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Killer Sites

Before we get in to this week’s Freeloader, I’d like to remind you that the annual Freeloader Freeware picks episode is coming up in a few weeks. Send in your freeware picks to brian AT macmerc DOT com.

We’re going to take a break from downloads to look at a bunch of sites each with a kind of connection to free.

CMS Matrix

Those that know are aware of the slew of free blogging applications. This site lets you shop these by feature. By far, this site offers the most comprehensive examination of content management systems on the web.

Wikinews Beta

The group that brought you the Wikipedia free encyclopedia are testing out a new concept in community maintained news. The experiment in wiki news is viewable and waiting for your contributions.

Lulu.com

This new face in print-on-demand offers a no-cost way for you to bring your masterpiece to the masses. Lulu prints and ships your book, calendar or music to buyers you bring to your free Lulu hosted shop.

The Extension Mirror

This site hosts an exhaustive list of Firefox and Thunderbird extensions and themes, including hundreds not listed on update.mozilla.org. In fact, the folks at Extension Mirror even have instructions of updating defunct extension to work in newer version of Firefox and Thunderbird – and host many of these ‘revived’ extensions.

That’s it. Don’t forget to send in your suggestions for 2004′s freeware picks!

Brian

Your Brother-in-Lawís Wedding Video– a tutorial

You may not be related to them, but now word has gotten around about your Mac prowess ñ and your SuperDrive.

Anyone whoís spent their afternoon dropping dozens of images one after another, and individually adjusting each transition knows there has to be a better way.

This is where iView Media Pro comes in. iPhoto makes a mean slide show on your Mac, but the finesse goes out the window when you attempt a QuickTime export. iMovieís image resampling is sometimes less than ideal and does not lend itself to any kind of batch handling.

iView Media Pro does much more than creating slide shows. It was created as a media management tool, and does it so well that it is the tool of choice for the tutorial.

So hopefully you have a tech savvy brother in law with a digital camera. If not the good news is that your scanning will be the most time consuming part of making the slide show.

Create a new catalog in iView and drag all your images in. Arrange them in the desired order. If you scanned them in order or strategically named them this can be done with a quick sort.

ssoptions Your Brother in Lawís Wedding Video   a tutorial

Take a minute to adjust your slide show settings. Chose Movie Presentation under the Make menu. Select a transition and set your dimensions to 720 x 480 and uncheck the Compression option and click Create.

mpoptions6 Your Brother in Lawís Wedding Video   a tutorial

Now, import the clip into iDVD, or your weapon of choice. You can drop music in with your video editor or in QuickTime Pro.

Easy enough? In three quick steps you can turn your collection of images into a slick video that might be enough to impress you in-laws.

You can download and use a fully functional version for 3 week evaluation. The full registered version is well worth the $45 price tag.

-Brian

Browse Better

Web browsers are my kind of software: free from the beginning. The heavy hitters both have OS X versions worth trying out. However, if open-source is your style, there’s a great alternative.

Chimera Navigator

Featured on Freeloader as an alternative to Microsoft Explorer, this mozilla-based browser is lean, stable and supports tabs. That last feature will change the way you browse, allowing you to open multiple sites without multiple windows. In its latest version, 0.5, Chimera is more stable than ever and feature-rich.

GooSearch X

This little free search utility opens a small floating window. From that window you can search Google for websites and images. To maximize this little apps utility, drag it onto your Finder toolbar for easy access.

RBrowserLite

If you mourned the day Fetch went shareware, then this app is for you. RBrowserLite is a simple, straight-forward FTP application. It also supports shortcuts to recently access sites.

WebGrabber

Epicware, the group that brought us Fire, also has a great web site tool. This utility allows you to download the entire contents of a website to your disk for offline viewing. This utility can download an entire directory without FTP access and supports resumed downloads.

With these great freeware options, there’s no reason not to browse in style.

Until next week, Brian