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After iLife '11: Alternatives to iDVD and iWeb
Over the weekend TUAW is going to be featuring in-depth reviews of the new iLife '11 suite -- or at least the three apps that were updated. As most of you know by now, iWeb and iDVD didn't receive an update at all. In light of that, we've compiled a list of several alternatives to iDVD and iWeb that you may want to try out. From a purely consumer standpoint, I don't think any of these apps offer the ease of use that Apple has so successfully built into iWeb and iDVD, but given that iDVD seems all but abandoned -- as should the MacBook optical drive be -- and the future is uncertain for iWeb, it's always nice to know you have some alternatives. iDVD alternatives: SmallDVD SmallDVD is a simple utility that lets you take any video files and add them to a DVD image ISO which can then be burned onto a DVD using Disc Utility. SmallDVD doesn't have many features, but it will appeal to those of you who want to create very simple DVDs with static background menus. It also has the added benefit of only creating the ISO file which can then be shared to DropBox or iDisk, and then downloaded and viewed on another computer using only the ISO -- no optical drive needed. SmallDVD is a free download.
Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL boost video encoding app by 50 percent
It'll take some time before we see the true impact of OpenCL and the newly-open-sourced Grand Central Dispatch on OS X, but we're definitely intrigued by this early report from Christophe Ducommun, developer of MovieGate, who says that shifting his app to use the new tech has increased performance by around 50 percent on the same hardware. Testing on a 2007 2.66GHz quad-core Mac Pro with a GeForce 8800GT, MovieGate MPEG-2 encode speeds went from 104fps under Leopard to 150fps under Snow Leopard, and decoding CPU usage dropped from 165 percent to 70 percent. Now, yes, that's just one app, and most users don't have four cores to play with, but it's still an eye-opening result, and we're definitely hoping it's the start of a trend. [Via MacRumors]
