I finally got enough nerve to pull the trigger and order a new MacBook Pro 13 inch. I’ve been wanting one ever since I made reservations for Macworld Expo in San Francisco Feb 2010. You see I never really had a legitimate reason to own a laptop until now. I have my Mac Pro [...]
Continue reading about I Pulled the Trigger on a New MacBook Pro
By David Sparks:
Main Menu is a menubar application that runs a lot of those system maintenance tasks that anal retentive geeks like myself love to do. While traditionally a free application, developer, Dare to be Creative, recently released a paid version 2.0.
The new release includes some improved functionality, an informative system menu icon, a cleaner drop down interface, and Growl notification.
The Main Menu interface all drops down from its Menu Bar icon. On the first click it presents a list of categories including things like “System”, “Network”, and “Utility.” Upon clicking any one of these tasks, a separate list of commands slides out allowing you to perform the requested maintenance with one additional click. The list is exhaustive. Indeed perhaps too exhaustive including cache cleaning, flushing the DNS cache, and other computer tasks that mere mortals should be very careful about. Cleaning your system cache every week, for instance, would more likely slow your Mac down than speed it up.
Regardless, using this application I was able to easily rebuild my spotlight index, run my daily/monthly maintenance scripts, and secure empty my trash from the menu bar. The real beauty of Main Menu is its simplicity. It also has tabs to force quit an application, repair drives, and a variety of other tasks which normally require some degree of drilling into your Mac or (gasp) Terminal mumbo-jumbo.
There are also are several commands that, while not really system maintenance, are very handy to have easy access in the menu bar such as displaying invisible files, relaunching the dock, menu bar, and finder, and the Tim Verpoorten function that kills the dashboard.
Another feature that is impressive is batch tasks. Using this you can bunch your most common tasks into a batch to be run automatically. You can save your favorite batches allowing you to do routine maintenance even faster. This would be nice if you wanted to set up a series of maintenance tasks. Strangely it does not have a scriptable system shutdown which is what I would want to do after running such a script.
Using Main Menu (wisely) you can easily help your Mac run clean and mean. While probably unfair, you can’t help but compare this application to other Mac system utility applications such as the $15 Cocktail or the free Onyx. These applications offer more of a dedicated application experience and offer more functions, tweaks, and twists than the $20 Main Menu does. Main Menu’s selling point is its simplicity. It is always present on your menu bar and system tasks are just a few clicks away. I think the batch task tool is also very intuitive and a definite plus for users.
This was a no brainer when it was free. It is still worthy of consideration at $20. The purpose of all of these system applications is to, essentially, put a pretty face and easy interface over the terminal commands and buried menus of OS X. Main Menu succeeds in doing this. You certainly could get by without any of these system utilities but probably would not want to. Whether Main Menu is the right system utility for you is up to you. It certainly should be a contender. I recommend you take the 15 day trial and decide for yourself.
The good news is that for a few lucky listeners, Main Menu is still free. The developer has kindly agreed to give away a handful of licenses. If you would like to be entered in the contest, simply send me (David Sparks) an e-mail with the words “Main Menu Contest” in the subject line. Just one entry per person please. There will be a drawing next week. Good luck!
Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted at podfeet.com. I’ve been doing some depressing reviews lately, but this week is different. It’s a HAPPY review this time.
Years ago I helped beta test the first virtual machine software for the Mac, Parallels. Let’s make sure everyone knows what a virtual machine is before I get in too far. A virtual machine is a 2nd operating system inside your main operating system. Your main OS is called the Host OS, and the second OS is called the guest. There are a lot of combinations you can do here, if your host OS is Linux, you can have a guest OS of Windows, or even a guest of another copy of Linux. If you’re running Windows as your host, you can run a guest OS of Linux, or another version or the SAME version of Windows. Some people make a guest OS of Windows and let their teenagers live in that guest Windows. Build the OS and applications just the way they want it, take a snapshot, and then when they booger it all up with viruses and spyware, you just restore the snapshot.
If you’re on a Mac, you can go even further because you can load guest OS’s of Windows and Linux. Unfortunately because of how Apple restricts usage of its Operating System, you can’t run Mac OSX as a guest OS on any host. That’s a shame really, a lot of people would love to do that. Well let’s move on from that, shall we?
