When the press release came in for AntiCrash, Cletus immediately suspected trouble. He thought the software sounded to good to be true. I disagreed, remembering people had felt the same way about other programs in the past. Startup Doubler and ROAM are two good products that come to mind. Given the fact that there was no evidence to conclude a hoax, I encouraged him to post it.

After seeing Ted Landau's post on MacFixIt, speculating that Dachshund Software was connected to Gadget Software based on shareware receipts, and that AntiCrash may be based on pirated code, I started to dig for answers.

Comparing the code and resources in AntiCrash to ResumeToFinder, Bomb Shelter, and Norton's Crash Guard, I am fairly certain that there was no wholesale theft of code from those applications. Instead, after looking at the code, a software developer believes the program does absolutely nothing. It appears to be nothing more than a 'face' created in REALBasic, and the controls are connected to nothing more than dialogs and counters.

This is rather clever of Dachshund Software. Rather than steal code that would raise the ire of a large corporation, simply create a useless application that does nothing more than display shareware nag screens.

Cletus and I have also received identically worded emails from free email services praising the virtues of AntiCrash. Follow-up emails to the senders of these identical 'glowing reviews' have not been returned.

In conclusion, I still believe ResExcellence was correct to post the initial information on AntiCrash, but given this new information, it appears the application is simply a waste of time.

One of the most popular edits at ResExcellence, originally by Anthony Saxton, modifies Apple's CD/DVD Driver to work with many third party external SCSI CD Drives. This latest update for version 1.3.5 was submitted by Ted Thibodeau Jr. Thanks to them both! (Continued...)

Next week is the last possible week to submit Macintosh browser throbbers into the Throbb-A-Thon throbber creation contest at pkelleher.com. Contest doors close on Aug 18th at midnight. After the 18th, our fantastic judges will narrow down the top ten, public voting will take place, and a few lucky folks will get some neat prizes mailed to their door step. Internal judging is being graciously provided by some of the worlds best Macintosh "pixel pushers" at ResExcellence, Iconfactory.com, and icons.cx

Tools and manuals are located on our site in order to assist and/or speed up the throbber creation process.

And on a side note... ThrobberEdit, the only program ever designed to simply apply IE 5 and Netscape 4.x throbbers without ResEdit, will be probably be available for download sometime this weekend. We've been quite busy and ThrobberEdit 1.0 will be rad to say the least. Macintosh throbber fans have been begging for this for months... they won't be let down.

Winners of Throbb-A-Thon will be allowed to have there work included with ThrobberEdit 1.0.

And if you're from Chicago, don't forget the logo at the bottom of the left sidebar, "How to Check Your Sox".

8/9/00

Whoa, this is a big set! It took a long time to sort-out the links in this latest Propaganda set, but it was worth it because "1999 Redmond Invasion Tour" contains over 150 great images for you desktop.

In most cases, the color palette offered by Apple in iMovie will suit your needs, but what about those times when you want to make a bolder statement, or the image that the title is to appear over is very light? This small ResEdit modification will allow you to modify the color choices of the title text. (Continued...)

• about box
• splash screen
• sign on screen
• sign on status screen
• buddy list
• buddy list setup

8/7/00

Last week's Poll generated a lot of email. While most people agree that Apple was within their rights to be angry with ATI over the hardware leak, it is unfortunate that end users who will purchase these "hobbled" systems are not getting the best graphics performance available.

It's likely that hardware decisions based on business politics happen all the time, it's just unusual for it to be made so public by the parties involved.

I wish to ask your opinion on how to handle links at ResExcellence. Since we are a launch pad for all things GUI, I wonder if it would be practical to have links that leave ResExcellence open into their own browser window. This would only happen for links on this main entry page. Links in other sections of this web site would be unaffected. This week's Polling Place asks, "Should ResEx links spawn new windows?".

I captured all my video from an 8mm analog camcorder using the iRez PCMCIA card and my Pismo Powerbook. To get the highest frame rates, disable virtual memory, turn off Appletalk, use Peek-a-boo or ProcessInfo to see what hidden apps are running and decide if you want to disable them too.

My iMovie Project. Click for larger.

BTW, I couldn't get iMovie to launch unless I had the Control Strip extension enabled. Go figure.

As you record your video clips, clean them up by editing them in the Quicktime Player to keep their size down, your hard disk will start filling up quick! If you load a clip, and don't need the audio, use the QT Player to delete the audio track. This will also save disk space, make your final movie smaller, and the sound mix will be cleaner.

Once you have your video clip prepared in the Quicktime Player, export it as a DV file (digital video). This is the required format to import into iMovie. Place the DV clips in your projects Media folder, and will be placed in the tray when you launch iMovie.

