Multi-platforming and overburning: shadowBurn

Submitted by Ivan on Tue, 2005-12-20 05:47.

Review

I've reviewed creativebits member and Mac OS X developer stupidfish23's applications before. shadowClipboard is one of the small third party applications that I use daily and it works great.

shadowBurn screenshot

This week he released another brand new standalone application that is putting up some competition to Toast called shadowBurn.

It makes sense to compare shadowBurn against Toast and Finder's built in burner. I could identify 3 major advantages over the two:

First issue is related to multiplatform capabilities. While in Toast you can create disks with two sessions where one is only visible for PC and the other for only a Mac — in shadowBurn you can choose this by file within one session. This is a major advantage when creating a CD with many media files that can be used by both systems, but the start files should be separate for the PC and the Mac. With Toast you would have to put the media files twice on both sessions reducing the media capacity into half compared to the way shadowBurn's approach.

Overburn is the second interesting feature. It allows you to burn 20MB extra on each disc. This can be a big help when you just can't fit your project on one CD beacuse of a few megs of extra space is missing. shadowBurn forces the CD burner to put the data on the disc.

Third is the price. It costs 20USD, which is really not much for a CD/DVD burner that is already future proof by giving you Intel compatibility.

shadowBurn icon This lightweight burner has one more cool feature. You can change the disc format after adding the files. If I remember correctly in Toast if you change the format after creating the file structure you would have to start over.

One thing certainly needs work on shadowBurn is the application icon. I really don't fancy the spinning wheel icon that the application currently features. It's not an eyesore, but it can be better.

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A few points

Submitted by JimD on Tue, 2005-12-20 06:32.

First off, Toast DOES allow you to burn some files with Windows visibility and some with Mac visitibility in the same session... I do it all the time. Right next to the file name you can click the buttons to allow for each.

Second, Overburn sounds nice in theory, but I'm betting that you *might* run into issues with some CD burners not being able to read the disk. I don't know this for a fact, but if I'm sending a CD to someone in overnight mail, I would rather just send 2 CDs then send one overburnt and find out they can't use it, with no time left to send a new one.

The price is nice, indeed.

This is certainly one app to keep an eye on, but quite frankly it just doesn't offer enough over the FREE BurnXFree - which by the way, ShadowBurn looks a lot like (kinda drab and non OSX-like)

Toast is king of the hill, but if I were looking for something a little cheaper, I would go with DiscBlaze. It does everything ShadowBurn does, except for overburning, plus gives you the ability to set custom icons to the CD. I also like DiscBlaze more because the icons in the toolbar are handy, rather than having to mess around in menus with ShadowBurn. The only downside, it costs $30.

Either will do the job well, so for most it will come down to money. After all, if money isn't the main consideration, you would be buying Toast to begin with.

Thank you Ivan, for

Submitted by stupidfish23 on Tue, 2005-12-20 09:27.

Thank you Ivan, for reviewing shadowBurn!

JimD: thanks for the comments. And now to your points:
1) I have been using Toast for a few years, yet could not figure this feature out. Actually none of the beta testers knew about it. I just fired up Toast to look for the button you mentioned, but I can not find it. Where exactly is this located? Also, which setting do you need to activate? Is it Mac & PC?

2) shadowBurn does give a warning every time you try to overburn and it does only allow a maximum of 20 MB of data to be overburned to the disc. Overburning is but an option for people who want to fit one large file on the disc rather than split it up on two discs. It is certainly not for use with clients, rather for home use.

3) BurnXFree is just a custom frontend to Apple's example Disc Burning application that it ships with Xcode in a brushed metal theme. That is exactly the reason for it being free. I would also like to know why you consider shadowBurn non OSX-like? If the similarity between the two applications is because of the erase and burn icons, then I must tell you that according to the Human Interface Guidelines set by Apple all applications that use the DiscRecording services should use the same icons for erasing/burning. The ones shadowBurn uses have special system calls to display the icons. So if Apple decides to change their looks, shadowBurn will also automatically show the updated icons. This is to keep the interface of OS X consistent to the users.

DiscBlaze is indeed nice, but it does not allow Virtual folder structures, so you need to prepare your layout on disc prior to burning. As for messing around with menus in shadowBurn: the idea is you do not have to. shadowBurn should just work fine without the need to search for functions, and all the stuff you need to set are there in the Toolbar.

The next version of shadowBurn will feature disc icon setting and other goodies, so if you are not discouraged from trying it, I believe shadowBurn will have a lot to offer in the future.

stupidFish23

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honey i'm home, but i'm just animal bones

Hello Fish ;-)

Submitted by JimD on Tue, 2005-12-20 14:41.

Regarding #1:

The reason you haven't seen it for years is that it's a (fairly) new feature in Toast Titanium. You can only see the option after you add files to be burned. The checkboxes are right next to all the files in the list off to the right.

Regarding #2:
You make a good point. If it works on YOUR machine, you can certainly take advantage of this feature (Lord knows I could have used it many times).