I mentioned that I used Parallels in it’s early beta stages, and I followed it through to its production version which allowed me to live in a Windows world with a Mac. Later VMware, the giant from the Windows side for virtual machines, decided to move into the Mac world. I always felt a sense of loyalty towards Parallels because they started the revolution, so I never tried VMware Fusion, that is until now. VMware released VMware Fusion 3 last month and I just had to give it a try.
So I have early experience with Parallels, and I have recent experience with VirtualBox from Sun which is their free version of a virtual machine progam ( virtualbox.org. You have to forgive a certain amount of dodginess when the VM software is free, and I’ve been happy enough with it so far. So now that I have it framed, let’s see what VMware Fusion 3 can do.
The first thing I noticed with VMware Fusion 3 was how much slicker and prettier it is than anything I’ve used before with clear and obvious icons and instructions. If you’ve never loaded a virtual machine before, I’m convinced I could hand you the software and walk away and you’d be successful with no help at all from me. The opening screen sets the stage from the beginning for how easy it’s going to be. You see three big icons for 1) install windows or another OS in a new VM, or 2) convert my existing Windows computer to run on a VM on this Mac, or 3) download a trial VM. If you had a boot camp partition set up you’d have had a fourth option – to run a boot camp partition as a virtual machine instead of having to reboot. I would love to try converting an existing Windows machine to a VM but since there aren’t any in the house that just won’t be happening I guess. I almost forgot, at the bottom of the window you can open an existing VM or import an existing VM that you set up somewhere else. I wonder if it can import VMs that were created for Windows? that would be cool.
I decided to install Windows 7 on my first VMware virtual machine. Clicked Install Windows or another OS, put in the Windows 7 DVD, and up popped a window showing me the defaults for the VM. In the old days you had to spend time answering a lot of questions, but now VMware Fusion 3 just picks everything for you and then gives you the option of changing the options. You can always change the settings later but I went in and changed the disk space option – they suggested a max of 40GB. That means Windows could grow but won’t start that big. I’m not giving enough to suggest W7 is allowed to be that big so it set it back to 12GB.
It’s hard to believe but pretty much the next thing you see is Windows installing itself, just like you’re looking at a “real” PC.
And then…well, it worked! I have never done such a painless installation of such a complex program.
The one tricky thing on Virtual Machines is how to get it to talk to YOUR hardware since there’s no direct connection to things like your trackpad, mouse, screen resolution, graphics card, network devices and camera. VM software always has a separate package called Tools that you have to run after you install the OS. In the old days you just had to know you needed to install the tools, but with VMware Fusion 3, you can’t possibly miss it. I think they told me three or four times, and then it was showing in the bottom of the window till I executed it.
At first VMware Fusion 3 didn’t recognize the CD for installing the VMware tools but they warned this might happen and said to just open the CD from Windows Explorer and run setup.exe which worked fine. Notice that I didn’t say I created or inserted a CD, there was just sort of magically a CD sitting on the Windows desktop for me to select. Crazy easy.
Another thing that was problematic in the early days of VM on the Mac was how to get a folder shared between the VM and your Mac. Not so on VMware Fusion 3 – I only have a vague memory of the installer asking me if I’d like to share info between my VM and my Mac, and yet after running the Tools installation and rebooting Windows 7 – darn it if the desktop on Windows doesn’t show the same things as on the desktop of my Mac!
Next challenge is always how to get your VM to talk to your network card – and Windows on a PC usually makes that a challenge right? So with trepidation I opened IE8 on Windows 7…and it hopped right on my network! That means it not only recognized my network card, it used the WPA password from my keychain and got on my network without me having to do ANY work at all!
I was even able to use the 2 fingered scroll on my MacBook Pro immediately after installing the tools. I opened a document to print, and the print menu was already preselected to default to my home printer on the network, AND the document printed. Amazing. Brought a tear to my eye actually!
One thing I noticed was that VMware Fusion 3 was only taking about 30% of my processor resources when it was idle, which is a lot less than one web browser window open with Flash in it on the Mac. I also noticed that VMware Fusion 3 was only using one of my processors, but when I opened the settings I discovered I can address one core, two cores or four cores since I have a dual core, dual processor machine. Very cool.
