For at least two years now, I have been screwing around with my disappearing login items. One day everything would open just fine when my computer booted up, and the next day, they were gone, just disappeared. I started keeping a list of my login items so that I could add them again whenever this happened, which seemed to be several times a month — often enough to make me NUTS! It was a time-consuming pain to keep re-adding the login items.

I tried creating login folders with Tiger Cache Cleaner, then Leopard Cache Cleaner, and MacPilot. I was even creating alarms in AlarmClockPro to open these files after my computer started up every morning. That worked, too, until the login item to start the starters would also disappear!

I Googled the problem and found people having the same issue, but no solutions. I hoped when I upgraded to Snow Leopard the problem would be solved. Nope. Still happening. Not major, in the grand scope of things, but hugely annoying.

Googling the subject again (and again), I found where several people suggested replacing the com.apple.loginitems.plist file. It didn't make a difference, BECAUSE [drum roll, please] it was the wrong file! It turns out it's the loginwindow.plist file, also in the Preferences folder. Once I got my login items the way I wanted them, I duplicated the file and started keeping a copy on my desktop. When I don't see all my icons in the menu bar that should be there, I replace the file in the Preferences folder with a copy of my "good" loginwindow.plist file, reboot, and all is right with the world.

I am a big fan of VisualHub, the excellent Techspansion application whose development was stopped about a year ago. I have the latest version of VisualHub and it still works fine, but one of these days, that's not going to be the case, and I have been hoping something new would come along to take its place. I've just been demoing VideoVangelist from Whimsically Plucky Software, and I think I have found my new VisualHub, which happens to be on sale at MacZot TODAY for only $5.00. Yeah, no kidding, $5.00. It's only $10.00 at full price! What is this guy thinking!?

With VideoVangelist you simply drag and drop video or audio files to the main window, choose the format you want and click start. There are a few basic settings you can tweak if you want to, some more advanced ones that you may NOT want to. You can convert files for iPod, iPhone/iPod touch, AppleTV, AVI, DV, WMV, XBOX 360, PSP, MPEG and Flash (swf and flv). You can also convert any video or audio file to MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF, FLAC or Ogg/Vorbis. This comes in handy when you have, for example, a DVD of Robin Williams' Broadway show and you want to listen to it in your car while you're driving. Or how about a Woodstock concert DVD? Convert it for iTunes and get yourself back to the ga-a-a-ar-den.

You can also add URLs and RSS feeds to VideoVangelist and convert those files to the format you need to make them compatible with your iPod. I subscribe to several podcasts that work fine in iTunes, but can't be synced with my iPod. VideoVangelist will take care of that for you. You can even export your iTunes Podcast play list to an OPML file that makes it a piece of cake to import into VideoVangelist. Say, for example, there is a series of training videos on YouTube that you want. Enter the URLs into VideoVangelist and convert them. You can even stitch the files together so that you have one file with all the videos.

The website also says "Generate Flash embed code for easy pasting into HTML documents and iWeb Widgets," but I haven't figured that out yet. There is an in-depth user manual and some really excellent tutorial videos available on the website. You really should watch them to see all the features — or just to get a few laughs. Check out the developer's Rick Roll birthday video to his wife, which doesn’t have anything to do with VideoVangelist, of course, but it's pretty funny.

As for us using VideoVangelist, I was first impressed in one of the videos how the developer seemed to be going from this action to that action, canceling this and starting that over and over without the app hanging up. Even with my beloved VisualHub, I got into the habit of quitting and restarting between projects because it would hang, and canceling didn't always work. I tried a few things with VideoVangelist, and sure enough, I could cancel and move on to another action quickly and easily. It eventually did hang on me one time and I had to quit and restart, but other than that, it's working great and most conversion times have been comparable to my results with VisualHub.

I have read comments on the less-than-sexy GUI, but I was thinking how much I like having most of the options staring me in the face instead of having to search through a lot of tabs and menus. No, it's not the most glamourous interface, but it's kind of similar to VisualHub, and my focus is on how it works.

I have also read some negative comments about the download size of the disk image, which is about 100MB. About 70MB of that is the codec library itself (Popcorn 3 downloads at about 94MB). If you want to convert audio/visual files, you're gonna need that codec library. I had to install them with VisualHub also, and they are easier to keep updated in VideoVangelist by simply going to the Help menu and selecting "Install Codec Libraries." That will download the latest library package and you just double click to install.

