Software | Mac Sage

Video Tutorials with Camtasia for Mac

by patrick

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth a thousand pictures.

OK, I made that last part up. But you get the idea. When it comes to creating rich learning materials, a well done video can often make a concept or procedure very clear.

Until a few weeks ago, the offerings for Mac screencasting software were sparse. While Snapz-Pro and ScreenFlow did allow you to capture screen movement on your Mac, they were limited in their ability to edit.

Now, TechSmith has released its Camtasia product for the Mac. Camtasia allows you to capture screen movement and voice, and then bring these captures into a relatively robust editing environment to create cuts, transitions, callouts, titles, and more.

Camtasia's clean editing interface.

The interface is reminiscent of iMovie, with it’s simple and friendly look and feel. The video and audio editing is done on a timeline at the bottom of the interface. The play window is in the upper right. The media storage, transitions and filters are located in the upper left.

The selection of transitions, filters and actions are in the upper left.

If you’ve done any work in iMovie or FinalCut, Camtasia should be easy to get up and rolling within an hour.

One of the greatest strengths of Camtasia over most of the competition (including Adobe’s Captivate on Windows) is the vast selection of output formats.

Quickly share with iTunes, ScreenCast, and YouTube.

The Advanced Export option lets you export into a wide variety of output formats, including various flavors of QuickTime formats, with full control over output parameters via the Options button.

The large selection of export options.

Given the prevalence of video enabled mobile devices, I’m especially pleased to be able to output to the .m4v format for playback on iPod/iPhone devices.

This is version 1.0 of Camtasia for the Mac, so TechSmith will likely be fine tuning and adding features as this software matures. One thing I’d like to see is built-in captioning. But for now, you can’t beat this feature-set and the $99 debut price.

See more information about Camtasia for Mac.

Snow Leopard – First Impressions

by patrick

Here kitty, kitty...

It’s been 4 days now with the new cat… so far, so good.

Right off, there’s a noticeable performance boost in startup, shutdown and general Finder tasks. That, along with the 7GB reclamation of disk space makes Snow Leopard worth the price.

The new QuickTime is slick, but lacks the export features of the previous version of QuickTime Pro. Thankfully, Apple anticipated this disappointment, and put the old QuickTime in the Utilities Folder in Applications.

Some folks will undoubtedly be using older applications which require Rosetta to run. Again, Apple found an elegant solution for those who chose not to initially install Rosetta. When starting an older application, a dialogue box appears asking if you’d like to install Rosetta. If yes, then your system connects to an Apple server, downloads and installs Rosetta, and launches your application. Pretty close to hassle-free.

There are still a few software developers racing to make their applications play nicely with Snow Leopard, but most of the major developers are already on board.

The Snow Leopard upgrade is highly recommended.

Coda, The Developer’s Tool

by patrick

Every once in a while, someone comes up with a tool that makes you wonder what you ever did before using it. For me, Coda is that tool.

If you work on websites, you should take a close look at Coda. Coda has these tools built in: text editor, file transfer, source control system, terminal (SSH), website preview, and resource library for HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP.

The interface is clean and doesn’t get in the way of doing work. In Edit mode, the code is color-coded for easy identification.

edit

There’s a very cool CSS editor built in that allows you to quickly add and change your style sheets with a very nicely designed visual editor.

css

When you need to preview your work, there’s no need to fire up a browser. Coda provides a built-in preview tab.

preview

If you need to SSH into your server, Coda provides that too.

ssh

And if you’ve forgotten that bit of PHP or CSS or Javascript, Coda provides a built-in reference library. You can even add more of your own.

bookshelf

Working with Coda on site development is like a dream within a dream!

There is also a good collection of third party plugins that extend Coda’s functionality. Check out their site at: http://www.panic.com/coda/

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

by patrick

Apple announced OS X 10.6 named Snow Leopard as more of a performance release rather than a feature release.

Some of the announced changes include a smaller footprint (giving back some hard drive space), Microsoft Exchange support, extended 64-bit support to allow a theoretical 16TB of RAM, faster clock speeds with the multicore “Grand Central” technology, and QuickTime X which includes optimized support for the latest codecs.

It’s not known yet whether Snow Leopard is the beginning of dropped support for PowerPC by Apple. Several developers are reporting that their developer preview copy runs only on Intel machines.

The rumors are that this will be a free upgrade, but that hasn’t been announced yet.

Maintaining Mac OS X

by patrick

As most of you know, the Mac OS is a UNIX-based operating system. UNIX systems have a way of maintaining themselves through scheduled maintenance routines that clean up a variety of system logs and temporary files. These automated scripts generally run in the wee hours of the morning (somewhere between 3am and 5am). However, if your Mac is turned off or in sleep mode during these hours, these maintenance routines will not run.

A healthy Mac is a regularly maintained Mac. So if you don’t leave your Mac on and awake over night, it’s best to run these maintenance routines on a regular basis.

You can do this manually by typing the following into a Terminal session: