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Default Folder - Add power to open/save dialogs Pick of the Week
DefaultFolder iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
The first Pick of the Week for 2003 is an oldie but goodie. If you were an OS 9 user, you more than likely have heard of (and/or used) Default Folder before. Default Folder enhances open and save dialogs in a number of ways. When enabled, you'll see a small floating vertical line of icons attached to your open and save dialog boxes. Using these icons, you can jump to your Favorites folder, your recently used items folder, any open Finder window, or any drive or partition on your machine. You can also rename selections, and assign a folder as a "default folder" for the chosen application.

But that's just the beginning of its power. When you open the Default Folder preference panel, you can assign folders to your list of favorites and give them a shortcut key. Have a folder called Images that you always jump to? Instead of navigating via the column-view window, just add it to your Favorites list and assign it the Control-I hot key. Now any time you need to get to Images in an open or save dialog box, just hit Control-I. You can have multiple sets of default and favorite folders, and you can even tell Default Folder to highlight folders in the Finder as you mouse over them, and display their contents in the dialog when you click on them.

There are a number of additional features, and it's well worth a download to give Default Folder X a run-through. As with most powerful tools, you may spend a few minutes learning the interface, but once you do, you'll probably wonder how you got along without it in the past.
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  You rated: 1 / 5 (8 votes cast)
 
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Sound Studio - Easy to use sound editing program Pick of the Week
Sound Studio iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
This week's Pick of the Week was chosen due to its fine work on a weekend iMovie project. I had a few video clips where the audio was nearly inaudible, and was looking for a tool to help fix the problem. A brief search on the web led me to Sound Studio from Felt Tip Software. Using a two-step process (open the movies in QuickTime and export the audio track as AIFF, then open in Sound Studio), I was easily able to up the volume on the quiet sections and then re-import them into iMovie.

But adding an amplification effect is only one of Sound Studio's tricks. You can also apply filters to create a customized fade in (or out), normalize the volume levels, add delays, echos, and reverbs, and even reverse the direction on a clip. You can do all of this to the entire sound, or just a selected portion thereof. There are also many additional features, most of which are beyond my simplistic audio needs.

Sound Studio has a very generous 14 day trial which is unlike most trial periods that I've seen. Instead of starting a clock that ticks down each day after the first launch, Sound Studio only decreases the counter for each unique day you launch the program (but you can launch it as many times as you like on that day).

This may not be a pro audio level program (I wouldn't know, given my lack of expertise in the area), but it seems more than sufficient for what I would ever need to do with sound. And given the re-shooting time it saved me this weekend, I'll be sending in my registration fee this week.

[As an aside, thanks for all the nice comments regarding my time off last week, they are greatly appreciated ... I hope you all had a nice holiday!]
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  You rated: 1 / 5 (7 votes cast)
 
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iStopMotion - Motion capture animation assistant Pick of the Week
iStopMotion iconThe macosxhints Rating:
4 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
A pick of the week that only scores a '4' on the scale? Yes, because this is such a cool little app with great potential. What does it do? iStopMotion makes the tedious task of creating stop-motion animated films much easier. If you've got a QuickTime compatible video camera and some free time, iStopMotion can help turn you into the next Will Vinton.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, stop-action films are created by placing an object, taking a picture of it, moving the object, taking another picture, and then repeating that process about 2.8 million times. It's very hard to do because you generally can't see the result of your animation until after you've shot the whole thing, and there's no easy way to go back and edit just one piece of it.

iStopMotion improves this by giving you a live preview window, showing a semi-transparent overlay of the current shot on top of the last shot. In addition, "onion skinning" lets you see the last few shots in sequence before you take the next. In short, it makes the process much less tedious and reduces the number of re-shoots that you'll have to do to get the effect you wanted.

iStopMotion scores only a '4' here because it's quite buggy (but it is only a preview release, and the problems are acknowledged on their site). The program crashed repeatedly on me, but you can work around that a bit. Just make sure you hit Command-S regularly to save your in-progress movie, and if/when iStopMotion does crash, you can just start a new film, and then combine the resulting files in QuickTime. But if you don't save, the crashed file will not open properly in QuickTime! Despite the bugs, it's still fun to play with, and it really will get you thinking about all the fun things you could do with your camera and a little bit of time. You'll also want to have a tripod to get the most professional results, as you don't want the camera to move at all between shots.

