Being the busy business man I am, suit and all, there’s always all of those sweaty meetings to attend, things to present, and doughnuts to eat (mmm… doughnuts). The presentations are the worst part. I mean, I can deal with sitting in a room full of sexy Italians while dickin’ around on my iPhone, but presenting takes effort. And what if I forget my presentation materials? Uh-oh. With Keypoint, I can not only create those presentations while traveling in my million dollar limousine, I can do it fast and professionally.
Keypoint, The Mini Keynote. Review and Giveaway.
Cathodique: Flashless Youtube Videos On Your Mac
I think Youtube is one of the websites where I waste most of my internet free time. I bookmark videos (especially music videos), watch rare and unreleased live performances of the artists I like, laugh at those compilations of internet memes, which never grow old. Together with Wikipedia, Youtube is a huge time waster, and since they rolled out the HTML5 playback beta feature, it’s even less memory consuming and stable to me.
But if Wikipedia has some dedicated clients (for iPhone, just check out Articles), the same doesn’t apply for Youtube: it’s quite difficult to come up with original ideas for a Youtube specific application other than allowing the users to download videos and let them browse videos as thumbnails in a grid.
Cathodique is an app I stumbled upon two days ago, it’s new, and it’s got some nice features that made me keep it in my Applications folder.
Air Contacts Winners Announced
Thanks everyone who entered the Air Contacts giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Project Cocoa developers for the promo codes they gave to MacStories.
Here are the winners:
Jonny
leesui
Kody
cjmegatron81
Davide85
You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.
In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet .
thermoCLine Updated - Adds Yojimbo, Things, Coda Support and More
thermoCLine, the quick entry text field for Mac OS X , has been updated and is now known as Threshold. The new version now sports better integration with a lot of 3rd party applications, including Things, Coda, Yojimbo, Omnifocus, Textmate and many more.
As the developer writes “the goal is to be a universal quick entry text field for all your applications”. And with the latest update, Threshold is on the right path to do so.
Steve Jobs Replies to Email: We Won’t Support Picasa, iPhoto Is Much Better
He did it again. Steve Jobs, well known for replying to customer’s emails every once in a while, replied to an English iPad enthusiast telling him Apple won’t support Google’s Picasa albums and faces recognition. He further suggested to get iPhoto instead, which has much better features.
And yes, he’s still running iPhone OS 3.1.2.
Echofon for Mac. A Review.
If you followed the latest MacHeist nanoBundle 2 happenings, you should know that Loren Brichter (atebits) teamed up with the MacHeist team to a) include Tweetie for Mac in the bundle and b) offer the possibility to enter the beta of Tweetie 2 as soon as it will be out. This thing alone made the MacHeist double their sales in two days. As you can guess, Tweetie 2 for Mac is one of the most anticipated apps of 2010, and the user base is literally going crazy to put their hands on Loren’s newest creation. But on the other hand, there are many users who got tired of waiting months and months to have a Twitter client which supported - say - native retweets and lists, so they changed their default application from Tweetie to another one. And in most cases, the “another one” is Echofon for Mac.
I never tried Echofon before, but I decided to give it a spin after all this talking about the Mac version being good, stable and faster than Tweetie. Let’s see what the kid’s got.
GiftList, So you’ll Never Forget
After every birthday and Christmas, I’ll often spend a little bit of time about the warm glow of my monitor, keyboard and coffee in hand. As the printer churns sheets of countless thank you letters, I cross yet another name off a sticky note with a blue pen. Yet, I wish instead of this sticky note, I had an iPhone app that could track and organize everything for me. GiftList is an iPhone and iPod Touch application designed to keep track of all the presents you receive throughout the year, so you’ll never forget to send a proper “thank you” note (you all should really).
TeamViewer, Remote Desktop Simplicity
How many mobile devices can claim that they’re actually good at allowing me to login into Grandma’s computer to inspect her Windows’ problems? Not many (does Android have anything spectacular?). There are two versions of TeamViewer in the App Store, one being free, and the other being one hundred dollars. I’m focusing on the free version, specifically because it’s most likely all you need for personal use - accessing your private computers or to help friends/family (this is straight from the TeamViewer page people).
HTML5 Video, Minus Ogg - Fixing Firefox Video Problems
That of Mozilla’s Firefox not supporting the de-facto standard H264 video format is a well known problem many people wrote about recently. I think John made the best analysis of the situation, depicting the absurd situation Mozilla is throwing itself into by supporting the .ogg format, together with Opera. From the post:
“So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.”
Whether Mozilla will finally understand that H264 is the format to support it’s unknown to us, but - technically speaking - there are some problems that Philip Hutchison over at Pipwerks tried to fix with a simple script. Indeed, Firefox does support the HTML5 <video> tag, but the linked video file should be encoded in .ogg rather than H264. As Philip writes:
“Firefox is essentially forcing people to offer two versions of each video: an Ogg version and an MP4 version. In my opinion — and the opinion of many others — this simply will not do. Providing two different video files is not realistic, Ogg’s quality is inferior to H.264, and many computers and mobile devices have direct hardware support for H.264 but not Ogg. Firefox’s HTML5 video is rendered useless.”
The problem is, Firefox 3.6 knows it can’t play an MP4 file but it loads the <video> element anyway, just because it’s a supported tag. This script will detect if HTML5 is supported, see if it’s Firefox who tries to open it and if so, the video element is deleted and the flash fallback stays there.
But all in all, if Mozilla really wants to stay in the market and keep a good slice of the market share, they need to accept standards and stop rambling about openness with unsupported, inferior formats. I think openness is when you support something widely accepted as a high quality standard, and not when you stick with license-free but unpopular or even closed formats.