Apple Mac HQ

I was recently on a business trip and one of my coworkers decided to buy an iPod Classic while we were at the Birmingham Apple Store. The next day he was looking to put some content on his iPod. In addition to a few songs on his laptop, he also had some videos he converted to avi files some time ago. He didn’t know how to get those videos on his iPod though. That’s when I thought of iSquint.

iSquint is a simple tool for converting videos to an iPod compatible format. As the screenshot below shows, it’s very easy to start converting video. Just drag a file into the application window, choose your optimization format and quality, and click start. If you selected the “Add to iTunes” checkbox, your video will be added to iTunes when it’s done converting. Sync your iPod and it will be transferred to it. It really is that simple. If you’re looking to put video on your iPod, iSquint is a great tool.

iSquint is available free of charge from Techspansion. iSquint is the little brother of VisualHub, the fantastic video conversion tool that I frequently use to add content to my Apple TV.

Popularity: 28%

I don’t know about you, but I love to listen to music. I listen to music at home, at work, on the train, in the car, and in between. I have a steady playlist of artists I like to listen to: Black Keys, Allman Brothers, Guster, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Will Hoge, and many more. As much as I enjoy those artists, I enjoy finding new music too. This is where the March Software Pick Of The Month comes in.

iScrobbler is a small program that sits in your menubar. The beauty of iScrobbler is the ability to send the music you listen to on your iPod or in iTunes to the Last.fm music service. Last.fm is basically a social network built around music. Even though other social networks have a music presence, music is the focus on Last.fm.

As iScrobbler sends music to your Last.fm profile, Last.fm begins to crunch the data behind those songs and creates a whole host of recommend artists, friends, concerts, neighbours, videos, and more. The more music you “scrobble”, as they call it, the better those recommend items become. What I like about iScrobbler is that it performs the intended function (sending your music to Last.fm) and gets out of the way. It’s a super easy program to use and it performs flawlessly. Using this program I’ve found some great new artists on Last.fm, most notably Sara Bareilles.

iScrobbler sends what you listen to Last.fm just as it should. In addition to music, it also sends your podcasts too. While I don’t care if people see what podcasts I listen to, I’d like to keep Last.fm focused on just my music. Here’s a tip from Rory Parle to stop iScrobbler from sending your podcasts to Last.fm.

1. Quit iScrobbler
2. Type the following in the terminal: defaults write org.flexistentialist.iscrobbler “Track Filters” ‘(“Podcast”)’
3. Start iScrobbler
4. Now your podcasts won’t be sent to Last.fm!

iScrobbler is free and can be downloaded from the iScrobbler group forum. If you’re on Last.fm and have a similar taste in music, add me to your friends list.

Popularity: 14%

I’m introducing a new featured post here at AMHQ this month and it’s called the “Software Pick Of The Month”. Each month I’ll feature one piece of software that I’ve enjoyed using recently. Sometimes I’ll do a full review of the software, and other times I’ll just post a little blurb about the software.

My first Software Pick Of The Month is called ColorTagGen by R.A.D. Productions. ColorTagGen is a perfect example of a piece of Mac software. ColorTagGen does one thing, and it does it well. Simply put, ColorTagGen generates HTML/CSS tags from a color on your screen. Do you want to find the hex code for a specific color on a website you like so you can use the same color on your website? With ColorTagGen, finding the hex color is a simple two click process. Open ColorTagGen and click the magnifying glass, then click the color you want. Copy and paste the hex code given into your CSS and you’re done.

ColorTagGen is free and available from R.A.D Productions here. In addition to downloading the application, you can also download the source code. There is no OS X requirement to run ColorTagGen given on the website, but I’ve run it on Tiger with no problems. If you do any sort of web design, this is a great tool to add to your application arsenal.

Popularity: 8%