I received an email asking me to try the beta of an application called Woopra. They call themselves “Real-Time Web Analytics on Steroids”. For the time being the beta is invite only, when it’s released, they’ll have a free version and a paid version with more options.
What is Woopra exactly? If you have a Web site or blog, you know how hard it can be to get instant feedback on the page views, the visitors, the origin and the referrals. Most analytical and site statistics are updated once a day or several times during the day. With Woopra, you get live track of visitors coming and going and moving through your website.
The interface is hands down the best user interface I’ve ever seen on an app like this. The real time updating along with your choice of themes and how the stats are presented to you, make this the first time it was actually fun to get your Web site information. Webmasters can respond faster to sudden influxes in traffic and help monitor trends in search and traffic patterns. Woopra helps webmasters generate content based upon visitors needs and trends now, not the next day.
Woopra breaks the Web statistics mold by allowing lightning quick search functionality along any data point in the system. What information do you need to help you manage and develop your site? Specific user names, IP addresses, geographic locations, user browsing data, visitor history, visitor paths, arrival and departure points - what do you want to know? All the data is search-able.
Click to Chat buttons allow Webmasters to remotely initiate sessions with visitors, or embed Click to Chat buttons within a site to accept inbound requests. In addition to the most comprehensive suite of Web statistics available, Woopra’s proprietary plug-in technology appends real known user data from existing communities. Once a visitor leaves a comment or registers with the site, their on-site activities can be tracked, helping you learn more about how your loyal readers use your site.
Now there is much more I could talk about with Woopra, but it’s still in beta and the final app might be a bit different then the beta. It has Wordpress plug-ins to allow easy installation, but it also can work with many other Web sites and blogging platforms. I’ve been using the beta for a little over a week, and I’m impressed.
I have a handful of invitations to give out, so please email me at surfbits at gmail dot com and put “woopra” as the subject. Just put your name in the body and I’ll pick the beta invitation winners at random from the emails and announce them on the podcast Saturday.
By David Sparks:
In a different lifetime I was a studio musician and spent a lot of time with microphones and soundboards. As a result, I’m a bit of an audio nerd. The thing is, I remember how hard analog audio was to pull off. But today we live in the digital age and suddenly Audio gets much easier. This week I’m looking at Ambrosia Software’s latest application in its stable of audio tools, Wiretap Anywhere.
To put this application in layman’s terms, wind the clock back about 80 years and imagine one of those old telephone switchboard stations. You have a board on one side with incoming calls and the operator would then physically connect the plug into where you wanted the call to go. “Oh Hi Eunice. You want to talk to Doc Jones about your lombago, let me patch you in.”
Now imagine that same concept but much cooler on your Mac and instead of just patching one call, you can patch five calls into one line. That gives you a rough idea of Wiretap Anywhere. With it you can take any audio generated by your Mac and pipe it across to any destination. Do you want to share your latest GarageBand project with your pal in Walawala over iChat? Its simple. You just set a line from GarageBand to iChat and you are in business. If you are a podcaster and want to get a Skype call, your local microphone, and some funky iTunes background music into your audio application but leave your system alerts out of the recording, it is simply a matter of making the proper connections in Wiretap Anywhere.
Wiretap Anywhere turns all of your applications into audio inputs which you can then mix and combine and patch into any application on your Mac that accepts an audio signal. The concept is not really that complicated but, depending on your level of audio needs, extremely useful. You can put the individual source applications to their own channels or you can mix them to a combined stereo signal from within Wiretap Anywhere.
One use that I particularly enjoyed was routing my Midi keyboard, Logic, and iTunes into one feed for recording. Pulling this off “back in the day” would have have been possible without some very high end, and expensive, recording equipment.
In some ways it is like Soundflower. It is just easier to configure and more stable. The interface, presented through a preference pane, is obvious. I’ve been putting Wiretap Anywhere through its paces now for for several weeks. Processing and redirecting all of this audio did not seem to cause any latency problems for me. Ambrosia knows audio. For about 10 months now I’ve been recording my reviews on another Ambrosia product, Wiretap Studio.
Wiretap Anywhere is certainly not for everyone but is an excellent tool for for people who need this sort of granular control over their audio. A license will cost $129. If you are interested, there is a demo version available from Ambrosia Software’s website. Ambrosia also has some nice tutorial videos to give you a better idea of how to use the application.
