It has been bantered about by some that the upcoming G5 could be one decidedly long-lived computer. Friends have opined that your grandchildren will be using the next G5 you buy, even an IBM executive said that the 64 bit G5 was probably overkill for desktops. Then you have any number of sites talking about how the G5 is really a workstation powered computer wrapped up in a pro level desktop. Others feel differently, they maintain that the processor and the up to 8 GB of accompanying memory will soon be taxed be programmers. I don’t which scenario to buy into, if it’s the latter then everything is pretty groovy. If the former is correct and the G5 is so monstrously powerful that your grand kids will get good use out of it then we have a situation, a bad situation. So fire up the Bat signal and hope Michael Keaton shows up instead of George Clooney, cause we’ll need a cool Batman to take on this issue.
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Dungeon Siege
Company: MacSoft
Price: $49.99
http://www.macsoftgames.com
Do you like breaking barrels, I mean REALLY like breaking barrels? If breaking barrels is your thing (for whatever reason: Donkey Kong fetish, barrels killed your brother, etc.) then Dungeon Siege is the must have game of your lifetime. Don’t think that barrels are the only thing you get to break, heck no, you also get to beat an Avargordos number worth of bad guys to death. Sure breaking barrels and killing things seems like it would be inherently fun, heck some people call that kind of action a weekend, but in Dungeon Siege it’s just boring thanks entirely to a weak plotline. The absence of an engaging plot is a shame because the story is the only thing holding Dungeon Siege back from greatness.
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There’s been some controversy about the G5, some folks aver that this is a computer so powerful you’re grandchildren will be using your hand me down Mac long after you’ve reached thermal equilibrium, while others proclaim that developers will soon find a way to tax the G5 to the point where you’ll be begging for a G6. Who’s right? How would I know,? I’m a pretty bad prognosticator, I picked soap to win the battle against France. Hence I won’t make a bold prediction about the longevity of the G5 but I will opine on another issue: If you’re spending your own money you don’t need a G5, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get one.
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I spend too much time on the ‘net. This over abundance of time spent clicking hither and yon means I read a lot Mac oriented commentary and lately some of the bitching is starting to bug me. I’ve got no problem with a little well placed criticism of Apple, heck any company can do things a little better and most corporations can probably do most things a lot better. The thing that’s getting to me is that some folks apparently want Apple serve up a perfect computer with a super zippy custom system designed just for that particular user and sell the whole mess for a nickel.
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Montage
OS X Compatible
Company: Arboretum Systems
Price: $149.99
http://www.arboretum.com
I admit it; I am an iMovie apologist. I think it’s the single greatest program ever made, with the possible exception of that puzzle game that came with OS 7.1. My fondness for iMovie compelled me to use it…a bunch. You use anything enough and you start to see limitations, I wanted better text control and audio where I could see the waveforms. Why? Well the titling in iMovie is nice but you don’t have the control you sometimes desire and the audio control isn’t exactly stellar. I’m not trying to be negative about iMovie, I still think it’s great for beginners but as you get more proficient you’ll want to step up.
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Learning Maya Personal Edition
Company: Alias|Wavefront
Price: $19.99
http://www.aliaswavefront.com
Quick, think of the high spots in the most recent Star Wars movies Couldn’t think of any? Neither can I. Still, as I scheme of ways to bleed George out of the fourteen dollars that was basically stolen from me, I am reminded that the visual effects were very well done (overlooking Jar-Jar’s footprints for the moment). Why were the effects so good, so realistic? Well you’ve got Maya to thank in large part for that. Here I’m not referring to the surprisingly advanced natives of the Yucatan peninsula, rather I’m speaking of a rendering program put forth by the fine folks at Alias|Wavefront.
If Maya is so cool why not just run out and buy a copy? Well the coolness that is Maya is also a $2,000.00 budget buster. Cheap if you can get work using Maya, expensive if you just want to mess around with it to see if you want to make it your life’s work. How to get around this conundrum? Simple, get the Maya 4.5 personal learning edition, it’s free. Once you’ve got your personal learning edition copy and put up with the slightly laborious process of scoring a software key you’re ready to learn Maya.
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SonicFire Pro 3.0
Company: SmartSound Software, Inc.
Price: $299 full purchase, upgrade $79
http://www.smartsound.com
You probably think Apple was the first company to offer a decent way to buy music over the Internet. Well, you’d be wrong. Shortly before iTunes 4 was released SmartSound boxed up Sonicfire Pro 3 and offered it to the masses. And, as you can guess, the most significant difference between Sonicfire 2 and Sonicfire 3 is a feature allowing you to search for and purchase royalty free music via the Internet.
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A few weeks ago I was surfing around the web (macslash) and stumbled across a post by AC (anonymous coward) who wondered if it was profitable to program for the Mac. My first thought was “those guys in MBU (Mac Business Unit) at Redmond probably do okay, then I realized he probably meant going the coder/producer/marketer route. I would have posted a follow up but I didn’t know the answer. This is not surprising because I don’t know the answer to most questions (“Do you think the laundry fairy comes and washes the clothes?” “Seems probable”). In this instance I wasn’t hopelessly befuddled, I had just been talking to that sort of guy and I figured he’d know the answer.
