AAUG Reviews

by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member

There are many reasons why one would want to take content from a DVD and edit it. Some camcorders now burn straight to DVD, producing what would otherwise be uneditable footage. Perhaps you’ve built a bunch of home movies and slideshows in iDVD and would like to take material from previous DVDs and repurpose it. Maybe you’d like to extract a clip from a commercial DVD (for strictly private, non-commercial, non-offending usage, of course). Cinematize makes all this possible. Now, having a DVD is no longer synonymous with content that is locked up and unavailable for future use.

Cinematize is billed by its publisher, Miraizon, as a DVD clip extractor that is used by tens of thousands of users, from professionals to home users, including in top studios, government offices, and anywhere else DVDs are made. I believe them. This is a tool that unlocks your DVDs and it does so with a minimum of fuss and confusion. There are other tools out there that offer some of the functionality of Cinematize Pro, but they are clunky, hard to use, and don’t come anywhere near Cinematize’s feature set.

Allow me to illustrate one problem this software solves. If you’ve ever built a home DVD in iDVD, you probably know that the “assetts” used in your movie can often take up a good 8 or 10 GB of hard drive space before they are compressed into the 4.7 GB of space on a DVD-R. (more…)

by Dave Enders , AAUG Member

The full body shield for the 13″ MacBook consists of seven pieces of film that need to be applied. I felt a bit overwhelmed as to where to start since the packaging instructions are generic for an iPod not a MacBook installation. So I went to the website and found the product description that I was installing. I did find good application instructions online at their website and additional instruction/faqs here. They should improve the documentation for the different products.

I started with the wrist rest, track pad and mouse button since they were smaller pieces to apply. I washed my fingers to remove any oils/grime etc as they are easily transferred to the pieces of film. I sprayed my fingers and applied the solution to both sides of the film. I found the installation of these pieces to be quite easy. I used the included squeegee to remove any excess liquid and bubbles. On a side note you may want to clean your notebook to remove any dirt/smudges before applying the film. I used a lint free cloth to remove any excess debris. So I was happy with this step which took me about five minutes to apply the three pieces of film. It looks good on the MacBook too ! (more…)

by Dave Enders, AAUG Member

When you first get your new iPod, it looks so nice. Smudge and scratch free at least for a while, a short while.

Shieldzone markets what they call invisible SHIELD for many products beside iPods. The invisble SHIELD is a military grade film that is scratch proof and guaranteed for life. I installed the fully body shield for the new iPod nano 3G.

What is included with the product is the appropriate pieces of shield material, application solution and squeegee. What is nice is they have an installation video online so you can see a demonstration of how to apply the shields to your iPod. I found this beneficial because the instructions included with the product are fairly sparse, plus it is always better to see see it done the first time.

Besides what is included in the package they recommend a lint free cloth and a credit card. I am not sure why the recommend a credit card when the squeegee is included.

I gathered the recommended materials and watched the video. I got the pieces assembled in the order of application. (more…)

by Gary Miller, AAUG Member

A great part of Apple’s new Leopard OS ( 10.5 )is Mail’s ability to use templates for stationery. But in using this well designed new feature, I wondered how either I would create or find more choices, and almost immediately Equinux announced it’s Stationery Pack with over 100 templates, WOW.

To start out, this is a downloadable product from the Equinux website or Apple stores, or Apple.com, or worldwide resellers listed on their website. Once you register, pay, you get a download code/license that allows one computer to use the software. The install went easy, and it comes with a manual accessible their help menu, and FAQ, plus email tech support. The company is headquartered in Munich, Germany, and has an engineering office in San Mateo, California, near Silicon Valley and Apple. I was assisted by their press and marketing person, Christian, and their tech support staff, who quickly responded to all my questions. I had wondered if one could create templates from templates, for correspondence, once I had dropped in a logo or personal photos, easy to do with their drag/drog designs, but the limitations are Apple’s Mail, so a good way is to save as a draft what you create.