This week we look at Wiretap Anywhere, PdaNet, TubeTV, Woopra 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.
Receive 25% off of all Devon-Technologies software by going to http://www.devon-technologies.com/podcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Woopra: http://www.woopra.com
Top Draw: http://code.google.com/p/topdraw
Shrook: http://www.utsire.com/shrook
Filezilla: http://filezilla-project.org
WavePad: http://www.nch.com.au
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
WireTap Anywhere: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/wta
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
TubeTV: http://www.chimoosoft.com/products/tubetv
Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com joins us and talks about Episode 4 of the iTunes App Store Games. This week he reviews:
21 Pro BlackJack Sponsored
Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab
Tom Piraino looks at PdaNet.
Chris Marshall from ChrisMarshall.ws joins us this week. We talk about his new iPod Nano and why Chris loves his 3G iPhone!
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
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By Chris Marshall:
Wirecast at $449 isn’t exactly cheap, but it comes from a good stable over at Flip4Mac, including one of my favorite applications ScreenFlow.
Wirecast is the most advanced live webcasting product available for your Mac or PC. You can stream multiple live video cameras, while dynamically mixing in other media (movies, images etc). Features such as Chroma Key (blue/green screen) and built-in titles merge seamlessly with Wirecast’s layering system, allowing you to create beautiful, professional webcasts.
As with many great applications the real strength lies in the simplicity of the interface and use, and the immense strength under the hood. It is one of those applications that allows you to achieve genuinely professional results with the minimal of fuss. Of course you have to have a reason to stream professional quality video, or to save to disc for future distribution, because at $449 I hazard the guess that it isn’t something that you would want to buy ‘just to see’ what it was like.
I got it as I am developing a range of video ’services’ for a number of clients for next year so I am on a pretty steep learning curve, and as I see it anything that can make my efforts look truly professional is a Godsend!
Centered around the concept of ’shots’, for packaging graphical overlays, movies and titles from your selected cameras, which you build a library of and then create and transition for broadcast.
While it is a OS X and Windows application in my view it is clearly designed with the Mac in mind with both the Keynote integration and use of QuickTime Streaming (1) architecture for broadcasting. What I particularly liked was the ability to edit in live or preview mode, so if you were capturing video to present later you can edit in preview so that all the edits are implemented at your control, or in live mode you can provide a live commentary on the action, changes etc.
As a European it is always handy to have the PAL option as well as the NTSC option:
(1) This feature requires that you have access to a QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS) or Darwin Streaming Server (DSS). Darwin Streaming Server is a free download from Apple and can be installed on several operating systems (not just Macintosh).
(2) Screen Shots of Chrome Key In Action
Flip4Mac offer a 60 day money back guarantee if you are not entirely satisfied, so you can try secure in that knowledge. It also runs in demo mode if you can put up with the annoying little voice and watermark that crops up all the time!
Gazmaz from the UK here. Well, I wasn’t actually going to do a review this week but a mail came in from Tim reminding us that the podcast segments needed to be in by Saturday morning your time. This spurred me on to do a short and sweet review.
So what am I talking about this week? I’m afraid it’s less a review and more a reminder for all of those new to the platform especially from the Windows side. Now I bet that you still receive lots video files from your Window friends but for some reason you don’t seem to be able to play them on your brand new shiny Macintosh.
Yep, I can hear you saying, “Hang on a minute, I thought they told me that this Mac just works?” OK, in some cases the platform needs a little help. This is where VLC, originally known as VideoLan Client kicks in. Now I don’t use this app all the time because I like using Quicktime where I can, but VLC has certainly helped me see those funny clips sent to me from my friends in a format that the Mac can’t natively play.
VLC covers lots of formats and I know that some people use it as their primary video player as the application can of course play DVD’s and Quicktime formats. VLC also incorporates bookmarking capabilities so you can mark a place on your DVD so you can get right back to where Darth Vader tells Luke he’s his father! I believe, although I didn’t have time to try this, that your also able to set VLC up to play the movies as your desktop background.
It also supports subtitles, crikey I’m beginning to think this is more than just a switchers tool! You can also use the application as a CD player as well, but hey, come on, surely you use iTunes for that. The interface is simple and really easy to pick up so straight in which is what you want when playing video’s of course.
