My Mac Software List 6 - documents, pictures and videos

PDF is a system wide service on mac. The benefit of this is that you can print almost every file (image, webpage etc) into pdf files, just use "Command + P" select PDF -> save as PDF, done. To view PDF files, Adobe Reader  freeware is definitely a good choice, but sometimes slow to open (at least on my ancient powerbook). Apple's build in Preview  is pretty decent for PDF files. You can even click the small pages in the drawer, deleting it (holding Command + delete key), or drag the relavent pages to another pdf file! One downside of Preview is that it does not have full screen feature for PDF files. Also, please do not forget the Leopard system wide QuickLook service , press the space key and you get a preview of the pdf (similar for pictures, slides, movies...) file instantly! If you need to write on the pdf files, you might need to get the expensive Adobe Acrobat Professional  commercial, or the cheaper application PDFpen  shareware.

The build in Photo Booth  is very fun to play with, and you may display those effects in iChat if have MobileMe account. I would also strongly recommend you organizing your photos with iPhoto  free in iLife with every new mac. There is no Google Picasa application for mac (at least for now), but you can upload your photos to Picasa Web from iPhoto using Picasa Web Albums  free. For (semi) professional photographers, do not miss Apple's Aperture or Adobe's Light Room. Both of them have very good press, but I haven't tried them.

Talking about pictures, you cannot miss the build in Image Capture  for screen capture. Or even simpler, press "Command + Shift + 3 or 4" for full screen capture or drag capture (link for detailed tips). There is also a dashboard widget, Screenshot Plus  freeware, if you hate to memorize the keyboard shortcuts.

If you want to draw some simple curves (like sine wave, ellipse) and do not want to open R or Matlab, try the hidden gem in OS X, Grapher  build in. Check out its own examples, and this guide on macrumors. If you want a graphical editor, but cannot afford Adobe photoshop, consider the cheaper Pixelmator  shareware, or just settle with Seashore  freeware. I've also tried Lineform and Vector Designer, but I am not a heavy graphical developer, so I don't have much comments on those applications.

To read comic books (or lots of sequential pictures), try this light weight application, Xee  freeware. To present your photos and movies with style, try award winning Photo Presenter  shareware. If you are still not satisfied, and want to make something like Scotland did in the end of his thesis defense, try FotoMagico  shareware. I cannot justify its high price, but it seems Scottland is quite happy with it.

You might remember using the linux tools for batch resizing/rotating pictures, you could use Resize!  freeware on a mac, and I think it is easier than setting up the an Automator routine for these simple tasks. Unless you got extra bucks to spare, you won't need to use this fancy Resize Me  shareware.

Needless to say, play your music in iTunes  freeware. For Chinese songs, you may need to use ID3Mod2  shareware to correct the wrong text encoding. But even better, now you can just get nLyrics  freeware to do the task, and even obtain lyrics when you play the song, for free (notice, the Tiger version is not up to date). To play .ogg files, I used to use Cog  freeware, but it seems that Vorbis solution is more popular these days.

Similarly, you will get used to QuickTime  freeware for your video files. There is not much reason to upgrade it to the Pro version, except the easy making movie files with many sequential pictures, which I liked a lot. No more Windows Media Player on mac, but you can play .wma files through QuickTime with free plugin Flip4Mac WMV . There is also non-free version of the plugin, which offer features like convert .wma files to .mov files without the ugly watermark. For stream files (.rm files), you should definitely use RealPlayer , again go with the free version, the little blue button on the top. I hate the company, which always tries to sale you the commertial version, and hide the free version download button at a place you'll never notice. In addition, if you do found certain .rm files cannot be played, try downgrading the current version 11 to Realplayer 10  freeware. It seems they are bad at backward compatibility. For other codec, you might want to install the system preference plugin Perian  freeware for iTunes, or try VLC player  freeware. Mplayer  freeware is also recommended when you need to view external captions for the movie files, or sometimes, you got to try DivX Player  freeware (not the Pro version). To much for you? Yes! So here goes my summary: install Flip4Mac and Perian, and forget about them; then open all you video files with Quicktime and Realplayer; if you fail, try VLC; fail again? Go to your windows box, and remind the good old days you can have just one media player solve all the problem. Hopefully, you won't miss your windows computers 99% of the time.

For watching TV or on-line streamed videos, there is no Windows ppLive conterpart on mac, but there is the Joost  freeware with limited programs. However, there is no problem about watching Olympics on NBC website, or YouTube, with SilverLight, or Flash plugin. So life is bearable.

To make a screencast, (notice those vocabulary: podcast, screencast...) you can try iShowU  shareware or SnapzProX  shareware. Both of them are not free, but if you really need them, the price is not that steep. However, if you just want to teach your grandma setting up the mac in another city, why not just use sceen share and configure the machine remotely.

Make Audiobooks in iTunes

不同类型的媒体使用方式不同，所以iTunes将音乐，电视，电影，电子书和podcast分开是个好的开始。譬如电子书，比方说我的法语课文音频文件，一般来说shuffle音乐的时候不想他们出来，但是把它们变到audiobook目录下面去并不是改一下genre成audiobook就可以了事的，做笔记如下：

首先，得使用苹果电脑。windows机器没有applescript，更加复杂，我也懒得研究了。

1. 安装Make Bookmarkable。具体说就是去dougscripts的网站下载这个script，然后copy到/User/Library/iTunes/Scripts/目录下面（如果没有这个目录就建立一个），然后重启iTunes。
2. 将文件convert成acc格式（.m4a后缀），这个可以直接在iTunes里面选好文件右健选菜单convert就好。当然，更加详细一点的转换设置在preference（apple+,）里面advanced->importing->Import Using ACC converter, and setting 64bit, stereo channel, and optimized for voice。
3. 删除旧文件，保留那些转换好的.m4a文件。
4. 选好要转换的.m4a文件，在iTunes菜单条里面选下面的make bookmarkable，done！

结果是.m4a变成了.m4b文件，然后这些文件自动出现在audiobook目录下了。

注：直接用机器人把.m4a文件改名字成为.m4b文件不会将文件挪到audiobook目录；而用这个方法改的文件列在audiobook目录下并不一定需要采用genre里面audiobook的tag，譬如可以使用French的tag。