How to Convert Video for Free

 Video conversion is one of those things that people constantly search and search for, but just can't get the best application. The Miro Video Convertor is really, what I think to be, the best app to do just that. Miro has just a simple UI that allows you to drop in a file and convert it to a variety of formats. You can convert video to specifically work with your device whether it be Android or Apple or just a video format. The app, however, is somewhat slow and only can do single video conversions at a time, but it works and is free!

You can download Miro Video Convertor (MVC) from the Mac App Store.

A Must Have Mac App: Hazel

Hazel is a maid for your Mac! Hazel goes through your Mac to clean and organize.

Hazel, by Noodlesoft, is a simple, but oh so powerful, app that runs through System Preferences as a pane. Hazel is capable of organizing and cleaning anything you need. Hazel works completely in the background giving you complete ease of use with no need to worry. By setting rules for Hazel to follow, the app will act on files with your given commands. You can move files to new locations based on any certain characteristics you choose and so much more. With Hazel you can also maintain a clean trash bin on your Mac. The app will go through your Trash and clean it with your given presets. Some of the things you can do are adjust the time in which you want files to delete and even set your Trash to "Secure Empty". One amazing feature in Hazel is the App Sweep capability. Many applications charge money to just completely delete all remaining files of an app, but Hazel has it built in. 

Overall, I cannot recommend Hazel enough. Hazel is one of the must have apps available for Mac OS X. I really suggest for you to give it a try on the Noodlesoft site for a 14-day free trial. 

 Here is my video demonstration of Hazel and all of the goodness!

Twitter for Mac, Twitter for Windows?

In January, we saw with the release of the new Mac App Store Twitter released their new client for Mac,updating the outdated Tweetie, after Twitter bought Atebits, creator of Tweetie and claiming rights to the application. Atebits was also the developer who invented Tweetie for iPhone which in turn changed to Twitter for iPhone. 

Twitter then created Twitter for Android & Twitter for Windows Phone after releasing a BlackBerry client too. With the majority of smartphones sorted, what about the other computer operating systems? Windows & Linux?

Twitter clients which are widely available for Windows and Linux, thanks to the Adobe Air platform are standard and allow the user to control their Twitter account within the client itself, without the need of logging into the web interface. TweetDeck is a great client for those power users where as Twhirl and DestroyTwitter are primarily focused at the casual tweeter. However, with the Adobe Air platform compatible with Mac too, Twitter is facing quite a competition and will need to add more functions than they did with their Mac application to win Windows users over. 

I'm both a Mac and a PC as I operate both within my household so I have no bias opinion, but I ask "what is yours?". Leave a comment below!

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Which browser is really the best for Mac?

Today, we spend hours and hours on the Internet, so it is important for us to have a good browsing experience. There is a good selection of browsers for all platforms now. So what one is best for the Mac? Which one is fastest and the easiest to use?

Now, you are all probably thinking “its Safari, duh.” Well let’s find out. Now, I have come to this conclusion from my personal preferences, so everyone’s browser of choice here will be different. My personal preferences are, speed of loading pages and simplicity.

So, how did I test all these browsers equally and fair? I used Peacekeeper, a browser benchmark. It tested you browsers JavaScript functionality. I tested Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. So here are the results...

As you can see, Chrome is the fastest browser when it comes to JavaScript fuctionality. I was amazed on how much it out performed them by. But, is that my preference? Not really, I like chrome but I have found it crashes far too much for my liking. It just would not respond, I downloaded it twice and both times I had the same problems.  Sure, its simple and easy too use. But, I am not going to use something that I can’t rely on.

I had the same problems with Opera as well, actually it was worse. I found it was just not responding. So maybe I got a bad batch of Chrome and Opera? So, if you use either of those two, does it happen to you?

Safari is pre-installed on every Mac and I would say is one of the most popular browsers for Windows users. When I saw the results for Safari I was a little shocked. I thought it being the ‘official’ Mac browser it would out perform the competition by a large margin. One problem I have had with it is my flash player never seems to work; maybe it is because of Apple’s support for HTML5? Nevertheless, I really like Safari; it’s simple, elegant and easy to use. It’s like any Apple product, really.

Firefox came dead last in my benchmark run, by a lot. But, I found it didn’t crash once and it was very simple to use. So does that mean, slow and steady wins the race?

No, I would recommend all us Mac users stick with Safari, its made for our machines. Its like Internet Explorer for windows, except it works and it’s not painfully slow.  

If I have missed anything or you want to know more, please leave a comment and I will happily answer you question.

iPad 2... iMovie?

With all the talk going around about Apple launching the iPad 2, I thought I'd share my most wanted feature: iMovie.

It's already predicted that Apple are going to add at least one camera, hopefully HD, to the iPad's successor. Whilst that's all very nice, I really hope that Apple have plans to bring iMovie to the iPad, whether they chose to include a camera or not. Let's face it, if something can be done on the iPhone 4, chances are you can do it on the iPad. Well, apart from texting and making calls obviously, but let's not be silly now. There are also rumours that Apple intend to add a USB ports and SD card slot. Even if they don't iMovie could still be used by being able to either:

Upload videos that need to be edited onto iTunes.

or

Be able to open videos from the Mail client.

What are you all hoping to see? 

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