Filed under: Fun, Video, Macintosh
Keep your DVD library in order with Multiplex
by Jay Hathaway Mar 9th 2009
If you've got a huge movie collection, whether it's physical DVDs and Blu-Rays or just movies ripped to a hard drive, Multiplex can help you keep track of all of them on your Mac. Its Leopard-like interface uses Apple's latest Core Animation improvements and looks like an even more epic version of Cover Flow. Instead of a pile of CDs, like in iTunes, you're looking at a wall of DVDs.Multiplex is pretty sweet, but it's not at version 1.0 yet, and there are areas where it could get sweeter. It will recognize DVDs when you insert them, up to a point. Although the search box is auto-populated with the name of the DVD, you still have to search by name or UPC for the right movie. Delicious Library creator Wil Shipley solved this problem by turning the built-in iSight into a barcode scanner. It will be interesting to see what Multiplex comes up with for quicker entry of DVDs.
Also, all the visual effects can be a drawback if your Mac isn't top-of-the-line. My last-year's-model Macbook choked a little bit once I got my library up to larger sizes. For serious movie fans with serious machines, though, the visual appeal alone makes Multiplex worth a look. The metadata search also works rather well, and it returned the movie I was looking for as the first result every time. Bottom line: if you're a DVD collector, you can trust Multiplex to get the cataloguing job done.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
