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Best of 2011 Nominations: Mac photo / video apps
During December and January, The Unofficial Apple Weblog is soliciting your nominations and votes for the best products for Mac, iPhone/iPod touch, and iPad. We'll start with nominations in a category, and then tally your votes for the top-nominated products a few days later. The winner in each category receives the highly-coveted title of TUAW Best of 2011. Today's category for Best of 2011 nominations is Mac photo and video apps. Your Mac can manage thousands of photos and help you to create video masterpieces, so this is a crowded category. You might be a fan of Apple's iPhoto (US$14.99) or Aperture ($79.99) apps. Maybe you love to create HDR images with HDR Darkroom (on sale for $7.99) or apply stunning effects with FX Photo Studio ($9.99). The ease of use of Flare ($19.99) might be more your cup of coffee. Video fans might be excited about Apple's iMovie '11 ($14.99) or Final Cut Pro X ($299.99). Perhaps you're developing screencasts and use either ScreenFlow ($99.99) or Camtasia 2 ($99.99) in your work. Whatever your favorite Mac photo or video app is, we want to hear about it. Leave your nomination in the comments below. This is the last Mac-specific category for the 2011 awards -- tomorrow we'll begin gathering nominations for iPhone apps and accessories. Nominations close at 11:59 PM ET on December 15, 2011.
TUAW's Daily iPad App: ScreenChomp (and Camtasia giveaway)
When most people think about developer TechSmith, they think of the company's big products like Camtasia and SnagIt. Now the company has come out with a fun little app for kids of all ages that brings video screen capture to the iPad. ScreenChomp is a free whiteboard app that captures everything that's drawn on the screen to a video that can then be shared with others. Not only does ScreenChomp work with the whiteboard, but it imports photos from your iPad Photo Library as well. The result? Well, it's really easy to draw a big pirate mustache and dark goatee on just about anyone, record a soundtrack, and have a blast. There's more to ScreenChomp than just fun and games. TechSmith sees this as a tool for teachers to explain concepts and record their drawings and explanations for posterity. The sharing capability is tied to a specific iPad -- there's no account to sign up for, you just tap a button to have the screen capture sent to ScreenChomp.com. ScreenChomp also allows sharing with Facebook accounts, and the URL for your opus on the ScreenChomp website is easily sent to friends or students. For students, they can draw and narrate their own movies for free. The app is extremely simple to use and cutely animated with the ScreenChomp mascot seen in the icon at the top of the post. There's only one downside for parents who show their kids ScreenChomp -- I don't think you'll ever get your iPad back from your child. Giveaway TechSmith has also provided TUAW with two licenses for Camtasia for Mac valued at US$99 each. To have a possibility of winning one of these licenses, keep an eye on the @TUAW Twitter account later this afternoon. We'll post the two product keys at a random time. Once you see one, grab it, download Camtasia for Mac (email required) from the TechSmith website, and then paste in the product key. If you happen to be the first person to use that product key, you're a winner.
Camtasia hits Mac App Store; TechSmith sees sales jump
For capturing screencasts, one of the more widely-used tools is Camtasia from TechSmith. After many years as a Windows-only application, the company brought Camtasia to the Mac world in 2009, and it's been well-received by Mac users ever since. TechSmith recently added Camtasia to the Mac App Store to test the waters, which they found welcoming. The app was listed for a while as a "staff favorite," and the company is reporting that sales of Camtasia have risen over 20 percent since the app appeared in the Mac App Store. TechSmith kept the price at US$99.99, and it's still available directly from the company's website, so the increased sales appear to be coming solely from improved visibility. In addition, TechSmith reports that the Mac App Store seems to be making Camtasia more visible to an entirely new audience. According to a TechSmith spokesman, Mac App Store sales are coming from all over the globe, not just the more traditional US market. We'd love to hear from other Mac developers who have taken the plunge and added their apps to the Mac App Store after selling them through traditional channels for several years. Have you also seen your sales take off? Let us know in the comments.
First Look: Snagit for Mac Public Beta
Switchers were elated earlier this year when TechSmith, developers of the fabulous Camtasia screen recorder application for Windows, finally shipped their flagship app for the Mac. Those switchers were probably also wishing that TechSmith would create a Mac version of their screen capture application, Snagit. Well, their wishes have been granted! TechSmith has announced the public beta version of Snagit for Mac, and a first look at the application shows that it's a worthy screenshot snapper for the platform. The company has made the beta available for feedback on operation and features, so this is a perfect time to download the program and give it a try. After installing the application and launching it, all that is visible is a small "tab" that pops out from the side of the Mac screen when you hover over it. The tab has a drop-down for choosing the capture mode and a red button for taking the screen shot. There are two capture modes -- all-in-one capture and window capture. Window capture mode displays all open windows Exposé-style, and you click on one of the windows to select it for capture. Once captured, it appears in a screen where you can annotate the screenshot in a number of ways, or add effects. At this time, there are no effects and the app shows that the feature is coming soon.
