We’re thrilled—beyond thrilled, actually—to announce the release of Usher 1.0 today. Usher is Many Tricks’ movie management and viewing application. If you collect videos—be they from cell phones, digital video cameras, internet downloads, ripped DVDs, or wherever, Usher is the tool to help you gain control over your collection.

The list of features is immense; check out the Usher web page to get a sense for its capabilities. We’ve really worked hard to make this a solid release, as yFlicks was a much-loved and much-used program that, sadly, stopped working a couple of major OS X releases ago. While Usher is the spiritual successor to yFlicks, the number of new and/or greatly improved features, along with the completely revamped interface, make it essentially a brand-new program. That’s why we tested Usher with our largest-ever group of beta testers—Usher is a large, complex program, and we wanted it to be as issue-free as possible.

Keep reading to see a small sampling of Usher’s features, and for full information on purchasing or upgrading to (including free upgrades for many yFlicks users) Usher.

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What is Usher, you may be wondering? Usher is the new name for yFlicks. The name yFlicks never really captured the real mission of the application; we think Usher is a much better fit: Usher is your personal movie assistant.

There are a ton of new and/or improved features in this update to yFlicks, which is why we’ve also chosen to reset the version counter: this release will be Usher 1.0 to reflect the scale of the changes. Due to the sheer number of changes, there are also probably some 1.0-type issues in Usher…and that’s why we’re releasing it now as a limited public beta. We’re looking for people who are willing to really help us test Usher and find all those little glitches–so we can remove them before we ship Usher.

We’re looking for 25 to 30 testers for Usher’s limited public beta, but we’re interested in people who can really help stress test Usher. To that end, we’re looking for people who meet at least one of these three criteria:

1. Existing yFlicks users with between 1 and 3,000 movies in their collection.
2. Existing yFlicks users with over 3,000 movies in their collection.
3. Non yFlicks users who are looking for a tool to help them manage their collections.

If you’d like to participate in this public beta, please send me an email, with the subject set to Usher beta. Important: In the body of the message, please let me know which of the above groups you fall into, and include the (approximate) number of movies in your collection. If you’re selected for the beta, you will receive a copy of Usher to test, along with further instructions on how to go about helping us test Usher.

As an incentive to help test, the top three testers–based on reporting the most (confirmed) issues–will receive a free license for all of Many Tricks’ products. So what are you waiting for…drop me an email and get your name in the hat for one of the limited testing spots!