disco
Latest
"Deluxe" boxed edition of Disco available
Disco is the multi-session media burning application that features pretty "smoke" (that I've never gotten to work), automatic indexing, support for VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders and more (we've written about Disco several times). It's $30US as a download, but soon will be available as a $40US "deluxe" boxed edition. What do you get for $10US? Bundled CD and DVD disc labeling software that includes several templates (you can make your own as well). As for me, I'm content to grab a Sharpie.Disco requires OS 10.4.3 or later.
Disco hits 1.0
Everybody's favorite funk-inspired disc burning application, Disco has hit version 1.0 and features a wealth of new enhancements and additions. With improved disc naming, a beefed-up Discography function, and minor interface enhancements, Disco 1.0 has seen a wealth of improvements to warrant the $15 price tag. Oh, and the infamous Smoke interface now works on almost any Quartz Extreme-capable Mac. The demo version limits users to seven complete disc burns, and the software requires OS X 10.4.3. Folks who participated in the beta testing should be eligible for a free upgrade to 1.0. Dare I say 'groovy'?
Countdown to Disco.app 1.0
Disco, the media burning application that people either love or despise, will finally be released as version 1.0 in just over a week. An official countdown timer has been added to the developer's blog to help you keep track.I've used Disco and I've got no major complaints. Sure, I could just use Toast, but Disco is less expensive. Plus, I like the database feature. As of this writing, the introductory price of $14.95US is still available. Disco requires Mac OS 10.4.3 or better.Thanks, Gerardo.
TUAW Podcast #15: The Delicious Cast
Fire up your favorite audio players ladies and gentlemen, for TUAW Podcast #15 is live and ready for consumption. This time around it was Laurie Duncan, Scott McNulty and I, and I'm delighted to say we have dramatically improved our recording setup to give you a much, much better and cleaner listening experience. Leaving iChat + GarageBand in the dust, we opted for Skype and the fantastic Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba, and we sound worlds better, if I may say so myself (though to their credit, Apple seems to be the only one who has mastered two-click audio chat recording, complete with separate channels in GarageBand for each participant). Also, Scott and I were both using Blue Snowballs for our mics, and Laurie's is in the mail.Moving right along, we dub this The Delicious Cast because it was more of a chat about this brewing topic of The Delicious Generation, a term borne out of a post Paul Kafasis at Rogue Amoeba wrote concerning recent aspects of the Mac community like macZOT, Disco, My Dream App and MacHeist, as well as their relationship to Mac OS X's seemingly wayward UI and the recent discussion amongst developers at C4. Paul and many others have been philosophizing over what all these things mean for the community and the future of Mac OS X's usability, so the three of us decided to weigh in, podcast style. I just noticed, by the way, that Paul issued a follow-up to his original post, in case you're down for some more reading on the topic.This time around, the podcast weighs in at just over 23MB and 25 minutes. As always, you can grab it via direct link here, our iTunes Store podcast directory or with our dedicated podcast RSS feed. Enjoy, and be sure to drop us some feedback in the comments!
Behind The Scenes with the Disco Icon
Regardless of what one might think about Disco as a functioning application, it's hard to deny that the latest app from the Madebysofa crew certainly has a unique look to it, and it is spiffy to boot. For the Disco application icon, designers Jasper Hauser and Hugo van Heuven collaborated to create something that I think deserves almost as much praise and attention as the application itself. Jasper has been kind enough to recount for us on his blog how the icon came to be, and the thought processes behind it.
