Getting Started

This part couldn’t be simpler: You open the program and are immediately greeted with a status window where you can start or stop media sharing and choose which types of files to share: Movies, Music, and Pictures. Within seconds of clicking start, your computer shows up on your PS3 and you’re ready to stream.

By default, Playback shares pretty much everything you have, but also offers you the ability to pick and choose what to share. For instance, under Movies you can share iTunes Movies, iPhoto Movies, EveTV Recordings, and even add specific folders. The same level of customization is also available for Music and Pictures – you can share as much or as little as you want.

One interesting feature, absent in almost all other programs of this ilk, is Access Control. Playback allows you to specify which devices on your network you’d like to share with and what specifically to share with them. This allows me to share all media types with a Windows PC and just share video and music with the PS3. Pretty nifty.

There are some other little niceties like Growl support, automatic generation of QuickLook thumbnails, and even the ability to limit bandwidth (though I can’t think of a reason why you’d want to do this). Codec support is also quite wide, with Playback offering the ability to share anything that PS3 supports.

Score One For the Nerds!

One bonus that really appeals to the nerd in me is the ability to convert high definition MKV files into an MP4 that PS3 can play. Most people will never even come across an MKV in their lives, but I have a few lying around from my days of ripping HD-DVDs. My test material for this was David Fincher’s “The Game”, which if you haven’t seen is your first mission right after downloading Playback. Anyway, the MKV file I converted was 1280×544 @ 24fps, with a file size in the neighborhood of 4.4GB. The Playback output file was quite literally almost identical in size except it was now an MP4. I tried to play this previously unsupported file on my PS3 and, viola!, it streamed (and looked quite glorious I might add).

Bottom Line

Playback fills in the gaps that Sony left when choosing to support only one protocol to share media across devices. Could I set up a UPnP server on my Mac? Probably, but the hassle and headaches aren’t worth it when a program like Playback makes sharing media this easy and effortless. There are a handful of programs that aid you in sharing media to your PS3, and while some of them are quite good, none hold a candle to Playback.

PS – I guess it’s also worth noting that Playback works equally well for Xbox360, though it’ll take a lot more than that for me to even consider buying one of those!

Memory of travel is fleeting at best. Photographs serve as road-markers for returning to those experiences.

Read entire review here.

What it offers

At it’s most basic level, MobileMe provides a dead-simple way to keep all of your contacts, calendar events, and Apple-provided me.com email account completely linked up.  This means that if you add a contact on your iPhone, it’ll automagically get sent to “the cloud” and be synced down to your computer’s address book application.  You could also add a series of events to iCal or your Outlook calendar, give them a label, and color code them and within minutes they’ll appear on your iPhone calendar exactly as you’ve added them. If you mark an email on your @me.com account as read, and move it to your ”Follow Up” folder while in Mail.app,  that’s exactly how and where you’ll find the email on your iPhone.

I think you get the picture about how tight the integration is.  The best part is at no time do your iPhone and computer have to be connected, this all happens wirelessly and instantaneously.

Stacking it up

Two out of three of those features (Address Book and Calendar syncing) can be acquired for free from a similar service called Google Sync.  You can see my write-up and review of that on my Google Sync Follow Up article.  The difference between the two is as simple as whether you prefer Google products or Apple products.

With Google Sync, you’ll be working within the realm of Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar. Your Gmail account also won’t be Push, which is probably a negligible feature for the casual user.

Using MobileMe, Apple’s Mail, Address Book, and iCal will be your primary desktop programs for viewing and editing contacts, events, etc.  Notice that when using Google Sync your information will be stored online at all times whereas with MobileMe your information is accessible from the web (via me.com), but can also be manipulated with desktop applications quickly and easily.

The extra mile

The aforementioned features alone weren’t enough to persuade me to the MobileMe side of the fence.  It was the additional value adds that Apple tacked on which sweetened the deal and made it a worthwhile purchase.

