News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
At a media event on October 14, Apple announced a top-to-bottom refresh of its portable Macs. Along with new unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros, the company also unveiled an updated MacBook Air that featured faster graphics and more storage.
James Galbraith | Nov 10, 2008
Adobe Flash CS4 has been radically redesigned and restructured. With CS4, Flash has finally turned the corner from a code-based authoring tool with an interactive animation element, to a designer-friendly space for illustrators to intuitively draw animation. Yes, draw animation—by shaping the path of an illustration the same way an artist would draw a vector path in Adobe Illustrator.
David Karlins | Nov 10, 2008
The MacCase Premium Leather Flight Jacket for the MacBook and MacBook Air is as much a style choice as a functional one.
Anthony Caruana | Nov 8, 2008
For the company’s 15th anniversary, Bare Bones Software has produced BBEdit 9, a major release to its venerable text editor that will thrill long-time users and will likely garner new converts. At the same time that the program makes several leaps ahead, however, it could still use some further tweaks, especially for cutting-edge Web developers.
Tom Negrino & Dori Smith | Nov 7, 2008
Bioware has a long history of bringing thrilling fantasy-based role playing games to life with titles like Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate. The company has made its bones by closely adhering to real Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules, creating a “legitimate” role playing game (RPG) experience that still has all the thrills and action of a computer game. They also thrilled Star Wars gamers with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Peter Cohen | Nov 6, 2008
Of all the keyboards we've looked at recently, Kinesis’ Freestyle Solo is the only one with good ergonomics as its primary goal. It largely succeeds in attaining that objective, and adds some unique functionality, although at the expense of a traditional keyboard layout.
Dan Frakes | Nov 5, 2008
Premiere Pro CS3’s debut on the Mac last year was impressive, especially given the challenges it faced. It not only had to overcome the lacklustre reputation of its previous Mac-compatible predecessor, Premiere 6.5, but it also had to reclaim the territory it had ceded to Apple and Avid editing systems during its long absence. Today, Premiere Pro has more firmly established a reputation with Mac-based editors, and this new version will enhance its credibility.
Antony Bolante | Nov 5, 2008
Originally released on other platforms in 2005, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones has finally arrived for the Mac. While the release may have been a bit delayed, it's still an entertaining (but technically flawed) new chapter in a franchise as old as Mac gaming.
Chris Holt | Nov 3, 2008
The newest version of InDesign CS4 would be welcome on any layout designer’s desktop. But it may not be worth the price of an upgrade in and of itself; the degree of change is not nearly as strong as users saw in the move to InDesign CS3.
Galen Gruman | Nov 3, 2008
When I first saw FileMaker’s database “for the rest of us” — namely Bento — last year, I immediately thought what a lot of other people thought: this is the database that’s missing from iWork. A lot of customers who’ve been clinging to AppleWorks for years longer than they should have are yet to accept iWork as the “successor” to AppleWorks until it can replace the database function. On closer examination, Bento was somewhat less than that. For one thing there was no easy way to bring AppleWorks databases over to Bento without a very fiddly process of export and import.
Matthew JC. Powell | Oct 31, 2008
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is a solid upgrade to an already impressive Web site design program. The latest version adds to features introduced in Dreamweaver CS3 (Photoshop Integration and Spry JavaScript tools for building interactive interfaces, for example) and also presents a completely revamped interface that more closely resembles other products in the Creative Suite.
David Sawyer McFarland | Oct 31, 2008
OS X’s Front Row interface is a fine choice for watching movies or TV episodes you’ve purchased at the iTunes Store. But if you want to play media from sources other than the iTunes Store, Front Row isn’t much use. There’s an alternative solution: a free, open-source media center application called Plex. Though still in beta as of this writing (and suffering from some prerelease instability), Plex is extremely flexible and customisable—a great media player for geeks.
Gina Trapani | Oct 31, 2008
Myvu has announced that its Crystal video goggles now work with the iPhone. The Crystal glasses require a new cable which costs $US24.95.
