Category: Mac Software & Graphics

10 on 10

According to Apple, there were, by Oct. 2002, nearly 4,000 native Mac OS X applications available. At the Macworld Expo held in NYC in July 2001, Apple CEO Steve Jobs highlighted a few of the best apps for OS X with a presentation he called "10 on 10." For each of the apps, a product manager took the stage to highlight a few features....

iTips

Useful tips for users of iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, iCal & Backup iTunes Add Ogg Vorbis support to iTunes with this plug-in for QuickTime 6.x Add new visualizations with iTunes plugins such as G-Force and WhiteCap. iTunes' (v3.0 or earlier) window resizing can be pretty slow. But not if you hold the Command key while resizing, notes Dr....

iTunes 4

Introduction As detailed elsewhere on this site, Apple on April 28 launched a revamped line of iPods and, along with them, a new version of iTunes and a new service the company calls the iTunes Music Store. In this report, we'll take a closer look at the iTunes 4 software. GUI Changes There are a number of changes to iTunes 4. Most obviously, the...

Maya for Mac OS X

Proving yet again that the Mac is the professionals’ choice, one of the world’s top 3-D graphics applications (maybe the top app) was released on the Mac OS X platform in Sept. 2001. It's been updated several times since then -- most recently, to version 5. Say hello to Maya, the 3-D program behind the special effects in 26 of the top...

Graphics Toolkit - Plug-in Power!

Photoshop plug-ins Looking to expand your Photoshop chops (short for "Channel ops," of course)? Check out these plug-ins: First up, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention our two favorite plug-in collections: Eye Candy from Alien Skin and Kai's Power Tools from Metacreations. Eye Candy Eye Candy, from Alien Skin Software, is currently our...

Photoshop 5.5: ImageReady adds Web Power

Photoshop 5.5 box shotProduct: Photoshop 5.5 From:  Adobe, www.adobe.com For: PowerMac (A Windows 9x/NT version is also available) Price: US$995, with an estimated street price of between C$900 and C$1000. Discounted upgrades from previous versions available. Contact Adobe for details. Pros: Improved clone function, new object-outlining and...

Photoshop 7.0

Introduction In Dec. 2001, MacOSRumors.com reported, "PhotoShop 6.5 is advancing rapidly and a beta is planned to be seeded in the coming months. This product, as Photoshop fans know, never reached the market. By Dec. 10, Adobe had apparently decided the changes in the program were substantial enough to justify bumping the version number to 7...

CorelDRAW 8 for Mac

Is CoreDraw a viable alternative to Adobe Illustrator? Product: CorelDRAW 8.0 for Power Macintosh From: Corel (www.corel.com) Price: US$695; competitive upgrades (from most other graphics programs) US$149 Pros: Good text handling, especially of special symbols. Photo-Paint (also available as a standalone product) is a dramatic improvement over...

QuarkXPress 4.04

Product: QuarkXPress 4.04 From: Quark Inc. www.quark.com For: Macintosh, Windows Street Price: about $1000 Pros: Version 4.0 adds Illustrator-like bezier curve support and impressive new drawing and text-handling features. Early bugs were swiftly addressed with the 4.01r1 update, released Jan. 30, 1998, and subsequently improved further in later...

QuarkXPress 5

Product: QuarkXPress 5.0 From: Quark Inc. www.quark.com For: Macintosh, Windows Price: US$1000. Upgrades cost US$400 from v3.0; US$300 from v4.0. Pros: New features include tables, layers. Improved PDF support. Web-page creation, XML support. Collect for output now gathers screen and printer fonts as well as ICC profiles. See http://www.quark.com...

Final Cut Express for Mac

Real-time effects options enhance Apple's "prosumer" video editor Introduction Final Cut Pro, as noted elsewhere on this site, is Apple's award-winning professional video editing, effects and compositing software for broadcasters, educators, web producers and professional videographers. It's a full-featured program designed -- and priced...

Making Digital Movies with Premiere 6.5

The biggest change in Premiere since the 5.1 release was the addition of support for OHCI capture cards. (This feature first appeared in version 5.1c). Premiere 6.0 was a competent video-editing package, but, due to an interface that is both clumsier and slower to use than that of many competing titles, version 6 of the US$549 app didn't make our...

Making Digital Movies with Premiere 5.1

Premiere 5.1, shown here building a movie preview from a collection of video clips, still images and sound files, has a dramatically revamped "tabbed" interface that resembles that of Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe Premiere 5.0 for the Macintosh and 32-bit Windows PCs was released in May 1998. Since then, it has been updated to version...

QuickTime 5: MPEG-1, Flash and spherical QTVR support, plus Skins and G4 optimizations

QuickTime 5's long gestation is finally over. Its first public appearance was at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in San Jose on May 15, 2000, where Apple treated developers to a sneak peek at QuickTime 5. The software was subsequently delivered as a Preview Release at the QuickTime Live! conference, on October 10, 2000 in Beverly Hills, CA...

QuickTime 4.1: Apple's Multimedia Engine

In what appears to be further evidence of Apple's second wind (or is it the third?), QuickTime fans with Internet access on April 19th, 1999 gained early access to an ambitious upgrade of Apple's multimedia architecture for Macs and Windows PCs, with a public beta of QuickTime 4. In the months that followed, Apple put the finishing touches on the...