I thought I could save some hard disk space by recording my video clips with mono audio, but this turned out to be a mistake because the sound for that clip will only come out of the left speaker. The good news is that the audio fade in/out and volume controls not only work on the music tracks, but also on the audio attached to a video clip. This gives you a surprising amount of control over the audio mix (and I'm finicky about my audio mixes!).

I recommend you create a solid black PICT in a graphics program and import it into iMovie to provide several seconds of black video at the front and back of your movie.

Once you have all your DV clips, still pictures, and audio music collected, roughly build the entire project before you start adding titles and visual effects. It makes it much easier to move items around in the progect when you don't have to concern yourself with the visual effects.

When it's time to print your movie to video tape, there are two ways in the analog domain. My Powerbook has a video out that I connected to the VCR. For the best looking title text, I rendered the project in iMovie, and played the resulting movie using the Quicktime Player in Full Screen presentation mode. Unfortuanately, the frame rate occasionally suffered.

To get a better frame rate, but fuzzier title text, play the project in the full screen preview mode of iMovie (this is where the 10 seconds of black at the front and back come in handy). Record the project right out of iMovie into the VCR.

Don't let these limitations discourage you. Even without a digital video camera, you can create some amazing movies, even if you're using only still photos.

8/4/00

I have spent most of the past two evenings creating my first iMovie. Not having a DV camcorder, I loaded video clips into the computer using my old iRez PCMCIA capture card. On a 500Mhz Pismo, this yielded 30fps at 640x480. I then scanned a dozen photos and saved them as 640x480 PICT's.

Fifty clips, thirty-five transitions, and three music tracks later, I had edited one heck of a four minute movie! The next problem was to get my creation out of the Powerbook and onto video tape.

My only option was to export the project as a Quicktime Movie. At the highest resolution, to took 4 hours to render the 4 minute movie! The resulting file was 300 megs in size.

The last step involved connecting the composite video-out port on the Powerbook to a VCR and '"Presenting" the movie using the Quicktime Player on the "Fullscreen" setting. The final result, while an impressive accomplishment, still has some of the Quicktime jitters that imagine would disappear with a DV transfer. All in all, for free software and an old $99 iRez card, the video tape will make a great presentation at the 40 year-old birthday party I will be attending this weekend. :)

With the arrival of musical composition software, the creation of music has become much less tedious. Mind you, a budding composer must still have an ear for music, but the laborious process of jotting down each note manually on paper has become unnecessary. Various commercial and shareware utilities have been created to assist today’s composer with their latest arrangements. However, Noteheads Musical Expert Systems’ Igor Engraver Light is the first one I’ve seen that is freeware! (Continued...)

I caught the mention of using process viewers for the Mac OS and Linux to see what's hijacking memory/processor time. While Peek-a-Boo seems like a great program it also does more, such as allowing you to adjust how much time an app gets using it's "special technology"

Why pay $20 for functionality you may not want or need when all you want to do is see what's chewing on your system like Pac Man in a maze of power pellets? I've been using Processinfo.app to do the same thing for a while and the best part is that it costs a whopping $0!

The "special technology" in Peek-a-Boo to which Mike is referring lets you change an applications ability to demand processor time. In Linux, this is called a program's NICEness! And it does work. For example, is you make your browser Nicer, so that it demands less CPU time when not the frontmost app, animated gifs will slow to a crawl.

Topics covered in this edition include:

• How to network two Macs together.
• Can I rename CDs?
• How to save graphics in JPEG format.
• Can I use my Excite email account in Outlook Express?
• What files can I trash?
• I think my boyfriend is cheating on me. What can I do?

8/2/00

After taking an unusually long time to drop-off my roll of 110 film at the drug store, I finally picked up my photos from Macworld NY. While I don't like to brag, Steve Jobs and I are pretty close. In fact, we have the same maid. Below are some candid photos taken during our weekend together in New York.

While we are on the topic of the Appearance Manager, MacInstruct has a new tutorial covering everything you ever wanted to know about this handle little control panel.

If you highlight Michael Coyle <coyle@ResExcellence.com> and drag it to the desktop, you will get a text clipping. To get a URL email clipping, drag only the email address. But later, when you double-click the email URL, your emailer gets passed the impersonal address, not a real name. This little tip from M Spreij adds the real name with the email address, or multiple emails with one URL clipping! (Continued...)

Here are two utilities that can help you get to the root of the problem. Under the MacOS, try Peek-a-Boo. It will provide processor usage on every application - even hidden programs like KeyQuencer Engine. If you're running Linux, try QPS. There is even a compiled PPC binary!

Keep an alias of these programs close by, and the next time your computer is working harder than you think it should, you can quickly find the little busy app.

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