This is a simple program to reduce the size of your iMovie 08 library.

I love iMovie ‘08. I know, I know, it has less whizzy features than iMovie ‘06 does, but darn it, it’s so darn fast and easy to build videos. I can create a whole hour-long movie in about ten minutes! (Not a very good one, of course — but none of my movies are very good.)

Part of why it’s fast is that it keeps all my clips on hand, ready and willing to be part of my latest (crappy) movie. Unfortunately, all those barely-compressed DV clips take up A LOT of space. (About 10 GB/hour of video!) This application will compress all the DV files in your iMovie library to save huge amounts of disk space! Using Apple’s H.264 compression technology, you can shave 70% off your library space with minimal loss of quality.

UPDATE: v1.2 works with SetFile installed in /usr/bin as well as in the default /Developer/Tools directory.

A while ago, I set up a Squidoo lens to let folks vote on which software for the Mac was best. To my great surprise, it was really popular, and quickly shot up into the top 50 Squidoo lenses, and was nominated as a Lens of the Day by Squidoo.

Well, it’s popularity has diminished slightly, but now the lens is in the running for the Squidoo Lens of the Year!

How cool would it be if a lens promoting the very BEST stuff for the Mac was awarded this prestigious title?

Following up on my earlier test of Mac archiving software, I decided to test some popular file copying/synchronization software to see which of these programs kept metadata and other Mac/HFS+ attributes intact. Rather than do a comprehensive test, I tried some popular utilities which seem to cover the general breadth of the software and which are particularly popular or prevalent. I also wanted to catch programs which had been updated since this article was written a year ago.

If you want detail on other utilities, I recommend reading the article linked above, or doing your own tests if you have the time. (And please let us know what you find out!)

The New Stikkit Package is a collection of utilities which allow you to quickly and easily add new “stikkits” to the Stikkit.com service. (Read more about Stikkit right here!)

This package includes…

• An application so you can add new Stikkits right from your dock!

• An AppleScript which you can launch thru the Script Menu or your favorite alternate script launcher

• You can use the scripts with LaunchBar or Quicksilver so that you can seamlessly add new Stikkits without even leaving your current context

• Perhaps most excitingly, it also includes a “Make New Stikkit” service, so you can send text to Stikkit from within any application that supports services!

All right, let’s just get this out of the way. This pick isn’t a Mac application, it’s another web application.

However, it’s a web application that works flawlessly under Safari, but doesn’t work perfectly under IE. Happy now? I thought so!

The web site is stikkit.com. Basically, it’s an online junk drawer/snippet keeper, just like the thousands of similar programs that have been cropping up on the Mac for the last few years. (And yes, even with every word in there as a link to another organizer/outliner/snippet organizer, I didn’t nearly fit all of them.)

Adobe has a free web-based application out called Kuler.

In a nutshell, Kuler is a color picker that helps you design a color scheme of complimentary colors. It lets you start with a base color, and will generate a family of related colors based on some simple rules (whether you want a high contrast or low contrast color scheme, for example). Any of the automatically generated colors can be overridden as well, should you happen to want to.

Where Kuler really shines, however, is in the community around it. You can publish and share and browse other designers’ color schemes. You can rate the schemes you browse, and the best and most popular ones naturally rise to the top.

Here at Nik's Picks, I try to dig up some of the best software out there and share it with you. But I'm just one (lazy) guy, and there's a lot of smart folks out there.

So, to make everyone have a little something new all the time, I set up Squidoo lens that tracks the top MacOS X software.

Just pop over to the lens, and you can vote on your favorite software, and vote down any software you don't think is deserving! Should be fun.

You can see the top few results here in the sidebar, or best of all, at the page itself. Get out there and vote! (And, if you like the lens, be sure to give it a nice rating!)

I recently whomped together a little TiVo decoding application, that lets folks convert the videos on their TiVo into something they can actually use. This has caused me to get a little more interested in other programs that enhance the TiVo experience. So here, for a Very Special Nik’s Picks, is a rundown of some of the best software out there to assist you in using your TiVo. Best of all, they’re all free!

