Sure, large companies can afford to have a booth at Macworld, but from what weire told, it is an expensive undertaking. Smaller companies would be hard pressed to pony up the cash for a full booth. Fortunately, there is the Special Interest Pavilion, where smaller companies can get a presence at Macworld. One of these companies, Boinx Software, was located in this area. We had a chance to get a demo of their products from Oliver Breidenbach, CEO of Boinx Software.
The first title we were shown is iRecordNow 1.1, a movie recorder specifically designed to work with the iSight camera. In the past, one could use QuickTime Broadcaster to create movies with the iSight, but this ability seems to have been broken in Mac OS X 10.3. And from what we recall, the new version of iMovie can also record using the iSight, but we suspect it doesnit offer the wealth of features that iRecordNow offers. iRecordNow lets you get at all of the controls that arenit available in other iSight apps like iChat AV. On the video side, you can adjust the brightness, saturation, hue, focus and sharpness of the camera. On the audio side, you can view the audio level, and adjust the gain to your preference. Plus, these settings can be modified while recording, which can lead to some interesting effects. Finally, iRecordNow is Woz-approved!
The second title we saw was iStopMotion, a program which can help ease the effort needed to create stop motion movies. Of course, you can press a button and record a single frame of your stop action animation, but this is only the beginning. To help judge if a frame makes sense next to other frames, you can use an Onion Skinning option to view up to 5 previously captured images at the same time. Thereis also a Blinking option, where you can rapidly switch between two frames to see the effect. And, to reduce the amount of time you spend touching your Mac (instead of your animation) you can use speech recognition to start capturing frames.
iRecordNow is available for US$14.95, and iStopMotion is priced at US$39.95.