Now not only does it play lots of different formats but its open source and can be used on Windows, I’ll be honest I have to use Windows at work and I use VLC on that machine but there’s of course also a Linux version, and the other really great thing about being open source, yep, it’s free, so go over to http://www.videolan.org and grab a copy so that you can still play the formats that you thought were lost to you.
So what I thought was just a reminder for those of you who find you’ve moved across and can’t play certain types of video clips turned out to be a little bit of a review for myself. I hope that if anything, it shows there’s often more to an application than first meets the eye.
Note-taking app Evernote gets an API | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET
I think you all know how much I love Evernote. We had the CEO Phil Libin on the MacReviewCast last March already with an interview. This is a freeware (Pro version available) app that we all should take a look at for our everyday information dump. Now we have even more to look forward to with the release of an all-access API. According to C/Net:
CEO Phil Libin is of course eager to see what developers do with the all-access API to the service. He’s hoping that people build new clients–he’s holding out for a Wii version of Evernote–but realistically suspects that developers of vertical applications will make the most use of the API. Already, he says, Salesforce.com developer Astitch is working on an app that will merge Evernote pictures and notes with Salesforce.com client and sales records. Evernote’s cloud-based OCR (optical character recognition) could be used to auto-file camera phone pictures of business cards into the appropriate records.
Libin also foresees mashups that synchronize Evernote with data on services like Remember the Milk and Google Calendar.
I, for one, cannot wait for the developers to take advantage of this amazing application. Evernote will be a player in the Mac community for a long time to come.
By Chris Marshall:
I have long envied people that live the cloud life as Paul describes it, and while many people over the years have said that I have my head in the clouds, or that I live up on Cloud 9, it really isn’t something that my life style requires or benefits from.
I looked at Memopal a couple of months ago and liked it, especially the 250GB of storage, but couldn’t find a place for it in my workflow. Basically having effectively your whole hard drive on line sort of seemed pointless at the end of the day ….. may as well take the MacBook Pro with me i.e. if I need access to all my data all the time then surely I would be better with it offline and accessible?
From time to time I do have a need to access a document from another computer, and to share them with people that I am working on a project with, or as Dropbox call it “seamlessly sync files between multiple computers as well as act as a conduit for backing up files online”.
For me the single biggest plus is the seamless integration on the Mac. Can’t say what it is like on Windows (and frankly don’t care), nor on Linux (but that is because I have never bothered to look at Linux yet), but in the Mac it sits in the Finder.
That said it is an online service, so using it online sort of makes sense, and for setting up shared folders that is certainly the way to go.
Once set up it is just a case of dragging files across to the folder and hey presto, online sharing, either with yourself across computers, or with colleagues.
So the way things are looking Dropbox seems to have worked its way well into my workflow and I think will stay as part of it. In time I am sure the free 2GB will become a limitation (and solvable via a paid for larger option) and I have no doubt that the more ‘heavyweight’ users would want to have greater control over encryption and secure storage (at the moment everything resides on their S3 account so even if you have your own - which for some reason I actually do! - you still have to use theirs), and for those with more data than disc space the ‘all of nothing’ approach doesn’t allow you to select specific files on a ‘on demand’ basis. I sense that these are limitations that will be addressed in future (paid for) versions …….
Yes I do have a few invites if you want to leave a comment or drop me an email.
By David Sparks:
Plasq, the makers of Comic Life and Skitch, is one of those developers where you should just automatically download their new applications. So when Doozla was released, I put it on the family iMac and I’ve watched my kids enjoy it all year.
Doozla is a drawing program aimed firmly at the little ones. When you first start it up there are four icons that send you into its four drawing functions. The top icon leads to a virtual coloring book with a several fun images the kids can color in with the mouse. My six year old reports this is her favorite part of the application. Another icon leads to a blank canvas and gives you a variety of simple to use tools for drawing pictures and adding text. Another of the opening icons brings you to a screen with a variety of colorful backgrounds upon which you can add your drawings and finally, there is a fourth icon that allows you to take an iSight picture and mark it up. My kids found this particularly fun when marking up a picture of their dad. That is right: they had me with big blue hand drawn glasses and lipstick.
Behind all of this fun is a fancy bit of programing. Doozla uses curves, not pixels, to draw so using the mouse, even the youngest Mac geeks can make smooth lines. You can run it in full screen mode so the kids don’t stumble into things like … I don’t know .. the system preferences or terminal?