While clearly not ready for prime time, iStopMotion is a unique, useful, and creative piece of software with potential if they can address the crashing bugs. It doesn't make stop-motion animation easy, but it certainly makes it much easier!
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MaxMenus - A powerful menu creation tool Pick of the Week
MaxMenus iconThe macosxhints Rating:
10 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
I published a review of MaxMenus back in March, but I had sort of lost track of it after a few system upgrades. This weekend, I had some reasons to dig it out and start using it again, and I'd forgotten just how amazing this little preference panel is. Although older versions had some problems with Jaguar, version 1.2 was recently release with full Jaguar compatibility.

Since there's a full review online, I won't go into a ton of detail, but MaxMenus provides a set of four (actually 20, as each one can display different items for each of four modifier keys) pop-up menus, one at each corner of your screen. Each of these menus is fully customizable regarding the items in the menu, whether or not it has submenus, seaparators, text labels, and much more. When MaxMenus is active, you'll see a small color splotch in each corner of your screen; click on the color to activate a pop-up menu.

Although this behavior by itself is pretty impressive, what really makes MaxMenus stand out is the ability to create your own menus and assign them hot keys that work in any application. For example, I have defined a menu with Control-D that simply lists all my drives in a navigable pop-up. So now to file an item anywhere on my system, I click and hold on the item, hit Control-D, and then drag it into the pop-up menu that appeared right next to it. There is no expansion limit on sub-folders, so you can drill down through your entire system.

I have a second menu defined on Control-E that contains one item - my "QuickLaunch" alias folder from the Finder. This folder contains a number of sub-folders called Browsers, Apps, Utils, Games, Graphics, and Documents. Each of these folders contains aliases to key programs and documents on my system. Now when I need to get something going, I just hit Control-E whereever I happen to be, navigate to the item, and open it. No added mouse movements required, it doesn't matter what window is active, etc. Just what I want to use when I want to use it. I use these menus so often that I've actually turned off the corner menus; I can get everything I need with a hotkey at the current mouse position.

MaxMenus has a ton more features than I've covered here, and it has a free 30 day trial, so there's no excuse not to at least try it out. The interface is just a bit daunting at first, given the complexity of everything you can do, but it's worth the learning curve. In short, it's one of the most useful utilities I've tried in the last six months or so...
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  You rated: 2 / 5 (9 votes cast)
 
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ProcessWizard - Control app priorities from the menubar Pick of the Week
ProcessWizard iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
If you like to mess around with your applications' UNIX 'nice' values, which control how the system prioritizes time amongst the running tasks, you might want to check out ProcessWizard. Although I covered this back in January, I felt it was time to give it a turn as the Pick of the Week.

ProcessWizard puts an icon in your menu bar that, when clicked, opens a window showing all of your running applications and their current 'nice' values. You can also switch the display to show background apps, other user processes, and non-user (system) processes such as cron, etc. Next to each icon and item name is a slider; move it to the right to increase the priority level of any item; move it left to decrease the priority level. You can authenticate each time you do this, or click the unlock icon to allow changes without re-entering a password. You can even kill any process by control-clicking on its name or icon.

ProcessWizard isn't perfect; it'd be nice if it remembered your settings for each application, and if it had a "default" button to quickly return an app to a normal setting. Still, it's hard to beat its functionality for $0, and I found a couple of interesting things just by looking at some of the background tasks (for example, my Wacom tablet driver is 'niced' well above normal by default).
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  • Currently 2.22 / 5
  You rated: 5 / 5 (9 votes cast)
 
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iDVD - Easily create professional-looking DVD projects Pick of the Week
iDVD iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
Although I wrote a mini-review of iDVD2 just over a year ago, it's never been featured as a Pick of the Week, which is a bit of an oversight on my part. This weekend I had the chance to use it quite a bit again, and my time with iDVD helped remind me that it's a very impressive piece of software.

iDVD takes away nearly all the complexity behind creating a professional looking DVD project. Although iDVD may not meet the neets of people who make a living creating DVDs (that's what DVD Studio Pro is for!), for nearly everyone else, it should be more than sufficient. iDVD includes a number of very sharp pre-made themes, and allows you to easily create themes of your own. You can have full motion menus, background music, slide shows, and choose from a number of unique button styles, all wrapped in an easy to understand interface. When I used it for the first time last year, I had my first project ready to burn in something less than an hour.

iDVD isn't perfect - there are some niggling glitches with font displays, the handling of slide shows could be improved (there's a 99 slide limit per folder), and you give up a certain amount of creative freedom in exchange for the ease of use (but that's a tradeoff I'll gladly make any day!). But overall, just like iMovie before it, iDVD puts a tool in the general consumer's hands that gives them the abilities that, prior to its release, could only be had in a Pro-level product (with a matching Pro-level degree of complexity).

