The Best Mac Utility. Ever. Plus, #2, #3, #4 Best Apps.

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#2 on my list of Best Mac Utilities Ever is Photo to Movie by LQ Graphics.

Photo to Movie is, as you’d expect with good Mac utilities, an elegant application. It’s simple and does what it does better than any other. Photo to Movie takes a digital photo (from your iPhoto collection, a scan, whatever) and turns it into a motion movie segment.

Slow Zooms. Pans. Tilts. Dissolve from one still photo to another while adding beautiful motion at a single speed, varying speeds. Zoom in. Zoom out. Change the zoom speed to fit your mood. Pause. Change it all again whenever you want.

Think of this as “Pan and Zoom” on steroids. Suddenly, still photos come alive with personality and emotion.

What’s the deal? Pay $49 for an application that Apple includes FREE with iMove? The Ken Burns effect is free, right?

Yes. And it’s worth $100 less when compared to Photo to Movie. Check the number of stars that users give it on VersionTracker and you’ll get an idea why this little utility is so well loved.

Yes, love. Photo to Movie takes your digital still photos and turns them into snippets of motion video that you can import right into iMovie.

Wait. There’s more.

Photo to Movie also does sound tracks. And it’s drag and drop and exports to a QuickTime movie.

Wait. There’s more.

Need character generation (text overlayed on top of the digital photo)? Yep. It’s like Prego. It’s in there. Now, let’s get serious: Keyframes. Motion Paths. Titles. Transitions. Soundtrakcs. Rendering. It does to still digital photos what Final Cut Pro does to digital video. It makes it MUCH better.

Guess what? You can download Photo to Movie for free and try it out.

Try it out.

What could they do better with Photo to Movie? Not much, but I’d like to see faster rendering (you get impatient because it works so well), and movement of the titling on screen. TV ads have text moving all over. That’d be a great touch.

OK, what’s #3 and #4 on my list of Best Mac Utilities Ever?

My favorite Backup Utility is Super Duper from Shirt-Pocket Software. We did a review just a few weeks ago. Yes, there are a few dozen back up utilities around. SuperDuper does the job as it says. Super.

#4? This one is hard to argue with. It’s one “techie” reason to switch from a PC and Windows to Mac. BBEdit from BareBonesSoftware.

It’s a text editor. It’s not a word processor. It edits text. And it does it so well on the Mac that many coders use Macs because BBEdit is just that good. It’s not Dreamweaver. It’s not TextEdit.

It’s the best text editor you can get for the Mac. For coding, for scripting, for editing HTML or CSS. It’s what you use on the Mac when you need to work with text. Web site. Write a program. Write scripts. Search log files. Pull data. BBEdit makes it easier. Better. Faster. Simpler.

It’s a reason to buy a Mac all by itself. And, yes, you can get a Demo Version of BBEdit that’s full featured and gives you a chance to see what driving a Mercedes of Editors is really like.

Is BBEdit perfect? What else does it need? Color integration would be nice. It takes too many clicks to get to an HTML color code. There’s too many menus (probably what happens when an editor becomes the editor that does everything very well).

What are your favorite utility applications for Mac OS X? What other utility would you like to see Apple have in Mac OS X “Tiger?” Share your experience, thoughts, perspective on the state of Mac utilities and click the Comments link below.

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