Also, the codec library that comes on the disk image might be out of date, because it may have been updated after the latest release of VideoVangelist. That is why the developer added the option to Install Codec Libraries in the Help. You can download and update them whenever you feel like it.

Bottom line: I most assuredly see VideoVangelist replacing my VisualHub, with its additional conversion settings, cool URL and RSS features, and a developer who seems to pay attention to details. Plus, the price is crazy low! I paid about $22 for VisualHub three or four years ago and thought THAT was a steal! For $10 (and $5 today at MacZot), I highly recommend this app.

Smoking Apples (I love smokingapples.com) recently did a round-up on clipboard managers. Lots of good information, but they didn't mention my favorite clipboard app, SavvyClipboard by BlitzClick Software, which can compete with and work circles around some of the apps mentioned in the Smoking Apples article.

While some of these apps have really nice interfaces and are pretty to look at (dangling preposition), they just don't do everything I want or are too obtrusive. I don't want to feel like I'm working hard to use the clipboard. I want it to just be there, with me using mostly key commands to copy and paste. I have downloaded and tried out more clipboard apps then I can count, and the one that works best for me and does just about everything I want is Savvy Clipboard.

SavvyClipboard has one scrollable window with previews of all your clips, up to 100 [buzzz ... I'm wrong about this. Turns out you can enter any number of clips to save. I just saw the presets, and you can select one of those OR you can enter your own number.], which has been plenty for my use, and which can be set lower in preferences. The window can be as narrow as 214px or as wide as you want to stretch it. I usually leave it at the smallest, because it's enough to see the image previews and the first part of the text to know what I've copied.

To paste your items, you can drag them out, or you can click on an item and paste, or use the control key plus a number for the first 9 items and paste. Depending on how you copied an image, it will either drag out in it's original format or PDF. You can also right-click and save items in these formats: TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP, RTD, RTFD, TXT.

As you copy, each new item goes on top and everything else moves down, unless you have locked an item by clicking in the lower left corner of the preview (a padlock appears). Locked items stay where they are, or you can reorder your items by dragging them up and down. I like to keep my locked items at the top. When I'm done with a locked item, I unlock it and it gradually moves on down the list.

You can paste your text items as plain text or rich text. You can set a default in preferences and then right-click to change it on a per-item basis. You can also right-click and edit your text items, even check spelling and grammar.

Unfortunately, editing items is the one area where SavvyClipboard falls short for me. It does not strip junk/carrots/forced returns text copied from emails. On the other hand, I haven't found any other clipboard apps that do that either, not without going through several extra steps, so I use SmartWrap for that.
Also, it would be nice if we could open every clipboard item, and not by right-clicking, but with a double-click [faster for me], for a default action. For example, double-clicking a copied URL would open it in a browser, email addresses would open a blank email, images would open in a predefined image editor, text items would open in a predefined text editor. If you want to do something different than the predefined action, THEN right-click or control click and make a selection. The developers have said they are actually working on adding this feature. One down, one to go.
I have read some complaints about the look of SavvyClipboard. I suppose it could be more polished, maybe some black and grey, some glassy looking stuff. I don't know, I'm mostly concerned with how it works, not how it looks, and with some of the clipboard apps hovering at around $30, SavvyClipboard is a steal at $12. You can even occasionally find it at MacZot for around $8.

Note to self: Do not—I repeat: DO NOT!—buy any more applications in January, February, or March!

There, now all I have to do is FOLLOW MY OWN INSTRUCTIONS. The MacHeist 3 bundle includes 2 applications that I just bought in the last month— 3, if you count EventBox that was included for free yesterday just for going to the site, and which I bought 2 days ago! Sure, one of them (The Hit List) isn’t unlocked yet, but I’m pretty sure it will be. How can you NOT buy this bundle for $39? And, if you did the missions, you get an additional $8 discount. I bought all these apps for $31. It’s like stealing— but legally!

I’m still torqued about the two apps, though: The Hit List ($50) and Little-Snapper ($39), especially since I’ve been mildly displeased with LittleSnapper and have thought a couple of times that I wish I hadn’t paid $34 for it (I had a $5 discount). I think Realmac is lucky that “they got there first” and snagged a lot of buyers. More apps are coming out now that are similar to LittleSnapper, e.g., Webbla (which was part of the MacHeist 3 loot), so that will, hopefully, motivate Realmac to update more quickly, especially now, when the app is new and there are lots of little things that need to be fixed.