1. Bookmarks Sync
   This might seem like a small thing, but for someone like me who’s constantly bookmarking articles and interesting things for later consumption and classification, this is a life (and time) saver.  Anything I bookmark on my phone gets synced back to my computer and vice versa, so I’m never away from my bookmarks.
2. Back To My Mac
   This has proven to be indispensable for me since I’m not always home to access my computer.  Basically, you log in to your MobileMe account on your primary Mac and then when you log in to MobileMe on any other Mac (on the same network or 500 miles away), you’ll be able to access all of the files on your home machine AND share the screen.  In the past I’d often find myself forgetting a snippet of code or image file when working on a website remotely and would pretty much have to make do without it, but now with Back To My Mac it’s as easy as mounting my home machine on the desktop as a disk and continuing on easily and painlessly.
3. iDisk
   Apple goes ahead and throws you 20GB of space  and 200GB of monthly bandwidth to divide up however you’d like.  By default it’s split evenly down the middle between file space and mail, although you can adjust it however you’d like from the me.com control panel. I’ll reserve my comments about iDisk for the next section
4. Gallery
   This is a dead simple and damn sexy way to look at your photos and videos.  On a desktop web browser you’re given a few options for how you’d like to browse and when viewing on the iPhone it looks identical to skimming your photo albums.  It’s such a rich experience it almost feels like you’re using a desktop application.  You can view one of my photo galleries right here: Bella Ragazza.
5. iLife Integration
   I use iPhoto for organizing all of my pictures and the integration of MobileMe makes sharing my albums a piece of cake. I just select any number of pictures, an album, or event, click the MobileMe button and it publishes the gallery just like that.  The same is true of iMovie and iWeb, although I don’t routinely use either of those programs so I can’t vouch for them personally.
6. Me.com
   I’m not personally a big user of the Me.com website, but it would be doing a great injustice to the service if I didn’t at least mention it.  Everything I’ve mentioned above is accessible from one central place at Me.com.  You can view your contacts, calendar events, galleries, and iDisk files from the rich web applications Apple has set up.  Everything is interactive and makes you feel like you’re on the desktop and if you’re not an iPhone user this would be the best way to access everything quickly and easily.
7. iPhone 3.0 Features
   Find My iPhone, by all accounts and measures, is an awesome service that lets you find your phone and even if you can’t locate it, you have the option to remote wipe it to clear all of your data if a less-than-honest individual was trying to access it from afar. The iDisk App isn’t available yet, but looks like a great way to access your files on the go, like a lite version of Back To My Mac aimed squarely at iPhone. I’m eagerly awaiting this to tie my digital lifestyle together just a tad more.

It’s not all butterflies and rainbows

There are definitely certain parts of MobileMe that are lacking.  The one major sticking point I have is the speed of the iDisk when transferring files thru the Finder.  It mounts on your desktop just like a regular hard drive and by default mirrors the folder structure of your home directory (Pictures, Movies, Music, Documents, Sites, etc). This makes it easy for newcomers to understand how to move files to their iDisk, but the transfer speeds are attrocious.  For a standard video file of 100MB, I clocked my upload speeds thru the Finder at roughly 8kbps to 19kbps on my 16/2mbps cable connection.  Compare that to when connecting via FTP (any clients with WebDAV support are capable of this) with the same video file transferring at an average of 114kbps and you can understand why I’m a little baffled by this.

While on the subject of iDisk, another tiny problem I have is the lack of options for adding more storage space. By and large, most users won’t ever have to worry about hitting the 20GB ceiling, but for someone like me who stands to benefit from storing uncompressed video files or moving large amounts of music to and from my iDisk for safe keeping, the option to purchase additional space by the 10’s of gigabytes as opposed to a system like Amazon’s S3 where you only pay for what you use seems teensy bit archaic.

My only other gripe is that I’m not crazy about having to use iWeb to create a webpage on my allocated web space.  Beings that I’m a designer/coder by trade, I’m curious to see how fast an Apple server would load my pages to the masses and don’t really want to use a WYSIWYG editor to test that curiosity.

