Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Hardware, Review, Software, Utility
Monday Jun 16, 2008
There are some Mac models that come with a built-in camera - if you have one of those, you’re golden, at least until the camera malfunctions or you want higher resolution. But if you didn’t get a built-in camera, or for whatever reason you want to use any typical off-the-shelf webcam, you will find that Apple’s support for webcams sucks. I mean it REALLY sucks. You can take a perfectly good webcam that works great under Windows, and just try to use it under OS X. It will see that the camera is connected, but unless you are very lucky, it just ignores the camera’s output.
This is generally NOT a hardware incompatibility, although it can be, particularly if the webcam is an older model. However, there is a very nice third-party software program called macam, which is a driver for USB webcams on Mac OS X. The developer’s site explains that “macam consist of an application and a component. Run the macam application to verify whether your camera works with your Mac and your USB setup. The component is the actual driver that allows other applications to access the video-stream.” Macam currently supports just about half of the known cameras out there.
photo credit: mangee
The problem is that that even with Macam installed, Apple’s bundled software won’t work with it. Got Photo Booth? Forget about using it with your unsupported webcam, although macam’s application (and some third party software) will let you snap single images of yourself or your kids. Want to have a video chat? iChat refuses to recognize a USB-connected webcam unless you purchase a third-party program (which we might have tried and reviewed, except that once we installed it and tried to use it one time, in an attempt that was unsuccessful due to an unrelated problem, on the second attempt it immediately thought that its seven day trial period was up and refused to run!). But you have to wonder, if a third-party program can make iChat work with a USB webcam, how hard would it be for Apple to enable this capability? It’s exactly this sort of thing that sometimes makes us wonder if we made the right choice by getting a Mac.
Of course, if you want to use Yahoo! Messenger, you can install their Mac client and use that to chat with your friends. Although we haven’t had the opportunity to fully test it yet, we do note that it at least recognizes our webcam (presumably using the macam driver) and displays a preview. That’s more than iChat does. As for AIM, for some inexplicable reason they distribute AIM 4.7 for Macintosh using a .bin format file, which must be expanded using Stuffit Expander. That put us off a bit, and since every review we’d read about it didn’t exactly give it a stellar recommendation, and since nowhere on the page for the Mac version did they say that it supports video chats, we decided to forgo attempting to install it for the moment - though we may revisit that decision later.
Oh, and before anyone comments that Adium has got a “mebeamIntegration” plugin that handles video - if you can get it to work, more power to you! We have it installed and when we try to access it (by right clicking on a contact, for example) it simply does not appear in the menu of choices. But then, we would add that the majority of comments we read about it (the plugin, not Adium itself) weren’t exactly glowing (though you could tell the hard cider drinkin’ boys in the bunch - their attitude was that if you got it for free you shouldn’t complain about it, even if it lays there like a giant turd on your hard drive and works poorly or not at all. After all, what did you expect for free, you ungrateful cheapskate?).
Come on, Apple - you put USB ports on your computers, and people expect that they can just plug in standard USB devices and they will just work. We will even put up with a little aggravation to get a device going, but when in your arrogance you decide that you simply won’t support an entire class of hardware, that’s simply going too far. We know that the hard cider drinkin’ boys will always think you can do no wrong, but those of us who have switched from Windows aren’t going to talk your products up to our friends and relatives if you can’t even support basic USB hardware properly. And yes, we do understand that you can’t support every older-than-dirt Webcam that was sold for use with Windows ‘98, but you should at least be able to support those webcams that are supported by the spca5xx/gspca Linux webcam driver project (which is given credit in the macam documentation). If the Linux folks can support these webcams, why can’t Apple? The answer is that there is no good reason why not, they just haven’t felt it’s a priority. Well, Apple, I suspect that many of your customers may feel differently about that.
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Games, Review, Software
Wednesday Jun 11, 2008
Here’s a little tip for those who wish to acquire free games that run under OS X: Never overlook a web page full of links to Linux games just because you see the word Linux. Quite often, if you actually follow the link to any of those games, you’ll see that in fact there is an OS X version also.
