QuickTime Pro 7.1.5 Review

Although the basic QuickTime Player is included with every Mac and free to download for Windows, it is somewhat crippled unless you purchase the "Pro" version. By going Pro, you gain several handy features related to saving and editing movies as well as full screen playback. Note that the Pro version usually has to be re-purchased for each "major" version of QuickTime - for example, 6, 7, and 8 when it comes out.

Many websites use QuickTime to play their movies; Pro gives you the ability to save any of these to your local computer by simply clicking on the bottom right corner popup menu and choosing "Save as QuickTime Movie..." It also becomes possible to edit movie clips in the player. You can now copy, cut, and paste sections of movies together to remove unwanted portions from existing movies or make brand new ones from scratch. For the photography buffs out there, you now have the ability to create a new QuickTime movie from a batch of time lapse photographs using the "Open Image Sequence..." command. In addition, recording movies and sound directly in QuickTime Player, and saving in formats optimized for iPod or Apple TV (H.264) is also enabled.

Possibly the feature you'll use the most in QuickTime Pro is the fullscreen movie watching - just press ⌘ (command) F to enter full screen mode complete with movie controls which appear when you move the mouse. For a full list of features, visit the QuickTime Pro web site.

• By Apple, Inc.
• buy
• features
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GraphicConverter 5.9.5 Review

GraphicConverter is many things: a poor man's Photoshop replacement, a versatile photo organizer with IPTC and EXIF tagging support, an excellent way to present a slide show, a robust photo editor, a batch processor, and an image format converter. The software has been around for many years and pre-dates OS X although it is frequently updated and now a universal binary. GraphicConverter can open files in nearly 200 formats and export in nearly 100. It is also available in twelve languages!

Since Photoshop is a bit of a beast and takes its time launching, you may find yourself using GraphicConverter for typical Photoshop tasks such as cropping, resizing, alpha layers, and basic photo corrections. GraphicConverter launches in a snap and is ready to do your bidding. The batch change feature is quite powerful (although the interface is antiquated) and makes short work of entire folders of images. It's easy to use for tasks such as creating thumbnails with different titles or file formats and is used extensively for the images which end up on this web page.

GraphicConverter may be used indefinitely with a short startup delay, however, it's well worth paying the small fee to support this fine software. The developer is also unusually responsive; if you find problems or have reasonable feature requests, he will often fix or implement them within weeks or months - quite different from the experience you'd get contacting Adobe.

The only real drawback of GraphicConverter is the sometimes obtuse user interface, portions of which (batch processing, etc.) haven't changed much since the early nineties. GraphicConverter also suffers a bit from "featureitis" and it can sometimes be difficult to find a desired feature or figure out how to set the preferences to achieve the desired goal. Still, the program is affordable, robust, fast, and hard to do without. It's a venerable workhorse and is sure to find a place in your workflow!

• By Lemkesoft.
• download
• screenshot

Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0-b5 Review

Carbon Copy Cloner is a backup utility which has recently received a massive face lift and is now much more accessible to the average Mac user. Prior versions performed their task well - cloning a disk volume to a disk image or other volume, but the user interface was somewhat confusing for beginners. Version 3.0 still performs the same basic functions but is now easier to pick up and begin using without a manual.

The Mac software marketplace is currently rife with programs claiming to provide easy backup solutions, but most of them are either difficult to use, unreliable, or not fully featured enough. Carbon Copy Cloner appears to stand up well to the task, and it's donation-ware so you can pay what you think is fair! Although the upcoming Time Machine (arriving in Leopard) may alleviate the need for these types of programs for the casual user, Carbon Copy Cloner will still have a valuable place in the enterprise world for backing up servers before upgrades or providing a bootable backup of your own computer. In addition, as the author mentions on his web site, this software could be invaluable for backing up your computer before sending it in for repairs.

Using the software is fairly straight forward - choose a source volume on the left and a target volume, remote server, or disk image on the right. Press the clone button to begin the backup. Folders and files can be unchecked in the source to exclude them from the clone and disk images can be created for you at run time and even automatically encrypted. A nice paragraph form summary entitled "what is going to happen" appears at the bottom for review before proceeding with the clone operation. Other thoughtful features include the ability to restore from a clone, schedule clones to occur at regular intervals (useful for servers or desktop machines), and run shell scripts before and after a clone.

Note that the version tested is still in beta, so some features are a little rough around the edges.

• By Bombich Software.
• download (freeware)
• screenshot

Terrabrowser Universal Binary and TubeTV

Development work has resumed on Terrabrowser after a long hiatus. Look for a new beta with minor changes in the not too distant future.

Capture Me and Chimoo Timer Released

Final releases of the new Capture Me and Chimoo Timer are now available.

FileMerge 2.2.1 Review

FileMerge is a visual diff tool freely included with the Apple developer tools. If you have installed the developer tools on your computer (they come bundled for free on the install disks which came with your Mac), you can find FileMerge nicely hidden in the /Developer/Applications/Utilities/ folder. Amazingly, many people developing software on the Mac haven't yet discovered FileMerge - if you're one of them, now is the time to do so. Apple provides lots of little goodies in the /Developer folder which are worth learning about.

Although it can be used to compare and merge any two text files you desire, FileMerge will mainly be of interest to software developers. If you've ever used the Unix diff tool, using FileMerge is like seeing the light; differences are actually visible side by side and easily understood at a glance - no more deciphering strange diff codes on the command line. As you jump to a difference in one file with the arrow keys, the second file scrolls to the same position and highlights the changes. You can also jump directly to methods/functions and choose which version of a change you want merged into the final output file. True, performing the same diff in the terminal is more condensed and geeky, but the FileMerge equivalent is much easier to grasp and work with. Many tools such as Xcode and svnX also have direct links within them which launch FileMerge for you.

• By Apple, Inc.
• screenshot