Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #65, July 2000

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #56, December 1999

RedNeck Rampage
Company: Interplay
Estimated Price: $9.95

So there you are, pistol in hand, on a long dirt road lined with trees. As you approach the intersection ahead of you, chickens appear running all about. Suddenly some hick starts firing at you, so you quickly take him out with your six-shooter.

You reach the intersection, and suddenly a pickup truck whips around a corner, taking out every chicken in his path. Blood and feathers fly everywhere amongst a sea of crazed hillbilly music brought to you by the likes of the Reverend Horton Heat. You pick up a double-barrel shotgun and slowly take it out with shot after shot as it continues to circle around you.

Yaaaahoo! So begins the first few minutes of Interplay’s Redneck Rampage. This is the long-awaited PC classic that has finally been ported to the Mac, and boy-ee! It is FUN! Built on a sweet 3D engine similar to the one used for Lucas Art’s “Dark Forces,” Red Neck Rampage teeters the line between a straight up 3D shooter and an episode of HeeHaw.

Weapons include a crowbar, pistol, shotgun, dynamite, and the likes. Your enemy is consists of a horde of fat, buck-toothed hillbillies, old hicks, and giant mosquitos! You blast your way through chicken coops, corner stores, and tool sheds!

This game is absolutely over-the-top hysterical; these guys don’t let any stereotype stop ‘em. Remember those power packs you’d pick up in DOOM to regain health? Well forget that sissy stuff. In Red Neck Rampage, you restore your power eating Pork Rinds and Cow Pies!

And if that isn’t fun enough, you can also help boost your health by guzzling beer or moonshine! But one warning: you drink too much,and you end up blasted! Suddenly your vision gets blurry, and it’s almost impossible to walk anywhere as you stagger to and fro. And forget about sobering up anytime soon—you basically end up out of commision shooting blindly and falling all over the place once you have too much sauce. It’s an absolute riot, especially for those who have, um, been there before…

The greatest feature is that Red Neck Rampage also includes your character’s voice. As you play, your character is spouting off all kinds of white-trash obscenities. It’s a blast. And all you parents, worry not: there is a Parental Control feature to block out the more adult jargon.

The game play is fast and smooth, the levels big and interesting. All in all, this is a great game for all 3D shooter fans, especially those who loved Duke Nuke ‘Em and Shadow Warrior. Have a blast—have a Pabst, and buy Red Neck Rampage!

•Mike Gorman•

Websites mentioned:

Adobe GoLive
Company: Adobe Systems
Price: $299.95

Recently I was on a job hunt around Portland, Maine. After several weeks of scoping out the classified ads, I realized one thing: there is a lot of money to be made in web page development and design. Personally, I had done some web design in the past on a freelance basis, but the majority of my web creations had been for my own personal fun. In other words, in the job market, I would be described as a “casual” web slinger.

I do know HTML pretty well (i.e. I know what I’m looking at when I look at code, and know what code to steal to accomplish what I need to do) but it always seems as though I’m several steps behind the “cutting edge” web design crowd.

The main reason for this is that I could never see the sense of learning straight up HTML code when there are numerous WYSIWYG web page compilers out there that I could use to quickly generate pages. I mean, why spend the time typing in a line of code to position a piece of art on a page, when I can just as easily drag and drop the art onto a page instantly with something like Adobe PageMill?

Unfortunately, this “do-it-the-easy-way” mentality became my greatest obstacle in this field of work, for as the Internet aged, people were learning more and more things they could get away with in web page design, and the consumer/surfer was expecting more with web page design. Thus, if you didn’t understand the “new stuff” from the skeleton up (i.e. the code), you were pretty much screwed until you taught yourself the new code, or you had to wait until an update came out for your WYSIWYG compiler.

Most new web technology has to be coded anyway. Hell, you have to have the latest version of your web browser to even experience some of this new technology!

So there I was, needing a job, seeing lots of “Web design guru needed” classified ads, but having limited skills to create pages. So I started to investigate the high-end, professional WYSIWYG web page generators that recently hit the scene, and decided to try Adobe’s GoLive 4.0. Originally known as GoLive’s CyberStudio, Adobe Systems bought out GoLive and released the software under their corporate name. I figured with my long history of pleasurable experiences with Adobe products, I couldn’t lose.

First, let’s talk System Requirements.

GoLive is different from the majority of the low-end, lower-cost WYSIWYG compilers out there on the market in that GoLive is a full Internet suite. Because it is such a full application (this application has a slew of high-end features), it requires a higher-end machine. GoLive requires a Power PC running Mac OS 8.0 or higher (bad news for all you folks out there getting by on 7.6.) For RAM, Adobe recommends 32 megabytes, however it will run with 24. I’m on a G3 with 160 megs of RAM, so I’m ready to go.

