User Profile for justamacuser

User Name justamacuser

Member Since 2001-10-03

Total number of Feedback Posts: 75

Total number of comments: 14

Last 10 Feedback Posts by justamacuser [ Search for All ]

Screenium 1.0 (Mac OS X)

Nice, works quite well on iMac G5 and MacPro

The "follow mouse pointer" function and the scaled-down recording is a very useful option for recording tutorial videos for the web. That's basically what I've bought it for. The option to overlay live audio/video from an iSight (or compatible webcam) into a corner adds a nice "human" touch to the result. Had some minor suggestions, and received a quick confirmation from the programmers. Happy customer here. There is room for improvements (e.g. seamless support for multiple screens - currently, one needs to pick the designated source screen from a pop-up menu), but on the machines I tried, it worked as advertised and proved helpful. [alert admin]

Perian 1.1 (Mac OS X)

Incompatibility/side effects with MPEG-4 conversion

I had this (weird) bug on my machine: MPEG-4 encoded video sources that are converted to other formats (through Quicktime Player Pro, or iDVD) had only every other frame updated, resulting in strobe-like video output despite the frame rate being "normal" speed. The playback was fine, only the results of a "write to new output" was affected. This disappeared once i disabled Perian by moving the component out of the Quicktime plugins folder. This may well be caused by other codecs interfering with Perian, not a bug in Perian per se, but i've not (yet) investigated further. [alert admin]

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Monday, March 03 2008 @ 01:58 PM PST

Time Out 1.5.1 (Mac OS X)

Good idea, but heavy on the CPU...

... my Powerbook hovers at about 50% CPU load during the "pause..." screen, which seems just a tad high for a program that only counts down the seconds? It tends to kick in its fan for the duration of the break, which isn't quite what i expected. There might be room for improvement there... [alert admin]

REALVIZ Stitcher 5.5 (Mac OS X)

I'd rather stay with 5.5.2 for now...

With 5.6 being a required-fee upgrade from 5.5., i'd rather stay with the free 5.5.2 update that came out about the same time. 5.5.2 also adds Universal Binary to 5.5, and has almost all the new features except the HDR support. 5.5.2's smart blend module has finally reversed the trend of every new stitch/blend module being significantly slower than the last. On a 4-years-old 2x2 Ghz G5, not one of the intel macs, 5.5's smart blend would require about 8 hours to build a 37-shot spherical panorama at 18000x9000 pixels and 3 GB RAM, 5.5.2 completes the same task in about 2 hours (all other settings equal) and is now as fast as the last major version while having much better image quality. So, for me, 5.6? Not anytime soon, but i'm not ruling it out once i've got some extra cash on hand. While the interface may be un-mac-like, i'm even less happy with the other offerings in the panorama stitching market, so for me it's the lesser of several evils... at least the workflow couldn't be much simpler: - drop images on empty window - press "auto stitch" - have a coffee (~ 2 minutes depending on amount of images and complexity of scenery) - set render size - have a break while the program does the heavy pixel pushing [alert admin]

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Sunday, June 24 2007 @ 11:53 PM PDT

()

Cute, except that the idea doesn't work :)

Nice little app, except that the whole idea of "subliminal messages" was a hoax from the start (and earned the guy that came up with it in the Sixties quite some cash :) Apart from that, it sure works well to freak out the believers if you set it to show the "subliminal message" just long enough to be actually noticeable, therefore it gets my recommendation :) [alert admin]

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Friday, May 04 2007 @ 02:55 AM PDT

CINEMA 4D 10.0 (Mac OS X)

v10 rocks!

(my comments apply to the studio bundle - some features may not be available in smaller configurations) I've put v10 through its paces over the course of a three-week all-night build/animate/render session for a small contest. I'm really impressed. Though there were several crashes (usually related to extreme angles while editing objects, and i'm attributing them to my graphics cards), all but once the built-in recovery function managed to save the scene file (see the "debug" folder by the side of the apps' location) before it went boom. My personal favourites: The new "visual selector" tag. A real time-saver. Especially with characters, dragging the bones you need to pick often into it, creating a "switchboard" of click-and-it's-selected items with a basic human shape in the background is bliss. The only way this could be better would be to be able to actually grab the objects on a touchscreen :) The new timeline. Takes some time getting used to, but after that, it's easier than the old one. The new elements browser. Muscles (part of Character module) Not too happy with: - the new joints. They're a nice addition, but don't work with my personal preferences for rigging and animating. i.e. they can't influence meshes that contain mirror elements, because they calculate their influence from weighting maps (which the mirrored object seems to miss). The older bones system is still available, so no problem here. - the new IK system. Fast, stable, great. But doesn't play nice with e.g. hip-to-feet chains. Feets keep rotating in sync with the hip axis. May be my fault, but with "legacy" MoccaIK and target vectors, they don't. So, again, nice to have, but doesn't fit my workflow. - the decision to turn the manual into HTML help. All in all, it's an excellent update that i'm very, very happy with. Here's hoping on the next maintenance update to smooth the edges. [alert admin]

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Thursday, January 18 2007 @ 06:49 AM PST

MacMP3Gain 1.9a (Mac OS X)

Very happy with it!

