Adobe CS5 Web Premium Part Three: Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and the Rest By Kevin Schmitt
We're down to the last major pieces of Adobe CS5 Web Premium, but last doesn't always mean least. OR DOES IT??? HMMMM??? With that as a spectacular teaser, let's spend our final installment looking at two holdovers from those halcyon Macromedia days of yore: Dreamweaver, the venerable web site building tool, and Fireworks, the oft-overlooked prototyping and vector/bitmap editing powerhouse.
...Read More »
Adobe CS5 Web Premium Part Two: The Flash Platform By Kevin Schmitt
Honesty time, dear readers: I don't think this is going to be an actual review. As Velveeta is to real cheese, there may be some review-like qualities to what follows, but considering the current all-out assault on Flash and everything it stands for, it may be beneficial to take a larger view of what Adobe has done in Web Premium CS5, namely the inclusion of not one, not two, but three separate tools for creating Flash content.
...Read More »
Adobe CS5: Five Things to Keep in Mind By Kevin Schmitt
Eighteen months, seemingly like clockwork. A mere year-and-a-half after CS4 was released (which itself was a mere year-and-a-half after the release of CS3), Adobe has unveiled the CS5 lineup. Having had a chance to see and try the new versions for myself over the past several weeks, here are some general observations about the latest versions of Adobe's software uberbundles.
...Read More »
Book Excerpt: My MacBook by John Ray By John Ray
Editor's note: Excerpt from My MacBook by John Ray, Published by Que My MacBook provides step-by-step instructions with callouts to MacBook photos that show you exactly what to do. It offers help when you run into MacBook or Snow Leopard problems or limitations.
...Read More »
Alien Skin Eye Candy 6 By John Virata
Alien Skin Eye Candy 6 is the company's latest collection of filters and textures for Adobe Photoshop CS4 and other image editors. The cool thing about Eye Candy 6 is the fact that each filter and texture can be tweaked to your heart's content, with more than 1500 presets in specific filters and textures. There are myriad sliders to work with to get just the right look that you are trying to achieve with a particular effect or texture.
...Read More »
First Look: AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 3.0 By John Virata
AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 3.0 is a Photoshop plugin filter that enables you to create cool puzzle looks with your Photoshop images. When you launch AV Broz Puzzle Pro 3.0, the plug-ins interface opens which enables you to further tweak the puzzle look of an image.
...Read More »
Screentime mProjector 4 for Mac and Windows By Kevin Schmitt
Flash wrappers, as I tend to call the genre of software Screentime's mProjector belongs to, have been around almost as long as Flash itself. Whatever the reason for their rise (the decline of Director, needing offline access to online content, etc.), there are still several options out there for turning your Flash content into desktop applications. And while Adobe's own AIR technology seems to get all the press, there is no reason why mProjector shouldn't be considered one of the top dogs in cross-platform Flash desktop app creation.
...Read More »
X-Rite Colorchecker Passport By Robert Jensen
I've got bad news for you. Shoo the kids away from the computer first. Ready? Guys and gals, there is no Santa Claus and the sensors in digital cameras are not all created equal. I hate to break it to you but all sensors vary to some degree in their capturing of data, not only from manufacturer to manufacturer but even from model to model from the same company. Worse yet, sensor characteristics can vary even from batch to batch of the same model sensor!
...Read More »
New Wacom Bamboo Fun (Pen and Touch) By Robert Jensen
First off I should tell you I've haven't seen a graphics tablet I've liked in more than 20 years, and I've tried quite a few in that period. When the new Wacom Bamboo Fun came in I was ready to make another mark in my 'Hate it' column. I did struggle with it at first but that was more to do with problems with Snow Leopard than anything wrong with the Bamboo.
...Read More »
3.06 GHz 17-inch MacBook Pro By Heath McKnight
I recently had a chance to review the latest, top-of-the-line unibody MacBook Pro from Apple; with a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 8GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and many other great features, this is the fastest Apple laptop I've ever used.
...Read More »
Sorenson Squeeze 6 By Kevin McAuliffe
These days, it seems as though every company has an application for taking your edited files and processing them for the web, and many of those applications are included with the editing bundle you purchased. Adobe has Adobe's Media Encoder, Final Cut Studio has Compressor, and there are the standalone applications such as Episode, and even QuickTime can do it as well.
...Read More »
X-Rite's Color Munki Photo By Joshua Virata
Ever had the problem where you have a picture on your computer and then print it out and the color doesn't turn out the same? I can tell you from experience that that has happened to me many times before. But now I don't have to worry about this problem thanks to ColorMunki Photo by X-Rite. ColorMunki lets you calibrate displays, projectors and printers so that the colors in your pictures or media are accurate every time.
...Read More »
Book Excerpt: MacMost.com--Guide to Switching to the Mac By Gary Rosenzweig
So you've decided to buy a Mac. Congratulations! Macs are great computers and your Mac will soon be a valuable tool for work, recreation, and communication. Perhaps, however, you're not sure which Mac to buy.You are not alone.There are many choices.Most people who switch to Mac have this same question. Which one? You've got three major choices in a desktop machine: the Mac mini, the iMac, and the Mac Pro. And you have three choices in a notebook: the MacBook,MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
...Read More »
Toolfarm's Professional After Effects Camera Training By Ko Maruyama
The 3D world in After Effects has always been a difficult composition space to navigate. Even if you are familiar with world navigation in a 3D application, working with the camera in After Effects may not behave the way you might expect. Like any application, there is a workflow which will make working with these tools easier to understand. Toolfarm's new training shows you how.
