Many Tricks
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.