If you’ve never used VM software before or not since the early days, you may not have seen one of the coolest features. Normally the virtual machine is one window floating around on your Mac desktop with the guest applications trapped inside that window. If you command tab to flip between programs, the entire OS is one application. But what if you could have the Guest applications look just like a “real” app on your host OS? Turns out you can do that. on Parallels they call it Coherence mode, on VMware Fusion 3 they call it Unity. While your VM is running you can flip on Unity and suddenly you can see IE8 as a separate application floating around on your Mac desktop as though it belonged there. Since I only gave Windows one core, and 1GB of RAM to entertain itself, so moving those floating windows around left some trails and wasn’t really smooth but I’m sure it would be better if I gave it more resources.
I did have a couple of instances where my machine slowed to a crawl while Fusion was running, but I couldn’t figure out why. In both cases I had Windows in Unity mode and I didn’t see it happen in Full Screen or Single Window mode. I didn’t experiment with upping the dedicated processors to the VM but that could have been it. I hope to eventually find a pattern to when it happens, but most of the time it worked really snappily.
One of the coolest features of VM’s is that you can get your machine tricked out just the way you want it and then take a snapshot. Now you let your teenager get on it and they go to some creepy site like Limewire and they get your system all gunked up with viruses and spyware, but it’s no big deal because you can simply restore the snapshot. VMware Fusion 3 has this capability of course but they have two options to bring the snapshot back – Rollback, and Restore Snapshot and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the difference is between them. I even read the documentation – almost pulled a muscle doing that.
So bottom line is that I am absolutely delighted with VMware Fusion 3 and can highly recommend it as an idiot proof way to install a guest Operating System on your Mac. Remember you don’t HAVE to install Windows, it could be Ubuntu Linux instead! Go check out VMware Fusion 3 at vmware.com. It will run you $80 US but I do believe this is a case of getting what you pay for.
This week we look at Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, VMware Fusion 3, MainMenu, Karnival, Freeware plus much more. I want to thank you for downloading and listening to the podcast. We have the best in Mac hardware, software and websites reviews. We have a lot of great folks on today’s episode with their reviews and comments on software, hardware and websites that make using the Mac special. Plus I’ll have the top freeware Mac apps of the week and much more.
You can email me at surfbits at Gmail dot Com. I love to hear from you.
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
ScreencastsOnline Special November Half-Price!
ClickFree Automatic Backup and C2 Automatic Backup Drive: http://www.clickfree.com
FlexCal: http://flexgames.com/flexcal
Preezo: http://www.preezo.com
Voice Mac: http://mrgeckosmedia.com/applications/info/VoiceMac
Hulu Desktop: http://www.hulu.com/labs/hulu-desktop
SecondBar: http://blog.boastr.net
BetterTouchTool: http://blog.boastr.net
Apple Mail to Evernote Script and more great scripts: http://veritrope.com/tips/mail-to-evernote
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
MainMenu: http://creativebe.com/mainmenu
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast looks at:
VMWare Fusion 3: http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion
Jeff Powell joins us and talks about:
Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelmac
Apple Magic Mouse: http://www.apple.com/magicmouse
To Show Hidden System Files in any Snow Leopard Open / Save As dialog box press: Command Shift . (Command + Shift + Period Key)
Michelle Lopez joins us today from the The Portable Gamer and iCasual Report to review the iPhone/iPod Touch game:
Karnival : iTunes App Store Link
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
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Continue reading about The MacReviewCast #231: PS Elements 8, Fusion 3, Clickfree C2 Drive, iCasual
If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you’ll know that I have a “thing” for word processors. This is partly because I spend so much time writing but also because I remember the cowboy days of word processing when our computers were 8 bits and there were 20 different developers trying to build a better mousetrap.
Gladly, the Microsoft Word stranglehold seems to be loosening and independent developers are once again bringing their own particular take on word processing to the Mac. One of the most recent additions is Pagehand.
This version 1.0 application is all about the words. The interface is simple and tasteful developed to stay out of your way and let you get to the hard work of writing.
Thankfully, you can spend a lot of time writing in Pagehand without ever straying into the menu listings and there simply are no inspectors. All of its tools are presented in the toolbar and sidebar. One nice touch is font are grouping by style so if you are looking for a nice decorative sans serif, they are easy to find.
It is always refreshing to see a developer create an application with no regard to feature lists. However, there are a few things missing from Pagehand that could make it a deal breaker for some. You can’t track changes and there are no footnotes or endnotes. For me, that severely limits my ability to use Pagehand. Likewise the page layout and table support is present but not nearly as robust as in Apple’s Pages application.
