#201 4 yr Giveaway SW, FIOS, SCummVM, Boxer

4 year anniversary giveaway is coming up – send an email to [email protected] with the title “anniversary” to enter. Sponsors of the giveaway are: Smile on My Mac, Dare to Be Creative, Reggie Ashworth, Ambrosia Software, Coding Mammoth, Rogue Amoeba, flip4mac, a href=”http://www.bruji.com/dvdpedia”>Bruji, synium.de, reinventedsoftware.com, Screencasts Online, Shirt-Pocket, and ScreenSteps. ConnorP gives us a review of Verizon FIOS for TV, internet and phone service. ScreenSteps webinars to jump start your learning at bluemangolearning.com/webinars. GazMaz tells the tale of how he had to get a Windows ME machine on the internets. BJ tells us about SCummVM from scummvm.org & Boxer from boxerapp.com. In Chit Chat Across the Pond, Bart thanks George for the gift and the listeners for their kind words, we revisit Aperture several months in – what we like and don’t like.

Listen to the Podcast Once (1 hr 15 min)

Today is Sunday April 26th, 2009 and this show number 201. Rather than a let down after show number 200 I’m still on a high! I keep going back and replaying the wonderful recordings sent in and I feel warm and fuzzy all over again! But I promised you that the 4 year show would be all about you, not me.

4 year anniversary giveaway
A lot of you have already entered the contest to win free software for the four year anniversary giveaway show, but I really want to encourage everyone to join in the fun because the developers are being CRAZY generous with this. Seriously, we have 1700 worth of software to give away! I’m going to get you really excited about it by listing out some of the software that will be in the giveaway, then I’ll remind you how to get your name in the drawing.

This whole giveaway was actually Jean MacDonald’s idea from Smile on My Mac! Out of the blue she offers me a copy of the Mac Switcher Bundle to give away. The Mac Switcher bundle includes TextExpander from Smile On My Mac, the fantastic tool for writing out your repetitive phrases with short keystrokes, 1Password from Agile Web Solutions that has made creating and using complex passwords a cinch, Witch from Many Tricks Software which adds Windows-like window switching to the Mac (that’s hard to say, but VERY useful to switchers or sliders!) and the last piece that holds it all together is a 10 video series of switcher videos made by the great Don McAllister of Screencasts Online. He teaches how to set up your Mac, use Preview, Automator, Pages and Numbers, make movies with iMovie ’08, and even how to master TextExpander and 1Password.

Philip from Dare to Be Creative (creativebe.com) has donated FIVE copies of the following software: iArchiver which is a is a powerful, easy-to-use tool to hande archive and Zip files on Mac OS X, Sponge which helps you free up disk space by ridding it of unwanted applications, finding duplicate files, and locating disk hogs. ResizeMe which you heard reviewed here on the show which is a powerful, easy-to-use batch image editor for Mac OS X. And finally my favorite recipe application Yum!

Great friend of the show Reggie Ashworth has graciously donated 3 copies of AppDelete. now AppDelete is the least expensive software in the giveaway but is one of the most crucial utilities I have on my Mac. you know how I abuse my machines, leaving them running for months on end without a reboot, adding applications as often as most people brush their teeth, ok, probably more often than that. How do I keep my machine running so smoothly with this kind of abuse? I never delete an app by hand, I always use AppDelete. I keep it in the top of all my finder windows and I drag the apps up there when they’ve outlived their usefulness to me, and it’s such a joy to hear AppDelete as it finds all the little crapola that the apps would have left behind, all popping into the trash bin!

Ambrosia Software is one of the top Mac developers around and I’m always astounded at how approachable they are, great folks, really responsive to questions. Anyway, I do every Chit Chat Across the Pond using WireTap Studio which allows me to record Bart and I on separate channels which means I can change our volume after the recording, I can apply filters to us separately, and do non-destructive editing. There’s so much more to this tool than I even use! As if that weren’t enough, they’re going to throw in their new Soundboard product which isn’t out quite yet, but which will provide a simple way to enhance your podcasts or broadcasts with sound clips, effects, or musical accompaniment.

Jelle De Laender from Coding Mammoth has generously donated 10 copies of QuickScale! In case you don’t remember from my enthusiastic review, QuickScale is designed to let you scale a large amount of pictures to a desired size and format – read and write to almost every format supported by your Mac. when I tested it it was fast (20 photos in under 2 seconds) and did a great job of mixed scaling and including a watermark and it even lets you save droplets of your favorite options.