Dissing Disco
Rory Prior has some not-so-nice things to say about Disco, and I agree with most of his assessment. While everyone else seems to be jumping on the Disco bandwagon, I'm hopping off. Disco is a CD/DVD burning app that positions itself as a viable, better-looking and much less expensive replacement for Roxio's Toast. After spending a week with Disco, I am once again hungry for Toast. Rory says Disco is the "triumph of eye candy over usability." That's a good start at what's wrong with it, but the much-hyped "eye candy" itself really proves the point that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To my eyes, this is one ugly app. Its looks actually make it less usable, in fact. Smoke screens and shooting flame effects don't impress me much when the app doesn't do what it is intended to do exceptionally well - and Disco really fails at that task. Disco is a triumph of is hype over deservedness. Let me add that I was one of the many who pre-ordered Disco when it first started it's viral marketing campaign. For $5 I'm not saying I didn't get my money's worth, but I wouldn't have purchased it at any price had I tried the beta demo before handing over the cash.One of the first things that struck me is that the UI is inconsistent and confusing. The glossy black-and-gray translucent theme is only interesting to look at for the first 5 seconds of the first launch. After that I found myself staring at it and noticing how unappealing it really was. Thinking an app's UI is ugly normally wouldn't dissuade me from using it as long as the app performed well, but It took me a good minute to figure out how and at what point to name the disc I was about to burn, which is not a good sign. In fact, the very first disc I burned ended up being named "Untitled" because I forgot to name it at all. I wouldn't have forgotten if Disco had prompted me at some point or had a visually obvious place for me to have named it. But with all that translucent black and gray everything just looks muddy on my busy desktop and the title field just blends in with the rest of it.Prior also says he's impressed by Disco's "simplicity and functionality." But I don't see it as being simplistic or functional - at least not in the ways I've come to expect from a media burning application. The second thing to strike me was that Disco didn't recognize my .toast image as an image and instead burned it as a straight data file. Once again, there was no obvious prompt at any point to alert me to exactly what kind of disk I was about to burn. The DMG file I tested was recognized properly and I suspect I could have renamed the .toast file to avoid the first issue, but I shouldn't have to. If Disco is going to compete with Toast in any meaningful way, it should at least recognize Toast images and know what to do with them.The one feature I do like is the Discography function, which could be very helpful, although I will admit to not having even really played with it yet - but the Spandex feature for spanning data across multiple discs failed miserably for me every time, splitting up groups of data in odd ways, wasted a lot of disc space and didn't allow me to split a single file across multiple CDs. Before I get flamed to high heaven, I am fully aware that Disco is currently in BETA and it's not a final release candidate. Some of my gripes may be addressed in future builds. The above isn't intended to be an in-depth review, either. But Disco toots its own horn the loudest about the user interface and that's the one feature that makes it hardest for me to use. The visual effects are impressive from a development standpoint but they seem to focus more on form and far less on function. Here's to hoping Disco dances its way into better shape before version 1.0.
Who Is Hubert?
Strange things have been afoot in the Mac shareware community over the past few days; manifested by the cute-as-a-button icon you see to the right popping up on multiple different sites. All we know about this cute lil' guy so far is that his name is Hubert.Oh, and he doesn't want us to talk about him.It's probably safe to say that Hubert is the brainchild of Mac Marketing guru Phill Ryu, and developer Austin Sarner of Disco and AppZapper fame is probably involved as well. If I had to hazard a based on what information we have, I'd say Austin is working on a new application, and a fun one at that. Maybe the OS X equivalent of BonziBUDDY? At this point, we can't do much more than speculate, but perhaps you readers will do some digging and find some info that I might have missed. Good luck!UPDATE: Changed the link in the middle of the post because apparently it now links to a porn site. Gotta love the internet. Link now goes to something a little more apropos.
The Cocoa Conundrum
When it comes to software on the Mac platform it's a mixed bag. I don't mean like on Windows, where the bag is full of snakes, scorpions, rusty blades, and the occasional bit of peach. Software on the Mac has been in flux for a decade. When Apple bought NeXT, most of us figured Copland was dead in the water (and it was). Personally, I wish we'd seen OpenDoc come to fruition, but that comes from years of dealing with bloatware. OS X pushed the "Classic" Mac OS further and further into the shadows, until, with the advent of Intel Macs, it's pretty much dying off... Read the fine print on these Leopard features for developers, and you'll realize how dead "Classic" really is. Perhaps we should call it "Relic."Now ask anyone (well, almost anyone) who's coded Cocoa apps and they'll tell you it's lovely. Shoot, Apple's so proud of the frameworks they provide for devs, they even touted a new one, Core Animation, as one of the 10 things coming in Leopard. But we're still living a dual-existence (triple or quadruple or more, if you get technical) in that you have Cocoa apps, and you have the non-Cocoa apps. Perhaps you know about Java, which is what Limewire uses. Or X11's ability to run apps like GIMP. Both of those have their quirks. Java apps can be all over the place, and X11 doesn't integrate the UI of OSX, among other issues. Carbon is a mix of old-skool API's (implemented in good ol' C if I recall), and permeates Mac apps like Office and Photoshop, where a teardown/rebuild would be too unwieldy. There's also the fact that key apps like Finder and QuickTime are Carbon enough to still have some legacy code from way back when, which might account for some of their quirks too... No holy wars about Cocoa vs. Carbon, OK? I'm with David Weiss on this one. So you have Cocoa, Carbon and everything else.Getting granular for a moment, look at a tale of two browsers: Safari vs. Firefox. Safari is a Cocoa app, and it is tightly integrated with OS X tools. It maintains the ability to look up words in the Dictionary app with a right-click, and access the OS X Keychain. Firefox is not a (full) Cocoa app, and you can't niftily use a keyboard shortcut to look up a word, nor will it store passwords in Keychain. I've learned to use this "wall" to my advantage. Since the passwords are stored differently, I can automatically log in to systems (like gmail) using two accounts simultaneously. I use my business gmail on one browser, and personal on the other. Unfortunately, you're limited to 3, as all Firefox-based browsers will share their version of Keychain, and all Webkit-derived browsers use Keychain. I say three, because Opera stands alone (and doesn't always play nice with Gmail). There's the conundrum: to the average user, they don't care, but when little non-Cocoa quirks appear, they scratch their heads and wonder why the Mac doesn't just "do stuff" one standard way.Keep reading for my take on shareware, freeware, and malware in OS X...