The thing is, those features that Pagehand does include are done extremely well. I’ve always used paragraph styles but I’m the only person I know who does (and I talk to a lot of writers). I think part of the problem is implementation. Pagehand has made developing, customizing, and naming paragraph styles very intuitive.
In terms of character and paragraph customization, Pagehand excels. There are four different styles of underline and four styles of strikethrough. You can apply shadow and control the angle, offset, blur, and opacity. The hyphenation control includes sliders for the current paragraph and entire document.
Pagehand also changes the rules with file format. Pagehand’s native file format is called Pagehand PDF. This way, any saved Pagehand file can be opened in any PDF reader on any platform. What a great idea. In addition, Pagehand also imports and exports to the usual suspects including Microsoft Word and several text formats. Although importing Microsoft Word documents that include unsupported features, such as footnotes, led to some grief.
I can’t help but really like this application. The simplicity of the user interface and the moxy of simply ignoring several of the word processing features everyone expects is endearing. If you don’t need those missing features, Pagehand may be the answer you are looking for.
I suspect there will be some feature creep with future versions and look forward to seeing how the developer does this and keeps the elegant simplicity.
You can download Pagehand from Pagehand.com. The introductory price is $40 but that will eventually go to $50.
There is usually one underlying reason why computer users do not backup their systems, and that’s because it can be a confusing and time consuming process. After all, backing up your system normally consists of two separate functions, the media to back up on and the software that sends your files to the media. Then there is the long and tedious process of having every file backed up while you patiently wait.
Apple has tried to overcome this natural aversion to backup by introducing Time Capsule, a combination of their Time Machine software and built-in media on their Airport Base Station. The idea was solid, wireless backup for any Mac on your network. Unfortunately the implementation has had it’s share of speed bumps along the way.
Enter the Clickfree Automatic Backup solution. Specifically, the C2 Portable Backup Drive. This is hands-down the most simple and fastest backup solution, especially for laptops, that I’ve ever used. Here’s why. Simply connect the Clickfree C2 to your computer, and Clickfree’s smart backup will automatically find, organize and store hundreds of file types, and will backup only what has changed each time you connect. There is no need to copy and paste files or install software. You can backup multiple computers, Mac or PC, and backup files will be organized by the computer name all on the same drive.
Let’s start at the beginning. The C2 Automatic backup drive comes with a built-in USB 2.0 cable attached and hidden away in the back of the small, and lightweight drive. You can plug the drive directly into the computer with that USB plug or use a convenient docking bay with a longer USB cable that will sit on your desk and hold the drive for a more permanent solution. (The Dock is optional). You simply plug the drive into your computer and the Smart Backup Clickfree software walks you though the process of naming your computer and deciding what you would like to backup.
One of the big differences between the Clickfree backup system and other backup software is that you can easily and very simply choose to backup just your documents, music, photos, or specific folder. You do not need to backup the whole operating system or clone the hard drive. You just backup the files you need to backup. Then each time you plug the C2 back into your computer it remembers the choices you made and it backs up your drive automatically. You can also leave the drive plugged into the computer and it will keep you backed up as you go. With C2 connected, plug any iPod or iPhone into another USB port, and the C2 allows you to import music and playlists directly into iTunes.
Another feature in the Clickfree software is the Smart Viewer. You can easily transfer photos to
another computer. You can email or print your photos directly from the backup drive, and share photos to Facebook, Myspace, and Flickr.
Secure data with powerful encryption by simply entering a password. C2 uses 256-bit hardware encryption that won’t slow down the backup. Then when you have to have the information in your backup, Smart Restore is what you need. Smart Restore helps you to migrate files to a new
computer, or when moving from older Mac versions to SnowLeopard. You can also move files
from PC to a Mac. Then you can create DVD or CD backups using the burner on your computer without having to install or learn complex archiving software. Restoring is as simple and easy as backing up your files.
The C2 Backup drive from Clickfree comes in 250 GB and 500 GB sizes. The prices are $139.99 and $189.99 retail. These drives are light as a feather and come in High-Gloss Black and High-Gloss White. It’s a combination that any computer user will say is a simple and easy method for backing up their system and simple and easy means they’ll back it up more often.
Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted at podfeet.com.
