There is a good overview article at Macworld's daily news page for 4/25 titled "Vector Formats Fight It Out on the Web" By Stephen Beale. It looks at QuickTime 3, Macromedia Flash, Lari Software's and PaceWorks's vector products.
Terran has a new beta version (b2) of their RealMedia Cleaner Lite at a RealMedia Cleaner Lite download page. (See Little QT Page 2/11 for more info.)
PaceWorks has released a demo version of Object Dancer (1.1), their 2D animation tool. This new version has a number of improvements that you can read about in a press release, you can also download the demo version at PaceWorks' download page.
Panimation has a new beta/preview of Nodester, their tool for creating QuickTime VR panoramas (without Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Tools). Get it at a Download Nodester Preview page.
The newly formed International QuickTime VR Association now has an official page at www.iqtvra.org.
Interactive Solutions has a new beta version of MovieWorks Interactive. This QuickTime movie making/multimedia presentation tool (actually a set of tools) really exploits many of the features of QuickTime. You can see an example of the kind of QuickTime movie you can create at the MovieWorks Sample page and you can download a beta and a tutorial at the MovieWorks Download page.
YAV Interactive Media has released Spike, a tool for analysing your movies to make sure they'll play ok on your target platform (CD-ROM or web). It's kind of like Apple's old Movie Analyzer. Read about it at the Spike page. You can also download a demo version (68K and PPC).
There is a QuickTime 3.0 white paper and a specsheet at Apple's QuickTime web site.
MacWEEK has an article covering QuickTime 3.0 and other news from NAB. MacWEEK also has an article about some new Radius cards for capturing still images and video via FireWire.
Apple has a new press release about QuickTime 3.0, and a press release about the OMF importer. (OMF is Avid's high-end post-production format).
You can get a free 30-day trial version of LightningDraw/WEB, at Lari Software's LightningDraw/WEB page. This application will support the vector compressor in QuickTime 3.0.
Version 2.1.1 of the software for the Connectix Color QuickCam is available at the Connectix Color QuickCam Updater page.
For an overview of NAB/QuickTime news see the MacWEEK article "Mac video editing an NAB focal point." You can also read an article on Ellen Hancock's keynote at news.com. There were some FireWire announcements at the show; you might want to check out Apple's press release on FireWire and their new FireWire homepage.
Apple released System 7.6.1 on Monday. It fixes reported bugs that occur when using QuickTime 2.5 with System 7.6. It also includes a new Video Player application (version 1.6) that's scriptable and has new settings for playing back MPEG files. Find out more and download the update at Apple's Mac OS 7.6.1 Update page.
There's a bunch of things on the VR front:
The QuickTime VR 2.0 extension is finally available on the web; it's at Panimation's web site. Panimation also has a beta version (PPC only) of a product called Nodester. (The final version will be 68K, too). Nodester is an application for making QuickTime VR panoramas, without having to purchase Apple's MPW-based QuickTime VR Authoring Tools Suite.
Another tool for making panos is PictureWorks' Spin Panorama, the first tool for both Windows and Mac. It's not out yet, but will be $79.95 when it's out.
Kaidan has a new panaoramic tripod head called KiWi. This head is for shooting images to create QuickTime VR panaromas, and is priced at only $99.95. Read Kaidan's press release about KiWi.
And Apple has released version 1.5.1 of QuickDraw 3D for both Power Macintosh and Windows 95 and NT. Read about it and download it at an Apple QuickDraw 3D download page.
There's a new version of the ASTARTE MPEG Exporter (1.0 b5 ) and it's available from ASTARTE's MPEG Exporter page.
ATI has new versions of the software for their XclaimVR card; check their Xclaim Current Drivers page.
The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) conference is next week in Las Vegas. We should see a lot of QuickTime-related news and PR from it. Apple is rumored to be releasing betas of QuickTime 3.0 (Mac and Windows) around this show. Also, there's a new web site at www.cinepak.com where there's a tease: "Cinepak PRO" and "NAB"--our guess would be that there will probably be something interesting there soon.
We've decided to do only an occasional How-to. Sorry, none this week.