Quickly I found that people receiving my emails were asking where I got all these new templates for photos, for birthdays, business, you name it, all easy to decide on because of the keyword search feature they included in Stationery Pack. Once you launch the application, you see all the choices, then clicking on a template, it comes forth in a bigger version that i could see better, then if you want another choice, click on that one, and it comes forth to replace the first one, then if you want to use that one, click on it, and it launches Mail, and a new mail ready for filing in sender, subject, and message. (more…)

by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member

If I were to set out to design a perfect stand for using my MacBook Pro on a desk, I would stop what I was doing and go out and buy the mStand from Rain Design, Inc., because there would be no sense in reinventing what they have already perfected.

I work with my MacBook Pro on a desk throughout the day, with an external keyboard and mouse. Of course, using a notebook computer on a desk is not ergonomic unless you can elevate the notebook so the top of it’s display is approximately at eye level. I have tried several stands but none have really met my needs. My needs include cable management (a USB cord and a power adapter cord), elevation, proper viewing angle, heat dissipation and improved airflow around the computer, and–I’ll be honest–desirable aesthetics.

Rain Design, Inc’s., mStand came to my attention and I immediately recognized it as the likely solution to my needs. When the review unit arrived, I marveled at the packaging, which was quite reminiscent of the classy, yet minimalist, packaging for which Apple is well regarded. Nice packaging always gives a good impression. Once removed from the box, the mStand stands about 6 inches high and is built from a solid piece of anodized aluminum whose color perfectly matches the finish of the MacBook Pro or Powerbook G4 notebooks. For most of us, the sharp design of our Apple computers is one of the reasons we like them. (more…)

by Wayne Watson, AAUG Member

My wife has a small business she operates out of our house. She has a dedicated extra line into the house for a fax machine/photocopier. However, now that we have Fax STF Pro loaded on our first generation iMac 17″ G4, we may not need to use the fax machine as much.

Earlier versions of this same software had some glitches but Smith Micro Systems appears to have worked out the bugs. I did not encounter any bugs during the 3 weeks we test drove Fax STF Pro. The software loads quickly. We sent faxes from Word and Apple Pages ‘08 without any trouble. When receiving a fax, the document landed onto the software’s holding location until we needed it.

We created faxes using the Dashboard fax widget that automatically loaded onto the computer. We tested the feature allowing for incoming faxes to be forwarded to an email address. It worked just fine. This was especially useful when we wanted to distribute an important work-related fax to other sales associates. Everything about this program was easy, intuitive, and simple to do.

This program managed and cataloged 45 faxes we sent to people for quick searches. We set up three group faxing folders without any glitches. I even attached JPEG photos with 6 faxes and did not have any problems on the receiving end.

We did not encounter any problems using this program and look forward to using it a lot in the future.

by Jeanne Fiske, AAUG Member

SMASHER provides a way to avoid a wide variety of font problems, including:

• Use smashed fonts with any font management utility or design application
• Stop wasting system resources by activating individual fonts rather than entire suitcases
• Improve system stability and reliability by verifying basic font integrity
• Simplify font menus by creating smaller, more precise suitcases for activation
• Examine and simplify Multiple Master fonts to extract them intact from suitcases
• See individual fonts in their native typefaces
• Compare contents of multiple suitcases
• View file permissions and foundry information with a click
• Keep bitmap and printer fonts together to ensure proper printing and PDF generation
• Create Mac TrueType versions of Mac OS X dfonts for running Mac OS 9 and Classic applications

To use it all you need to do is drag folders, fonts and suitcases into the left pane, select a family, style, or entire suitcase, and click the “Smash” button. I feel confident that there will not be any font problems that I cannot fix if they ever occur.

by Richard Geiger, AAUG Member

DiskWarrior version 4 by Alsoft is a software utility program that rebuilds your Mac directly and repair permissions on you Mac and it also monitors for hardware drive errors. Alsoft states that directory issues are one of the main causes of problems on the Mac so rebuilding your Mac’s directory can solve many of the problems users have with their Macs. The difference between DiskWarrior and other programs is that it rebuilds your Mac directory not just repairs it. The program is designed for a specific function and executes very well.

