Hands-on: LittleSnapper becomes Ember, with powerful collection features

The word “scrapbooking” may conjure visions of arts-and-crafts sessions for children with paper, scissors, and glue. But if you’ve ever done research for a project that required you to save data like images, videos, and webpages from different sources, you’re already familiar with the adult version of this activity.

To that end, Realmac Software on Tuesday released Ember (Mac App Store link), a $50 app aimed squarely at professional users who need to build a library with all sorts of digital information.

Ember is the successor to LittleSnapper, which has been around for many years and developed quite a following; true to its past, the app continues to allow you to take screenshots and annotate them with drawings or text; you can also rotate and crop the screenshots you take to make sure that the information you actually want to highlight is front and center.

In addition, the app also allows you to capture and store entire webpages, either directly through a built-in Web browser, or by subscribing to a site’s RSS feed. Once inside the app, the pages are treated like every other image, and can be manipulated by the same means. If you’ve ever done any kind of Web design work, the ability to just scribble and type some text on a document is going to be of great use—particularly when coupled with the app’s sharing features, which allow you to send any piece of data to a friend or colleague using a variety of methods.

Speaking of the Web, Ember also ships with a set of extensions that can be installed directly in your browser—both Safari and Google’s Chrome are supported—which allow you to dynamically capture webpages.

Ember sports a slick interface whose every little detail has been thought out with almost fanatical attention
Given the amount of information that you are likely to collect in an app like Ember, I was curious to find out how good its search capabilities are.

For starters, you can attach an arbitrary number of tags to each piece of information that you add to a collection; these are displayed in a convenient utility window to help ensure that you do not inadvertently duplicate a tag and make your data harder to search on.

The app also supports full-text search against all your collections and scraps, using a convenient “live-fill” mechanism that shows you the results visually while you type your search query.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the contents of a webpage are included in the search database; this would be a nice addition for the future.

The app's scrabooking capabilities extend to entire web pages—which can be manipulated and annotate just like every other image.
Ember is an extremely slick app whose developers have paid fanatical attention to every detail of the user experience. As a result, you can find little touches all over the interface, from the way the software remembers the URL of a captured Web document, to its ability to automatically detect and categorize screenshots from an iPhone or iPad.

As I mentioned, the app is designed for professionals, and priced accordingly—particularly when you consider that owners of LittleSnapper don’t get any breaks in the form of a upgrade discounts. If you work in a visual field like Web development or graphics design, however, Ember seems well poised to pay for itself in no time, and make your life much easier.

Trailer Report: 'Despicable Me' Becomes Most Watched of Week, 'Pacific Rim' Hits Top Ten

Matching its strong opening weekend, Universal's Despicable Me 2 was the most viewed trailer for the first week of July.

Universal's continuing animated story about a super villain (voiced by Steve Carell) who adopts three girls, the sequel to 2010's original, recorded 7.6 million views, more than doubling the No. 2 finisher, Fast & Furious 6.

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The Vin Diesel-Paul Walker car epic recorded 2.6 million views for its preview. The movie, which opened in the U.S. on May 24 and has grossed $695 million worldwide, is continuing to roll out to new foreign territories.

No. 3 finisher Man of Steel recorded 1.3 million views, half as much as the one ahead of it on the list.

The next six slots are all head by fall releases, except for World War Z in the No. 7 spot.

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Interest in Thor: The Dark World (32 million lifetime views) and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (36 million lifetime) remains strong.

Pacific Rim, the monster movie from Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, which opens July 12, was the only new film to enter the list, coming it at No. 10.

The movie has been tracking softly, raising questions about its box office potential. The uptick in trailer views might indicate a stronger-than-expected opening for the movie.

Twitter: @sajilpl

Rick Santorum Becomes CEO of Faith-Based Film Studio

Rick Santorum is getting into the film business and says he is looking forward to taking meetings in famously liberal Hollywood, where the former U.S. senator received scant support when he ran against Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination for president.

Santorum said Monday he has become CEO of EchoLight Studios, and the Texas-based firm is weeks away from closing a $20 million film fund that it will use to finance, produce and distribute faith-based and family friendly movies.

Santorum has been helping EchoLight raise money for about six months, and a few months ago he joined its board of directors. On Monday, he officially announced he has become CEO and that he and his staff are taking pitches from Hollywood filmmakers.

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Santorum’s brand of religious conservatism didn’t go over well in Hollywood during his brief run at the presidency, though he garnered a small amount of support from some who are active in the entertainment industry’s Republican underground. He says he’ll tap those relationships and strike new ones given his new position as chief of EchoLight.

The former senator from Pennsylvania says most of the investors in EchoLight and its film slate – which will consist of up to four movies annually – are wealthy Texans who are novices in film but are supportive of the message-movies EchoLight intends to make.

“Here’s what I think of Hollywood,” Santorum told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re looking for talented people who want to make quality films, even though we won’t be spending tens of millions of dollars on each of them. We want good writers, actors, and producers who want to make honest, uplifting content.”

EchoLight’s first film, due this year, is The Redemption of Henry Myers, a western about a left-for-dead bank robber who is nursed back to health by a widow and her young children (a trailer is below). Also in the pipeline is a modern-day telling of the Biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, though a dramatic take, as opposed to the popular Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

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“There’s a lot of good family movies produced in Hollywood, but in almost every one of them there’s a scene where, as a dad with younger kids, I say, ‘Why did they put that gratuitous sex, or language, or violence in there?’ To me, it diminishes the film, so we won't be doing that,” Santorum said.  “If it’s part of the story, then fine, but we won’t be putting things in there that aren’t relevant to the characters or storyline.”

Santorum likens the films he intends on making to the Sony/Affirm/TriStar Pictures 2011 release Soul Surfer, the true story of a teenage girl whose arm was chewed off by a shark though she still pursued her dream of professional surfing. Soul Surfer, though, played down Christianity a bit too much for Santorum’s liking. Executives, after all, considered editing out a reference to the Bible in Soul Surfer.

“Even in faith-based films, Hollywood tends to water down the truth. Soul Surfer was a good film, but it didn’t accurately portray faith in that young lady’s life and how she overcame what she had to overcome,” Santorum said. “I don’t want to preach to anybody, I just want to portray faith as it really is, and we’re going to be telling a lot of true-life stories, and we’re going to make them comfortable even for people who are not of faith, because they are honest. That’s the challenge for us, and it’s what Hollywood tends to shy away from.”

In post-production now at EchoLight, ironically, is Hoovey, a film directed by Soul Surfer director Sean McNamara. The movie due next year stars Patrick Warburton and is the true story of Eric “Hoovey” Elliott, a high school basketball player whose brain tumor forced him to have to learn anew how to walk, talk and perform other basic functions.