iKeepActive Lite 1.1.2 Released

Added a new mechanism for tracking when scheduled activities are due in Mountain Lion.
– For earlier versions of OS X, the Applescript system is still used for tracking due activities.
– Rearranged the flow of information on the Summary View for ease of the new user.
– Added 4 more available activities.
– Quite possibly one of the last versions to support Snow Leopard and Lion, so get it while you can.
– Dropped support for 32-bit.

iCaption – Development Life After 2.0

Development on iCaption 2.0 stopped over a month ago, winding down to the final phases before the end of the release cycle. While this version is huge, with many great new features, there are some wish list items which just couldn’t make the cut.

The most notable and sought-after feature, by myself and from customers, is waveform visualization, which happens to be the next natural step after implementing the new timeline view. Waveform visualization didn’t make the 2.0 cut simply because it’s difficult; the development scope could have easily doubled the timeline feature scope size, were it to be in this release.

There are multiple points of difficulty with waveform visualization and left unaddressed the application, frankly, will feel like shit, which will in turn soil the user experience rather than enrich it. I’ve seen an audio application make me wait for what felt like a minute, to analyze a 4 minute song – an algorithm like that would never fly if you’re trying to subtitle a 120 minute long movie.

Algorithmically there’s analyzing each frame of a video’s audio track in a timely manner, keeping the application responsive while operating on the former (which may include background loading or streaming while also keeping the video available to the user) and waveform data cache management. The background thread is tricky because a QTMovie must detach from the main thread in order to become accessible from another thread, but that would cause the video to be unavailable to the user, whom will be interacting via the main thread. There’s also coming up with a reasonably fast approach to drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of audio samples on screen at any time without the user noticing pegs in the CPU (and it can’t simply use a pre-render for each draw because the waveform should squish/stretch and cull based on the current view of the timeline).

On the API side, as far as I can tell the examples I’ve found for audio frequency level extraction which Apple provided seem to have no 64-bit support, forcing me to drop down and compile iCaption as 32-bit-only. This should in theory still work fine in the 64-bit Mountain Lion, but it’s unsettling at best to make your project have to “go there”. There may be some newer API but if it exists, I’m sure I’d have to drop Snow Leopard or even Lion support, as I’m seeing a trend for favouring Mountain Lion specific APIs. Worse case I would try to make one final Snow Leopard compatible release of iCaption before switching to the 10.8 SDK.

In ferocious spite of the above, I have already made enough serious headway with iCaption 2.1.0’s WIP to leave you all with a bit of a teaser.

 

Version 2.1.0 will be done when it’s done; don’t hold your breath.

iCaption 2.0.0 Released

The new major version bump to iCaption 2.0 is warranted, because this update is huge! I have taken into consideration the helpful input from customers, and have applied these ideas into a tangible, intuitive user experience. The main focus of this release is the new and powerful timeline editing which increases your workflow productivity, with a secondary focus on previewing, and tertiary improvements for an altogether better subtitle editing environment. Continue reading for the full feature list:

  • Subtitle editing improvements, made possible by a new timeline view, which features the following:
    • All subtitles are visualized in the timeline view.
    • Selected subtitles will visualize overlapping to neighboring subtitles, in addition to the non-selected subtitles with overlapping times shown in red in the table view.
    • Draggable start and end markers, which are used to add new subtitles or apply to existing subtitle start and end times.
    • Markers can be moved individually, or panned together across the timeline.
    • Show start and end marker position in real time while dragging.
    • Scrub through the reference video by dragging the markers.
    • Markers can also be nudged in either direction by a quarter of a second at a time.
    • Zoom in and out of the timeline, changing the current scope of your view of the timeline.
    • Panning the current scope relative to the timeline as a whole.
    • Display of the scope start and the scope end times.
    • Timeline panning and zooming are done with left mouse drag and right mouse drag respectively, complete with Shift and Control key modifiers to make it go faster or slower.
    • Transferring times from the video position itself is no longer the workflow, but is still supported. (Since markers also do video scrubbing, transferring from marker position has the same effect)
  • Subtitle previewing improvements:
    • The preview is now layered right into the video view, rather than the hacky looking floating window. This also means that for now you can no longer detach the preview and move it around yourself.
    • With certain file types the QTMovieLayer appears to have much smoother video scaling than previously.
    • The preview font is much larger and has a black shadow under it.
    • The preview timing is accurate to 250ms now instead of 300ms.
  • Added the ability to play a selected video segment in a loop.
  • All human readable times shown in the application are now easier to read (dropped the QuickTime formatting).
  • Added a more prominent Help button on the toolbar.
  • Main menu and toolbar updates.
  • Updated the documentation.
  • Updated the application icon.

Enjoy!

iKeepActive 1.2.2 Released

The latest version of iKeepActive (1.2.2) is now available in the Mac App Store now. The release focus is on Mountain Lion Fixes, but other features and improvements have also been added so updating is recommended for everyone on 64-bit Intel Macs.

– Added a new mechanism for tracking when scheduled activities are due in Mountain Lion.
– For earlier versions of OS X, the Applescript system is still used for tracking due activities.
– Added support for retiring scheduled activities. This allows you to remove an activity from your calendar while still keeping the history for tracking purposes. Retired activities can be re-scheduled.
– Rearranged the flow of information on the Summary View for ease of the new user.
– Added 4 more available activities.
– Quite possibly one of the last versions to support Snow Leopard and Lion, so get it while you can.
– Dropped support for 32-bit.