Every once in a while I get a product to review that I really struggle with. It’s not that the product necessarily has anything wrong with it, but sometimes I just don’t see the point of all the things it can do. Maybe it’s that I don’t personally have a need for what it can do, or perhaps it really doesn’t have unique functionality – it’s hard to tell. This is one of those reviews.
The product that I’m giving such a difficult intro to is Popcorn from roxio.com. Now Roxio is a household name, well known for their quality products, like Toast for burning DVDs. Popcorn is a multi-faceted tool that has lots of distinctly different capabilities.
Popcorn can help you convert non-copy protected DVD movies to play on your iPhone, iPod, AppleTV, Playstation, Xbox, PSP, Blackberry, Palm, YouTube…the list goes on and on. So insert a DVD, it shows up in the main convert tab, and gives you some options on what you want to convert to. You can even schedule the conversion for a specific time, which is pretty cool. It’s going to take some time to get this done so you could set it to start after you left for work and when you got home it would be all done.
There have been various freeware programs to do this over the years, like the discontinued VisualHub and iSquint. Since those freeware programs have been around, I’m not sure this capability would merit the cost of Popcorn. One thing that might make it worth the price is that Roxio teamed up with Elgato so Popcorn will let you use Elgato’s Turbo.h264 to speed up your encoding. if you haven’t seen it, is an oversized thumb drive looking thing that actually is a hardware accelerator designed specifically to offload encoding from your computer’s cpu to this dedicated processor. I tried it out and it worked, at least I think it did – hard to tell unless you encode an entire DVD twice, once with and once without! It went pretty fast so I’m pretty confident it works as advertised.
The documentation for Popcorn said that you can also extract video clips from your non-copy protected DVDs. I was excited at the idea of extracting video clips from the home movie DVDs Steve so laboriously created for us and sending them up to Youtube. We have a hilarious clip of Lindsay when she was wee tiny dancing to my brother playing base, and I’ve wanted to pull that video out without having to work on the whole disk. I read the help file that came with Popcorn and while it does say you can extract video clips, it doesn’t tell you how. This is kind of a theme with Popcorn – the documentation that comes with it is great about telling you what you can do, but many things have no how.
I went online to the support section at roxio.com and I found the detailed instructions on how to do the extraction, but guess what? It won’t work on the DVDs Steve made using iMovie. His movies always have chapters and music and scene selections and all that, so I was really disappointed to find that Popcorn did not recognize the chapter markers, but instead saw the DVD as one giant file. Now they’re very clear throughout the documentation that they can only work on non-copy protected DVDs, and since this application was made for a Mac, it would make sense if it could recognize the chapters made by the Mac software iDVD. In a few other areas of the documentation they say they support iDVD but this is clearly not always the case.
Popcorn will create a disk image of your DVDs so you can do things like back them up to a hard drive, maybe hook it to a hacked AppleTV to play, that sort of thing. The functionality works exactly as advertised on Popcorn, but again this is something you don’t have to pay for – it’s built into the Apple Disk Utility. I argued this with research assistant Niraj and he brought up a good point – some people don’t want to go poking around in a bunch of different freeware programs, they want it all in one place and they want it to look pretty and be intuitive. That might be the real selling point for Popcorn because it does take some fiddling to figure out how to use the free tools. Popcorn has easy to follow menus that look very pretty and mac-like so it’s a more pleasant experience.
I’ve been experimenting recently with tools that will allow you to capture content from Tivo, bring it down to the Mac to play it, or convert it to use on a portable media player like an iPod, iPhone, or PSP. I tested out iTivo but it was far to flaky to recommend. Roxio’s press release said that Popcorn could transfer using TivoToGo to transfer from Tivo DVRs to watch on the computer, burn to a DVD, or convert for iPod or PSP, so this was worth a try.
Now this was considered an “Extra” feature but was actually the one that interested me most. It actually launches a separate program called TiVo Transfer, but it does it in a way that makes you feel like you’re still in one program. You have to find the IP address of your TiVo and the Media Access Key for the device and plug it into TiVo Transfer but they tell you how to find that before you get started. Next up TiVo Transfer shows you a list of your recorded shows. Select the ones you want to transfer, choose what format you want them in, and you’re off to the races.
