There are quite a number of improvements in yFlicks 3.3: First of all, our eye candy department wants you to know that you can now browse your movies in coverflow mode (Mac OS X 10.5 only, sorry). And if you’re using yFlicks’s Usher mode to have Front Row display your movies in a hierarchical fashion, you will be pleased to hear that yFlicks can now include your iTunes movies in its library. Apple doesn’t want us to play back movies you’ve bought from the iTunes store, but you will be able to organize those movies in your smart groups nevertheless.

In other news, we’ve added something we had been promising since yFlicks 1.0: more conversion/export options. You’re no longer restricted to exporting to MPEG-4, and converting a movie no longer blocks yFlicks. We’ve also improved the web video downloading mechanism quite significantly. Downloading those movies is now much less likely to fail, as we’ve added something we like to call the generic web media detector. Said detector not only makes yFlicks work with a lot more video sites than before, it also supports things like downloading MP3 files from MySpace, for instance. And once you’ve downloaded a web video, you can now have yFlicks convert that video to something your iPhone/iPod can work with automatically.

In fact, we’ve come to the conclusion that yFlicks’s downloading and conversion functionality might also appeal to users who don’t want to organize those web videos in yFlicks — e.g., because they’re doing it in iTunes. So we created a spin-off, which focuses on just that: downloading and converting movies. Say hello to TubiTunes, the easiest-to-use web video downloader and movie converter ever.

And if you think that TubiTunes is close to being a light-weight download manager, you’re perfectly right. It would be ridiculously easy to develop TubiTunes into a download manager, and if we ever did this, even the application icon would be quite similar to TubiTunes’s icon. We’ll see.

If you’re like us, you have some of your movies on your computer’s boot drive, while others are located on an external mass storage device. Up to now, that was a problem, because there wasn’t an elegant way to organize all those movies in one library while keeping the benefits of having yFlicks organize your movie files automatically.

yFlicks 3.2 introduces supplementary library folders that help you distribute your movies across several volumes while still having them organized automatically. And it hides those movies that are currently not available as soon as you unmount your external volumes. Re-mount them, and yFlicks shows all those movies again.

Apart from the usual maintenance stuff (fixed downloading from YouTube and others), there are a lot more improvements in this version, and most of them can be classified as user interface enhancements. Have a look at this list for the details.

Update: The original yFlicks 3.2 had an issue with Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, which we’ve just fixed. So if you were experiencing a problem with starting yFlicks under Tiger, please download again and accept our sincere apologies for having overlooked this one.

There are a lot of improvements in yFlicks 3.1, and you can read all about them here; but let’s focus on two things we’re especially thrilled with for the sake of brevity:

Firstly, you can now have yFlicks treat a sequence of movies as one composite movie by selecting them and choosing “Merge Movie Sequence…” from the “File” menu. This makes dealing with multi-part movies, as present in vast quantities on YouTube, for instance, much easier and more elegant.

And seconly, sometimes you encounter a movie that has black borders around the actual movie frames. Apart from consuming screen estate, these don’t serve any purpose, so yFlicks now lets you get rid of them by choosing “Crop Visible Area…” from the “Display” menu.

yFlicks 3.0.3 squashes just one little bug, namely a display glitch in the English localization’s “Advanced” preferences tab.

This is just a small update to yFlicks, but it contains a lot of things we know you have been waiting for. First and foremost, it reduces the delays you’ve learned to hate when you were adding multiple files to your yFlicks library, and it does so dramatically. Movie metadata — such as preview images and movie durations — are now cached by a separate little helper process we call the “yflickscrawler”, so you don’t have to wait until yFlicks has digested all those new movies before doing anything else anymore.

There is also a new overlay slider control for movie previews, giving you the possibility to skim entire movies with minmal effort — without ever really having to open them.

And there are a lot more little improvments, but this one is kinda important for us, since we’re native German speakers and we’ve had a lot of friends asking for this: yFlicks now has a complete German localization.

The new yFlicks 3 doesn’t just let you view and arrange movies in static groups — its versatile tags feature lets you categorize your movies any way you want. You can even tag your movie automatically by querying Amazon’s online movie database, which gives you the additional benefit of having the corresponding DVD cover art downloaded automatically. And once you’ve done so, creating smart groups based on your tags and subdividing those smart groups by tag values will let you browse your movie library by Genre, Actor, Director, MPAA Rating, or Year, for instance.

And if you’re a Front Row fan, you’ll love the fact that usher mode lets you access the full complexity of your yFlicks library via Front Row.

So head over to MUPromo and get it. It’s available there with a 40% introductory rebate. Only today.

First of all, we’d just like to say thank you! yFlicks was quite a success with the macZOT community. When we negotiated this offer, macZOT gave us an estimate of the number of licenses they thought we would be able to sell, based on their usual sales figures and consisting of a minimum and a maximum number.

We sold almost three times the maximum estimate.

And macZOT buyers are no different from our other customers, inasmuch as they ask for tag support a lot. You really seem to be waiting for this — waiting for a way to store a movie’s director and its genre, for instance, in your movie library. So we thought we might as well let you know that we’re working on tags right now. And there’s a reason why we are taking our time for this: We want to do it right; and we think we do. In fact, this could easily turn into the most intelligent tagging mechanism you have ever seen — most notably when combined with smart groups.

And who knows… There may be an even bigger picture to this.