JT's Blog

Upon purchasing Apple’s Magic Mouse one will notice that the middle trackball is missing. Upon updating to the Magic Mouse Software, either for Leopard or Snow Leopard, one will notice there a few options to make up for the missing functionality of a standard mouse, after downloading Better Touch one has limitless options at ones finger tips.

Remember that missing middle trackball from the Apple Mouse (formally known as the Mighty Mouse, Ya I don’t know why Apple thought they could use that name either) after installing Better Touch your worries float away.

With Better Touch I use the 3 Finger Click to reveal my desktop and the the 2 Finger Swipe to get to the dashboard.   With Better Touch I am able to the same things with a Apple Mouse and more.  Better yet if you touchpad on a Mac Laptop you can apply gestures as well.  The best thing, the application is free, download here.

During the February 1st, 2010 Mac Geek Gab Podcast cool stuff found segment, John and Dave talked about Perian.  Perian is the self proclaimed Swiss-Army Knife for Quick Time.  As the site states:

“Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.”

As a OS X user I get emails from family members with video, that most often will not play in Quick Time, until no. Previously I had been using the plugin, Flip4Mac, but a small number of video files still failed to play.  After installing Perian, many file formats became available via Quick Time. The best part about Perian is that it is free and is compatible with Quick Time and Quick Time X.

One of my all time favorite OS X third party applications was Techspansion’s VisualHub.

It was able to covert a video file into many different file formats. However, the developer decided to call it quits back in 2008 and though the utility is still useable there has not been an update since that time.

Finally, after a few years a candidate to replace VisualHub has emerged.

The fine folks over at The Little App Factory have developed Evom. Best of all it is free! Evom is able to convert video files into several file formats including Apple TV, iPod, HTML5, YouTube, Flash, AVI and many more. Like many people, if you have lost the ability to make VisualHub work or are new to OS X, please give Evom a try.