Unfortunately some of my content was copy protected, which really irritated me, especially when I discovered that my CNET podcasts recorded via TiVo were copy protected! I wrote to Tom Merritt about this and he wrote back telling me that he and Molly Wood have complained like crazy about this to their bosses and haven’t been able to get it changed but he was going to forward my letter on to them to see if one more letter would break them. Seems so counterintuitive to have a freely available podcast in so many forms and then copy protect it when it gets to TiVo.
The help file in Popcorn also says you can transfer standard and HD video from your Mac to your TiVo but for the life of me I couldn’t find the menu choice that showed me how to do that. I found in a lot of cases the documentation told you what you could do, but now how to do it.
With Popcorn you can combine a set of movie files into one disk image that you can burn as a DVD or just play from your desktop. I took a bunch of little videos with my iPhone on Halloween of Steve and Ron carving their pumpkins but I made one big mistake – I took them all with the iPhone vertical instead of horizontal. Steve has been working on how to import them into iMovie HD and it’s been a bear of a problem to get the letterboxing right on them.
I used the Copy tab of Popcorn and clicked on DVD-Video and it allowed me to drag in my multiple video files, choose a menu style for each chapter and even mess with encoding if I wanted, which I most definitely did not want to do! You can lose days of your life if you start fiddling with encoding options and in my personal experience you end up back with the standard settings in the end game!
The interface is fantastic for this process – after you drag in your video clips and even photos for a little slideshow in the video, you can walk through each clip and name it as a separate chapter for the movie. they have a tab so you can do a quick review of the clip so you can remember why it was worthy of inclusion in your video before you name it. When you’re done setting things up, you can choose to burn it directly to a DVD, or make a disk image of it first. I recommend the disk image option because you can always burn from there using Popcorn or Disk Utility, but you don’t waste the time and materials making a physical DVD before you know if you’ve got everything just right!
I’m sad to report that after all my painstaking work to create each chapter for the DVD naming each clip, when Popcorn was done creating the DVD disk image, there were no chapters at all, not even an opening menu screen when I opened it using Apple’s DVD player. I tried opening it with the Toast DVD player that comes with Popcorn, and while it showed me the opening menu screen, I couldn’t select any of the items to play.
Remember at the beginning of this review I told you I wasn’t sure where it would go? I went back and forth throughout the review sometimes liking it sometimes being aggravated, and in the end game I have to recommend a pass on Popcorn. Video clip extraction from videos created with iDVD failed, and creation of a chapter-filled DVD from video clips failed. Many of the features like creating a disk image of a DVD are already built into OSX. the only feature that worked well for me and wasn’t already freely available was the TiVo Transfer, but $50 for Popcorn is too much to pay for this features.
Thanks Tim, we’ll talk to you again soon.
Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted at podfeet.com.
Every once in a while I get a product to review that I really struggle with. It’s not that the product necessarily has anything wrong with it, but sometimes I just don’t see the point of all the things it can do. Maybe it’s that I don’t personally have a need for what it can do, or perhaps it really doesn’t have unique functionality – it’s hard to tell. This is one of those reviews.
The product that I’m giving such a difficult intro to is Popcorn from roxio.com. Now Roxio is a household name, well known for their quality products, like Toast for burning DVDs. Popcorn is a multi-faceted tool that has lots of distinctly different capabilities.
Popcorn can help you convert non-copy protected DVD movies to play on your iPhone, iPod, AppleTV, Playstation, Xbox, PSP, Blackberry, Palm, YouTube…the list goes on and on. So insert a DVD, it shows up in the main convert tab, and gives you some options on what you want to convert to. You can even schedule the conversion for a specific time, which is pretty cool. It’s going to take some time to get this done so you could set it to start after you left for work and when you got home it would be all done.
There have been various freeware programs to do this over the years, like the discontinued VisualHub and iSquint. Since those freeware programs have been around, I’m not sure this capability would merit the cost of Popcorn. One thing that might make it worth the price is that Roxio teamed up with Elgato so Popcorn will let you use Elgato’s Turbo.h264 to speed up your encoding. if you haven’t seen it, is an oversized thumb drive looking thing that actually is a hardware accelerator designed specifically to offload encoding from your computer’s cpu to this dedicated processor. I tried it out and it worked, at least I think it did – hard to tell unless you encode an entire DVD twice, once with and once without! It went pretty fast so I’m pretty confident it works as advertised.
