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.