Camtasia for Mac looks like a screencasting powerhouse
It hasn't exactly been a secret that I (and several others at TUAW) have been big fans of ScreenFlow since its release. Up until yesterday, I didn't really think it had much serious competition in the professional screencasting field. That seems to have changed with the release of Camtasia for Mac. At the same $99US price tag as ScreenFlow, Camtasia is offering a very similar interface with some impressive capabilities. Camtasia has long been considered a heavyweight in the PC world, and its Mac debut has been anxiously awaited. While it hasn't exactly reached feature-parity with the PC version, it's been quite a pleasure to try out. Some of the features it's lacking in comparison to its PC counterpart include region recording, narration-only recording and ScreenDraw. However, its capabilities in the area of direct media manipulation are quite well-developed. For a complete feature comparison, check the TechSmith website or grab the comparison PDF. A quick run-through with a review copy convinced me that this is some serious competition for ScreenFlow. One of the coolest features I played with was the SmartFocus action, which can be applied to an entire clip or just a region in the editor. It automatically determines what the point of focus at any given time should be, and zooms that area. Additionally, you can highlight the foreground window, add text and shape callouts, and work with imported media. The only problem I noticed immediately was with changing colors of library elements (arrows, etc.). I haven't figured that out in my brief trial, and haven't had a chance to ask yet. I'm hoping that's not a missing feature, as it seems relatively important to me. A complete array of QuickTime formats can be exported, and presets for YouTube, Screencast.com and iTunes are included. There's a default export which gave me a 10.5MB QuickTime file for a 47-second clip, at a 960x600 resolution. The "Advanced Export" option provides the opportunity to tweak settings and export to all the standard formats. There's some mismatch between the PC and Mac export capabilities, though, making cross-platform projects difficult (file format comparison). Camtasia for Mac requires that all of your video cards be Quartz Extreme-enabled. If you run any USB->DVI hardware, be sure to disconnect it before you launch the application. Also, TechSmith warns against running Perian with Camtasia. I tried it and didn't have any problems -- but it was for a short record/export experiment and I'm guessing they have good reason for pointing out the potential conflict. I would probably heed that advice when working on a more important project. Camtasia for Mac is currently available at the Camtasia website as a free trial, and can be purchased for $99US, or a 5-pack for $495US.
Camtasia coming to Mac on August 25th
If you're wavering on the edge of switching to the Mac as a consequence of the impending release of Windows 7, this may be news that will push you over that edge. In the Windows world, there's an extremely popular app for recording, editing, and publishing screencasts. That application is Camtasia Studio, and today developer TechSmith finally let the world know when the Mac version of Camtasia is going to see light. Beginning August 25th, you'll be able to purchase Camtasia for Mac for only $99. TechSmith plans on keeping this introductory price until the end of 2009, after which the price will bounce up to $149. Details of the Camtasia for Mac release are still extremely sketchy, but TechSmith promises to spill more beans about what the app will do over the next couple of weeks. You can sign up for email updates on the website, or follow the Visual Lounge Blog to get more info. It'll be interesting to see how Camtasia for Mac fares against the existing screencasting champ, ScreenFlow, also available for US$99 and much more established in the Mac community. While we're waiting for Camtasia, why don't you tell us about your favorite screencasting application? Leave a comment below.