The program comes on a CD and can be installed in the Mac application utility folder so that the program can monitor drive issues and rebuild external drives. The program will run on Intel or PowerPC based Macs. If you need to run the program to repair damage to you bootable drive you will need to run the program from you CD which is a very slow boot.

I tested DiskWarrior on three different Macs running Mac OS 10.4.10 (Tiger). If you are thinking of purchasing the program for Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) I would check with Alsoft before purchasing it to ensure it is compatible. Two of the machines I tested were Intel based Macs and one was a PowerPC G5 tower and the program worked fine on all three machine. Before testing the machines two of the Macs where having ball of death issues and force quit issues. The first computer I ran DiskWarrior on was MacBook Pro. The program found 50 or so directly errors and rebuilt the directory. After running the program I found the MacBook Pro booted faster and have very few force quit issues. I also rebuilt the directly on a G5 tower and it seemed to clean up the stability problems. The computer had problems with Microsoft Excel crashing and hanging before the repairs.
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by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member

Information overload is a problem many of us try to cope with on a daily basis. Think about how many pieces of paper you handle during the course of a day or a week. Quite possibly this number is in the hundreds. Assimilating all of this information, and then keeping track of it, can be a real chore. Many of us do nothing more than stack things up until the stacks get too big, then file it away. This is hardly an effective system and does nothing to make all that data accessible in the future, without some real effort to track down the tidbit you are looking for.

DEVONthink Pro Office aims to be the organizer of all those data you want to keep but need some help organizing. Even the best organized person can sometimes find themselves wondering how to keep all sorts of data from various sources organized in a meaningful matter. We have bookmarks in Safari, email messages in Mail or Entourage, PDFs and Word documents in the Finder, which require opening external programs to read, and so forth.

Organization is not just for work; home users can benefit from being able to better keep track of their information, such as bills, statements, medical records, sports and school records, recipes, and so forth.

What if you could stir all your Word docs, PDFs, bookmarks, web clippings, images, chat logs, and many other forms of data into one organizational pot, so to speak? You may have recipes that are in Word documents, for example; maybe some favorite cooking websites in Safari with a bunch of bookmarked recipes; and a few PDFs, too–maybe scanned in from your cookbooks. In the world of printed data, we might just end up tossing all of these things into a box or a drawer. In our Macs, we often just end up tossing them all into our Documents folder, where they more often than not just lay around–often with meaningless document titles, hard for us to find in a hurry.

DEVONthink Pro Office invites us to grab all of these documents and plop them into its digital file cabinet, where we can organize (quickly!) a hierarchy and structure that will meet our needs, and modify it as we go along. (more…)

by Bruce M. Herman, AAUG Member

Filemaker Pro 9 is the most recent release of the database program is one of the few fully relational database solutions to run on both Windows and Mac OS. Filemaker’s origins lie not in the relational database but in the flat file. That’s a database where each table of data is independent. Rather than review the high level capabilities of Filemaker, as most other reviews have done, I’ll discuss Filemaker from the point of view of someone using the database for some fairly simple tasks, such as tracking membership. This is the very use to which AAUG puts Filemaker. It’s in this context that Filemaker competes most directly with a spreadsheet. Because I suspect that most AAUG members will be faced at some point with managing some data that can be represented well in a single table, this review is a comparison of spreadsheets and Filemaker Pro.

Here’s a bit of my experience with databases. I’ve handled membership at several non-profit organizations, and have always used a spreadsheet to organize the member information. It wasn’t an elegant solution, but it could be made to work. When I began assisting with membership in AAUG I was surprised to see that Filemaker was being used instead of a spreadsheet. I designed a complex relational database in Borland’s Paradox some years ago. At that time, the general consensus was that if something could be managed in a single file, you did so. So what would justify the extra effort of using Filemaker ?
First, what would a simple spreadsheet look like? For a membership database each record would contain all of the information for a single member, including name (first, middle initial and last), contact information (address, city state, zip code and phone number), membership level and the date when membership expires. (more…)