If you've been paying attention to the recent debacle surrounding Apple's release of Final Cut Pro "X" you know the majority of the Final Cut userbase (including myself) were flabbergasted and disgusted with the direction it took.
Not to mention that a large number of people who purchased the new app got a refund from Apple because of the major issues and unseen gotchas that reared their ugly head.
However Apple in rare form has done two things to being to address the long list of issues surrounding "X":
They've just released a major update to the app with a few bug fixes and added just a few of the functionality items missing from X and;
This update also comes with a free 30-day trial (a first for any Apple-branded app!) so anyone can take it for a spin and see how it handles:
http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/trial/
What's NOT clear - because it's not stated anywhere on Apple's webpages - are what limitations, if any, there are associated with the trial version. I plan to find out myself and will update as needed.
I'd highly suggest anyone curious about FCP X to use the trial and put it through it's paces. And while you're at it, download the free trial of Premiere Pro as well... and YOU be the judge, not the over-hyped marketing materials!
Reviews for Professional Editors, Producers, Camera Operators and anyone involved in the commercial filmmaking community. Often you'll find some stuff not related to filmmaking... but fun anyway.
Showing posts with label Software for Max OS X. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Software for Max OS X. Show all posts
Sep 20, 2011
Jun 21, 2010
Clean App for Mac OS X: The missing app removal app!
Must-Have Maintenance App for Mac
Occasionally while testing an app I'll find one that really proves itself worthy as a "professional" application, and here's the latest:
One of the big things Mac users fuss with is how to properly un-install old apps or, find where all the preference, cache and other files actually live on the system. Especially when it comes to apps from Adobe which have spider-like traces of their apps all over the OS it can be a daunting task to locate and get rid of them all. And especially when things go wrong with an app and you want to manually refresh it's cache there's almost no way to find a safe method for doing that. Until now, that is.
Enter CleanApp 3:
Much more than an app deletion program this handy, cost-effective app can help you: Locate and delete unused language packs (remember Monolingual?), find and delete/refresh cache files (better than some maintenance apps like Onyx), give you a visual map of your HDD and *every* file that lives on it. Plus, with the help of the built-in "logging" feature - which works in the background and uses almost no resources - you can finally see and delete every file associated with any application that's installed on your system, even if that app doesn't live on the main drive.
I give this app "5 Stars" and would make this a must-have tool along with Onyx and DiskWarrior both for routine maintenance and troubleshooting.
Alsoft Disk Warrior for OS X: Must-Have utility for EVERY Mac user
Do these situations remind you of a "oh god, not now!" scenario you've lived through before? :
- You've been doing tons of work on your system and now it's painfully slow to do normal tasks like starting up or even saving files.
- Opening a once stable application now causes the system to hang or crash.
- Saving a file even a small text file makes the Finder hang or freeze.
- Icons in the dock or Finder don't display properly anymore.
- Your preferences don't act the way they should.
- You get the Mac "bong" during startup but then you get the "?" symbol.
When the directory becomes overwhelmed with too many corrupt files (which absolutely can happen in OS X) or too many directory files become out-of-order then OS X becomes very unstable often becoming completely unusable and even un-bootable. And when situations like the ones above and others occur then it's past-time to diagnose and repair the OS X directory and that's when it's time to call in the directory specialist, DiskWarrior.
DiskWarrior can either be loaded into your applications/Utilities folder to look any Mac volume that you're not booted from or, you can boot from the DiskWarrior DVD and diagnose and repair your boot disk as well.
The process is deceptively simple and to the uninitiated seems as if the application really doesn't do much, but what it's doing is well underneath the surface and is in fact deep surgery to core files that the user never sees (unless you've purposely un-hidden system files, a process I never suggest even for tweak-happy users). Once loaded you DiskWarrior will provide you with a graphic view of your selected drive which looks like a simple version of a defragmentation screen showing file fragments all over the place.
The report will tell you how many files - in percent - is "out of order" meaning, how much of the data is incorrectly stored on the drive. Once you command DiskWarrior to "rebuild" the drive directory a subsequent re-graphing of the same drive will show a "0" percent out of order report along with a very cleaned-up graphic of your now fixed directory.
Typically when a system's directory report has a percentage greater than 25% percent out-of-order then it's time to run DiskWarrior and get things back in order. Percentages that run closer to 50% will usually be associated with very slow running machines with buggy behavior and anything beyond a 50% directory out-of-order and you're running the risk of having serious data corruption or worse. Often systems with reports of higher than 65% out of order won't even boot even though the disk itself is physically running fine.
DiskWarrior has fixed many a directory for both myself and my consultation clients, and I've seen it fix drives that won't boot and don't appear in Disk Utility too. Trust me, being able to repair what would otherwise be an unusable hard-drive and not losing any data is a life-saver and something that makes owning DiskWarrior a mission-critical tool.