In Summary

If you’re an Apple computer user and have an iPhone, then MobileMe is really a no brainer.  For $99 a year, you get the convenience of, well, everything… everywhere.  Access your contacts, calendars, mail and more from a variety of platforms and programs.  Serve pictures and videos attractively from the MobileMe Gallery. Store and access your files on “the cloud” or just get them directly using Back To My Mac.  Despite the one or two complaints I have, they’re certainly not enough to outweigh all of the convenience and ease of use MobileMe has provided me for the past three months.

It’s the Little Things

The first thing you really notice upon first booting up 3.0 is that it’s very snappy; everything feels just a pinch faster.  Additionally, the interface has a new level of polish with some subtle cues that let you know how everything works and where everything is; basically everything you’d expect from Apple and then some.  Two great examples of the enhanced polish that I’ve noticed are: Closing apps now provides you with the slightest of fades as the apps vanish into the background.  The other is the changing of the cursor color from a very dark blue to the same blue as the text message send button and slightly thickening it, making it easier to track when skimming through lines of text.  These are such simple changes, but ones I noticed in an instant.

The new Spotlight feature is one of my favorites: From the home screen, you can either swipe to the right or press the home button and you get a nice little fade of your icons as the Spotlight search bar comes into view.  Assuming you don’t have  pages upon pages of index-able apps (I have four, but not four completely filled pages), searching works like a charm and you can even control the results order via Settings > Phone > Search Results.  You can also swipe down on almost any application window (iPod, Notes, Mail, etc) and search specifically in that area.  The attention to detail and intuitiveness of it is nothing short of amazing.

The Phone and Messages icons have received a small design treatment.  Not so much that you’d readily notice, but they both have a faint diagonal pinstriping now and the “SMS” text has been removed from the messaging icon.  I can only assume this is the case in the 3G and 3GS iPhones, since they’re they only ones which support the new (and still unavailable, thanks AT&T!) MMS feature.

Obviously, the option to go landscape on everything should garner a big “Horrah!” from users.  In the Mail app it works great and has been something I’ve personally been hoping for since the 2.0 release.  The text messaging area also benefits from the landscape keyboard plus some minor interface tweaks for the better.  In the pre-3.0 system, upon sending a text you’d have to wait for it be completely sent before accessing the keyboard or text area again.  Such is not the case in 3.0, as the progress indicator has been moved to the title bar, allowing you to navigate freely while the text sends.

Another great thing I’ve noticed is that the call lists (Recents/Voicemail) have been greatly improved, telling you which source has called you (home, mobile, etc) and giving you the appropriate state (based on area code) for numbers not in your phone book.  These are both two huge improvements as far as I’m concerned and should be put out there for all to see.

Three Words: Cut, Copy, Paste

I can’t say anything that hasn’t been repeated ad nauseum about the integration of cut/copy/paste into the 3.0 OS.  I will say that the execution is very tight and works better than expected.  I like the addition of “Select All”, as sometimes I just want to completely highlight all of my text, delete it, and start from scratch.  The ability to copy and paste text, images, and links between programs will be huge and I’m already thanking Apple for it.

A Few New Apps

Let’s just cut right to the chase, since I know everyone is excited about it: the new and improved Stocks app ROCKS! Actually, I’m so uninterested in the Stocks app that, in addition to not opening it yet, I’ve banished it to my last page of apps (along with the similarly useless Contacts app).  I must confess the Voice Recorder apps is pretty cool and something I can see myself using on a regular basis for quick things.  Couple that with it’s ability to sync recordings to iTunes and you have yourself a winning app right there.

MobileMe and the new features therein

I’m reserving my comments about MobileMe for my actual rundown and review of the service as a whole (review forthcoming).  I will say, however, that the deal has been greatly sweetened with the addition of Find My iPhone, Remote Wipe, and over-the-air Notes syncing. (Not that my phone actually ever leaves my side, but it’s a nice thing to have).