My First GoLive Site
My first thought in reviewing GoLive was to build a site that showcased all of GoLive’s features so that My Mac’s readers could go there and see how it looked and worked. But at the same time, I wanted to see how it handled the basic website as well. Necessity decided what I would build first: My friends and family outside of Maine wanted to see some new pictures of my daughter, so the first GoLive site I built was a “picture page” of her.

There are three ways to create your web pages in GoLive: WYSIWYG, tag-outline, and with straight-up code. I used WYSIWYG mode as this site was a basic one in which I’d be mainly dragging and dropping images onto the page.

Using GoLive was incredibly easy. I just dragged the photos onto my “page window” and dropped them where I wanted them. With a button click, the color palette popped up. I chose a background color, which I just dragged over to the “Page Inspector” window. POP-the background turned white. I hit SAVE, and posted it on the Internet! In less than an a half an hour, I had designed the page, posted it on the Internet, and had written an email to all of my loved ones to go check it out. That’s a quick job!

That was a very BASIC website. To properly review GoLive, I had to push it. I decided to go all out and created “WHY WE BUILD,” a completely freeform, experimental, artsy-fartsy site full of fun and games. Unfortunately, I’m the type of person who has so much fun developing content, that I have yet to post ANYTHING for you all to check out. However, the following is a review of the features I’m working with on this site.

WHY WE BUILD
The first thing I checked out with GoLive was “clickable image maps.” GoLive makes creating them easy! I had always coded image maps in the past, and it was kind of a pain (a rewarding pain, but time consuming all the same.) GoLive makes it a snap. You simply take your piece of art, and either draw boxes, ovals, or (and this is really cool) you can use the draw tool and create exact, bezier curve-type selections for hot spots in your art. Once a hot spot is defined, you type in the target URL in the “inspector window,” and you’re good to go. It’s too easy.

GoLive offers the designer out there quite a cool feature-Grids. Grids are basically what they say: you draw a box on your page, it fills with a boxed grid. What you get in using grids is a web page that in preview mode looks like a sheet of graph paper. You can draw overlapping grids to position your art and type in. This way, you can choose EXACTLY where you want things to flow on your page. This feature takes web page design and pushes it more towards print-page design.

Another wonderful feature for all you webmasters out there is that GoLive has CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. This alone is the greatest feature of the application (especially for those who are used to the production end of a print magazine wishing to switch over to a web version of the said magazine. Style sheets are a longtime MUST in magazine layout, but until now who the hell had that as a feature in a web design application??!!)

Creating forms is impossibly easy: you just drag over your buttons, text-input boxes, submit buttons, etc. onto your page. Hit the preview button, and you can try them out!

Adobe GoLive is also created to run very closely with Adobe Photoshop. I truly enjoyed the ease of use between the two applications. It’s nice to be able to double-click an image in a GoLive document and have it immediately open in Photoshop. Also, it’s nice to take a piece of art already placed in my GoLive document, alter it in Photoshop, and to have it refresh itself instantly in GoLive!

You can also easily add QuickTime Video, JavaScript, Frames, etc. to your site, simply by dragging the icons for those features right onto your page. There are a slew of other fantastic features in GoLive, but I haven’t even gotten to ‘em yet!

DRAW BACKS
GoLive adds lots of extra code into its web pages. Now, this may not be a bother to all you out there just pumping out pages for fun, however I had to go in and clean out a bunch of code even for the basic website I did of my daughter. It’s just a wee tad too unclean for me to allow to be posted. GoLive also has some pretty hefty system requirements as well, especially for a web design application.

IN A NUT SHELL
I wish I had finished enough work on the site I am creating to post something for you to check out, as I’m having FUN with Adobe’s GoLive. It’s fast, stable, and incredibly easy to use. This is drag-and-drop the way it should be, while at the same time GoLive is a FULL web design application, of which, when used to its fullest, should impress anyone with the end-product. I can see myself becoming somewhat of a web-god with this product. I highly recommend it.

•Mike Gorman•

Websites mentioned:

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #50, June 1999

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #47, March 1999

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #46, Feb 1999

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #45, Jan 1999

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #44, December 1998

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #43, November 1998

Corel Draw 8
Company: Coral

Estimated Price: $695 (Full version)
$149 (Upgrade)
<http://www.corel.com>

About a month ago, I got an email from Tim, My Mac’s publisher, asking me if I wanted to give Corel Draw 8 a whirl, and if I wanted to then write a review of it. I was more than happy to do so as I’m always out to try new graphics applications, having already built up some major prejudices for and against some of the “industry standard” art programs now available.

The prejudices against were towards Adobe’s painfully awkward Illustrator, which I continually find to be a mind-numbing experience to work with, and even worse, Macromedia’s blunder of an “art” program, Freehand (which I can’t believe is actually a Mac application, as it is devoid of the staples that make a Mac a Mac, e.g., a logical interface, ease of use, a rational toolbox, etc.).

