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Daily Mac App: NameChanger
Batch-processing files is a great way to save time. Automator scripts work will for simple jobs, but if you're trying to do something complex like remove or alter the filename of a great many files, a free tool like NameChanger could be a useful addition to your armory. NameChanger takes on file renaming with aplomb. It'll allow you to replace parts of a file name, append or prepend characters to existing file names, as well as add dates, sequences or any other regular expression. It's a little more complex than the likes of Quick File Renamer; but once you get to grips with it, it's a rapid way to process files. One thing that's not that obvious when you first start out, is that to get NameChanger to ignore file extensions in it's processing of your file name, you have to reach into the Options menu and tick the "Hide Extensions" box. That way you can maintain the original file extensions of the files you're processing. Once you've got that down pat, it's just a case dragging and dropping the files you want modified onto the app. You use the drop-down box to select the type of processing you want, type in the characters or select the sequence or date string and hit "Rename." Alternatively, if you want to do it all within the program you can use the "Add," "Remove" and "Clear" buttons on the toolbar. While it's true you can perform all these functions with Automator's file actions, NameChanger brings swift flexibility to your batch-renaming tasks. It's free, so if you're after a file renamer, it's well worth checking out. Thanks for the suggestion Brandon.
Daily Mac App: Image Bucket
You don't realize how important batch processing is until you are faced with 50 photos that need to be resized from 3872 x 2592 to 640 x 480. Processing each photo one-by-one in an image editing app would take an hour. Instead of wasting your time with such a tedious task, you can turn to an app like Image Bucket, which will do all the work for you. Image Bucket is a batch image processing app for OS X. It'll let you resize, flip, rotate and watermark a group of images all at once. You can even change the file format of an image or modify the name of a file by tacking on a prefix or postfix. The app can sit in the dock or at the side of your desktop. You simply select the files or folders you want to batch process and drag them onto the app. This will open a dialog box with all the different resize, rename, and watermark options. Select your option, click start and sit back while the images are processed. The app is pretty fast; a batch of 10 images takes about 5 seconds to process. The batch tool does a good job modifying the images, but it's not perfect. The rename option doesn't fully rename the files. It adds a prefix and a postfix, but won't replace the name. This is inconvenient when you're doing screenshots and want to get rid of the date and time stamp in the image's name. The app also doesn't have any algorithm options for resizing. As a result, the images are not as sharp as they could be. This is fine if the image is going to end up on a general website, not so good if you want it to showcase your photography skills. Overall, I am pleased with Image Bucket. It's a nice companion to Pixelmator which I use for basic image editing. It's fast and always available in the dock which makes it easy to use. And for $3.99, it's priced favorably, too.
Last remaning BlizzCon tickets go on sale at 8:00 p.m. PDT tonight
If you want to go to BlizzCon in October, you have one last window to buy your tickets: 8:00 p.m. PDT tonight. That's 11:00 p.m. Eastern, and 10:00 p.m. Central. This news comes from an announcement on the main page of the WoW website. The announcement further tells us that all the available tickets were sold out within minutes of the Blizzard Store coming on-line this afternoon.Considering there will be a third hall open this year, we believe around 12,000 tickets have been made available (this number has also been reportedly confirmed by phone sales reps), which is 50% more than the 8,000 that were sold last year. The World Wide Invitational that took place in June also sold out very quickly.In the case of the WWI, additional tickets were made available after the primary batch had sold out. However, and this is important, there is no indication Blizzard will do this again.We'll update with any further information when we have it.
Roxio to announce Crunch, a new video conversion app
Looks like VisualHub and iSquint are going to have some competition on their hands, as Roxio on Monday will announce Crunch, their own entry into the software video conversion market. With computer-based video leaving the nest for devices like the Apple TV, the iPod and soon the iPhone, tools that can easily convert video from a plethora of sources and formats are becoming ever the more useful. Roxio looks to make a decent splash in the market with Crunch, as it features their typical UI (which, personally, I detest) and a nice array of features, including batch encoding of multiple files, conversion of DVDs created with Toast, iMovie, and other video editing apps (in other words: it won't rip and encode commercial DVDs), support for a very wide array of video formats including the elusive MPEG-1, presets for specific devices and one killer and rare feature you don't see in many (if any) other apps: encoding from VIDEO_TS files that are ripped straight from a DVD.Still, all this comes at a price: Crunch will cost $50, whereas similar solutions that don't do DVD or VIDEO_TS conversion, like VisualHub, can be had for half that. Still, we'll have to reserve a final judgment until we can get our hands on a copy. Until then, check out our gallery of Crunch screenshots to get a better perspective on whether you should try out a demo.[Correction: VisualHub does convert VIDEO_TS folders as of version 1.1; our apologies.]%Gallery-2967%
iPhoto Batch Enhancer
iPhoto Batch Enhancer is a handy tool that allows you to apply iPhoto's built-in effects to a group of photos, instead of just one at a time. One feature specific for users of iPhoto 5 + 6 is 'Snapshot', the ability to quickly record the slider positions of iPhoto's built-in adjustments panel and save them as a batch adjustment setting for later use. iPhoto Batch Enhancer also works with RAW images so it looks like it can work on just about any format compatible with iPhoto.Compatible with versions 2-6 (the latest) of iPhoto, this handy tool is also a Universal Binary for all the Mactel owners out there. iPhoto Batch Enhancer is donationware and available from feroXsoft.