In Summary

If you didn’t believe the iPhone was the mobile handset for you because it was missing feature X, you’ll have absolutely no reservations about getting one now because with the 3.0 software Apple has covered the spectrum of everything a smart phone should do for a user.  Set some time aside on Wednesday to get to know your new iPhone because in addition to all of the things I’ve listed, there are plenty more things to discover and become acquainted with.

Preface

As you all probably know by now, I’m an avid Twitter user.  That said, I also realize that Twitter, by it’s very nature, can be distracting.  I chalk this up to that fact that it’s so easy to update and ingest multiple (and oft-unrelated) small pieces of information so rapidly that you just get lost in it all.  Because of this, when I look for a Twitter client (be it on the Mac or the iPhone) I’m looking for something streamlined that organizes the chaos rather than heightening it. There’s also this little voice in the back of my head that cries foul whenever I see a non-native interface on my screen. I’m looking at you, Adobe AIR.

So all I look for in a Twitter client is a clean, streamlined UI written in the native OS language (whether it’s Mac or Windows).  To some that might be unfair because I’d hazard a guess and say that a majority of people I follow on Twitter use either TweetDeck or DestroyTwitter, both of which use non-native interface widgets.  Regardless, this is my take on the subject and if you want to chime in, that’s what the comments are for.

On Tweetie

So we get to Tweetie, which isn’t a port of the iPhone app by any means, but brings what you could call an “iPhone-esque” experience to the desktop. In a world of Twitter clients that want to inundate you with as much information as possible and take up so much screen real estate, Tweetie plays it pretty close to the chest and breaks things up in the same fashion you’d find in many iPhone Twitter clients.

Very slick and takes up only a fraction of the screen real estate of some of the other Twitter clients.

Along the top you’ll also notice breadcrumb navigation that tells you exactly where you are if you’ve explored inside of a particularly lengthy series of @replies, DMs, searches, etc.  It’s a great way to show how you arrived where you are, but also functional in the sense that it lets you backtrack by clicking earlier in the breadcrumb trail.

The main timeline is concise and clutter-free.  To the right of each of your follower’s tweets is an arrow that allows you to shoot back a quick @reply and clicking on a @username takes you to that person’s stream.  When you receive new tweets, the menu bar glows blue and within the app itself blue markers appear to indicate what’s been received (stream updates, @replies, DMs, etc).  It actually makes zipping through all of the conversations easy, organized, and most importantly: intuitive.

Speaking to the ‘Verse

The weird thing about Tweetie, and I know I’m not alone on this one, is the position of the New Tweet button which is tucked away, very small, in the bottom left hand corner of the program.  Being a keyboard jockey, it really isn’t too much for me to just hit Command + N, but for some people it could take a few moments to realize it’s a clickable button.

Once you find the New Tweet button, you write your tweets in a window separate from the main program, which at first I thought was kind of a silly idea; especially after having used the Mac version of Twitterriffic for so long. Turns out, it’s grown on me and has proven to be a distraction-free way to write tweets that works especially well when you want to add links or images to the mix using drag and drop.

Additional tools built in to the compose window allow you to shorten URLs and add images.

The preferences of the program allow you to select from both a wide variety of URL shortening services as well as image hosting solutions.  For URL shortening I vacillate between bit.ly and tr.im, and both are fully supported which makes me smile.  As for the image hosting, all of the usual suspects are included: YFrog, TwitPic, Twitgoo, or Posterous.  The amount of tools packed into such a small window is actually quite impressive.

Summing It Up

As with any software, your mileage may vary from mine.  If there’s one thing that’s for sure though, it’s that Tweetie accomplishes the goal of taking a massive amount of data and funneling it in such a way that makes general consumption easy, fun, and usable for both beginners and pros alike.

There are some things that I would change about it: ability to remove the dock icon, add a refresh button (maybe opposite the new tweet button),  add the ability to delete tweets, and a few others, but overall for a 1.0 release it’s already shaping up to be one hell of a program.

