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xScope, Fantastical, more available for just $10 in new MacHeist bundle
The latest bundle from MacHeist has just gone live, and it's a good one. There are six apps in the bundle, and they're a steal at a price of just US$9.99: You'll get the great xScope measuring tools for designers, Fantastical's excellent calendar app, Boinx's stupendous iStopMotion, tutorial-maker Clarify, invoice-creator Totals and CleanMyMac 2, which will help clean all sorts of old cache files and cruft out of your system. In addition to those (any one of which is worth the price as-is), the excellent indie game Little Inferno is set to be added to the bundle at 10K sales, and PathFinder should also be added in at some point. Plus, there are two more spaces on the site for more apps, and 10 percent of your purchase will go to charity, so there's quite a few reasons to just go grab it now and treat yourself to some excellent Mac software. And if that's not enough, there's also a Name Your Own Price Mac bundle sale going on over on Stack Social, where you can get 10 more great Mac apps (including CrossOver 12, DiskTools Pro and Paperless) all for a price you name yourself. If you beat the average (currently $7.77), you get all 10 apps, so if you combine this with the MacHeist deal, you could pick up 18 of the best apps on the Mac for under $20. It's a great day to be a Mac owner for sure.
Boinx offers Spring savings on its "Home" products
From now until Monday, May 23, Mac users with a craving to create can save a bundle on iStopMotion Home, FotoMagico Home, or BoinxTV Home when purchased through the Mac App Store. Each product is available for US$9.99 during the sale announced by the German software maker Boinx earlier this week. Boinx's iStopMotion Home transforms your Mac into an animation studio. With it, toys, clay, drawings, or other everyday items can become stars of your own animated hits. It's normally priced at $49. FotoMagico Home allows aspiring photographers to combine photos with music and transitions to create eye-catching slideshows. The non-sale price for this software package is $29. Lastly, BoinxTV Home turns your Mac into a personal TV studio. It's an affordable solution for adding spice to the YouTube videos and video podcasts you create at home. During the sale, BoinxTV Home is discounted from its retail price of $49.99. With prices discounted by up to 80%, this weekend's sale is a good opportunity to try some well-crafted, award-winning titles without devastating your wallet.
Boinx Software's early push on the Mac App Store
Here at Macworld in San Francisco, CA, we had a chance yesterday to sit down with Boinx Software CEO Oliver Breidenbach, both to hear about the new BoinxTV Home, and also to chat about how the company is doing two weeks into the Mac App Store. The company has been quite aggressive with Mac App Store releases, with everything from the $17 utility Mousepose, going all the way up to the $500 full version of iStopMotion Pro. Breidenbach says that App Store sales are going "great" -- while Apple's review process is taking significantly longer than the iOS store (though he suspects that's simply because it's so much newer), what he's seeing is that App Store revenue "looks as if it's on top of existing channels." That is, customers on the Mac App Store aren't the same customers buying Boinx Software through the company's website or other partners, which means that Mac App Store sales, right now, are brand new income. "But," Breidenbach continues, "I don't think it's going to stay that way."
iStopMotion adds tilt-shift effect to animation tool
For hobbyists and weekend filmmakers, playing around with stop motion and timelapse image capture is an enticing way to create memorable movies. On the Mac, the most user-friendly and accessible app for these projects is iStopMotion from Boinx. Starting at US$49 for the basic Home version, iStopMotion makes it easy to animate your furniture, Legos, kitchen items or anything else you happen to have lying about. In the 2.5 version of the product, released this week, Boinx has added one marquee feature that's going to be showing up in a lot of timelapse projects: tilt-shift. You've probably seen some spectacular videos using this effect, which simulates the fine control over focus that was traditionally available only with specialized lenses on still cameras. When the selective focus effect of lens tilt is applied to timelapse footage, the scene appears to be acted out in miniature (check out the work of directors Sam O'Hare and Keith Loutit for great examples). It took Jim Clark weeks of effort to create 30 seconds of tilt-shift music video footage a few years ago, but now you can do something similar on a tabletop. Boinx has also added compatibility with new Canon still camera models and a 'Send to iMovie' option in this version. In the Express and Pro versions of the app, color correction options are now included. Express, at $99, includes several additional features such as rotoscoping, a soundtrack and continuous capture; Pro, at $499, adds the option of full high-definition. Compatible cameras are listed here, and I've had good results with both an old iSight and an IPEVO p2v USB camera. You can see a video demo of 2.5 in the second half of this post. If you're a pro animator or effects artist and iStopMotion isn't powerful enough for your needs, you may want to check out Dragon Stop Motion; it's designed for professional work, with an interface and feature set to match. The $275 app can control lighting, shoot in 3D and more; it even comes with its own USB keypad for fast access to key commands. Happy animating!
Time-lapse tips for your Mac and iPhone
I've been messing around with more video lately, and considering doing some time-lapse work, so this post over at Macworld came at the exact right time for me. Heather Kelly walks you through some options, from expensive to free and complicated to simple, for creating time-lapse pictures and videos on your Mac and iPhone. Some of them we've already heard and written about, including iStopMotion 2 and the great open source Gawker, but there are a few new names in here for me as well. The $2.99 iTimeLapse Pro [iTunes link] and free GorillaCam [iTunes link] apps, both of which let you make some pretty amazing footage straight from your iPhone, are also mentioned. Putting together interesting time-lapse photography is a great skill to have no matter what you're doing -- it can be used to show off your work online or just give you a look at visual trends in whatever space you tend to be studying. It's great that we've got lots and lots of different apps, on both Mac and the iPhone, that help make it easy to assemble this stuff.
iStopMotion 1.10.1
iStopMotion 1.10.1 from Boinx software is out, and it has a cool new feature for Apple Remote enabled Macs. That's right, you can use the remote to interact with the program. The menu button takes a picture (this is a stop motion program, in case you didn't know) and the play button plays the movie you are working on. That's pretty nifty.If you are interested in stop motion photography then iStopMotion is the way to go. There is a free demo and the full version costs $40.
