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.)

ScreenCaptureX from SlidesNow! is a bare-bones screen capture program. Its VersionTracker listing claims it works with Intel Macs, but OS X identified the program as PowerPC. It may run fine on Intel Macs, but it’s not Universal. It’s the only one of these programs that saves to the PICT format, and it can add a caption below your captured area. It does also run under Panther.

CaptureMe from Chimoosoft is the granddaddy of the surviving free screen capture programs, first appearing in July of 2002. It was completely rewritten in Cocoa/OpenGL in the fall of 2006. It’s donationware, so you’ll get a nag screen every few launches asking for a $15 donation. It gives you a translucent window to resize and click in to capture; your file can be automatically saved to your desktop. You may also be interested in its screen movie feature, or its support of GIF files.

SnapNDrag from Yellow Mug Software has you click a button to create the screenshot, then click another one to save the file. SnapNDrag keeps a gallery of all your screenshots in a history drawer, and you can drag any of those icons out to another location. If you want keyboard shortcuts, resizing capability, menubar access, or just to get rid of the text ad across the bottom of the window, you’ll need the $5 Pro version. There are plenty of hooks into Yellow Mug’s other products for framing, cropping, and file sending, which can be removed from the toolbar if you don’t have them. It does work in Panther. It’s a decent enough program, but I found its metaphor awkward and too manual.

InstantShot! from DigitalWaters takes up an icon’s worth of space in your menu bar, and doesn’t appear in your dock at all. You can activate InstantShot! from the menu bar, or through user-set keyboard shortcuts. The file is automatically saved anywhere based on your preferences. As you can see from the feature chart, it has the most features and user-set preferences of any of these free tools.

InstantShot! will take a snapshot and have it named and saved automatically with the fewest keystrokes. It’s my favorite of these programs, and the only one I continue to use.

There are also lots of programs that improve OS X’s built-in screen capture features, but why put lipstick on a pig? For an outstanding free screen capture program that’s easy to use but has lots of options and custom features, you won’t go wrong with the very impressive InstantShot!.

Why should you care? If you’re moving to an Intel Mac, you’ll want to find your PowerPC programs and upgrade them to Universal Binaries if possible. If you’re already on an Intel Mac, you should track down any PowerPC programs you still have around, since they’re running in a less-than-optimal way under Rosetta.

How to check. It’s easy to check on one program. First, find its icon in your Applications folder (to get there, you can right-click or Control-click on its dock icon and choose “Show in Finder”). Now, right-click/Control-click on the program’s icon and choose “Get Info”. You’ll find what you’re looking for under “Kind”, as shown below.

It would be a lot more helpful to get a list of all the PowerPC programs on your system. If you have OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you can find this list in the System Profiler, which is in your Applications/Utilities folder. A quick way to open the System Profiler is to click the apple in the top left corner or your screen, choose “About this Mac,”, and then press the “More info” button.

In the System Profiler, find the Contents pane on the left, and open up the Software list. Choose Applications, and then sort your list by Kind.

What should you do about it? If you see any of the Apple programs that come with your Mac, don’t worry about them; they’ll all be native to whatever kind of system you’re running, PowerPC or Universal (Intel). Even if you have an older Mac, you may see some Universal programs listed. Those became Universal binaries transparently, in a past upgrade.

Take a look at the PowerPC list. If you see programs that you installed but are no longer using, you should delete them, ideally with a program like AppZapper. For programs that you rely on, check to see if there’s a newer Universal release. Check at the developer’s web site (just Google the program’s name or look it up at VersionTracker). In many cases, the update to a Universal Binary version will be free. However, some apps went Universal as part of a major upgrade, and you may have to buy the upgrade.

If there’s an upgrade cost, you’ll have to decide if it’s worth upgrading. Your program may run just fine in the Rosetta compatibility mode on an Intel Mac, it may be unacceptably slow, or it may not run at all. See what you can find out at the web site.

If you’re graphically oriented, you may like Todos or Overflow. However, if you’re keyboard oriented, there is an alternative. Namely, an app from Amar Sagoo, lets you pop open apps quicker than ever. All you have to do is start typing any part of an application’s name, and it gives you a list of possible matches. It learns which ones you use most, and orders the list from most used apps to least used apps. It’s basically Spotlight for applications.

So why not use Spotlight? Spotlight will churn through its index and show you every file you’ve got with that letter combination. Namely is faster and easier, since it just finds apps, not other file types. What’s more Namely also learns your habits over time, making future searches that much quicker.

Namely is customizable as well. It allows the user to set the activation shortcut, exclude certain programs, start it on login, and even set its window color. It has only one flaw, as it has a dock icon, and no option to get rid of it. But think of all the clutter you can remove from your dock if you use Namely.

Namely is free, and Universal. It’s a small program that adds a little grace to the Mac interface without replacing it entirely. If you need advanced features, go with Quicksilver. But if you just need a little more than a crowded dock and scattered desktop icons, do yourself a favor and try Namely.

