwise, you may find that one of the four free programs reviewed here meets your needs (all four in one chart are in this graphic.)
Moving to an Intel Mac: Which Apps Do You Upgrade?
Did you buy a new Mac in the past year? Are you planning to buy one soon? When you move from an old PowerPC-based Mac to a new Intel Mac, you’ll probably carry over or reload a lot of your programs. Older PowerPC applications generally run on Intel Macs, but in a “Rosetta” translation mode that’s slower than apps written for Intel. Most Mac programs have been rewritten into “Universal Binaries” that run natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs. How can you tell which apps are PowerPC-only and which are Universal? If you have Tiger, its built-in System Profiler can show you a full list.
Namely: The Simple Way to Launch Apps
Using many apps at once can cause a big, overloaded dock with too many apps. However, you can clean up that messy dock of yours using an app launcher. An app launcher is a program designed to find and launch apps quickly without going to the Applications folder. Many Mac users will recommend Quicksilver. However, Quicksilver really has lots of features, maybe too many. I got scared off just reading the web site and all I wanted was a simple way to start my programs.
The Search For a Video Clip Manager
It’s the app that Apple forgot: the video clip manager. We’ve got iTunes and iPhoto, but neither one is really made for the task. What can we use to organize all those stray video clip files sitting around on our hard disks–the short movies from our digital camera or video camera, those clips we’ve downloaded from blogs or groups or YouTube, all those miscellaneous 5-minute or 30-minute little movies we’ve got floating around? I have hundreds of clips I’d like to organize, so I can remove duplicates, delete lower-res copies, and just be able to FIND stuff. Where’s the “iPhoto for video clips?”
