(For those new to the column, Forward Migration is our term for companies moving from Wintel machines to Macs — or at least adding or increasing the number of Macs they use. A Forward Migration Kit is an overview of Mac OS products for a particular occupation, such as photography, optometry, etc.)
It’s a fitting announcing considering that the QuickTime Live! 2002 conference has just ended: a small company that was formerly Windows-only has announced they’re going 100 percent QuickTime and Mac OS.
LeoBairn, which formerly only made specialized applications for corporate IT customers running Windows, has “embraced” QuickTime, according to an online letter from Joseph Styls, company president. He said LeoBairn thinks that QuickTime is the “most important product to the future of the entire digital hub concept.”
“Last year, one company hired LeoBairn.com to create a special project for the Mac OS,” Styles said. “Since then, the idea of working with Macs has changed the lives of everyone at the company. At first, nobody was very thrilled. Then everyone learned a little more about the world of Macs. Today we are proud to announce that because we believe in the power of Apple’s digital hub strategy, we are henceforth not planning any Windows versions of our titles.”
The company has released its first Mac OS application: Picture Browser 3.1. It combines the features of a slide show program, an image viewer, and a Web browser. It has a built-in slideshow generator so you can display your images one at a time for however long a period of time you choose. You can even have them automatically enlarged to fit your screen.
“It is the only image viewer made for people who have big collections of movies and images downloaded from newsgroups and Web sites,” Styls said. “If the Mac is a digital hub, Picture Browser 3.1 proves it. That is the whole point of Picture Browser. Whether on OS X or 9, anybody can use Picture Browser’s tools to do things like easily viewing their image collection as a slideshow. Plus, they can use standard Macintosh drag and drop functionality to create playlists of QuickTime compatible video files (such as .mov, .mpg, and .avi).”
Picture Browser costs US$15. Styls said no Windows version was planned as long as Mac users download (it’s a 1.2 MB file) and register the software. It runs on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. You’ll also need QuickTime (of course) and at least 64 MB of RAM.
“LeoBairn passionately believes in the vision of Mac as digital hub, and we’re counting on Mac users to join us in making that a reality,” Styls said. “We intend to work hard to create good Macintosh tools … We are also on a mission to create unique Macintosh prosumer software.
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