The Backstory

The original Resident Evil was simply a great survivor horror game. In hindsight, it’s easy to pick apart all of the things that were wrong with it (poor voice acting, clunky controls, bad camera angles, oft-idiotic AI, etc) but it was also nothing short of revolutionary. The claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in a mansion with the undead lurking just beyond every door was an experience that walked the fine line between excitement and terror. I was probably a little young to be playing it (12 years old when I bought it), but that made it all the more frightening and memorable for me. I recall some of the simple pleasures: killing a group of zombies on my way to poison Plant 42, draining the water in the basement lab so the sharks wouldn’t tear me to bits², and who could forget the final battle with the Tyrant?

The games following in the series improved upon a winning formula.  Resident Evil 2 had very unique story lines for each of the main characters that changed and explained more and more as you switched back and forth between them (A game and B game), interlacing perfectly and adding more challenges as you made your way (Mr. X, anyone?).  Resident Evil 3 seemed more like a side story then part of the main canon, but added some cool new features like timed dodging and the infinitely useful quickturn.  Another great element was regular enemies could now pursue you up and down stairs and Nemesis could even chase you between areas, adding a constant feeling of suspense.  Code: Veronica was technically the fourth game in the series but, despite having two previous main characters and a very solid story, was deemed a tangent. This was the first game that dropped the pre-rendered backgrounds for fully 3D ones and had some cool other features added like instant continues rather than starting over from a save point.  We then go back in time for a prologue called Resident Evil Zero that literally ends at the beginning of Resident Evil 1 (and cleverly weaves it all together).  This game added in a partner system for its entirety that was necessary for solving all of the main quest puzzles.  You controlled your character of choice and the computer would control the other, following you closely and assisting in combat.

Models of Leon from RE2 and RE4

Then we arrive at the one big one that reinvented the series, one of two games I purchased a Gamecube for: Resident Evil 4.  All convention was thrown out the window for this release because, well, the old formula was stagnant.  Gone are the fixed camera angles, replaced with an over-the-shoulder view that zooms in slightly when taking aim.  Speaking of aiming, this game also added a laser sight to most weapons as well as enemies who respond differently to being shot in various areas.  Overall, I thought RE4 was an excellent game but not a survival horror game.  When you can just purchase a machine gun 2 chapters in and obliterate everything in your path with ease, the feeling shifts from surviving to completing.  You no longer needed to conserve ammo like a crazy person (read: Chris’ game in RE1), so getting caught in a room full of monsters with only a knife is a situation that just won’t happen.  This isn’t a bad thing, because it allows the pace of the game to stay strong and consistent but detracts from the general creepiness and paranoia that was prevalent early in the series.

RE-finement of the series

Resident Evil 5 seems to do very little that’s new.  Instead, it’s a refinement of the system introduced in RE4 with, of course, the obligatory graphical enhancements that come with developing on a next-gen console.  Based on the demo, the game looks to be nothing short of visually amazing, which is no surprise.  My real hope is that it continues to shape the Resident Evil story in a positive way that keeps me, the player, engaged and caring about the fate of these characters.

A look at the graphics from Resident Evil 5

The controls have been reworked a tad and while the addition of strafing is very nice, is does take some getting used to.  Since Resident Evil 4, it’s becoming apparent the series is akin to an action game with “zombies” rather than a survival horror game with action sequences.  As I’ve said, this isn’t a bad thing unless you go in with the impression that it will control like your standard action game.  There’s no run’n'gun here – every time you raise your weapon you’re locked into place.  It’s a blessing and a curse: standing still allows you to focus your shots accurately on various body parts using your laser sight, but leaves you vulnerable to attack from the sides and behind.  I found out, the hard way, that the best course of action is to take a few guys down, run, shoot, run again, shoot again, repeat.  The amount of enemies that are coming after you at any given time is overwhelming, so you can’t just sit around in one place and hope to take them all down.

