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The Little App Factory - Pay What You Want
Buried amidst Apple's latest announcements is news to make your digital life easier. The Little App Factory, which produces very useful utilities, offered up a "pay what you want" bundle for five of its Macintosh apps via Paddle: Evom, Grappler, Ringtones, RipIt, and iRip. All of the apps work in Mac OS X 10.6 and up. The deal is available until September 27, 2013. The current average price for the five utilities is US$3.45, while the recommended price is $29.00. No matter what you choose to pay, these apps will not disappoint you. Evom, which I confess is free on the site, takes video and converts it to an iOS-compatible format. I've used it to convert YouTube videos, Flash, AVI and WMV files. As The Little App Factory advertises: Drag. Drop. Convert. It's that easy. Grappler, according to The Little App Factory, lets you play and save video or audio off the Web. I've never used it, so I can't tell you anything about it, but you can read about it on the site. It normally sells for $19.95. iRip helps you copy your files off your iPod onto your computer. I've recovered a variety of music libraries from PC and Macintosh formatted iPods, and think iRip works really well. I had tested version 2.0, but 2.1 is the current version now. Normal price is $24.95. RipIt takes your personal DVD library and lets you convert it to iPhone, iPad, or an iPod compatible file. It works well and lets you protect your original media from children's abuse, dog teeth, and any number of other mishaps. Normal price is $24.95. Ringtones lets you take your favorite music and use slices of it as your phone ringer. It works with DRM-free music. I used it to rip a line from Jevetta Steele's "Calling You" from the Baghdad Cafe movie soundtrack. Fun stuff for the normal price of $12.95. This is a bit off topic, but if you want to see Jack Palance and CCH Pounder (Warehouse13) in very non-traditional roles, rent the movie! Paddle offers other bundles also, but I've not bought from them previously. My notice of The Little App Factory deal came via email from Wallpaper Wizard, to which I subscribe.
Evom beta takes up iSquint's mantle, effortlessly converts video formats
While still in beta, Evom (from The Little App Factory, makers of iPodRip) looks ready to pick up where iSquint left off. It easily and quickly converts videos to formats compatible with iTunes, YouTube, your iPod, and Apple TV. It couldn't be a simpler drag-and-drop operation: drop the video on the Evom window, and select a destination. After that, Evom does the heavy lifting and (optionally) adds the finished video to iTunes. The output quality is good -- it uses the same technical foundation as ffmpegX. You get the same high quality without all the fiddly controls of ffmpegX. Evom also includes a bookmarklet that lets you save off YouTube videos to your computer with a single click. The quality of the output there mostly depends on how good the source video is, but it couldn't be easier. iSquint, my favorite "as if by magic" video conversion tool, was discontinued after Techspansion (also the makers of iSquint's bigger brother VisualHub) shut their doors last October. The VisualHub codebase is still being developed, however, in a new project called Video Monkey that Aron covered in March, which is also well worth a look. Evom is in beta, but unlike iSquint, it appears like it may cost something when the final version is released. It also appears limited to converting 60 items until it's registered, and trying to register the app leads to a non-existent shopping cart area. Even so, the simple interface and easy installation will be worth a few bucks to me. [Via Daring Fireball.]