Another application that is a critical piece of my podcasting process is Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba. I use it to hijack the audio from Garageband and then pipe it into Soundsource and over into Ustream so the chatroom can hear what I’m hearing in Garageband. This sounds complicated but with Audio Hijack Pro it’s a set it and forget it process! Of course that’s not all Audio HiJack Pro can do – it can basically record ANY audio your Mac is playing, including scheduled recordings so if you have an internet radio show you want to record, AHP is the tool you want. Thanks Paul for your generous donation to the giveaway!

Steve travels pretty often and he likes to take his MacBook Air with him on the plane to watch movies amongst other things, but of course the MBA doesn’t have a DVD player. I like to travel with my MacBook Pro too, but I don’t want to carry a bunch of DVDs with me anyway. We solved this problem by buying a family pack license of Drive-in from flip4mac. Drive-In lets us make an exact bit for bit copy of our DVDs, not breaking copy protection at all, and it only takes a little under a half hour to copy them too! The night before Steve runs off he hands me 3 or 4 DVDs, i make Drive-In copies of them on an external drive, and then he drags them from the drive into the MBA. he deletes them when he gets back to save disk space, but we still have them on the external drive for the next trip. Janet from Flip4Mac gave us a copy of Drive-In for the giveaway, but that’s not all! She also threw in a copy of VideoCue, which is the software I tested that lets you have a teleprompter for doing a video podcast. I had a lot of fun with VideoCue, some lucky listener will enjoy it too. But wait, there’s more, she’s also giving away a copy of Flip4Mac WMV Studio which not only lets you play Windows Media files in Quicktime, it lets you import WMV for conversion to QT formats, AND export WMV using fixed present encoding profiles. If you have to live around windows users, and let’s face it, who doesn’t? you’ll find Flip4Mac WMV Studio a very useful tool.

So remember the really long review I did about DVDpedia from Bruji for cataloging your DVD collection, and then that was then followed by about 128 people telling me even more cool things it could do? and then remember people wrote in about how cool Bookpedia was too? Well Nora from Bruji has decided that you guys deserve 3 copies of DVDpedia and 2 of Bookpedia! I think she’s nuts, but it was her idea!

I’ve tested out a lot of video screen capture tools and the simplicity and ease of Screenium really fits my needs. With Screenium capture everything that’s happening there, including mouse pointer, selections and movements — in real-time! Describe what you are doing on-screen, with on-the-fly voice recordings and iSight Picture-in-Picture. Nils knew that this would be a popular giveaway so he’s giving us TWO copies of Screenium and he also threw in a copy of MacFamilyTree. There’s been a hole in the Mac development community in the area of family tree software – it used to be that the only good options were for Windows, I know because my friend Nancy went on a hunt for one years ago and couldn’t find anything fun. Now with MacFamilyTree you get a modern family tree app that makes really vivid diagrams, not static old pages. Check out these cool tools at synium.de.

I’ve mentioned a few hundred times that I use Feeder to create the feed file for my podcast. I even use it for creating all of my html for my looong SHOWNOTES because it makes it so easy to insert images, and links. Steve Harris of reinventedsoftware.com is one of my favorite developers – so incredibly responsive. 95% of the time his answer to my questions involves him politely telling me where in the menus the thing I’m asking for is, but that 5% of the time I do find something he’s just as responsive. He also makes software called Together, which is a place to keep your “stuff” with intelligent auto-tagging, nesting of groups into folders, web page groups, tabs you can edit and rearrange. I’ve been using Togethersince it was called KIT, and it’s really useful. So here’s the deal Steve offered, if you win a Reinvented Software package you get your choice of Feeder OR Together, since Feeder is kind of a niche product. Either way you’ll really enjoy what you win!

It’s hard to learn how to use all this software, reading manuals – who reads manuals? How about having it spoon fed to you by the great Don McAllister of Screencasts Online? Don creates beautiful high def videos teaching not only how to use the tools but why you might want to use a certain tool. I kid Don that if I watch one of his tutorials I HAVE to buy the software! How do you think I ended up buying MacHeist? Well Don is giving away a six month subscription to his fantastic ScreenCasts Online for our four year giveaway!