Doozla is like Skitch but for kids. If you are looking for something fun on the Mac with your little ones. Give it a try. The application costs $24.95 and you can download a demo at plasq.com/doozla.
The nice folks at Plasq have agreed to let me give away two Doozla licenses. So I’ve decided to do this with a contest. Download the Doozla demo and send me your kid’s masterpiece. My 6 and 11 year old daughters will then pick their two favorites and the winning artists will get Doozla licenses. Send the pictures to me at david@macsparky.com and mark the email as “Doozla Contest”. I can’t wait to see the creative kids in your world produce. I’ll announce the winners in next week’s review.
By Tom Piraino:
Leopard has been out for almost a year now, and those of us using Time Machine hopefully have had a good experience with it, I know I have. When I first setup Time Machine, I used a hardrive that I had partitioned, and well after about 8 months or so decided that Time Machine needed its own, much larger hardrive. I wasn’t able to go as far back in time as I hoped.
I purchased a new hardrive, and thought I could just drag my Time Machine backup folders from my original drive and drop them on to the new drive. Hmmm…….if only it was that simple. That just didn’t work!. After a few google searches I found the solution and thought, “I’d share it with everyone in 10 Easy steps.”
Step 1. Connect both hardrives to your computer.
Step 2. Open up Disk Utility located in Finder/Application/Utilities
Step 3. You need to format your new drive. DO NOT accidently format your existing Time Machine backup. To do this select the NEW drive that you want to become your Time Machine backup (you’ll see all of your connected hardrives in the left side panel of Disk Utility).
Step 4. Select Erase from the main window and choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the Format. Then click Erase. When that is finished continue to Step 5.
Step 5. Select the Source drive you want to copy from the side panel. (your original Time Machine backup drive)
Step 6. Click on Restore in the main window.
Step 7. You will notice two text fileds; “Source” and “Destination”. Click and drag the Source drive (again, the drive that has the Time Machine backup files on it) to the “Source” text field in the main window
Step 8. Click and drag the “Destination” drive (your new formatted drive) to the “Destination” text field.
Step 9. Check the “Erase Desitnation” option.
Step 10. Click “Restore”
Once it is finished you will have a copy of your Time Machine backup on your new drive, and the next time your computer uses Time Machine to backup it will just continue where it left off.
This week we look at DataCase, Doozla, VLC, Pixelmator 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.
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Receive 25% off of all Devon-Technologies software by going to http://www.devon-technologies.com/podcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Raw Photo Processor: http://www.raw-photo-processor.com
FStream: http://www.sourcemac.com/?page=fstream
Skim: http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/index.html
DVD Hunter: http://software.joelares.net
Offshoots: http://projects.digitalwaters.net
Simple Invoices: http://www.simpleinvoices.org
Tom Piraino looks at three great iPhone apps and tells you why to choose DataCase.
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast cannot join us this week.
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
Doozla: http://plasq.com
Chris Marshall from ChrisMarshall.ws joins us this week. We discuss his new 3G iPhone and DropBox online storage
Then Lola Wong is off this week this week.
Jeff Powell cannot join us today.
Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com cannot join us today.
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review
VLC Video Player: http://www.videolan.org
Robert Lachman, L.A.Times Staff Photographer joins us. His Web site is PhotographyandtheMac.com, and he talks with me about Digital Cameras and software, specifically the new Adobe CS4 Suite.
We have Don McAllister from ScreenCastsOnline joining us every other week to talk about his new free screencast: Pixelmator
A full membership of ScreenCastsOnline Extra! for 6 months which includes:
The next 26 weekly shows via iTunes or direct download,
Immediate access to a catalogue of over 140 DRM free tutorials,
The tutorials are in HD, Apple TV, iPod and iPhone format,
Access to a special members only site.
The usual cost for the full 6 month membership is only $49 but they can get a 15% discount by using the coupon code MRC2008 bringing it down to $41.65 for the full six months.
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
And now we have the Podcast in Bit-Torrent Feeds!
…
You can either click on the podcast link on the left and listen to it via QT from the browser, or you can right click on the podcast link and choose to “download linked file”. That will download the mp3 and you can play it from you hard drive with iTunes.
The right link below is