Free Disco for your friends!
But... only if you took advantage of yesterday's macZOT offer! I see as of this morning Disco is still available for $14.95, so maybe the freebie is still valid. Apparently when you register, the surprize (sic) is revealed: another license to give away to a friend. That's a brilliant way to spread the love. If I buy a copy today, I'll update this post if the freebie is still available. Considering Disco's fantastic UI, cool tricks, and excellent implementation, what's going to happen to venerable (and for a while, pretty much standard) Toast? If they don't at least drop the price I'm not sure what advantages it would offer. I'd like to see El Gato build some support for Disco too, boy that'd be cool.Thanks, Timmay.
Disco public beta and today-only macZOT price
Disco, the new burning app with so much buzz, has transitioned from a private beta to a public one. We've covered our fair share of Disco already, but to summarize: it has burning features that place it somewhere in between the Finder and Roxio's $99 Toast 7. One feature I didn't know about before though is Discography, a built-in search engine that lets you search through all the files you've previously burned. Users can search when the file was burned, when it was last edited, and to what disc it was burned - now that's innovation, boys and girls.However, today is the last day Disco can be had for the introductory price of $14.95. While you can purchase at this price straight from Disco's site, macZOT is running one of their zany deals where three lucky buyers will win a Lacie DL DVD Burner with LightScribe, and some sort of a bonus is included with every purchase. You'd better hurry though: as of this writing you have just under 14 hours to hop on the Disco + macZOT bandwagon, and after today, Disco's price rises to $24.95.
Disco beta is out
Disco, the new burning software that's been blazing a name for itself, has entered a more or less public beta. Those who pre-ordered through a MacZOT that was featured not long ago should be receiving ticket numbers with which they can redeem a beta download, otherwise you can email beta [at] discoapp.com to see if Jasper Hauser and crew will randomly select you for a lucky download of your own.If you're interested in seeing more of this $14.95 piece of burning shareware check out the Disco blog for more screenshots and explanations on what the developers are shooting for. It's a pretty impressive app, both from feature and UI standpoints, and definitely worth a look if the Finder's burning abilities leave you wanting, while Toast's ridiculous 'discounted' price of $80 leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.Thanks Nik
Disco revealed
Lots of people emailed us about Disco, the new app from the folks behind AppZapper and MacZot and we didn't post about it. Why? Because there was very little information about the app, other than it was supposed to be super cool.This all changed recently, though, since some screenshots were posted to the Disco blog. Disco is a disc burning utility that tries to make burning discs easy and fun, and it is taking aim at Toast. Check out the screenshots for more info.
MacZot and Disco ask you to trust them
MacZot and the guys behind AppZapper are asking all you hard working readers to fork over your cash for a yet-to-be-announced application by the name of Disco. The idea is you get in early at a price way below what the app will eventually cost; and you get access to the private beta.Not much is known about Disco other than a few small screenshots, some hints given on the MacZot page, and some super-seekrit classified info (italicized for your reading pleasure) that I've been able to acquire from an anonymous source. What we know it does:- 3D particle effects- Motion sensing- Sound sensing - At times, the app icon will begin smoking as an indication of certain application activityAccording to my source, a lot of effort has been put into making Disco look really, really good. Although it might sound that Disco is just a lot of fluff, I can assure you that it does serve a real purpose, and does do something useful. I just cant tell you what that something is.