The partner system from Resident Evil Zero has returned with some refinements.  Your partner will now help you if, say, you’re in a grapple with an oncoming foe or they’ll revive you with a green herb if you’ve taken a critical hit.  They’ll also pick up various ammo and health items as enemies drop them and give them to you if your supplies are low.  I like this insofar as the demo let me experience it, but I worry about having to babysit for my partner when I find myself in a heated situation because if they die then it’s game over.  An improvement to this system entails 2 player co-op (both offline and online) so you can run through the game with a friend, which I think would be great.  Bluetooth headsets are also supported, so you can coordinate your attacks or just yell to a friend in trouble: “He’s friggin behind YOU OH NO!”

I might be the only person I know who liked the attache case inventory in RE4 if for nothing else than the realism, but they’ve done away with that in this game.  The new inventory system allows you and your partner each to carry a total of 9 items (possibly more as the game progresses), 4 of which can be assigned to the D-Pad buttons for quick access – things like guns, grenades, herbs, etc.  This system works well until you find yourself surrounded and needing to navigate to a healing item because, unlike all of the previous games, bringing up your inventory happens in real time so you can still be attacked while selecting an item to use.  I have mixed feelings about this, but definitely appreciate the added level of difficulty.

It’s hard to draw solid conclusions from a demo.  I mean, they have a screen in the very beginning dedicated to telling us that it is, indeed, just a demo and some bugs may be present.  Regardless, I’ve had a lot of fun playing it thus far and am hoping for many great things when it’s released early next March.  The solid visuals combined with a pretty decent partner system and a refined RE4 control schema give me a lot of confidence that Capcom has really put their all into this, one of their flagship franchises, and we won’t be disappointed.

I’m a bit of an audiophile, but I don’t require my MP3 collection to be ripped at 320kbps CBR because I understand the law of diminishing returns.  In fact, in the tradition of the late, great OiNK I generally opt to encode my MP3s using the V0 option in EAC (which is roughly 256kbps VBR). I understand from the start that I’m going to lose a bit of fidelity in the music, primarily in the highs and the lows and I accept that because I know the intricacies of the encoding process.  So you can understand me being a bit skeptical when I see these audio plugins come along promising to enhance the audio quality. My primary argument being that you can’t enhance the sound that isn’t there (ie: the highs and lows that have been cut in the encoding process). 

The iWow Plugin Interface

I recently sat down with the iWow plugin for iTunes from SRS Labs.  You might’ve seen their logo around, sometimes in the form of audio processing on receivers and mid-to-high range televisions.  Here’s text pulled directly from their site describing what the plugin does:

Patented solutions in iWOW Premium greatly improve the playback of audio by creating an expansive sound stage, putting you, the listener, in the center of the performance. iWOW Premium also restores audio cues that are buried in the original source material so your music and videos files sound more natural and more detailed.

Pretty much sounds like the junk I was just condemning, no?  Well, after using iWow for a few hours on two machines (one desktop with external speakers and one laptop with built-in speakers) I can sum my experience up in five words:

It is the real deal.

You probably saw that coming, based on the title of this blog, but I was blown away at how much better the music from iTunes sounded after enabling iWow.  As I stated earlier, I’m a bit of an audiophile so I own a pretty nice pair†† of reference monitors and headphones for both casually listening to music and mixing audio for video post-production.  9 times out of 10 I keep the equalizer off because I think,with a decent set of speakers, the music will sound fine regardless.  Keeping all that in mind, I can say that iWow is not an equalizer per se.

Without delving too deeply into some of the principals behind psychoacoustics, let me just explain that it’s the process of altering our perception of sound, and not the sound itself.  It’s how Bose is able to sell a 2.1 surround sound system as 5.1 surround sound system replacement. This plus a very simple equalizer are the principals upon which iWow is based.

The music you’re listening to passes through iWow’s sound processor and enhances several different aspects of the music. Their advanced settings window looks like this:

It’s difficult to determine, by ear, what these settings do individually (aside from TruBass and Center level) but combining them all together produces some most excellent results.  The good news is that you don’t need to know what any of these settings do. You simply select the output device (speakers, headphones, or laptop speakers) and iWow does the rest.  One of the biggest improvements I heard were from the built-in speakers on a Macbook.  The difference in volume I was able to get once iWow was enabled was drastic and the speakers didn’t sound like they were struggling to produce the enhanced sound, either.

