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ATPM 10.05
May 2004

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Review: Trans Lucy 1.01

by Ted Goranson, tgoranson@atpm.com

verynice

Developer: CE Software Inc.

Price: $15

Requirements: Mac that supports Quartz Extreme, Mac OS X 10.3.

Trial: Feature-limited (quits after 20 minutes)

It’s quite a show, watching Apple’s effect on software development. In some cases, it has the “Microsoft effect,” shoving out competition, as in Final Cut and maybe with GarageBand. But there are lots of examples where Apple supplies a good basic application, leaving room for developers to do far better. This happens in many areas: e-mail, browsing, script editing, notebooking, maybe even the Finder.

We have such a case with Apple’s DVD Player. It does the job, but now comes Trans Lucy, an alternative DVD player with some cool features that so far exceed Apple’s that it has the potential to become a hit, like SoundJam was in the old days. (SoundJam became iTunes.)

That’s because Apple likes to keep its versions of these types of applications simple. Plus, there are all sorts of property rights issues that it treads lightly around. For instance, you cannot pause a DVD and “copy” a screenshot with Apple’s player. Also, these small programs that emulate hardware seem to be under very strict, dogmatic user interface control, depending on larger Apple strategies.

Trans Lucy is an application that has a radically novel and apt interface. Its most notable feature is the ability to play a movie—in full screen if desired—as a translucent layer over your work, allowing you to click and type through as if it weren’t there. This is one of those things that sounds like it really wouldn’t work. And it may not for some people.

I was skeptical myself, but then I tried it and now find myself addicted. It’s because the thing is so well thought out. You can adjust the level of translucency to suit your taste; I find 50% works the best on my 17" PowerBook for most films. If you keep the controller visible in full screen mode, it fades away just like Apple’s. And if you move the cursor over it (or where it was), the entire movie becomes opaque like normal.

1-trans-lucy-on-my-desktop

Trans Lucy on My Desktop

It is a great trick. As you probably know, I write ATPM’s outliner column. My present outliner project is a huge specialized survey of movies. There’s a certain “folding” in the way many films are made that can be captured by advanced “folded” outliner modes. I have literally watched thousands in the past two years, during which I take notes, and must watch many more.

You won’t want to watch a fine film in translucent mode nor divide your attention away from it. But many films aren’t of that type, and if you can multitask this is a great little tool. Even the most cinematic films are given a new, more ethereal “stained glass” quality.

I use Trans Lucy as the default player for all my DVD watching, even when not using transparency. That’s because I like the controller better.

2-trans-lucy-controller

The Trans Lucy Controller

Most of the controls should be obvious. Those three things that look like dials? Well, they are dials that you can grab and then swing around in huge arcs, like we had in an older version of QuickTime Player’s controller. The lower left knob controls the percentage of translucence and the lower right the volume.

That one in the upper right is what they call the Jog Shuttle. By turning this dial, you can make the movie go backwards or forwards at varying rates. Clicking in various quadrants steps forward discrete amounts.

One of the things that annoys me with Apple’s controller is that it doesn’t have variable controls for backing up or fast-forward. That’s fixed here.

That colorful DVD icon in the middle is a menu. It appears in three places: here, in the menu bar, and in the lower right of the screen when a DVD is playing. Everything in the menu is self-explanatory.

3-the-trans-lucy-popup

The Pop-up Menu

Trans Lucy has assignable hot keys for all the common functions, but you have to be really careful; usually the keyboard is controlling whatever is underneath, so you have to pick your shortcuts to be some that are never used elsewhere.

That cuts both ways, too. All DVDs have menus that you need to click to select items, even just to play the movie. But you just punch through a translucent Trans Lucy screen as if it were a ghost. They’ve solved this with a little pop-out drawer that appears when a DVD menu is on-screen. Oddly, some DVD menus just work the regular way, even in translucent mode!

4-the-trans-lucy-popout-nav

The Trans Lucy Pop-out Navigator

So far, it sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Well, it is not. It offers three advantages over Apple’s free player: it does the translucent thing, it has an arguably better controller, and it supports many non-Apple-supplied DVD drives. (Apple’s controller only supports the Apple SuperDrive and combo drives.)

But it has a couple of disadvantages also: it ain’t free (though $15 is almost free); it drops more frames than Apple’s player (meaning you get occasionally jumpy playback, but some of this is because you are doing stuff underneath); and it is not scriptable.

Apple has a very bad record of making its own applications scriptable. DVD Player is possibly the most scriptable application it currently supplies. But if you are not a scripter it won’t matter to you. On the other hand, Trans Lucy is sold by CE Software, the same folks who brought us the venerable QuicKeys. It would be terrific if QuicKeys could better integrate with Trans Lucy.

Here’s what I think Trans Lucy needs to be perfect:

If it did this, it would be awesome, earth-shaking. Open source code exists to allow the last three already. As it is, Trans Lucy is very nice and worth checking out.

Reader Comments (3)

Richard Dalziel Sharpe · May 7, 2004 - 07:00 EST #1
Not a patch on the FREE VLC player or for use with Apple's DVD player. the most obvious fault for me is that the application defies the most basic of Apples user interface guidelines and does NOT use the menu bar. To any first time use this presents an absolute blank wall, how do I select anything, how do I change preferences, etc etc etc. something as simple as a DVD player should NOT need to have its manual read before find out even the most basic operation how to select a disc or vob file to play. And the playback quality is nowwhere near that of VLC. While I am at it, to require a 6mb demo download that will then only play 20 minutes before quitting is stupid meanness. A better alternative would have been to allow only a limited number of movies (say ten) to be viewed. Big thumbs down.
Eric Roccasecca · May 7, 2004 - 09:51 EST #2
Richard Dalziel Sharpe: Wow! Such venom for such a simple little application.

TL is intentionally not a normal app. Think of it as a "slacker" utitlity. I wrote TL specifically to watch movies and still work on code at 3 in the morning. It intentionally gets out of the way as much as possible so you can just slap the movie over your work and keep on going.

Besides the manual, which really is a good place to start, this review actually descibes just about everything you would need to know to get started using TL.

Considering the quality versus VLC, I can't speak to that as I don't use VLC. TL actually uses the same engine as Apple's own DVD Player which Apple made public in Panther. Maybe I should add a "send feedback about display quality" menu item that sends messages directly to Apple?

I have noted your feedback you provided here in our bug tracking database. If you haven't already, please send in any other feedback using the provide feedback menu item. Thanks for trying TL!
J.Lederer · February 6, 2005 - 21:47 EST #3
To the author of Trans Lucy :

I endorse your application to the fullest and recommend it to everyone I meet that uses Mac OSX. The only major gripe I have is that it is not scriptable and/or EVERY button on the controller is not mappable to a hotkey.

I beg of you, please, please, please, add scriptability to this application and then it will be absolutely the best DVD player available.

p.s. if nothing else, you should add the ability (since there is no variable rate of ff and rew) to allow keys similar to F8 and F9 to be toggles instead of keys that need to be held down to invoke shuttling within chapters.

thanks again for the great product,

jonathan

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