The Hit List, I bought less than a week ago (kick, kick, kick). Don’t get me wrong, I love this app, but I wrongly assumed it wouldn’t be in the bundle because it is still in beta. It’s version 9.3.3, and when it goes to Version 1, the price is going up by $20. So, I “saved” myself $20 and bought it last week. Oy!

I know I shouldn’t complain, though, because this is a great bundle. Even if all I got was Kinemac, I would be thrilled. I was tempted to buy it before when it was on MacZot and MU Promo, but at half-price, it’s still a chunk of change. For $31? $31 ... $31... I have to keep saying that to myself because it’s so unbelievable. Acorn is very cool, Picturesque has always interested me. I don’t even know what I will do if BoinxTV is unlocked. Probably annoy my family with new “projects.”

Long live MacHeist ... and MacZot and MacUpdate Promo and all their bundles ... and any other bundles! I love them all!

For years now, I have had an iSight on my computer but haven’t known anyone with whom I could use iChat. About a year and a half ago, I bought my daughter an iMac, and now we can have video chats with each other on iChat and it works great. Really fun, yes, but considering she’s sitting right next to me in the same room, a little unnecessary.

I then met a guy on a list I’m on and we tried to use iChat, him from Pennsylvania and me from Tennessee. It was okay, but the picture broke up a lot and looked scrambled, but we still had sound. Pretty disappointing. He said he communicated with his brothers on iChat, and they had varying levels of picture quality also.

More recently, I started work for a guy in New Mexico who also has a Mac, and we tried to communicate with iChat. It worked for maybe 3 minutes, before the scrambling started, then froze completely, not even any sound. We tried several times and finally gave up.

My sister-in-law in Oregon finally got a Mac, and we were pretty excited about communicating with iChat, letting Grandma see the kids and all— same old scrambling/freezing garbage. When my daughter iChats with her friends here locally, she also has the same scrambling/freezing problems. We are all working with either cable or DSL connections, but none of it works well, if at all. Why? I don’t know.

What I do know is that when Google’s video chat came out, I installed it right away and told my sister-in-law to do the same. We now use it for all our video chats and have had no scrambling or freezing problems whatsoever. It works flawlessly. What is Google doing right that Apple is doing wrong?

MacUpdate’s latest promo bundle still has two more days to go. I bought it, of course. Some people collect salt and pepper shakers; some people collect Barbies. I collect applications.

I already own LightZone and Alarm Clock Pro and wasn't motivated to buy this bundle until the day I checked (yes, I check every day, even when I’m on vacation. I check the MacUpdate promo and I check MacZot) and saw that TidyUp was being offered to the first 3,000 purchasers. All of a sudden there was more motivation to buy. I've been waiting for TidyUp to be on a promotion for a long time, a really long time. So long, in fact, that I thought it was never going to happen. So I decided to check out the next most promising app, or the one I think that I would be most likely to use, anyway, Norkross Movie, and I was instantly impressed. I haven’t actually created anything useful with it yet, but I know I will.

I figured at this point, even if I never used any of the other applications, I would still have $89 worth of applications for $49. So, I bought the bundle and am starting to wade into the other applications. I’ve got kids writing school papers, so Bookends and Mellel will come in handy. I’ve been toying with the idea of purchasing MacJournal for a while now, so I can cross that off my list of “Applications to Seriously Consider” (it’s a very long list).

As for LightZone, my 11-year-old daughter has done some amazing things with her photos all by herself. The application is very intuitive and they have great tutorials on their website. It's impressive, it really is. You can set up iPhoto so that the default editor is LightZone. I hope it gets unlocked so more people will use it and spread the word about how awesome it is.

And, Koingo Software is offering a discount to all buyers of this bundle, their Utility Package for only $19.95! That’s a crazy deal! I already owned several Koingo apps, and bought the Utility Package a few months ago when it was on MacZot for half-price. This is even a better deal! The Utility Package includes lifetime free upgrades and licenses to every application on their web site ... AND licenses to any application they come out with in the future! Plus, they have licenses on some of their applications for Mac and Windows. This Utility Package is normally $80, and you get it for $20. Seems like a no-brainer. The offer expires September 30.

Even if you don’t buy the bundle, you should check out the developer videos. They are very entertaining. It’s nice to see that they are people, just like you and me, with kids, cats, not the super humans like I usually think. People who can code, of course, so I guess they are not EXACTLY like you and me. Look at their surroundings in the background— surprisingly tidy. That’s another way they are not like me.