If you have a photographic memory, you may recall an article I wrote for TUAW about a year ago describing how to use AppleScript to make it easier to transcribe QuickTime movies and audio. In the comments for that piece, a program was pointed out to me (thanks imnotjesus) which has become a valuable tool in my toolbox. Transcriva is a single-purpose program for transcribing video and audio clips with a rich set of features certain to make your life easier. If you're doing professional transcription, recording audio notes in a class or a meeting for later reference, preparing sub-titles for a movie, or anything which involves copying what's being said or shown into text form, Transcriva has tools to fit, and pricing I find very reasonable.

The main window of Transcriva offers a library view of your transcriptions, a media playback bar and your current transcription. With user-configurable keyboard shortcuts, it's possible to comfortably operate during a transcription without your hands ever needing to leave the keyboard. It even works with a foot pedal, if you're set up with one. You can control playback speed and set it to match your typing speed, as well automatically jump back a configurable number of seconds when you pause and resume playback.

Of all of the features available, Follow-Along is my favorite. It allows you to play back your audio after you've transcribed it, and highlights the appropriate sections of the transcription as the playback head moves through them. More importantly, clicking on an area of the transcription jumps to its related point in the playback, allowing you to quickly review the audio associated with a note or transcription. This is important because that's exactly how I use Transcriva, taking notes from audio recordings or even during a recording when I'm using the built-in record features. Then I can review my hastily typed notes and immediately hear the audio that was happening at the time I took the note.

It's great for recording meetings and annotating recorded Skype conversations. I imagine it would be an amazing tool in class, if you were in a situation where recording and typing were allowed. I haven't been to school for a while. The functionality is similar to Pear Note, but at $29.99US, Transcriva comes in $10US cheaper and packs more features.

Transcriva can handle just about any type of audio or video you can play on your Mac. It uses QuickTime, and with Flip4Mac and Perian installed, you can extend the possibilities to include WMV, AVI, DIVX, FLV and more. When you're done with a transcription, you can export it to RTF or Word formats for sharing, publishing or continuing editing externally. I use Transcriva to recap interviews I do over Skype, and take my notes in an "outline" format which I can, with a little finagling, turn into a mind map or outline for an article.

Transcriva has made my life exponentially easier and is a tool I'd gladly recommend to anyone with similar needs. My direct experience with the developer has also been great, with quick response times and a single bug report resulting in a new build within a couple of days. Transcriva is free to try, $29.99US to buy. You can download the trial at the Bartas Technologies site. If you hurry, it's even discounted to $19.99US in the MacUpdate Promo today.

• It's fast, both in loading and renaming
• Easy to rename just files, folders or recurse folder
• Hard to mess things up because you have to preview the new names before committing
• Drag and drop (Apple forgets how important this feature is all too frequently)

I'll open this Friday Favorite with a caveat -- Mac HelpMate is not an app that just anyone is going to want to license. However, if you're a Mac consultant and/or do system support for many Mac users, this is an application you should consider.

Mac HelpMate is the brainchild of Dean Shavit, an Apple Certified System Administrator based in Chicago, Illinois. Dean's goal in producing Mac HelpMate was to eliminate many of the issues that Mac support professionals deal with when trying to perform remote support tasks for their clients. What are those issues? Usually, they consist of trying to reach the end user's network through a maze of firewalls and routers. For example, one of the major issues with Apple's Back To My Mac remote access and control technology is that it doesn't work with many cable or DSL modems that don't support UPnP (Universal Plug-and-Play) or NAT-PMP (NAT - Port Mapping Protocol).

Mac HelpMate provides zero-configuration remote access through a proxy server run by Shavit's company, eliminating the hassles of trying to talk clients through configuration of their Macs and network hardware.

Another Friday Favorite, our weekly opportunity to get all sloppy over our most-loved applications.

If you have an always-on Mac at home, a decent upstream connection and another Mac anywhere outside of your home network, you might find ShareTool to be as useful as I do. It allows you -- with an amazing degree of simplicity -- to access your Bonjour services on a remote machine as if you were still within your home network. It does this over an SSH encrypted connection (and also automatically sets up a proxy for secure web-browsing over the tunnel). Yes, you can get some of these benefits with a simple SSH tunnel, or you could set up a VPN using HamachiX, but the simple fact that ShareTool "Just Works" makes it my favorite choice for everything from screen sharing to iTunes streaming.

I use ShareTool on a Mac Mini, with an Airport Extreme Base Station on a connection that gets about 800k average upload speed. iTunes streaming is flawless, and remote drive access is as good or better than just using SFTP. Setup is as simple as choosing a port (defaults to 22, the standard SSH port) to share on and hitting "Share" on your home Mac. After that, you can set it to start at login, and begin sharing on launch. Then, on your remote machine, you just need to enter an IP or domain and the port, and the rest is automatic. You can select which Bonjour services to enable or just go for broke and enable everything. I've got a static IP these days, but services like No-IP and DynDNS work great if you have a dynamic IP address. ShareTool can even handle updating the dynamic IP service for you, so you don't have to run any daemons.

ShareTool is provided by YazSoft, and a free trial is available for download on the main page. The pricing structure requires a license for every computer, and a pair of licenses costs $30USD (5 for $75USD). YazSoft provides free updates within a major version number (1.x customers get all 1.x updates for free). If you're looking for an easy way to keep your entire home network handy anywhere you go, it might be worth a try.

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Robert tells us about his favorite Web development tools.

It's no secret that I heart Coda. I've been in love with the one-window web development app since the day it came out. It turns out, though, that I was just scratching the surface of using Coda until I signed up for my new favorite web service: Beanstalk.

Beanstalk is a service that hosts your version control repositories remotely. This is great for far-flung team members with firewalls and other networking hurdles between them. Having a zero-configuration Subversion repository available no matter where you're working is hot stuff.

Best of all, Beanstalk publishes items committed to the repository to my team's development server automatically. It's just like it lives on our network.

To make Beanstalk work with Coda, I first had to check out a copy of the repository with Versions. Versions is still in beta (and Christina has written about it before), but its ease of use is unparalleled. In fact, it has Beanstalk in mind, with shortcuts to help you connect with your Beanstalk repositories.

With the repo downloaded, it's just a matter of setting it up as a site in Coda, and entering my username and password for Beanstalk. Coda does all the heavy lifting from then on. Committing changes and adding files is as easy as clicking an icon in the same position as if I was uploading it (and not using Subversion). I love that it keeps my muscle memory working for me, and not against me.

Coda is $99, Versions is free (while it's in beta), and Beanstalk starts at $15 per month (which is the plan I have). Put together, though, it's a million-dollar solution.