Real World Color Management
by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting
Peachpit Press
534 pages with many color illustrations
ISBN 0-201-77340-6
$49.99 (USA), $77.99 (Canada) £37.99 (UK)
For me, reviewing a book on color management is not a whole lot different that reviewing one on brain surgery. My perspective is not from one well versed in the subject but rather from your run-of-the-mill graphic artist with a smattering of understanding of the subject. That’s a caveat that needs to be stated in this case. Can’t say for sure whether the information imparted is accurate, current, etc., … but it sure looks good.
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TurboTax Deluxe Macintosh
2002 Tax Year – Federal and State
Company: Intuit
Price: $49.95
http://www.turbotax.com
Timing is everything, right? When reviewing annual income tax software it’s difficult to complete a product evaluation before finishing the tax returns. In previous years we have attempted to present either:
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Mac OS X for Windows Users: A Switchers’ Guide
by David Coursey
Peachpit Press
277 pages, black and white
ISBN 0-321-16889-5
$19.99 (USA) , $31.99 (Canada) £14.99 (UK)
The Switchers’ Guide is an unabashed endorsement of Mac over PC — and rightly so, in my opinion. If you work in creative applications on a PC (as I do, I’m ashamed to say) you will feel woefully inadequate and be convinced that life has passed you by. Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration. However, David Coursey presents many compelling reasons for making the switch in this well written and entertaining book targeted to disgruntled Microsoft captives.
FlipStand
Company: Speck Products
Price: $34.95 US
http://www.speckproducts.com
I love my iPod, but I am going crazy worrying about damaging the thing. Really, when you spend almost five hundred bucks for a little thing to play music on, you tend to be a bit over-protective. So one of the things I wanted to do was upgrade the 20GB iPod’s case, something better than the cheap sleeve Apple ships with the unit.
Enter the FlipStand from Speck Products. This is a nice solution as both an iPod case, as well as a desktop stand. The case is all plastic, with a piece of clear plastic over the iPods display. The FlipStand completely protects the iPod in a somewhat durable plastic enclosure. There is a hole at the top of the unit so that you can slip the headphone jack in, and it is wide enough to support the volume control extension the 20GB-iPod ships with.
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Anyone who can’t use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate,
and should not be allowed to vote. –Robert A. Heinlein
Like most of you, I have several hobbies to keep myself amused and busy, during the times when I am not working to pay the bills. Some of my hobbies are pretty standard (if anything can really be called standard any more.) As I have mentioned in a few columns, I love to bike ride. This is a sport and hobby combined. If I am not riding, I am perusing the latest bicycle catalogs that stuff my mailbox, or doing some “wrenching”, or lurking about the website of my favorite shop, which is a fine website indeed. For interested parties, its Harris Cyclery. And yes, they’ll ship parts, tools, complete bicycles, and pretty much anything you want to almost anywhere in the civilized world. It’s arguable, but I think they have what is possibly the finest bike shop in the world.
Real World InDesign 2
By Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner
Peachpit Press
650 pages
ISBN: 0201773171
Price: $44.99 US $69.99 Canada
I was delighted when Adobe introduced InDesign. Finally, I thought, a program that will let me do everything I need without going back and forth from Quark to Photoshop. Then I got the program. And I thought, bloody hell, I’m going to need a four-year college course to learn this. Then I got Real World InDesign 2 by Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner, and saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
The chapter layout of the book is excellent. Chapter One is called Workspace and details all the windows, palettes, menus, shortcuts, preferences, defaults, navigation, plug-ins, even how to get help. Kvern and Blatner use clear and concise wording, which appeals to a non-professional such as myself. I’m not a graphics professional, and even though I’ve used some of Adobe’s products in the past I’ve not always known what the various tools are. The authors define the functions first, then tell you how to use them. For example: “The Polygon tool makes it easy to draw equilateral polygons, such as pentagons, hexagons, and dodecagons. (Polygons are closed geometric objects that have at least three sides; they’re equilateral if all sides are the same length.)”