I just wanted to add a bit of a warning about these "overclocking" type of features. They're great when they work, but with so many computers and platforms, it's risky business. The same can be said for the el-cheapo CDs you can buy at computer stores where they practically give them away. It seems like every one I get from clients and vendors never wants to mount on any computer we have. You can tell right away when you get one of those CDs because if you hold them up to the light you can pretty much see through them.

Regarding #3:
This comment wasn't meant as anything negative. It just looks like BurnXFree and I compare your app to it and simply because they're the only real options to Toast that I've seen around. The sparse toolbar is really the visual comparison between your app and BurnXFree. I like DiscBlaze because it just looks more "OSX-ish" with more colorful icons in the toolbar.

As for the menubar vs. toolbar, I just prefer (in an app such as this) to have all the options right there where it takes a quick click. Especially considering the very nature of these apps don't really have (or need) a lot of options.

I will be giving shadowburn a try, don't get me wrong. I have Toast at home, but at the office we don't bother buying Toast, so I'm left with using BurnXFree simply because DiscBlaze at $30 doesn't offer enough over the free app to warrant purchasing it. At $20, shadowburn may be the app that we finally buy for all the Macs – it offers more than BurnXFree, but the cost is still low enough to justify.

Hi JimD

Submitted by stupidfish23 on Tue, 2005-12-20 18:57.

Hi,

1) Ah, then this must be Toast 7. I must confess I have only been working with Toast up to version 6.x, at which time purchasing an upgrade was simply not worth it.

2) Yes, you are right. That is exactly why I put an extensive warning whenever shadowBurn offers to overburn and also wrote a warning in the help files.

3) Alright, I understand that. But adding something like the Project Type selector, which requires the Mac/PC/Hybrid/ISO9660/etc. names to be present, icons would be an overkill. Or do you know of a better solution? I am always looking for new ideas.

4) That is exactly why I decided to put all information about the disc into the titlebar of the winddow. To have them present all the time and yet not overclutter the interface. Most menuitems are also accessible from the main window, but items like Eject and Close, which have a key combination on Mac keyboard anyway should not take up valuable Toolbar space. At least that is what I think. I will add more Toolbar buttons like Disc Info to be optionally available to the Toolbar, if that is what you are missing.

Please, give it a try. I would like to know what you think after you tried it. As for the price, remember htere is always a 50 USD license for up to 10 Macs :D

stupidFish23
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honey i'm home, but i'm just animal bones

Oh, by the way

Submitted by JimD on Tue, 2005-12-20 14:43.

If you're going to add goodies to the app, might I request that you add in a feature that will allow me to not only set a custom icon, but a custom desktop picture for the icon view.

There are apps that will do this for you, but I find it annoying to have to use more than one app to burn my CD.

A way to include an image background for icon view, with a checkbox to "hide" the file on the CD when it is burned would make this a killer app!

That can be fixed easily.

Submitted by mck on Tue, 2005-12-20 15:05.

That can be fixed easily.

First technique - create a disk image, add the background in the finder, then burn the image to disk

Second technique - copy the .DS_Store file to the disc. BE SURE TO INCLUDE THE IMAGE _INSIDE_ THE DIRECTORY!

Yeah, you could do it that way

Submitted by JimD on Tue, 2005-12-20 15:36.

But then your image is showing in the CD directory. I don't want the image to be visible to the end user. I could add a period before the file name, but that requires an app like FileBuddy to set the visibility bit in the file.

There are other ways to accomplish this technique, but I would rather have a "one-click" solution.

EDIT: I just noticed that Toast Titanium now allows you to do what I want. You can put the image on the CD as normal (after setting it as the background image and including it in the directory of files to be burned) then select the image file in the list in Toast and click the "Info" button. There is a checkbox to make the file invisible. OR, you can click the "More" button in the options drawer and set the background color, image, view, custom icon, etc... AWESOME!

Thanks all for this

Submitted by Ivan on Tue, 2005-12-20 18:36.

Thanks all for this interesting exchange of comments. I've learned a lot!

window background

Submitted by stupidfish23 on Tue, 2005-12-20 18:59.

if you by this mean the option to add a window background for the root directory for a Mac CD, that I can add as a new feature in the future.

stupidFish23
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honey i'm home, but i'm just animal bones

Looks very nice!

Submitted by Josh on Tue, 2005-12-20 15:09.

I don't know if this is in the current list of features, but what I often do when burning CDs for clients is create auto-run CDs that open a specific file open disc load (usually an index.htm file).

I've always had to use additional apps to do this. If it was made so you can select a file on your soon-to-be-burned disc, and set it to autorun, that would be awesome!

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Josh Stevens | Nautilus7 Design
My CB Blog

Autorun

Submitted by stupidfish23 on Tue, 2005-12-20 19:02.

Autorun is not supported on Mac OS X because of security reasons, which I can perfectly understand. As for adding autorun information to the PC part of a hybrid, I could add that feature if it is requested.

stupidFish23
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honey i'm home, but i'm just animal bones