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Our favourite App in the world RIGHT NOW: VLC for iPad

| Reviews | November 22, 2010

VLC Media Player

VLC is one of the great free Apps we insist that you install as soon as you buy your Mac. It's the swiss army knife of Video Players that sweeps away the woes of file and CODEC compatibility. You name it, it'll play it. Not just video either, obscure audio formats such as FLAC, OGG, WMA and Realmedia are easily dealt with.

So it is with huge surprise that a version for the iPad is now available within the iTunes App Store. Why such surprise? Well we expected the stringent rules of the app store to block it, but it's got a clean bill of health and in.

This is very exciting news then. Like all Apple products, the iPad will only play formats supported by iTunes. Audio wise this is fine, as the range supported is pretty wide, with audio also being easily converted. Video on the other hand is a bit trickier. Firstly they're are quite a few different formats out there: MP4, MKV, MOV, MPEG2, MPEG4 - all of which will use different video wrappers and codec's. On top of this the conversion of video is very time consuming, required a lot of CPU horsepower (many professional video encoders will utilise very beefy 8 Core servers).

So if we don't have to convert, life is much easier. This is where VLC on the iPad comes into itself. No more lengthy file conversion to ensure video plays in iTunes and on your iPad. Instead once installed, you can take your video files from (cough) the internet and directly transfer them into the VLC app through iTunes:

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Now there are some downsides to this. First of all VLC cannot take advantage of the iPad's hardware acceleration like it's native video player can. This means a much higher drain on battery life as well as the possibility that complex large videos that require a lot of decoding simply wont play.

HD video therefore is a bit of a no go. My attempts to play a Broadcast quality HD MPEG 2 of Top Gear ended in tears with VLC locking up instantly. However keep the files reasonable and this is a very useful free app.

The interface is easy to use, simple and elegant.

Above all: it's a great app that brings a rare bit of format choice to your Apple iPad. And it's free.

Download it now from iTunes

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Adobe Audition for Mac is here

| Reviews | November 13, 2010

Adobe

We are very excited here at UsedMac's London Media Towers.

Our favourite all round Audio Editor, Adobe Audition, has finally arrived in Beta form on the Mac.

Adobe Audition for Mac Beta

First impressions are very promising: It's snappy to launch, it reads core audio and looks and feels exactly like Audition on Windows. Even more impressive is the in app performance. As promised in the preview video, the speed at which processes take place is excellent. The Spectral Display flys along and the Multiband plugin reacting immediately to changes.

Being a Beta product, myself and others have suffered a few crashes when in use, however it has done a good job of recovering the session when relaunching.

We will be using this in anger so look out for more posts. So far, so good. Given the amount of creatives that use Macs yet retain a PC for Audition, this could be a success for Adobe.

You can download the Beta of Adobe Audition for Mac here

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Our favourite App in the world RIGHT NOW: Dropbox

| Reviews | October 31, 2010

Dropbox Stick men

Welcome to a new feature for Used Mac for the winter. As the nights draw ever darker, we all need something to look forward to in the evening. And here at UsedMac there is nothing we love more than coming home to a warm flat, putting the Kettle on and checking out some fresh App meat.

The inaugural outing of fresh meat today is a biggie too: Dropbox


This is absolutely the most important cloud based app to hit the scene in the last year. Now instantly I can hear you dozing off and reaching for your iPhone to play Angry Birds. But stop and consider this:

Imagine a USB key you never need to carry. One that is always on all your devices: Vista PC at work, MacBook Air at home and iPad on the train.

Then imagine being able to upload a Powerpoint through a website at a Conference and it appearing effortlessly on all your other machines.

Then imagine sharing folders with other friends effortlessly.

Ok so you get the point. We LOVE this App. It's beyond brilliant and like all beyond brilliant apps (ahem), simple to use.

You simply register at the Dropbox website and install the Sync app. This will create a 'Dropbox' folder amongst your Documents and Download folders on your Mac, or if on Windows under your My Documents (Linux users aren't left out either).

