If you’re looking for some quality Mac software at reduced holiday prices, check out MacSanta. Each day several different companies offer a 20% discount on their programs. If you should miss a day, you can still get a 10% discount until December 24th on the extended deals page.
Today is Bruji day so if you’re looking for a special gift for that Mac-lover in your life, head on over to MacSanta and buy the Pedias!
What do you do with a Mac Mini, assorted software and a very large DVD library? Why, you build a home entertainment network of course. And to show you just how easy it can be, Ara Derderian and Braden Russell walked listeners through it step by step in the HDTV Guys podcast last March. After the podcast we received lots of great feedback from listeners who got turned on to DVDpedia and its full screen view. Most of that feedback found its way into version 4 of DVDpedia and its redesigned full screen view: filters, multi disc/episode launching, switching collections and a details view. In response to that the HDTV Guys did another podcast about their move to version 4 of DVDpedia on their Mini Video Server. Once again, the feedback was great (including multi-page annotated PDFs that we are still working our way through) and quite a few people have taken Ara’s and Braden’s idea and implemented it in their own home.
For version 4.1 we have taken care of the more frequent requests from HDTV listeners: inclusion of the summary in the details view and multiple lines for the starring information. We had to keep something for future versions so multi-row browsing petitioned by Ara did not make it into this version. We had mentioned to the HDTV Guys that we’re testing out scrolling to make long summaries fit on the details screen. Turns out that reading text that’s not sitting still takes Jedi powers.The biggest request though was customization. Users wanted different information in their details: some wanted just the summary, others were missing the aspect ratio and video format and some didn’t even want the title as they can tell from the cover image. So there was only one solution: let the users choose the fields and their order. Twenty different fields or 550 summary words or a mixture of both fit on the full screen view details page, so get customizing!
Thanks to Braden and Ara for using DVDpedia in their Mac Mini media server as well as all the HDTV listeners that checked out our program. If you have an HDTV and connecting devices to each other is your thing, I highly recommend their show. Like any respectable podcast you can subscribe to it on the iTunes store.
With Leopard finally loose in the wild, the feature that’s caught our attention the most so far is Quick Look. The description of Quick Look, previewing documents without opening them, doesn’t sound all that impressive; after all that’s what programs are for – to view documents. But with the combination of Quick Look, Cover Flow and smart folders you no longer need the Pedias to view your media.
The smart folder gathers all your Pedia items, Cover Flow lets you browse them and Quick Look serves up the details for an item. To show you just how cool this is, we’ve put together a little video.
Luckily you still need the Pedias to add and edit your items. Maybe 10.6 (Small House Cat) will have Quick Edit and programs will be optional; but in the meantime dive into the Pedias’ Leopard features.
We are the quiet ones, the shy ones, the reserved ones, the blogless in a world of posts. Here we are trying to change that with our new Wordpress installation. Daniel Jalkut convinced us that if lawyers have blogs then all Mac developers should as well. But in the years that we have been without a voice our users have taken up our cause. Now that we are blogging the first thing I would like to thank all of those out there that have spread the word about our programs. We know from emails and sales that this group includes most of our users. You have told family members, friends, reviews, previews, competitors, blogs, podcasts, forums, social bookmarks, in French, in German, in English and via email. Thank you. Here’s to great users.
DVD Sphere has ceased development and we have swooped in offering a discount to all their customers to switch to DVDpedia. In truth we are honored to be considered the best competing program for Spherecorner to refer their customers to and we welcome DVD Sphere users into the Bruji family. We are actually sad to see Pascal leave the media organizer arena since competition benefits all Mac users. He will be using his new found time to concentrate on his security related software and we wish him the best of luck.
Version 4.0 of the Pedia programs is finally here. We have been working hard on this release and are very proud of it. Although it includes a number of new features, a lot of the work has been behind the scenes. Tremendous effort was made to make the programs easier to mantain and give us more time to dedicate to implementing all those features still on our to do list. Apple’s Core Data has been essential in making this a possibility.
Due to the enthusiasm of our users in sharing the Pedias with friends, 3.x was an immense success; that is why version 4.0 is free for all our users. If you are not already a Bookpedia, DVDpedia, CDpedia or Gamepedia user, try them out and let us know what you think.
In order to stay with the times this is the first post of our new iWeb RSS feed that will contain Bruji news for your subscribing convenience and possible entertainment.