John Gruber ran an excellent article, ‘Beta’ is Not an Excuse, dissecting the important difference between beta software and simply buggy, but released, software. His target: The much ballyhooed CD burning application, Disco. His point was simply that calling Disco “beta” is disingenuous, because as long as they’re selling the software, they have an obligation to their customers to create software that works.

Simple logic, but it misses the true genius of their approach: They’re using pre-sales as a means to gain investment capital to fund the final development of Disco!

Introducing Send to KGTD Advanced Version 3.1!

…Now featuring full support for international character sets to support productive people around the world!

This is a simple, powerful script which allows you to quickly enter tasks, projects and/or contexts to your Kinkless GTD file. It’s faster and easier than doing it by hand via OmniOutliner, or using any other scripts out there!

New in Version 3.0

• Full Unicode support! The parsing engine has be re-written from scratch so now non-Roman character sets are fully supported.
• Support for KGTD files without date columns
• Support for KGTD custom inbox sections (uses meta-inbox)
• No longer requires any scripting additions!

Despite all the crabby things I say about iTunes, I use it every day, and there’s a lot to like about it.

For example, iTunes offers some amazing ways to organize your music. You can rate it, you can build up albums, browse by cover art, and even create smart folders based on the year the tune was released or by the beats-per-minute of the song.

That’s great, provided that you have a team of data entry personnel getting all that metadata up to date, scanning Amazon.com for album art, and listening to your various mislabeled tracks to figure out what song it is and add the appropriate information in iTunes. But otherwise, you generally end up with some smart folders that track about half a dozen of your songs, and you kind of give up on the rest.

But hey, isn’t that what computers are for? Shouldn’t your Mac be able to handle all that tedious work for you? And for those tasks that it can’t do by itself (rating songs, for example, is an inherently personal task), can’t it make it easier for you to take care of it?

But if that were possible, wouldn’t Apple have built in into iTunes for you?

Apparently they didn’t (at least not all the way), so here’s a handful of utilities that will help you get your iTunes library into shape, and make the most of what you’ve got in there.

I just installed IE 7 on my PC at work, and I thought I’d share my impressions after using it for an hour or two. I was trying to put this review into a “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” theme, but I found out that all I had was bad and ugly and one tiny shred of good. So we’re just going with The Ugly.

Is it just me, or is it the ugliest browser ever made?

Those tabs are HUGENORMOUS, there’s toolbars everywhere, and it’s all this kind of sickly blue color. Those giant jeweled buttons are absolute eyesores, too. Ugh. It’s like MacOS X’s public beta with all life sucked out of it. Garish and depressing.

Fully integrate your email with Kinkless GTD!

Updated September 21, 2006: Removed link creation to work around a bug in a recent security update.

Have you ever been in your car, and you just want to remind yourself to pick up a certain CD on Amazon because you’re digging on the current tune on the radio?

Do you have web forms that send you tech support requests and you’d like to get those requests in your Kinkless GTD file?

Do you sometimes just want to remind yourself to follow up on an email, but you’d rather have everything in one place, and so you end up filing an email and then creating a task to follow up on it in KGTD, and pretty soon you can’t remember where anything is?

It’s a special edition of Nik’s Picks today with two whole picks! Why? Because, well, these two apps are great tastes that go great together!

Today, we’re going to talk about automating your Mac with Hazel and Proxi. I’m an avid AppleScripter, and I can’t say enough good things about making those tiny repetitive tasks automatic. I have about thirty or so little scripts (scriptlets, I call ‘em) which do one thing that I often want to do or just would rather have automated.

But these scripts are not necessarily easy to write, even with Automator to help out, and there’s a lot of common jobs you may want to get done which simply aren’t possible without some fairly henious AppleScript-fu.

That’s where our two picks come in…

A number of users have reported that when their mail rules activate Mail to KGTD, they get an error type 8. I’ve tracked down the CAUSE of this problem, but I’m not quite at a solution yet.

The cause is that when messages come in, they don’t seem to have message IDs anymore. Since my script requests a message ID, everything borks when it tries to get it. Once messages are properly received (after rules are run), they have IDs (like they should), which is why Mail Act-On continues to work, as will the rule if you edit it and then request that the new rule run on all messages in your inbox.