I had read about that little tool here on versiontracker, but didn't bother to try it - until last week, when my iPod picked ZZ Top's "Afterburner" (remastered) right after the "Best of Simon & Garfunkel" original version - quite a jump in volume (about 16 dB). While it did jerk me awake at work ;) it wasn't an experience i wanted to repeat. So, after doing the usual backup, i gave it a try. 1) for the first run, it's taking its time. Subsequent runs are much faster, since the results of the analysis are stored in the MP3 files. 2) I did not witness any "dead" files so far (contrary to some experiences mentioned below) 3) It'll write a temporary file and copy that file over the original MP3. So if you're proud of your MP3 files showing creation dates like "June 2001", you better hack together some Applescript to copy that information into the MP3 comments before you run MP3gain. Agreed, that may be overkill, but my library dates back to iTunes 1.1, and that's something i'm taking some pride in ;) - besides, scripting iTunes + disk access is a nice learning experience. 4) The progress indicator is just "barber pole" if you're running folders recursively. Also, the text output is too short for long song titles. Adding some pixels there (or having it wordwrapped on two or three lines would be nice. But that's just nitpicking. 5) Since the original gain value is stored in the MP3, adding the "undo changes" feature to the frontend would be a nice touch. All in all, does what it claims, and does it quite good. Thanks! [alert admin]

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Thursday, November 30 2006 @ 03:54 PM PST

MacOSaiX 2.0a6 (Mac OS X)

Works, but shows some bugs/glitches that you need to work around

Just having downloaded 2.0a6, i've got to say: well, it obviously works - after a fashion. NOTE: The problems listed below apply to my machine - your mileage may vary. Bugs to be aware of: - picking a local folder of images must be repeated after each tiling run - on the second try, it doesn't find any more source images. Remove the folder from the sources, then add it again. It'll work one more time. - the "Save" button in the "Add Folder" dialogue only activates after toggling the "follow aliases" checkbox. Actual setting doesn't matter on my configuration, only touching it is necessary. - Either you've got a lot of pictures at hand, or you may need to "loosen" the tile placement rules - or you may not get a result at all, because no matching tiles are available. For testing, i used "Image may appear in any number of tiles" and "1 tile apart", with the "image cropping" slider positioned to the middle. My summary for now: Promising, but some interface/handling glitches need attention. [alert admin]

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Sunday, May 14 2006 @ 10:50 PM PDT

teleport pr3.6 (Mac OS X)

The most fascinating thing - with a little nuisance

Worked flawless across three computers and a total of five connected monitors. This was the single most amazing thing i've seen for the last year on my mac :) However, a note in the read-me that it always checks for updates on system launch would've been nice, instead of the "Application teleportd wants to connect to XYZ" alert i got from Little Snitch... one point off for being a little sneaky about that :) [alert admin]

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Saturday, February 25 2006 @ 01:02 AM PST

Apple QuickTime 7.0.2 (Mac OS X)

Works OK, and fixes the QTVR editing problems

Just installed 7.0.2 on a 10.4.2 system, and FINALLY it's possible to access the movie controller settings, add sprite tracks etc. on Quicktime VR movies (this was inaccessible since 7.0). Can NOT confirm any problems with iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, GarageBand etc. Everything works as advertised. [alert admin]

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Thursday, September 08 2005 @ 01:20 AM PDT

Last 10 Comments by justamacuser [ Search for All ]

Applescript example code, if you're interested...

(Copy and paste into Scripteditor)

-- you need to create a playlist that contains -- all the files you want to batch-process -- and name it "BatchFiles" for the script to work -- that's quick & dirty, so better have at least one file -- in your playlist or else... tell application "iTunes" set myList to a reference to playlist "BatchFiles" set myPointer to the number of tracks of myList repeat set myFile to track myPointer of myList set myPointer to myPointer - 1 set theSourceFile…

Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)

Thursday, November 30 2006 @ 04:05 PM PST

Found it where it always was...