When you’re all done downloading software and learning how to use it from Don and creating all kinds of amazing content, what is the only thing missing? Backups of course! Dave from Shirt-Pocket is donating a copy of the fantastic backup software SuperDuper! Every saturday after I record with Bart i just plug in my hard drive, hit SuperDuper! and I know I have a safe backup of my recording so Bart doesn’t holler at me for accidentally deleting it! And remember the TWO TIMES last year my hard drives failed? Did I kill myself because I lost precious photos or my NosillaCast archives? Heck no, because I had them backed up on SuperDuper! And you know those offsite backups I’ve finally started to do? How do you think I do it? With SuperDuper of course!

And you know that no NosillaCast giveaway would be complete without a giveaway of ScreenSteps, the most fabulous documentation software I’ve ever used. take screen snapshots with ease, annotate, throw in some written instructions and hit one button to get beautiful PDF or html documentations. Easy peasy as research assistant Niraj would say (who actually FOUND ScreenSteps for me in the first place!) Not one, not two, but three lucky listeners will receive a free copy of ScreenSteps Pro from Greg & Trevor!

So how do you get your hands on some of this Mac software goodness? Just send an email to me at [email protected] with the title “anniversary” to enter the contest. I’ve gotten a lot of entries so far but we have a TON of prizes to give away as you’ve just heard, so be sure to enter soon! One of the unexpected benefits of doing the giveaway is that so many people who’ve never made contact before are writing in lovely notes about the show! So get your entry in right away so you make the drawing and win one of these fabulous prizes!

Connor on FIOS
Connor from the International Mac Podcast and connorp.me brings us his review of getting Verizon FIOS for TV, Phone, and Internet service. He’s slightly jazzed about it!

==============INSERT CONNOR P=========================
Thanks for the review Connor, I knew the broadband speeds were amazing, I had no idea it would make such a difference in TV! Weird that you can’t change the DNS settings, and how very odd that you can only do G on the wireless. I wonder if you could daisy chain an N router off of it? I had trouble doing that for some friends of mine here who have Verizon FIOS, I read online how to do it but it was a MAJOR hack and I didn’t want to risk it on THEIR network! I asked Connor what services he used beforehand that he was able to save $80/month and he told me it was Verizon DSL for Internet, Verizon for land line phone, and comcast for TV service. He said they threw in the phone service for free when they switched to FIOS and with free long distance and caller ID. They even got WAY more HD channels. Aw man, i never should have played this, Steve’s going to make me change to FIOS now! it’s not that I don’t WANT twice the download speed, a better phone service and more HD channels for less money, it’s just all the hassle of doing a switch like that!

ScreenSteps
One of the fun things about advertising for ScreenSteps is that as each of you buy this incredible tool for making tutorials, you send me things you’ve created and they’re NOT all tutorials. I think the most creative one so far is how George from Tulsa uses it to keep track of the bills he’s paid using online bill pay. He still enters the info into Quicken later but in the mean time he has a snapshot and notes about the payment saved. Very cool idea!

ScreenSteps went live with version 2.5 which is a HUGE enhancement from 2.0 that you should definitely download right away. It’s a free upgrade and it includes a bunch of productivity enhancements from how the icons are arranged, how to flip from lesson to lesson, how to move steps around, and they’ve even added the ability to throw text on top of a graphic. If you’d like to learn more about how to use ScreenSteps, don’t forget to check out their upcoming webinars at bluemangolearning.com/webinars on Tuesday April 28th at 9am and 2pm Eastern time. If you’re hearing this after the 28th, you can still go over and watch the recorded version!

When you go over to screensteps.com to actually buy ScreenSteps, be sure to enter the coupon code NOSILLA to get 25% off! Think of all that happiness for around $30 or $45 for the Pro version!

Gazmaz
==============INSERT GAZMAZ================
this week I’m joined by Gazmaz, well known for his entries to the Mac Reviewcast and For Mac Eyes Only Podcast to tell his story of adventure and intrigue trying to put a Windows ME box on broadband. it’s a great story.

BJ on SCummVM & Boxer
========INSERT BJ====================
Hello to the Nosillacast listening audience! This is BJ from North Carolina chiming in once again with 2 very cool applications that solved 2 very real problems for me and I wish to pass them on for people who have the same problem that I did.

My problem was that I had a bunch of old DOS games that I used to play a lot. On top of that, I have a copy of the floppy disk version of The Secret of Monkey Island, one of the old LucasArts point-&-click adventure games. The problem is, how does one launch all these older games with the greatest of ease on a Mac? It should just work, to steal a term from Steve Jobs. Enter the two applications that make it absurdly easy to play those old games again: ScummVM, from scummvm.org, and Boxer, from boxerapp.com.