Enter Stephen Becker. Stephen knows a lot about Macs, he’s written various articles for MAcAddict, TidBITS et al and taught computers classes at the local college Stephen Becker also owns MacEase.com which produces some very nice Mac enhancements. MacEase also produces some very nice window enhancements so Steve has the all bases covered. I e-mailed Steve a few times to try to set up an interview, it turns out the interview had to be put off for a few weeks because Steve was working sixteen hours a day to get the latest version of WebPrint Plus ready. There’s one quick lesson for you: it’s not all sitting back and letting the checks roll in there’s also sixteen hours of day of hard coding.
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After writing and accidentally publishing The Great American Camcorder Hunt I received some well earned criticism. One problem: I didn’t recommend any particular camera. I intend to rectify that oversight shortly. First let me recap the features I am looking for: Continue reading »
Optical image stabilization
An accessory shoe so I can get rid of that awful camcorder hum with a damped boom mic
Low price (hey why spend money if you don’t have to?)
A nice lens
Plenty of manual controls
That being said the things I absolutely don’t care about:
Size of the LCD screen
Still picture capability (I already have a digital camera)
Effects that can be applied via the camera
Owing to recent experiences, I have concluded that either a: The very wealthy do not like to use their hands or b) they like to use their hands but the not so wealthy are afraid to let them actually do so. I base these conclusions on a recent trip to New Orleans. My long suffering hard working wife was rewarded for months of toil in the sales industry with a pretty sweet trip to the Big Easy.
Going from my modest twelve hundred square foot tract housing abode to a nine hundred square foot luxury hotel suite was an experience I was not quite prepared for. Apart from the visual shock of tasteful decoration (my dwelling is “post college eclectic”) the servile manner of the staff was a bit discomfiting. In short, should I ever become fabulously wealthy, I’m staying in the motel six.
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If you have a semi-recent Mac, you’ve got iMovie. If you’ve got iMovie you have one of the most fun programs ever devised. Of course you’ll never know just how great iMovie is, just how much fun it can be, if you don’t have a digital camcorder. This is because a digital camcorder is the price of admission for iMovie. Having just recently spent a lot of time trying to decide on a camcorder, deciding on the camcorder and then realizing I lack the requisite cash for the camcorder (I’m saving up) I will pass my accumulated knowledge, be it ever so meager, onto all those who wish to sup at Chris Seibold’s big plate of camcorder shopping frustration.
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Back Office
Company: Shaun Jackson Design
Price: $149.95
http://www.sjdesign.com
Steve Jobs has called this the year of the laptop. I agree, I rarely touch my G4 tower preferring my iBook owing to the addition of a wireless router. Of course once you have semi splurged on a laptop you are going to want to take it with you somewhere. You may find yourself with the urge to take it on the road, you may want to haul it to the local coffee shop, heck you might not need to take it anywhere you might just want the status of hauling around a laptop because cell phones are so passe. Whatever the reason you’re going to need something to haul said miracle of compact computing and here your choices are nearly limitless. You can use anything from a free brown paper sack to a finely crafted leather satchel costing…well if you have to ask you can’t afford it.
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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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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.
Webster’s New World Computer Dictionary
Bryan Pfaffenberger
ISBN 0-7645-6325-4
US $16.99, CAN $25.99
No plot, no tips, no tricks, and no pics: Are these the ingredients of the worst book ever? Well, they would be if it weren’t a dictionary. Fortunately I am reviewing a dictionary, Webster’s New World Computer Dictionary to be precise. What you have here is your basic dictionary: Words and acronyms in bold followed by the definition the whole shebang flows down two columns per page. The difference is the focus, Webster’s New World Computer Dictionary focuses solely on Computers so the reference won’t be much use to scrabble players looking for a two-letter word that starts with Q (answer “qa”, it’s legit, trust me).
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Digital Photography for Dummies
Author: Julie Adair King
John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 0764506463
US $24.99
I have never read the any of the “Dummies” books; I always thought they were reserved for people named Lamont (’cause, you know, of Sanford and Son). I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this particular “Dummy” book. Digital Photography for Dummies contains just about anything you need to know about the world of digital cameras: storing images, transferring images, printing etc. and a bunch of (well marked) trivia you’ll never use but you’ll be glad you read.
Stupendous Bundle
OS X compatible
Company: Stupendous Software
Individual Bundles: $25.00
Stupendous Bundle: $200.00
Site License, Educational Discounts Available
http://www.stupendous-software.com
(Author’s note: Stupendous Software is giving away (as in free) 43 effects. They do this in homage to all the freeware they’ve enjoyed over the years; I think that’s pretty cool. Free is a pretty good deal in my opinion so head over there and download them; you’ll end up with a better idea that plugs are for you.)
A while back I received some software from Stupendous Software. Usually I try to review the stuff I get within a week but with Stupendous Bundle I purposefully put it off. Was I slacking like I am so often accused of? Heck no I was waiting for the latest release of iMovie. How could I recommend a product that didn’t work with iMovie 3? So after the extra weeks wait I can report that Stupendous Bundle works flawlessly with iMovie 3. I can also steal a line from Martha “Stock Guru Extreme” Stewart and say “it’s a very good thing”.
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MyMac Podcast #403
Review
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