So you can use Dropbox via either Finder on your Mac, with the unobtrusive Sync app keeping across your file moves. Or if your on a Corporate or Public computer where you cannot install the app, there is also its intuitive web interface:

You'll get 2GB of storage for free when you sign up and they're are also paid options for getting more storage: $9.99 a month for 50GB of storage or $19.99 a month for 100GB. You could easily keep your iTunes library in your Dropbox folder for access to your music anywhere if you are prepared to pay for it.

2GB is pretty ample anyway for free. And as one of the benefits of Dropbox is easy file sharing with others, every time you sign up a mate to use Dropbox, you'll get an extra 250MB of space to play with when they install the syncing app. You can do this up to a maximum of a rather useful 8GB.

So why use this over the alternatives such as YouSendIt, Rapidshare or Windows Live Mesh? Well these apps are simple upload and share websites. They are great for one off file sends that are too large for email, but for sharing multiple files, it can get a bit clunky and repetitive. With Dropbox though, you can simply share a Folder within your Dropbox on your Mac with a friend, copy the files into it and that's it. Once they are uploaded they will appear in your friends Dropbox.

You can also easily share files publicly, as you would with the alternatives. Within Dropbox there is a Public folder, any item you put in here will be given a public URL. You can easily copy it to the clipboard by right clicking on a file and being given a public URL, just as below:

You can sign up to Dropbox here

Its our favourite App in the world RIGHT NOW!

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HTC Desire Review. From the M6….

| Reviews | July 30, 2010

HTC Desire

HTC Desire: Desirable?

I'm a bit odd, I love motorways. I know, weird aren't I? But being on them normally means I'm escaping London for a few days and I'm driving (which I also love).

Right now I'm on the M6 heading to Scotland, but I'm sat in the back. So a perfect opportunity to write about my play with a HTC Desire last night in the local Wetherspoons (yes yes, I know. An HTC). I thought it would be interesting comparing it with my now ancient iPhone 3G.

Here are my initial impressions:

1. Look and Feel. Nice bright screen and I like the feel of the phone - it feels substantial and well-enough built in the hand. I quite liked the control button/pad/ball/nipple (whatever the hell it actually is), however the row of physical buttons at the bottom of the screen took a bit of working out. This one is evens.

2. Operating System. Now I presume it was running an HTC derivative of Android 2.1 rather than a pure version of Froyo 2.2 (right now only Google's Nexus One will run this). Straight away I felt it lacked the consistency of iOS visually. Now I am a geek that loves getting my hands dirty with tech, but it just felt a bit too 'linux terminal' for my liking. Perhaps that's a bit unfair. Perhaps I'm a fanboi but I've always felt iOS is just so immediately intuitive. Christ, my dad can even use the App Store. For just ease of use iOS gets it. Although Android is clearly maturing.

3. Google integration looked great. But then, with a bit of fiddling and setting up, so is my iPhone 3G. I've got push Mail, synced Calendar and if I was brave enough I could sync my Contacts. Gmail's threaded conversations looked better on the HTC though. There was also a Facebook and official Twitter app (I prefer the Tweetie derived Twitter for iPhone though). So pretty even between the two until I came to type. I didn't like the vibrate response on the Desire or the response. It wasn't 'bad', just not as good as the iPhone.

4. Multitasking. Yep it can do it. My iPhone 3G can't. And never will. In fact seemingly everything would run in the background whether I wanted it to or not. God knows what effect it will have on battery life although my friend told me they would shut themselves down after a while (What if its a radio app and I dont want it to?) I could have closed them properly myself though... This one goes to the Desire.

So would I trade my iPhone in for the Desire on a first impression? If based simply on that short play I'd say....

Maybe.

It's clear Android is getting better and better, but it just lacks the polish I talked about earlier. There are obviously other considerations. The Desire is more 'open'. I can just plug it in by USB and store files on it. However I can't easily sync my existing iTunes music library to it. I definitely cannot use my iOS apps that I've previously paid for.

We'll be keeping a beady eye on Android phones. Perhaps soon we might even get one. I wonder how easy it will be to write a post like this on it from the back of a Diesel Astra?

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