With the newly announced Superdrive-equipped Titanium PowerBooks, the universe of potential iDVD users has just increased, and hopefully more people will get a chance to see what a nice job Apple has done with this software ... and I can't wait to see what iDVD3 brings to the party, whenever it gets here!
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  • Currently 2.67 / 5
  You rated: 4 / 5 (9 votes cast)
 
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BabelBlox - An addictive blocks-type game Pick of the Week
Babelblox iconThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
This week's Pick of the Week is an entertaining diversion for those times you have a few free minutes. BabelBlox is a block-removal game, but it's nothing like Brickout or any of the other "Pong-style" brick removal games. In the free trial version, your task is to remove bricks of identical color that are touching in either vertical or horizontal directions. The longer the chain of blocks that you remove, the higher your score. You make block colors align by removing blocks of other colors, and gravity then pulls the remaining blocks down to fill the holes left by the others. Complicating this process are special blocks that can destroy a number of their neighbors, and which jump around the grid as you go about your business of removing blocks.

Once you register, you gain access to a number of variants, including "beat the clock" and a very difficult version where gravity reverses after every block removal!

BabelBlox won't change your world, but it's a great way to pass a few minutes of free time. The program takes full advantage of the OS X environment, and even features a dock icon with changing block colors. You can buy the game by itself for $14.95, or buy a five-pack (BabelBlox plus HextriX, MarbleX, MnemoniX and RoX) for $19.95, which seems a great bargain (I've played with MarbleX, a Tetrix type of game, but none of the others).
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  • Currently 1.88 / 5
  You rated: 3 / 5 (8 votes cast)
 
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Chimera - The newest OS X browser Pick of the Week
Chimera iconThe macosxhints Rating:
6 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
Although Chimera has been out for quite a while now, it's only in the newest versions that it's really starting to feel like a 'real' program to me. It still doesn't have everything needed for successful use as my full-time browser (hence the somewhat low score for a pick of the week), but it gets much much better with every minor release. Version 0.6, released about a week ago, is by far the best version yet. I've found myself using it quite often this last week, and so it winds up as this week's Pick of the Week.

Chimera has many of the advantages of Mozilla (it uses their page rendering technology, and it supports tabbed browsing) but it is developed in Cocoa, which speeds its interface greatly (and it should eventually support services). Although I don't have any solid empirical research to back this up, it also seems like pages display much more quickly in Chimera than they do in Mozilla or any of the other OS X browsers (has anyone done any real timed studies?).

So while Chimera may not be ready to become my default browser yet, its progress to date has been amazing, and it is now a very usable product. So here's a word of thanks to the Chimera team for taking the best rendering engine and combining it with what's shaping up to be a very nice user interface!
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iChoose - Global bookmarks and more Pick of the Week
Photoshop Elements iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
iChoose is a preference panel that offers easy access to bookmarked websites from any application. Instead of switching to your browser and navigating its bookmark folder, just pop down the iChoose menu from the main menubar and select the bookmark to be opened. You can also use iChoose to store folders containing folders and items that you want fast access to from anywhere.

Although there are many URL managers out there, in my brief time with it, I've found that I most prefer the iChoose interface. It's easy to understand (drag and drop from the browser into the preference panel), very customizable, and (at least for now) free. About my only real complaints are that you can't add items via a keyboard shortcut and that its menubar icon is not movable.

[Sorry this Pick of the Week is so late; I didn't get it done before this week's trip.]
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Cocoa Gestures - Mouse actions in Cocoa apps Pick of the Week
Cocoa GesturesThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
A while back, we ran a hint on mouse gestures in Mozilla. Mouse gestures are basically motions of the mouse that lead to actions within a program. Sometime last week, someone submitted Cocoa Gestures 1.0 as a potential pick of the week. After looking at the program, I must say I agree. It may not completely change your world, but Cocoa Gestures is a cool little program.

As you might have guessed from the name, Cocoa Gestures gives you mouse gestures in any Cocoa application. Installation is trivial (drag a folder to your Library folder), and gestures are then available to any subsequently launched Cocoa programs. Every Cocoa app will have a new Cocoa gestures menu item in its application menu; this is where you set the gestures and the actions they will perform. You start by deciding what modifier key to use with what mouse button, and then you can add and remove gestures from each app's "gestures dictionary." There are pre-defined gestures for many things, and you can add and delete from the list as you like. As an example, up-down-up in Mail is predefined for "New Message." Hold down your modifier key and selected mouse button, and drag up then down then up, and a new message window springs open.

Cocoa Gestures is harder to explain than it is to use, so give it a try ... if you've never used mouse gestures before, Cocoa Gestures is a very easy way to get acquainted with them.
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  • Currently 1.75 / 5
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