SnapZ Pro is the premiere image and movie capturing software for Mac OS X. It’s one of those apps that does some things just plain better (i.e. taking screenshots) and some things you just can’t do without a 3rd party app (like taking movies for screen-casts).
When the Intel move was announced, many programs seemed to just appear with Universal versions overnight, or pretty quickly. Others have taken awhile, which was OK because “Well, there’s always Rosetta.”
SnapZ Pro didn’t work in Rosetta. I’m not nearly technically inclined enough to know why I just know that it didn’t, at least for awhile.
Ambrosia fixed that as a free update, as you’d probably expect.
But it wasn’t a real Intel version, so it didn’t run as fast as it should. However, at least it didn’t crash and it did work, probably no slower than it did on PPC hardware. So that’s fair.
The tacit agreement seems to be “If a Universal version was easy to make, it’ll be free, otherwise, expect to pay for the next version which will be Universal.”
If you’re still waiting for an Intel version of your favorite app (cough Office cough), you’re probably waiting for the next major version (i.e. 2.x to 3.0) and you’re probably going to be forking over some dough to pay for the upgrade.
Folks have been hounding Ambrosia for a Universal version for quite a long time. How do I know? Because I was one of them. I assume it was taking them awhile to make it work and it more than likely required a lot of “people hours” (if not months). Either that or they just weren’t all that interested in making a Universal version — yeah right, not very likely.
Yet when it came out (version 2.1.0) it was a free upgrade.
They didn’t bolt on a few things and release 3.0 and hit up their users for $20 worth of upgrade. They just handed it to them. “Here’s months of our work to make this faster.”
How fast is it? Well, to be honest, it’s so fast on my MacBook 2.0 Ghz that I thought it had crashed while rendering a movie, but no! There’s the familiar “That’s a wrap!” telling me it had finished.
I realize that some will say “Well there aren’t any new features, of course it should be a free upgrade!” but we all know (if we stop and think about it) that this process took a lot of time, time they could have spent on other apps they could have charged money for. During those months they still had bills to pay, food to buy, not to mention the $3/$4 per gallon of gas to buy.
By releasing this as a free upgrade (a “Thanks for waiting” perhaps?), they have (hopefully) gained a lot of respect and good-will from current customers…
I know they have from me.
ps - all I had to do is install the new version over the old. If you do need to reinstall, here’s a reminder from their website that their license codes but not their registrations expire:
–> Registrations are forever, but License Codes do expire.
Each License Code is encoded with a timestamp, and must be entered within 30 days of generation to unlock the product. Once unlocked, the game will remain unlocked forever unless you:
a.) Reformat your hard drive b.) Or install it on a new computer
–> If you have lost your License Code, you can have it sent to you automatically at your current email address by going to this web page: http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/lostcodes/
–> If you have your License Code, but it has expired, don’t panic. It has not expired permanently, enter it into the Register application accompanying your product, then click on the “Renew” button.