I’m not talking about full-length movies, VIDEO_TS folders, or a way to manage a DVD library. There are great tools out there for that, including my favorite, DVDpedia, and Delicious Library. What I’m looking for is a similar app that just deals with clips, populated with tags and categories that I provide (and figuring out metadata like video length and file size automatically) rather than pulling down movie information from IMDB or Amazon.

What features should be in an app like this? It should:

• Refer to your files in their existing locations without sucking copies of them all into a special library. That way, big files aren’t hogging twice the space.
• Work with any type of video file that your Mac can play, including WMV’s with Flip4Mac and Quicktime, and even FLVs from YouTube with TubeSock. You should be able to double-click on any file listing or thumbnail and open it up its associated player. A built-in player using Quicktime would be nice, too.
• Understand video files. For anything playable in Quicktime, it should automatically fill in the length (minutes, seconds) of each file.
• Have an iTunes/iPhoto-like interface:
  • Groups, folders, or playlists that you can create manually, and smart groups automatically updated based on date, length, or any other metadata.
  • User-defined keywords, categories, tags, ratings, or at least a free-form text field for notes.
  • A spotlight-like search in the upper right corner that immediately narrows down the list based on name, keywords, tags, or other metadata.
  • A thumbnail view, with the option to set how far into the video the thumbnail frame should come from (preferably adjustable for each file). There should be options to show the file name, clip length, and file size below each thumbnail.
  • A list view showing all the data for a clip in columns, just like iTunes.
• Have a reasonable price, say under $40. There are some professional-level applications such as iDive that can do all these things, but they can get expensive.

There’s got to be an app out there that does all this, right? Well, not exactly. There are lots of video players, browsers, and converters out there. But not many managers. A few come close, a few others are in the ballpark. You may find one of these works for you.

Let’s start with the biggest disappointment: the program that can do almost everything we’re looking for, but isn’t a viable choice. iVideo from Waterfall Software ($19.95) even bills itself as the “iPhoto or iTunes for video files.” It does nearly everything on the list, except support FLV files. It even has a cool icon. So what’s the problem? The most recent version, 3.02, was released a lifetime ago, in October 2005. And it’s buggy–it crashed on me within the first 10 minutes of using it. It’s also not Universal, and its creators don’t seem interested in maintaining or updating it. In fact, Waterfall last updated its company blog in April 2006, nearly a year ago. E-mails to the development team go unanswered. So this doesn’t look like an app with a future. I’m not spending hours of my time cataloging my clips in a nearly-orphaned program with a tendency to crash unexpectedly.

MovieGallery from Bitfield AB ($29.95) is a pretty good candidate. It handles a variety of movie file types (but not FLV Flash files), has a great list view and thumbnail view, and a good Spotlight-type search. It’s Universal, requires OS X 10.3 or higher, and was last updated in December 2006. It has smart playlists, ratings, and even a system for allowing you to share your galleries on a web site. It’s completely lacking in Help or documentation, outside of the features on the web site and a short list of questions and answers. It has no tagging or categories, but there is a Copyright field that takes any text, and an Info box for text notes. Both are searchable, along with file names and video type.

yFlicks from ManyTricks (about $20) is a new app, from January 2007. It’s Universal, but does require OS X 10.4. It’s a nice video browser that is specially designed to download and even convert YouTube FLV movies, along with the other common formats. It’s an excellent player, with optional fullscreen playback and controls. It has very little for organizing files, thoughjust Artist and Rating fields, and no smart group capability. It has a Search box, which is limited to file names and artists. It’s a very slick video player that definitely has potential, but isn’t much of a manager yet.

Keep It Together from Reinvented Software ($24.95) is more of an information manager, but I saw in the recent MacApper post about it that it handles movies, so I gave it a look. It’s Universal, and was last updated in March 2007. It has great tagging capabilities. It shows individual thumbnails and can play back movies, but has no thumbnail view of a group of files. Larger movie clips seem to slow it down drastically (anything over 20-30 MB). It also can’t determine clip lengths, and there’s no field for it. KIT looks like a great app for organizing things, but it needs some more movie-specific features to be a contender as a video clip manager.

I found a few other programs in the neighborhood, although none was promising enough to test personally. FootTrack ($49.95) is designed to manage DV files, has extensive keyword/smart group capabilities, and seems to be aimed more at the digital video professional (which explains the higher price). It captures all video into its own library, has compression capabilities, and doesn’t officially support non-DV Quicktime files. Qpict ($35) and Stimulus ($19.95) are “media browsers” that handle both images and video. Both appeared to have limited management and organizational features (tagging, smart groups, etc.) for video clips.

So where is the ultimate video manager? iVideo’s an orphan and doesn’t support FLV files. MediaGallery also has no FLV support, and limited keyword/tagging options. yFlicks has great FLV support, but offers little for managing files.

Is there something better out there? Is someone currently writing the perfect “iPhoto for video”? Speak up in the comments.