Apple Events often are REALLY, REALLY boring things.
You'd expect some great magical Steve Jobs-ian type
of moment where, you get introduced to something really
really cool, that would help you with your productivity,
or at the very least, help you get through a project
in iMovie or Garageband that your stuck on.
Instead you are often given 6 hours of butt to the chair,
non stop PR talk about how great Apple is doing,
how great Apple will be doing, and how you can
be a part of that by buying more apple product.
But occasionaly, you do get something cool for
coming, and not just the free can of soda that
comes with the boxed lunch.
And at this event, not only did we get to see something
cool from Apple, but then they gave it to us
( in attendance only) for FREE.
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I Present the little app
that changes the game: Screen Capture.
Screen Capture, we are told leverages the power of
Core Video in Quicktime, and enables something
really cool: You can, for free, screen capture your
mac and save it to a quicktime movie file.
You can even record your voice while you work on screen,
annotating the event you are doing, and once done,
you can turn that into a podcast, or share it
as is with collegues to show them how to do
that which they have been stumbling around on
in their Mac app of choice. ( which is what I've
been doing of late)
The results are impressive: On an MBP Intel Core Duo 2.0,
I can capture 1440 x 900 at 5fps in Best mode
to Mpeg-4 with AAC audio at 1080 x 675 and
at 950 x 594 at 15fps in Better Mode to
Mpeg-4 with AAC audio as well, and yet it
was very watchable and played back quite nicely.
Now, it's no iShowU ( my favorite app of this type),
but it is two things: (1) FREE, and (2) leverages
both the built in iSight Camera and Quicktime
to put something together that costly apps can
only do one of ( iShowU does the video, but doesn't
leverage the isight Camera to record audio).
Word is now that Apple is incorporating this tech
into Snow Leopard going forward. The app that
was given to us at the even for FREE works only
on Leopard and only on Intel based Macs
( sorry PPC and Tiger).
If you get to go to an apple event, show up with a flash drive,
and be prepared to get at lest something for showing up;
while I didn't expect anything this cool, it was worth
the 6hours of butt in a chair aerobics I had to endure.
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