The documentation for Popcorn said that you can also extract video clips from your non-copy protected DVDs. I was excited at the idea of extracting video clips from the home movie DVDs Steve so laboriously created for us and sending them up to Youtube. We have a hilarious clip of Lindsay when she was wee tiny dancing to my brother playing base, and I’ve wanted to pull that video out without having to work on the whole disk. I read the help file that came with Popcorn and while it does say you can extract video clips, it doesn’t tell you how. This is kind of a theme with Popcorn – the documentation that comes with it is great about telling you what you can do, but many things have no how.
I went online to the support section at roxio.com and I found the detailed instructions on how to do the extraction, but guess what? It won’t work on the DVDs Steve made using iMovie. His movies always have chapters and music and scene selections and all that, so I was really disappointed to find that Popcorn did not recognize the chapter markers, but instead saw the DVD as one giant file. Now they’re very clear throughout the documentation that they can only work on non-copy protected DVDs, and since this application was made for a Mac, it would make sense if it could recognize the chapters made by the Mac software iDVD. In a few other areas of the documentation they say they support iDVD but this is clearly not always the case.
Popcorn will create a disk image of your DVDs so you can do things like back them up to a hard drive, maybe hook it to a hacked AppleTV to play, that sort of thing. The functionality works exactly as advertised on Popcorn, but again this is something you don’t have to pay for – it’s built into the Apple Disk Utility. I argued this with research assistant Niraj and he brought up a good point – some people don’t want to go poking around in a bunch of different freeware programs, they want it all in one place and they want it to look pretty and be intuitive. That might be the real selling point for Popcorn because it does take some fiddling to figure out how to use the free tools. Popcorn has easy to follow menus that look very pretty and mac-like so it’s a more pleasant experience.
I’ve been experimenting recently with tools that will allow you to capture content from Tivo, bring it down to the Mac to play it, or convert it to use on a portable media player like an iPod, iPhone, or PSP. I tested out iTivo but it was far to flaky to recommend. Roxio’s press release said that Popcorn could transfer using TivoToGo to transfer from Tivo DVRs to watch on the computer, burn to a DVD, or convert for iPod or PSP, so this was worth a try.
Now this was considered an “Extra” feature but was actually the one that interested me most. It actually launches a separate program called TiVo Transfer, but it does it in a way that makes you feel like you’re still in one program. You have to find the IP address of your TiVo and the Media Access Key for the device and plug it into TiVo Transfer but they tell you how to find that before you get started. Next up TiVo Transfer shows you a list of your recorded shows. Select the ones you want to transfer, choose what format you want them in, and you’re off to the races.
Unfortunately some of my content was copy protected, which really irritated me, especially when I discovered that my CNET podcasts recorded via TiVo were copy protected! I wrote to Tom Merritt about this and he wrote back telling me that he and Molly Wood have complained like crazy about this to their bosses and haven’t been able to get it changed but he was going to forward my letter on to them to see if one more letter would break them. Seems so counterintuitive to have a freely available podcast in so many forms and then copy protect it when it gets to TiVo.
The help file in Popcorn also says you can transfer standard and HD video from your Mac to your TiVo but for the life of me I couldn’t find the menu choice that showed me how to do that. I found in a lot of cases the documentation told you what you could do, but now how to do it.
With Popcorn you can combine a set of movie files into one disk image that you can burn as a DVD or just play from your desktop. I took a bunch of little videos with my iPhone on Halloween of Steve and Ron carving their pumpkins but I made one big mistake – I took them all with the iPhone vertical instead of horizontal. Steve has been working on how to import them into iMovie HD and it’s been a bear of a problem to get the letterboxing right on them.
I used the Copy tab of Popcorn and clicked on DVD-Video and it allowed me to drag in my multiple video files, choose a menu style for each chapter and even mess with encoding if I wanted, which I most definitely did not want to do! You can lose days of your life if you start fiddling with encoding options and in my personal experience you end up back with the standard settings in the end game!
The interface is fantastic for this process – after you drag in your video clips and even photos for a little slideshow in the video, you can walk through each clip and name it as a separate chapter for the movie. they have a tab so you can do a quick review of the clip so you can remember why it was worthy of inclusion in your video before you name it. When you’re done setting things up, you can choose to burn it directly to a DVD, or make a disk image of it first. I recommend the disk image option because you can always burn from there using Popcorn or Disk Utility, but you don’t waste the time and materials making a physical DVD before you know if you’ve got everything just right!