The effects of iWow also seemed quite pronounced on all music files, regardless of compression or file type.  I used the final two songs off Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon — Brain Damage and Eclipse — as my test subjects.  The songs were transcoded in both MP3 and AAC formats at the following bitrates: 128, 256, and 320.  I also took a lossless sample in WAV format just for the hell of it. The better the quality of the music going in, however, yielded better results with iWow enabled.  You can only do so much with the flimsy, tinny sound of an MP3 encoded at 128kbps.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the iWow experience and would recommend it to others, especially laptop users who don’t routinely have a pair of speakers or headphones with them.  The richness of the sound after processing is a delight to listen to and adds a new depth to songs you thought you knew backwards and forwards.

I remember getting a license to PulpMotion (version 1) back when I purchased the MacUpdate Bundle in 2007, but only used it once or twice and never explored too much further into the settings because it seemed too niche.  I’m sure I wasn’t the first person back then (or now) to liken it to the popular Comic Life that comes bundled with some Macs, but it just felt like a program I’d only use to pass the time rather than utilize for completing a meaningful project.

Well all that’s changed now with the current release, as a huge long list of updates and changes decidedly quashes any issues I previously had.  To focus on just a few that really stood out to me when working on a quick project: totally overhauled UI that’s downright easy, multiple songs in your soundtrack, huge performance improvements and, last but not least, new themes.

I’m not a read-the-manual kind of guy when it comes to consumer-grade programs.  I like to be able to dive right in to a project and figure things out as I go.  In this respect, PulpMotion delivers.  Visual cues combined with just the right amount of information on the screen make working with this program a pleasure and, more importantly, easy.  I stress easy because the alternative to producing such high-quality slideshows would most probably be Adobe’s After Effects, which is an undeniably intricate program.

The layout is reminiscent of earlier versions of iMovie.

The media browser you see there is a floating HUD window like the ones featured in Pixelmator, Twiterriffic, and other various Mac OS X programs. Despite my love/hate relationship with these types of windows, I think the execution in PulpMotion works extremely well.  I only needed the Media Browser at two points: the very beginning of my project when I was selecting my images and at the very end when I chose the soundtrack.  In between I just closed it, which allowed me to focus on the canvas and picture settings.

Another pretty excellent feature they’ve added is the “Zones of Interest” (also called Regions of Interest).  Using the built in image editor, you can select particular parts of a photograph to focus on and PulpMotion does the rest.  The end result is most excellent.

Speaking of the end result, I have to mention how many formats this program can export. The list is exhaustive: You get all of the standard Quicktime options (with presets) or you can choose custom settings specifically for the iPhone and AppleTV.  Is your PulpMotion slideshow part of a larger project?  That’s really not a problem because you can export your uncompressed project directly to the iLife suite for further editing.  

I’ve saved the two coolest export options for last because I’ve never seen anything quite like them before.  The first is exporting your project as a screensaver, which is nice for being able to share between Mac users.  The second is exporting your movie as a standalone app, which is great for sharing between fellow Mac users.  You get basic quality options here as well as the ability to wrap the whole thing in a DMG file for easy distribution.  Again, if you were to consider the alternative of doing this by yourself, you’re looking at hours spent in front of Adobe Director creating a wrapper just for your video – not particularly a cup of tea and definitely not this easy.

So after using PulpMotion for a few projects I can safely say that it will be added to my digital media tool belt. The sheer number of improvements this version has over the former coupled with the simple interface is enough for all users, both new and old, to consider purchasing a license.  If you’ve ever been curious about creating a slideshow that uses more than just fades and the Ken Burns effect, PulpMotion might be your ticket.

