The B/side app for Mac

B/side in its own window on a Mac — the whole keyboard, including the keys a browser keeps for itself, and nothing that looks like a website.

The app is the same editor as app.bside.video, in its own window. Your projects, cuts and settings are the same ones whichever way you open them, and somebody reviewing a cut can still use a browser.

Getting it

The first time you sign in to B/side in a browser on a Mac, it offers the app. Download for Mac downloads it; open the download, drag B/side into Applications, open it and sign in. Use on the web carries on in the browser, where everything works except ingesting footage from your computer, which needs A/Side. B/side offers A/Side when you need it. Either way, B/side does not ask again in that browser.

The app has A/Side inside it, so there is nothing else to install.

What the app adds

• The whole keyboard. A browser keeps ⌘W, ⇧⌘W, ⌘T and ⌘N for its own tabs and windows, so B/side never sees them there. In the app they are the editor's: ⇧⌘W is Close Project, as in Media Composer.
• The menus are the Mac's menu bar. File, Edit, Clip, Timeline, Display and Help sit at the top of the screen, beside the B/side menu, with everything the editor's own menus have — the Export submenu, ticks, and items greyed until they can be used.
• Any panel floats in a window of its own. Right-click a panel's tab ▸ Pop Out… and it becomes a window you can put anywhere — beside the editor, on another screen — and it stays in step with the editor. It has no grey title bar: the Mac's buttons sit in the corner of its own dark strip, which you drag it by. Keep on Top, on that strip, keeps it above the editor while you work: a Command Palette or scopes that never drop behind. A popped-out Source or Record monitor has Fit to Picture, on unless you turn it off: after you resize the window, it settles to the shape of the picture, so there is no black band around it.
• Its own icon in the Dock, its own window, and ⌘-Tab, like any editing application.
• Voice-over asks for the microphone once, as a Mac app does.

Updates

B/side looks for a new version each time it opens, and B/side ▸ Check for Updates… looks now. When one has downloaded it asks: Restart Now, or Later — it opens the next time you start B/side either way.

Installing it

Open the download and drag B/side into Applications. It runs on Apple-silicon and Intel Macs, macOS 13 or later.

Media on this Mac

Cloud proxies are what B/side plays, as in a browser. When A/Side on this Mac already has a shot's proxy — footage it has just read, before the upload finishes, or a project kept off the cloud — the app plays it from the disk instead, with nothing to set.

A/Side comes with it

The app carries A/Side, the helper that reads your cards and drives. Open a project and B/side starts A/Side in the menu bar and connects it to that project by itself — there is nothing else to download and nothing to sign in to. If A/Side is already installed on the Mac, B/side uses that one. A/Side keeps running when B/side is closed, so an offload or an upload carries on.

A computer that only ingests — a station by the card readers — still uses A/Side on its own.