Evernote + Screencast ready for prime time and paid use
Two of my preferred Mac-friendly cloud services have now made the jump to actually accepting money from subscribers, which is a good thing (really, it is!). TUAW favorite Evernote has moved from private to public beta, and Techsmith video hosting site Screencast.com is now at 1.0 release status. Both services are now offering trial/free plans alongside their premium plans for paid subscribers. The Screencast.com site is already integrated with the free Jing Project capture tool for Mac and the pro-level (and, at least for the moment, Windows-only) Camtasia Studio app; you can also upload screencasts that you create with almost any tool you like (including ADA multi-winner Screenflow) in a variety of formats for hosting on the service. Selecting which of your screencasts to share and which to password-protect is very easy, and the service automatically sets up RSS and iTunes feeds for the folders you choose to make public.The 60-day trial account includes 200 MB of storage and a 1GB transfer limit; paid plans start at $6.95 a month. Evernote's private beta grew to include over 125,000 users (ahem), and the new public beta includes an option for a $5/month premium user plan that increases your monthly transfer quota/new note cap from 40 MB to 500 megabytes and gives you SSL for all data, priority access to the text-recognition queues and tier 1 customer support. Plus you get a snazzy t-shirt while supplies last (pink elephants on parade!). The web interface to Evernote has also gotten a facelift, with full drag-and-drop support and an improved clipper feature. Can't say yet if they've fixed the session timeout issue that ate a long note my wife was writing last night, but I surely hope so. In a conversation a couple of weeks back, Evernote CEO Phil Libin shared some future directions for the product with us as well as a couple of tips from his personal use of Evernote. First, what many are waiting for will be coming very soon: a native iPhone client for Evernote (shipping shortly after the App Store opens), including one-button publishing to Evernote and location tagging for every item you create from your phone, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading you back to that favorite restaurant or bargain spot. (Phil's tip: whenever he parks his car at the airport, he takes a picture of the parking spot and sends it to Evernote to help jog his jetlagged brain.) Second, the upcoming platform-wide features for Evernote will soon include more granular controls on publishing and sharing, a revamped Windows client, Evernote for Blackberry, and audio notes. (Phil's tip: he uses Evernote notebooks to share collections of photos or screenshots, like this accidental poetry from CNN rundown.) Later this summer we should expect to see the first public release of the Evernote API, which will permit third-party devs to add features to the service (personally I'd love to have a business card postprocessor tool, which Libin sees as a good 3rd party opportunity). Other future features are yet to be publicly disclosed, but Libin hinted that the image-processing power of Evernote's servers may be bent to teasing out specific features of photographs. Faces? Product barcodes? Geotagged landscapes? Can't wait to find out. Meanwhile, the free Mac version of Evernote (read Brett's original review here) is downloadable at evernote.com.
Cinemassively: Getting started with voice chat in Second Life
Torley Linden is a tutorial-making machine! Her how-to's are great for the starting resident of Second Life, but might also teach the older enthusiast a thing or two. If you need instruction on a specific subject, there's actually a video tutorial wiki page.Yesterday, Torley did a whole series of them on voice chat. The video above is on getting started, but she also has videos on who's speaking, etiquette, improving your hearing, private calls, speech gestures, and disabling it for yourself and your land. These clips are in easy to digest lengths of just under one minute to almost four, depending on the complexity of the problem!
Cinemassively: Machiniminute, Episode 2
Yesterday, Juiceof Prunes showed us how to get started on machinima in the first episode of Machiniminute. Today, we'll look at episode two, which focuses on the interface, mice, and arrows. If you're even an intermediate machinimator, these tutorials will probably not tell you anything new. However, they're quite detailed and fairly painless for the person just starting out.Tip #1 in the video tells you how to hide your user interface (UI). I can't stress enough how important this is for your Second Life machinima. Tip #2 explains how to remove the mouse cursor in Fraps. Tip #3 talks about something that I don't believe will affect you when your UI is off, but for those times when you need the UI on, is very useful. In episode three, which is yet to be released, she'll instruct us on camera angles.
Cinemassively: Machiniminute, Episode 1
Second Life resident, Juiceof Prunes, started a cute series of machinima tutorials under her "Pink Paw Productions" label. In the first episode, she focuses on how to get started with machinima. I'm particularly impressed with her use of Camtasia to prepare the video, as well as her easy to follow instructional style. She even uses CrazyTalk to lipsync her character's dialogue.More specifically, episode 1 gets down to the basics. She shows viewers how to log into SL, what program to use to capture, and what settings to use in both Fraps and the SL client. As the series continues, she plans to go more in-depth into the process.
Want to see a Mac version of Captivate? Let Adobe know.
We've mentioned a few screen capture and screencasting apps here recently, but interest in finding new and shiny tools for the job still seems high. There are a couple of possibilities on the porting and development front that might excite the screencast community:First, Jing Project developer TechSmith - long a dominant vendor for Windows screencasting tools - has indicated that further Mac development is in the cards: the Mac plans page says "...we are actively pursuing a Mac version of Camtasia Studio" and evaluating a release of SnagIt for the Mac. I've used Camtasia on the Windows side and I like it, which makes me optimistic for the Mac version's future. You can sign up for email updates at the TechSmith Mac page, or follow the feature request link if there's something you can't live without.On the other side of the fence is Adobe's Captivate 3, a high-end screencasting and presentation tool for Windows that's aimed at instructional designers and training applications. While it's pricey, casual users can leverage it to create podcasts or 'casual learning' environments quickly and easily. There isn't an official roadmap for Captivate development on the Mac yet, but Adobe representatives were clear in a recent conference call on the product: if you want to see Captivate come to the Mac, let Adobe know via the company's feature request form.