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PodHolder
Company: PodShop
Price: $15.95
http://www.podshop.com
Guest Review by James Henke
At $15.95 the Pod Holder fills a niche for desktop users wanting to keep their iPod within easy reach while retaining the easy functionality of the iPod. I’ve noticed many of the cases on the market seem cheaply made and a little “clunky” in the real world use department.
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Adobe Photoshop 7 Web Design with GoLive 6
by Michael Baumgardt
Adobe Press / Peachpit Press
ISBN 0-321-11561-9, 321 pages
Price: $45.00 US, $69.99 CN, £33.99 UK
303 pages, all in color
No CD (image file examples and tutorials must be downloaded)
Adobe Photoshop 7 Web Design by Michael Baumgardt is a very
comprehensive study in Web design. Pages are beautifully illustrated with colorful samples and diagrams. The author goes into great detail explaining many nuances of this craft that the most of us tend to ignore.
The book starts with design basics and concepts, which include interviews with professionals in the trade, plus many examples of successful designs in practice. The middle of the content gets into some Photoshop and ImageReady techniques that have application in Web design. There are a few tutorials that some readers may find helpful in reinforcing concepts.
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LaCie “d2″ 52x24x52 CD-RW FireWire Drive
Company: LaCie
Price: Currently $169.00, $149.00 in April, 2003
VS
Other World Computing “Mercury” 52x24x52 CD-RW FireWire Drive
Company: Other World Computing
Price: $149.99
Both of these high-speed FireWire CD-RW burners arrived on the same day three weeks ago, so I had ample opportunity to compare them under optimum evaluation conditions. The cross-platform physical drive mechanisms are identical, manufactured by a company called LiteOnIt. If you are interested, they have a thorough FAQ on this line of products at their web site.
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Speed and operation are excellent, with much improvement over earlier CD-RW drives we reviewed. If the Other World Computing (OWC) burner costs the same for less software than its competitor, you should purchase the LaCie, correct? Not so fast. Keep reading.
As is evident by now, my editorial decision to publish
Charles Moore’s ‘political’ piece last Friday has caused
a stir here. I make the following remarks not to justify
myself: I believe I was justified and seek no further
justification. I will explain partly why I made the
decision, but even that not because I think it’s owed
anyone. I answer to myself for my actions because I
have to live with myself after acting in anyway. If
conscience keeps me awake at night, then it is only
because of my own actions, and not that of others which
stirs my slumbers.
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Liquid Ledger
OS X Only
Company: Modeless Software, Inc.
Price: $45.00
http://www.liquidledger.com
Sure the economy is a little sluggish of late and if you own stocks you probably don’t want to look at the bright red numbers scrolling across the bottom of CNBC. Economy aside, you still need to know what your dough is doing (unless you work off the simple accounting method that once ruled my life: cash in car ashtray=net worth). There are quite a few methods to keep an eye on your dough. These range from the very basic (a napkin) to the highly customizable (a personally designed spreadsheet/database) all the way to any of a number pre made solutions.
One of the pre-made solutions is Liquid Ledger. After using Liquid Ledger for a week I have decided that, for most folks, Liquid Ledger is a very good solution. You acquire Liquid Ledger via a simple download of 1.2 MB (even dial up users won’t balk at that). Installation is a fairly simple matter of drag and drop. The first thing you’ll notice when you fire Liquid Ledger up is, predictably, the interface.
QuickTime for Macintosh and Windows Visual Quickstart Guide
Judith Stern, Robert Lettieri
Peachpit Press
US $21.99, CAN $3499
ISBN 0-321-12728-5
http://www.peachpit.com
You’d be surprised if you knew just how much you could accomplish with QuickTime. For most folks QuickTime is just an underutilized streamer of web media. But there is more to QuickTime than a player the latest Lord of the Rings trailer, under the brushed metal facade lays a power packed Swiss army knife of multimedia manipulation. Of course you’d never chance upon just how much you could do with QuickTime by playing clips off the Internet because the true utility of QuickTime is hidden from view. That’s where Judith Stern and Robert Lettieri step in, they reveal all of QuickTime inherent niftiness in “QuickTime for Macintosh and Windows”.
