Circle Six on Multimedia Apps

As the final post in our software roundup, I’m going to cover a few of our favorite shareware and freeware multimedia applications. I’m going to go very light on audio, since Randy handles most of our audio needs on a PC platform. He keeps talking about switching, but for the time being I don’t have a reason to explore much in the way of audio, besides working with my iPod, which I will cover. But there are quite a few handy design, image and video apps out there for Mac, so I’m just going to highlight a few…

This list got a little long for my usual format of icons, but I’m sure you’ll get along without them.

Design

Color Schemer Studio

I’ve blogged about Color Schemer before. There are quite a few color wheel apps out there, and even some very good online apps to choose from (kuler comes to mind), but I find Color Schemer Studio to be simple and highly effective.

You Control: Fonts

If you have a ton of fonts, this can be handy. It’s kind of a personal preference piece of software, but I mention it because it provides some really good visual feedback when choosing fonts, and saves me a lot of time scrolling through my lists. It also provides a consistent font selection interface across design programs from different developers.

ViewFontX

The site sums it up: “Ever wondered how to type a certain character from a certain font that you need? Well, wonder no more with this handy utility! This small application allows you to view every ASCII character (in any size, font and style you select) of any installed font, and will also show what the exact keystrokes are needed to type the character! You can also print these handy tables for quick reference. This is a must have utility and only $5 shareware!”

Lineform

I can’t say I own or frequently use Lineform. It made the list because I have friends who speak highly of it. I own Illustrator and I don’t do a ton of vector work to begin with, so I haven’t had reason to explore it. I apologize if listing software I don’t use seems irresponsible ;-).

Image

EasyCrop

For simple image cropping and sizing, jpeg conversions, sharpening and great screen capture utilities, Easy Crop is the best I’ve found. It’s small, lightweight and does what it claims extremely well. I love the drag and drop interface. Just as an example, I can capture a portion of the screen with a crop tool, type in a size to scale it to, and drag it right into TextMate and have it uploaded to my blog. No files on the desktop or anywhere else! Yellow Mug Software also offers a batch processing tool and some other goodies. For a lot of menial image tasks, small utilities like these mean there’s no need to open Photoshop and go make coffee while it loads.

Pandora

If you scour the net for images, Pandora is amazing. You can set it to search Flickr for Creative Commons images with a minimum size and pull in all kinds of great images based on your search terms. It’s configurable and extensible and I expect that development will continue to improve on a great product.

Paparazzi!

There are quite a few tools for doing what Paparazzi! can do, but I love this little program. It captures full web pages by scrolling the page and lets you set a minimum width for the capture. You just type in an address and hit capture, and you get a screenshot. There are bookmarklets for capturing right from your browser, and it’s an excellent way to keep an archive of changes to a website.

Dimensionizer

This isn’t a capture or manipulation tool, but a handy utility for anyone working with images. It just adds an item in your right/control click context menu when you click an image that tells you the image’s dimensions. Quick and easy, no need to open Info.

Video

iSquint

I like to carry my video work on my iPod to show potential clients that I meet in my wanderings. iSquint is a free utility that makes converting video into an iPod format quite painless. It can do H.264 and it’s pretty darn fast.

Flip4Mac WMV Products

I don’t heart Quicktime for a lot of reasons, and I don’t heart Windows Media even more. I know that didn’t make any sense, but I think you understood it (because you and I, we’re on the same wavelength). But I have to deal with both, and Flip4Mac products let me not only play WMV files in Quicktime, but for a little green, I can send WMV files from Final Cut Studio to Randy for use in Acid and other PC programs that just loathe Quicktime (despite what the manual says).

Kinemac

This one is fun. It’s easy, and you can do a lot of cool tricks when you combine it with a program like Motion or Final Cut. Yes, there are some high end apps that can do a lot more and do it better, but Kinemac is a favorite of mine for making 3D visuals that impress clients for reasons that we may never understand. The latest version has added quite a few new features, so check it out. It’s a free upgrade if you already own it.

iStopMotion

I keep renewing my trial of iStopMotion and always promise that when I get around to making my epic stop-motion movie, I’ll buy it. It’s great stop-motion software, especially if you use the more expensive version and work with a good digital camera instead of DV video.

VLC

This is one great video player. Be sure to check out MacRabbit’s VLC Makeover.

HandBrake

HandBrake is a free DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. It comes in handy on occasion, although I’m not promoting any illegal activities.

MPEG Streamclip

“MPEG Streamclip is a powerful video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies.” I use Streamclip a lot. I love it, it’s free and it’s saved more than a few video projects for us.

Audio

Audio Hijack Pro

Like I mentioned at the top of the article, I’m not the audio engineer. When I do need to record, process or do anything that I don’t feel like using Garage Band or Soundtrack Pro for, Audio Hijack has been a great tool.

Senuti

Does it upset you that iTunes erases your iPod when you sync with a new machine? Try this.

iPodDisk

Better iPod mounting for OS X.

Tangerine

This is a fun little tool for making BPM based playlists automatically. It’s not extremely accurate in determining BPM with my mp3 collection, but it does make some very interesting mixes.

Skip Checker

And this is just for fun. If I don’t like the song that comes on while I’m working at my laptop, I can (gently) smack it and skip to the next track.

Well, I think that’s it for the software roundup. It’s far from listing every program on my hard drive, but that was kind of the point. I get sick of reading lists that just go and list a ton of software for the sake of listing software. If I wanted that, I’d just head over to & Games">MacUpdate or VersionTracker. Which I do, regularly, but this was meant to be my own personal list of what I’ve found that actually works. I hope that it serves its purpose and that you find it useful. If you discover a great new program, then I’ve done what I set out to do. If you disagree with something on my list, or know of something better, I’m always happy to hear you out.

Enjoy.

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