So here is Corel Draw 8. The history of Corel is as such: It was first introduced in 1989 as a Windows-only graphics application. It was first known as simply an illustration program, but after several years of aggressive development, it established itself as the PC design world’s standard graphics application, transforming into an entire graphics suite. Apparently, at their peak Corel held an 85% market share of the Windows graphics community.

Now that’s all fine and dandy, but everyone knows that pretty much 99% of all design work done professionally is done on a Mac OS, and THAT is the truth of it all (in fact, in my 8 years in the business, I have never known a single designer who even owned a Windows machine!). Hence, Corel released Draw 8 for the Power Macintosh, years after Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, Freehand, and PageMaker had established themselves.

I was a little skeptical at first. For one thing, I hate illustration applications, preferring to do all my line work by hand. Secondly, this application was originally created for a Windows world, so I wondered how awkward the GUI would be, and how well the code was written (e.g., try Painter 5.0. That application had to be a rewrite of a Windows application. You never used a more sluggish and buggy application). And finally, my only use for Corel would be limited, as I usually do all my art and design work in Photoshop and Quark.

So why bother trying it? Well, I work during the day as a designer for J. Weston Walch here in Portland, ME. Walch is a big name in the small world of educational book publishers, and I get to work all day doing art and design work for their covers and for the interiors of their publications. Being an educational publisher, you kind of want the books to scream “inspirational”, “interesting”, and “surprising.” Design-wise, I’ve been forced to try new things with the artwork, and I’m always looking for different ways to spruce things up.

One of the first gimmicks I started incorporating in my design work for Walch was something I call “Type on Curve”, or better said: You draw a curvy, fun line using Illustrator’s or Freehand’s bezier drawing tools, and attach type to it, so the type then bounces along the line.

I also have tried this other gimmick: I was designing the cover for a book titled “Amusement Park Physics”, of which I picked out a wicked cool photo for the cover of a cart wiping around a bend on a roller coaster. I wanted the type to follow the curve of the bend, and I wanted it to have a 3-D, colorful look of almost plastic.

Now, I tried doing both these things in Quark 4.03, however Quark can only at this point do “Type on Curve”, and it is BUGGY. Having Freehand at work, I created the type within it rather easily, and then dragged it into Quark. I decided to try doing the same thing in Corel, to see how it handled this same simple task.

Wow. Not only did it do type on curve, but it took THREE less steps than Freehand. In Corel, creating text on curve is as follows: You draw a line. Click on the Type tool. Start typing. In Freehand, You draw a line. Then you create a text box. You type out what you want to say in the text box. Then you select the text box with the cursor. Then select the line. Then you attach the type to the line.

But beyond those three saved steps the possibilities of manipulation of the type from there was what blew me away. With your type selected, click on the fill button, then on any color in your palette, and BAM—the type turns that color. Hold down option, hit another color, and your type is outlined in THAT color! Or you can click on the gradient button, pick two colors and an angle for which to blend, and it will make a blend of those 2 colors! Then skew the type, twist it, flip it… and you end up with some pretty funky type!

These are all (pretty much) things you can do in Freehand and Illustrator, however the difference is that in Freehand and Illustrator, you have to convert your type to outlines to be able to color it and outline it, warp it, etc… and say you do all these manipulations and after about 20 minutes of getting it just perfect, you realize you spelled “Physics” wrong. Then you start again from scratch, trying to remember how the heck you did it the first time!

In Draw 8, you can manipulate the hell out of your text, but it remains TEXT. Say it’s all 3-D and colorful and funky, and you notice you spelled a word wrong… well,then you just fix it the same way you would in any word processing program. Or you decide you like the effects you made, but you want the font to be Futura Book as opposed to Gill Sans Ext. B. Cond. Again, you just switch it like in any word processor, and Draw 8 applies all those same manipulations to your new font!

Now those are all BASIC things you can do with an illustration program. What most people doing computer generated art are into is what I call “Intensive- Amazing, Bezier Wire-Framed, Super-Blended, Super-Realistic Art,” an example of which is on the cover of Draw 8, an illustration of actress Hedy Lamarr.

Now that drawing of Ms Lamarr is pretty incredible, but that type of art is well beyond anything I am inspired to do or capable of doing or patient enough to do. The basic core of how a piece like that is made is simple: (hah!) It’s basically a huge skeleton of meticulously placed blended shapes. Hit the “Wire Frame” preview in Draw 8, and your eyes will bleed amongst the sea of bezier lines criss-crossing across your screen. Hit the “Enhanced” view, and Draw adds all the blends you applied to those same wire frames, thus creating a perfectly rendered 3-D image.