If you're the type who likes flying by the seat of your pants or never wears a seatbelt in a car for example, then having a preventive maintenance or worst-case repair tool like DiskWarrior won't appeal to you. But if you're one of the tens of thousands of people who depend on their Mac to work reliably day in and day out then DiskWarrior is a must-have. In fact just as with Onyx I recommend DiskWarrior to ALL Mac users regardless if your computer use is personal or business oriented.
iDefrag for Mac OS X: The best Defragmentation Utility - Ever
If you've ever used a Windows machine but have since converted to Mac and remember the "good 'ol days" of Windows 95, 95, ME, and XP and you did your own hard-disk maintenance then you undoubtedly remember the built-in disk defragmenter. It's unique block-graph display mesmerized many a user who intently watched as those small individual colored-blocks were moved around the screen eventually being grouped together in same-color "cells" resulting in an optimized hard-drive.
Mac OS 8 and 9 had "Speed Disk" from Norton which in some iterations actually caused data corruption rather than giving an optimized hard-drive. Later Tech Tool Pro for OS X gave offered it's Optimizer tool but until recently Mac users have never had a similar tool like Windows users did for defragging their systems.
Enter iDefrag from Coriolis Systems. The user interface is very Win-defragmenter-ish with it's colored-block display showing the hard-drive data image and a Color Key identifier which defines what each color represents on the disk. However unlike the Windows-based defragmenter and even the old Norton and Tech Tool offerings iDefrag offers a host of features that have no equal in the market.
iDefrag identifies and supports the "hot zone" in HFS volumes, it supports both journaled and non-journaled volumes, it has a thermal monitor to make sure your drive/s don't overheat and will stop the defrag process if things get too warm and, it has 4 different defrag routines from a simple-and-fast "online" defrag all the way to "Full Defrag" which takes the longest time but gives you the most possible defragmentation possible.
There are also deeper preferences for how the data is realigned and you can further tweak those options for an even more data-accurate defrag.
And with the CD Maker application also from Coriolis Systems you can also create a bootable DVD with iDefrag on-board which will allow you to *fully* defrag your OS drive since it will be unmounted. That's something no Window's based defragger has done, to my knowledge.
But you're probably saying to yourself something like, "Mac OS X is much more efficient than Windows and doesn't require any defragmentation..." or something similar. That's only a half-truth and in fact one of the biggest myths about Mac OS X is that you don't need to do any maintenance at all, and that's just not the case. Any computer system regardless of platform or OS type requires routine maintenance to run properly and one of those tasks is to keep your main working drives from performance robbing and potentially instability causing deep fragmentation.
OS X is definitely more efficient at keeping large files from becoming fragmented but in now way is OS X fragmentation-free, not by a long shot. Temporary, dyld shared cache, logs, user-cache, font cache and dozens of other types of files that are in constant use are being moved around the HDD all the time, not to mention whenever you install or delete an application things get moved around quite a bit. And over time this causes... you guessed it: Fragmentation. The question of how often and which disks should get de-fragmented will be covered in my "How To" section of this website.
To date, iDefrag is the only Mac-based defragmentation routine that does it's job as well and with as many user-configured options than any other application I've ever seen or tested. It's closest competitor - if you can call it that - would be the Optimization routine avaiable in Tech Tool Pro, but it's minimalistic interface and options don't come close to what's available from iDefrag. And to top it off, in the 3 years I've been using iDefrag it has *never* caused any data corruption or any other problems on any of my Mac's both tower and laptop going back to OS 10.4 on a G5.
Onyx for Mac: The best free Maintenance Uitility for Mac OS X
As I've mentioned elsewhere in my site, one of the biggest myths about Mac OS X is that because it's so much more efficient and logically built around a UNIX core that it doesn't require any maintenance, and that it's three built-in routines of daily, weekly and monthly scripts will magically keep the system running clean and stable. That's just not anywhere close to being the truth.
Like any computer operating system OS X does in fact require routine maintenance and "tune-ups" if you will to keep things running smoothly and prevent major issues. One of the best - and free - utilities on the market today is one from Titanium Software called simply, Onyx.
Built into the Onyx interface are several cleaning and maintenance routines that do things like clear out old cache, delete hidden temporary files, reset the dyld shared cache about about a dozen more operations that literally clear out all the cobwebs in OS X and freshen up the back-end interface.
On top of that are several options for feature-tweaking to help OS X run more efficiently and or, to turn on or off hidden features that would otherwise require manually entering code into the Terminal window such as speeding up the display of sheets, allowing for more file formats in Disk Utility, adding and directing where scroll arrows are placed in windows and tons more too many to list.
And of course Onyx can manually do the high-level Disk Utility functions of fixing permissions, executing the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts and resetting the launch database. All these cleaning and maintenance routines go a long way to keeping a tuned-up and smooth OS X environment. In fact, many low-level UI problems and slow-running machines can be cleared up by running all the Onyx routines.
What Onyx doesn't do however, is look at or fix the directory and the best tool hands-down for that is DiskWarrior which is yet another must-have Mac maintenance application. (see my review)
There are other Mac maintenance programs out there and a few are even payware (Onyx is 100% free!) but none of them do the job of being a multi-routine maintenance application as well nor as thoroughly as Onyx.
There are versions of Onyx that are compatible not only for 10.6.2 Snow Leopard but also all the way back to 10.2 Jaguar. Try to find that much compatibility in the those "other" products!
Along with a copy of DiskWarrior, Onyx should be part of EVERY Mac user's toolkit for DIY maintenance, period. I guarantee regular usage of this powerful application will go along way in helping you from having to make a trip to the Genius Bar.
And did I mention: It's free!
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