Here’s my little project, something I put together for my mom, whose 50th birthday was this past December 8th: Mom’s 50th (Quicktime Required)

My Rig and Performance

Now my computer is by no means a dinosaur, but it should be noted that it’s not the top of the line by any means.  My specs are as follows:

• 24″ Early 2007 iMac
• 2.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor
• 3GB of RAM (stupid hardware limitations!)

In terms of overall performance, both programs ran my copy of Windows at speeds I’m used to on PCs.  Windows apps opened up almost instantly and maintained consistently good performance using the default virtual machine settings (which vary slightly between VMware and Parallels).  Granted, I don’t run anything too intensive, but for general use in web development it works great.  Both companies assert that you can even play games in your virtual machine.  I don’t have many Windows games to test that, but it seems reasonable to me that if you allotted a bit more memory to the virtual machine (circa 1GB), you’d be able to play games from roughly a year ago and back at halfway decent settings.

Setting Them Up

Being a long-time VMware user means that I don’t need to install the virtual machine.  My install speeds wouldn’t be very helpful anyway, since I’m installing from a slipstreamed disk image of Windows XP SP3 to reduce headaches.  Regardless, I thought I would take the opportunity to try both a fresh install and import my VMware Virtual Machine via the Parallels Transporter bundled software.

The fresh install allows you to use physical media or disk images exactly like VMware, which is nice for both the casual Windows user who just made the switch to Mac AND the ubernerds that have multiple distributions of Linux in ISO format.  From start to finish, installing from my disk image to booting up took less than 10 minutes and detected all of my settings for me. Sweet.

Parallels Transporter was not such a pleasant experience.  It detected my VMware install and worked it’s magic during what I can only assume is a conversion process, then rebooted after about 5 minutes.  “That was faster!” I exclaimed in my mind, but was disappointed to find that the conversion process was not finished.  I sat through a progress bar that told me to “Please wait while the virtual machine is being upgraded…”  My guess is this process removes VMware Tools and installs Parallels Tools on the Virtual Machine.  Overall the Transporter method took about 23 minutes start to finish, about the install time of XP when booting from a CD/DVD.  Go with the fresh install whenever possible.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?  Coherence vs. Unity

Both of these programs have excellent integration into Leopard.  Parallels has Coherence, which lets you run Windows apps side-by-side with your Mac OS X apps.  VMware has Unity, which performs a similar function and allows for all the dragging and minimizing of apps your heart desires.

The one default setting I don’t like about Parallels is that it insists on placing Windows’ Task Bar above my OS X dock.  You can turn it off, but it seems pointless to have on by default since the Parallels dock icon new becomes a clickable Start Menu, which is pretty damn snazzy in my opinion.

I don’t know if I’m the only person who experienced this, but resizing and moving application windows in Parallels looks pretty bad.  I didn’t fiddle around with the graphics settings so this might be an isolated issue, but I know that in VMware, regardless of whether 3D Acceleration is turned on, resizing and moving app windows is smooth as silk. Moving on…

Interfaces and Key Features

With this release of Parallels, there isn’t much that’s decidedly different between the two contenders.  Both have very Mac-like interfaces, that is to say very clean and simple.  One problem I had with previous iterations of Parallels were the shiny, colorful buttons that ran along the side of each virtual machine when operating within Windowed Mode; my problem being that they looked awful.  Parallels took a page from the VMware play book to remedy this by moving the important things like Suspend, Shut Down, and Configure buttons to the top left, and the view modes on the top right.  The bottom right area now has a few sets of indicators for things like drive activity, network activity, printing, etc.

Both programs allow you to take Snapshots of your installation as well, which is great if you install a lot of temporary software or are a magnet for viruses.  Connecting USB devices is a snap and I didn’t notice much of a slow down when transferring files from a USB hard drive into the guest OS.

In Conclusion

I can now say that both of these apps are equally matched in their ability to bring you a Windows virtualization experience.  Previously I would argue against the interface of Parallels being strangely alien to the OS X environment, but both apps now have thoroughly refined (and almost identical) interface.  As for me, I’m going to continue using VMware because, in addition to already having purchased a license, I’m pleased with it’s OS X integration and continued stability.