So just where can you go with QuickTime? I’m glad you asked. The following represents a small sampling of tricks gleaned from the aforementioned “QuickTime for Macintosh and Windows”:
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Using Adobe Photoshop 7
By Peter Bauer and Jeff Foster
Que Publishing
928 pages, 8 in color
CD included with supporting files and samples
$49.99
ISBN 0-7897-2760-9
Photoshop is an enormously complex program by anyone’s standards. To attempt to cover it all in one book is no small feat. Even with 928 pages of text and illustrations it is impossible, even foolhardy, to think that the creative potential of this software can be fully exposed.
The authors readily acknowledge this obstacle and candidly admit that their work is not for the Photoshop novice, and it wonÕt make anyone an expert. Rather, it is intended to present a “broad brush” (no pun intended) summary of the myriad of tools available with explanations that assume a working knowledge of the graphic design business.
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Kensington PocketMouse Pro Wireless (a.k.a. Rodentia Tailessia)
Company: Kensington Technology Group
Price: $49.99
http://www.kensington.com
As recently as February 4th, I was visiting an Apple Store in Denver, CO, with my brother and three sons (on our way to Steamboat Springs for a week of skiing) and happened upon Kensington’s latest rendition of their PocketMouse product. In fact, the Apple Genius who was giving us a tour of the store, noted that it had just arrived that very day!
Now I had been looking for a “portable” mouse to go with my Titanium 1Ghz PowerBook for several months and I had considered several. What I really wanted was something wireless but more portable than the current crop with their cumbersome RF receivers with lengthy USB cords. I was about to compromise and purchase one of the mini-mice with retractable cords, but something held me back, and I am glad I waited.
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The first thing that caught my attention wit
Marble Blast
OSX, Windows, Linux Compatible
Company: Garage Games
Price: $14.95 (downloadable)
http://www.garagegames.com
If you have a basic grasp of gravity you’re ready to step up and play Marble Blast. Similar to the token eating Marble Madness of my junior high years Marble Blast features, well, a rolling marble. Yep, you roll a marble around and around. Sounds a bit boring but, trust me; this is a finger cramping good time. Marble Blast has one of those “son of a bitch!” gameplay styles where you know exactly what you did wrong and also know what you need to do to correct said mistake. The SOB factor is what makes game play addictive, if you know where you went wrong, heck why not go back and get it right?
Marble Blast isn’t a clone of Marble Madness; this marble can do a bit more. Your marble is powered (I think it uses the segway concept) so it’s not just 9.8m/s^2 downhill action. You scramble your way up hills and, when necessary, get the marble to hop by pressing the space bar.
I have a friend at work that has a teenage son, eighteen this summer. He’s a senior in high school, and I always love to hear stories of youth, likely because mine was so miserable that it’s always enjoyable to get a vicarious thrill now and then. Of course, he’s a jock and I was a geek, so there’s not a lot of transference happening. But still, I think humiliation in high school is a universal theme and hearing of his misadventures usually leaves with some sort of heavy sigh like feeling while muttering things like “ah, youth.”
Hearing of one of his latest trials though, I was completely floored. I could handle stories of teenage alcohol use and even the frowned upon drug experimentation, because I was raised Catholic and I was well versed in getting drunk by the time I hit seventh grade, and of getting stoned my freshmen year in high school. She talks about him being sexually active and I can’t really frown upon that either. I had sex in high school and I’m not raising children, so I don’t think it’s wrong, yet. But this latest news had my proverbial jaw on the floor. The mom was talking about how tired she was of him sneaking out to see his girlfriend (of two months) that she simply relented and is now allowing said girlfriend to sleep over.
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MyMac Podcast #385
MyMac Podcast #384