Let’s first look at ScummVM, from scummvm.org. Every old LucasArts point-&-click adventure game used an underlying engine called SCUMM, which stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (which, incidentally, was the very first game to use this engine). Several years ago, a few open-source developers figured out how to run these old games inside an interpreter (namely, ScummVM), while forcing users to bring their own games. ScummVM now runs much more than just the old LucasArts titles, including titles from Humongous Entertainment, Revolution Studios, and more. Now ScummVM runs on many more systems than just your PC or Mac. You can run it on most Linux distros, a jailbroken iPhone, a Sega Dreamcast, a Nintendo DS (with homebrew card), a modified Playstation 2, your old Amiga, and many more.

Next, let’s look at Boxer, from boxerapp.com. This app is still in beta, but you wouldn’t know it if you started running some of the older games. I have thrown a number of games into this app, and every single one absolutely works like a champ. I’m shocked I have been able to throw games at this app and they actually work. Here’s how Boxer works. Boxer is based on DOSBox, an open source DOS (or Disk Operating System) emulator. Basically, Boxer is an app whose sole purpose is to take the pain, fuss, and fiddling out of playing old DOS games. Once your game files are inside the Boxer package (whether installed from a CD or from a folder on your computer), you double click them inside Mac OS X and you are off to the races! You can go to dosbox.com and click on the games tab at the top of the page to check the compatibility of your favourite old games.

So, this is BJ from North Carolina signing off until next time! Happy 200th Nosillacast, Allison!

Honda Bob
Thanks to Evan for the Honda Bob commercial today! Call Honda Bob at (562)531-2321, email him at [email protected]. HDA Bob’s Mobile Service is not affiliated with Honda, Acura or Honda Worldwide.

Chit Chat Across the Pond

Thankyous:

• Bart – Thanks so much to all the lovely comments form people on the 200th show – great show!
• Bart – Thanks so much to George from Tulsa for an exceptionally generous and massively against-the-odds iTunes voucher – it will definitely go to good use
  • This was my first time getting physical iTunes vouchers – very impressed with the presentation
• Al – thanks to George from Tulsa for the poster

Aperture Re-visited:

• Both been using it for a few months now, both nicely settled in, yet both using it very differently
• Bart Dislikes:
  • The inability to make nested global smart folder is a constant annoyance. Done lots of experiments, and I seem to be forced to choose between a usable all-projects view, or the nested smart folders I so badly need
  • In many ways it feels as if Aperture is behind on even iPhoto 08 when it comes to use of your photos, let alone iPhoto 09
    • The all events interface feels crude and clunky – like an after-thought
    • Can’t get a big view of an image when in thumbnail mode by hitting space – instead you have to cycle through the views. REALLY annoying – feels so out of touch with the OSX way of doing things
• Bart & Al wanted to complain about the small text again but begrudgingly admit they’re used to it
• Al Dislikes:
  • Can’t hit a photo, add meta data and then with a keystroke go to the next one. I change the name of every file to explain what’s going on in it, want to just flip next, next, next
• Bart Likes
  • However, the level of control over images and the non-distructive editing is so good I would never give it up – can’t get into using Pixelmator because the idea of having to bake in any edit in a distructive way just feels rediculously primitive and frankly retarded – everything should be infinitely tweakable at any future time. Why on earth should I have to get everythign perfect first time through?
    • Al thought if you launch a photo editor from within Aperture it makes a version so you can revert back
  • Really getting to enjoy the nested keywords
  • very happy with the keyboard shortcuts, really feeling at home in the interface
• Bart Wish
  • One feature that could make my experience with Aperture infinitely better and basically perfect would be an auto-generated folder-like representation of my keywords so I could navigate my carefully keyworded images with total ease. I manually set this up in iPhoto, but cannot even do that in Aperture

Before I forget, this week’s Mac Roundtable podcast #62 was a lot of fun with me, Katie Floyd, Bart, Don McAllister and the inimitable David Sparks. We talk about Microsoft vs. Apple profit and sales, our experiences with hacintoshes and some great software picks. Check it out at macroundtable.com.

That will wind it up for this week’s show, be sure to send me emails including those dumb questions to [email protected], and if you’re atwittering, be sure to follow me at twitter.com/podfeet. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.