And it is for that reason we will point you to this article: Introduction to Linux Gaming. It gives you screenshots and descriptions of three, and I quote here, “Native Linux games.” Of course, what they mean by native is that you don’t have to run the games under an emulator, not that the games have only Linux versions. As it turns out, of the three games listed (Neverball, Frets on Fire, and FlightGear), all three have Mac OS X versions available for download (although the one for Frets on Fire is labeled as “Experimental”). Check it out if you’re looking for some downloadable Mac games (and don’t let the word “Linux” fool you)!
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Media, Software, Utility
Wednesday Jun 11, 2008
How often has this happened to you - you shot a really funny video of your cat, posted it to YouTube, then accidentally lost the original and now you want to download the copy back from YouTube? Never, you say? Okay, but work with us here for a minute. Supposing you had done that, there’s a real easy way to download it back to your system, and you don’t even have to use any special software to do it. Here’s how:
First, open Safari and navigate to the YouTube page containing the video. While the video is playing, press the following key combination: Command-Alt-A OR click on the word “Window” in the top menu bar, then select “Activity” from the drop-down menu. Once the Activity window is showing, look for a line that contains this character string: get_video
If you have trouble seeing it, it may help to look for the largest files in the list - it’s usually the largest file shown. It may also help to expand the window so you can see the complete links. When you find the one containing the get_video string, double-click on it and the video should download. Once the download is complete, go to your desktop or downloads directory (wherever your downloaded files are normally saved) and rename the get_video file to something meaningful, but be sure to give the file a .flv extension. The annoying “Mac Nanny” will pop up and ask if you are sure you want to change the extension, and you do.
Now that you have recovered the precious video of your cat clawing the neighbor’s dog, you can watch it whenever you want. You’ll want to make sure you’ve downloaded and installed Perian, so that you can play the .flv files. If you have also downloaded and installed MPEG Streamclip: video converter for Mac & Windows, you can use that to play the video or encode it to another format, or even do some selective editing of the clip (such as trimming off extraneous material at the start or end of the clip).
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Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Application, Review, Software
Tuesday Jun 10, 2008
For those of you who have been looking for a lightweight Twitter application that is native to Mac OS X (and in particular, doesn’t require the installation of any additional software), you may want to twy Twucket. Although the name is a bit of a twongue twister, it’s worth twaking a look at (okay, enough with the dumb Elmer Fudd impression):
Here’s the description from the developer’s web site:
Maybe you’re a Twitter user. Maybe you’d rather use a standalone program to access Twitter, instead of using a web browser. Maybe you’ve tried other Twitter clients and found them lacking, and maybe, just maybe Twucket is what you’ve been waiting for!
Twucket is a new Twitter client for Mac OS X Leopard. It’s designed to use a minimal amount of screen real estate, so you can keep an eye on your Twitter feed in a window small enough to leave open all the time.
Simple Window
Twucket runs in a normal window. Unlike some other Twitter clients which use “special” windows designed to hover in front of your other windows, Twucket behaves like a normal Mac application. Click it and it comes to the front; Drag another window in front of it and it goes behind the other window, just like you’d expect. Thousands of applications work this why; Why should a Twitter client behave differently?
Silent Operation
When you receive new messages from Twitter, Twucket remains remarkably quiet. You’ll hear no chirping, crowing, bleating, or anything else. For that matter, Twucket’s app icon won’t flash, bounce, wave at you, or do flips. Imagine the simplicity of new messages appearing without fanfare in your Twucket window. Isn’t life noisy enough?
Free (as in beer)
Twucket is free software, with no embedded ads or other annoyances. Download it, take it for a spin, share it with your friends.
For those of you that love Twitter, it’s about time you got a native Mac OS X Twitter program. The only thing we might wish for in an upcoming version is a way to automatically convert a long URL to a shorter one, using one of the many web-based services available for the purpose. Of course, Firefox users can always use the TinyURL Creator extension to convert the URL of a page being viewed to a TinyURL (unless you are using Firefox 3.0 - that extension is only for Firefox versions 1.5 through 2.0.0.*, although if you know how to hack the version information within the extension, it actually does appear to work under 3.0 RC 2).
EDIT: We have discovered one serious bug in Twucket - if you create a message that contains an ampersand (&), it truncates it just before the ampersand, sending only a partial tweet. You might say, so what, don’t use ampersands, but what if you are writing about M&M’s, or a company like AT&T? They need to get this fixed! This appears to have been fixed in version 1.1.0.
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