Now I don’t have nearly enough time to do anything like that (although I
greatly appreciate that type of art). Instead, I found I could do tons of fun and cartoony things using simply the Circle tool and playing with bezier points to warp those circle to ameba like shapes, then adding blends to those said shapes.

For instance, the basic structure of the cover is like this:

1. I created a circle for the head. I added a blend from green to no color using the Interactive Transparency tool.

2. From there, I warped in the corners of the circle to get it to a shape I liked. That was my base “Skull.”

3. Then I added the features of the face, creating the mug of the alien on this month’s cover.

What I liked about Corel Draw 8:

1. It’s very easy to use. In fact, I think it blows the doors off Illustrator and Freehand. I will only use Corel Draw from here on out for text manipulations and bezier drawing.

2. The color palettes are awesome: it seems like every palette you can think of is built-in, including both a Netscape Navigator AND an Internet Explorer web palette!

3. Incredible capabilities.

4. Cool tools and effects.

5. Incredible price for what you get (It’s ALMOST like getting Photoshop, Illustrator, Page Mill, and Quark in one application suite!)*

6. It runs very fast on my G3, with no instances of any sluggishness.

A few things I didn’t like about Corel Draw 8:

1. First and foremost, Corel Draw 8 had enormous memory requirements. The recommended RAM you should have allotted to Draw was 64 megs (!!), running on a Power Mac with OS 8.1 or higher. That should turn a few of you off. That means that for it to run optimally, you should have 96 megs of RAM installed, as OS 8.1 can hog as high as 32 megs of RAM alone! Its minimum requirements are 7.6.1 with 32 megs of RAM, again which seems painfully high.

2. Corel Draw can’t open many basic image file formats. This is bad.

3. Although I appreciated not having to change text to outlines to manipulate it, in some cases I WANT to be able to!

4. Although Corel made huge strides to match the GUI of Illustrator and Photoshop, it was only 80% there, and many tools react somewhat differently than in these two longtime industry favorites, making for a few “Now why the heck is that tool doing THAT” instances.

5. I hate multiple undos. You’ll want to make sure to adjust that under Preferences before you give Draw 8 a go.

6. Selecting multiple items that lay on top of each other is a royal pain. I found the same problem with Freehand.

Final thought: If you want to get into the field of graphic design, but don’t know where to start and have limited funds, go buy yourself an iMac with a ton of RAM and Corel Draw 8. You’ll save a boat load of money versus buying a straight up G3 with Illustrator, Photoshop, and Quark, and will be able to do everything the pros do. Later on, you can buy a more “muscular” CPU. For your money’s worth, though, Corel Draw 8 is a fantastic bargain with phenomenal capabilities. I don’t think you would need much more than Corel Draw 8 to do it all!

*Corel Draw 8 comes with Draw 8, Photo Paint 8, and Corel Trace, Font Reserve, Canto Cumulus, a bunch of plug-ins, 1,200 pieces of clip art, 100 digital photos, and 1600 TrueType fonts!

Corel Photo Paint 8:
I have a brief synopsis of Photo Paint 8, Corel’s attempt to steal the thunder from Photoshop. At first I believed Corel did a really fantastic job creating a basic mimic of Photoshop. Photo Paint 8 pretty much matches the features of Photoshop with few exceptions. It seemed just as easy to use as Photoshop, and can do most of the fun and funky things good ol’ Photoshop can do. The night I tried it out, I went into that exploratory mode I did when I first tried out Photoshop where I kicked back with a beer and just tried stuff out for a few hours. Just exploring.

Now I’ve tried to do those things with Photo Paint 8 that I do with Photoshop, mainly, I scan in my line art, bring it into Photo Paint, and drop in color. Soon I became surprised at how confusing Photo Paint was. The tools reacted so “foreign”!

Man, why couldn’t I easily select colors for the Paint bucket without having to draw up an overloaded palette, or without having to hold down the Shift key? Where’s the CYMK Palette?! Why was it that I had to use the Magic Wand tool to select an area to pour the color into? In Photoshop, I would just select the Paint bucket, select a color, and pour. In Photo Paint, I had to select the spaces I wanted to color with the Magic Wand, select the Paint bucket, hold down shift to pick out a color, then pour the color into each separate selected area, then reselect the magic wand to click off of those selections. That’s madness!

The interface bugged the heck out of me, as well. Basically, your entire screen is wrapped with those Windows-type tool bars that seem to want to latch onto the sides of your screen if you move ‘em around. Why do software developers continue to do this with their GUIs?

Anyway, I think I’ll stick with Photoshop. I dig it. It does it the way I like it. I think Photo Paint 8 is an excellent first-timer paint program that does a ton of cool stuff. I just don’t care for its hassles.

•Mike Gorman• <mikegorman@mymac.com>

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #42, October 1998

Cover by Mike Gorman
MyMac Magazine #41, Sept 1998