I’m sad to report that after all my painstaking work to create each chapter for the DVD naming each clip, when Popcorn was done creating the DVD disk image, there were no chapters at all, not even an opening menu screen when I opened it using Apple’s DVD player. I tried opening it with the Toast DVD player that comes with Popcorn, and while it showed me the opening menu screen, I couldn’t select any of the items to play.
Remember at the beginning of this review I told you I wasn’t sure where it would go? I went back and forth throughout the review sometimes liking it sometimes being aggravated, and in the end game I have to recommend a pass on Popcorn. Video clip extraction from videos created with iDVD failed, and creation of a chapter-filled DVD from video clips failed. Many of the features like creating a disk image of a DVD are already built into OSX. the only feature that worked well for me and wasn’t already freely available was the TiVo Transfer, but $50 for Popcorn is too much to pay for this features.
Thanks Tim, we’ll talk to you again soon.
From The Loop: It’s available for download through the Software Update system preference, and should be online shortly from Apple’s downloads software site. The 10.6.2 update “enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac,” according to Apple. Specific changes include fixes for: an issue that might cause your system to logout unexpectedly a graphics [...]
This week we look at PageHand, Popcorn, ScreenFlow 2, Gourmania, Freeware plus much more. I want to thank you for downloading and listening to the podcast. We have the best in Mac hardware, software and websites reviews. We have a lot of great folks on today’s episode with their reviews and comments on software, hardware and websites that make using the Mac special. Plus I’ll have the top freeware Mac apps of the week and much more.
You can email me at surfbits at Gmail dot Com. I love to hear from you.
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
ScreencastsOnline Special November Half-Price!
Whimsically Plucky Software: http://www.whimsplucky.com
BackityMac: http://www.whimsplucky.com
VideoVangelist: http://www.whimsplucky.com
RadioRocker: http://www.whimsplucky.com
DockChanger: http://www.whimsplucky.com
NewOCR: http://www.newocr.com
Bleep Blop: http://bleepblop.isnot.tv
Quiet Read: http://bambooapps.com/free-stuff
Fairmount: http://www.metakine.com/products/fairmount
Skreenics: http://code.google.com/p/skreenics
Sequential: http://sequentialx.com
Joomla: http://www.joomla.org
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
PageHand: http://pagehand.com
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast looks at:
Popcorn: http://www.roxio.com
David Allen from Mac20Q.com podcast reviews:
ScreenFlow 2: http://www.telestream.net
Michelle Lopez joins us today from the The Portable Gamer and iCasual Report to review the iPhone/iPod Touch game:
Gourmania – $.99
Gourmania Lite – FREE
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Continue reading about The MacReviewCast #230: Popcorn, PageHand, ScreenFlow, Gourmania
MacHeist is having another bundle sale, this time it’s 6 apps and they’re Free! Wonder Warp Software’s Shovebox: Temporary information storage Hog Bay Software’s WriteRoom: "Distraction-free" word processor Iconfactory’s Twitterrific: Twitter client TinyGrab’s TinyGrab: Screenshot sharing Freeverse’s Hordes of Orcs: Tower defense game After 500,000 folks download the bundle, the 6th app will be [...]
The new StuffIt is radically enhanced. In one simple motion users can compress files and upload them to the cloud. Then a URL is generated so anyone can download the content from the cloud easily and securely. The new Snow Leopard-compatible release includes StuffIt Connect, a new cloud-based file transfer service that lets users share large files without the hassle of email attachments or FTP.
StuffIt continues to provide best-in-class compression technology, and includes Smith Micro’s industry leading patented compression methods designed to provide pixel-perfect compression of image files, audio files, PDFs and Microsoft Office documents. StuffIt works with virtually all files and compression formats, such as zip, to satisfy all users’ personal and professional needs and ensure that all their photos, music, videos, Keynote presentations and other large files are shared or stored securely.
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StuffIt Deluxe 2010 for Mac Features and Benefits:
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StuffIt Deluxe 2010 for Mac is available direct from the Smith Micro web store at http://www.smithmicro.com/stuffit/mac and from popular resellers, catalogs and distribution partners worldwide. The MSRP for StuffIt Deluxe 2010 for Mac is $79.99. Registered users of any previous version of StuffIt Deluxe or StuffIt Standard for Mac can upgrade to the full StuffIt Deluxe 2009 for Mac for just $29.99.