...Read More »
Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) By Heath McKnight
Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), the new version of Apple's 8+ year old operating system, Mac OS X, is an impressive upgrade from Leopard (10.5), which came out in late 2007. While it doesn't sport many new features as in years past, it does feature many "under-the-hood" improvements that make it worth the upgrade.
...Read More »
Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet system By John Virata
Wacom graphics tablets are the standard to which all other graphics tablets are judged, and for the most part, there aren't a whole lot of competitors that can match the usability and fit and finish of a Wacom. The Intuous 4 is a medium size tablet that features an 8.8 x 5.5 inch drawing area on a 14.6 x 10 inch platform. It sports 2048 pressure levels with +/- tilt sensitivity of 60 degrees.
...Read More »
Verbatim SureFire 500GB Firewire 800/USB 2.0 external hard drive By Joshua Virata
In today's world of digital cameras, home movies, music, and all of our other media, storage is everything. Convenience and reliability are two big sellers when it comes to storage, and this is where the Verbatim SureFire line of portable hard drives comes in. Sleek, portable, fast and large capacities are some important aspects to portable drives and the SureFire has all of those aspects.
...Read More »
First Look: Photo Mechanic 4.6.1 By John Virata
Photo Mechanic is an image management and organization tool that helps you to speed up the process of viewing and culling your digital images. The application is not an image editor, but rather, it helps you to better view your digital images and then organize and apply keyword and other text information to them to help keep your image collections manageable. The application is super fast, and enables you to quickly scroll through and manage a lot of images.
...Read More »
First Look: Pixelmator image editor for the Macintosh By John Virata
The Mac OS doesn't have a whole lot of image editors available for it due in part to the excellent iPhoto application that ships with every Mac. Why should a developer build something for the Mac that when there is a like application that ships with every Mac? And not everyone needs the power of Adobe Photoshop, nor wants their hands held with Photoshop Elements (though Elements is a great image editor/organizer).
...Read More »
Class on-Demand training with Sue Jenkins By Ko Maruyama
For those of us new to the Photoshop experience, Adobe's Photoshop Elements is the perfect way to start exploring the creative potential you have, and pushing the boundaries of your photographs into uncharted areas. However, you may need a guide to lead you through these waters. The latest class on demand DVD will help you figure out the application quickly and easily.
...Read More »
NO...Doesn't have a thing to do with "that" smartphone...or "that" store...or "that" tablet. It's the next generation. Kids and we mean little kids. That's what today's products are being designed for/targeted at. You happen to buy one...fine. Watch a little, little kid pick up a smartphone. He/she just uses it. They've come pre-wired and we're still trying to figure out how to IM. It's the IGen. They want it instantly. They want to use it instantly. They expect their photos, their video, their music, their stuff immediately when/where/how they want it.
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In this clip, lynda.com host Mark Abdelnour takes a look at proxy bidding. He discusses the strategy and how it works. He also discusses the maximum bid, and when to use Proxy bidding.
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The blood, gore, adrenalin challenges that were unveiled at E3 and enjoyed at ComicCon are fun to look at, easy to hold but are they really the games people want to plunk down their credit cards to own or rent time with? Seems as though the investors, the players who control the controllers have a different idea of a "good" game than the kids who develop them. While mobs of people play educational, informational, stimulating games our kid huddles in his room and mumbles "The Few, The Proud, The Gamers."
Read More
Adobe CS5 Web Premium Part Three: Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and the Rest
We're down to the last major pieces of Adobe CS5 Web Premium, but last doesn't always mean least. OR DOES IT??? HMMMM??? With that as a spectacular teaser, let's spend our final installment looking at two holdovers from those halcyon Macromedia days of yore: Dreamweaver, the venerable web site building tool, and Fireworks, the oft-overlooked prototyping and vector/bitmap editing powerhouse.
...Read More »
Adobe CS5 Web Premium Part Two: The Flash Platform
Honesty time, dear readers: I don't think this is going to be an actual review. As Velveeta is to real cheese, there may be some review-like qualities to what follows, but considering the current all-out assault on Flash and everything it stands for, it may be beneficial to take a larger view of what Adobe has done in Web Premium CS5, namely the inclusion of not one, not two, but three separate tools for creating Flash content.
...Read More »
Adobe CS5: Five Things to Keep in Mind
Eighteen months, seemingly like clockwork. A mere year-and-a-half after CS4 was released (which itself was a mere year-and-a-half after the release of CS3), Adobe has unveiled the CS5 lineup. Having had a chance to see and try the new versions for myself over the past several weeks, here are some general observations about the latest versions of Adobe's software uberbundles.
...Read More »
Book Excerpt: My MacBook by John Ray
Editor's note: Excerpt from My MacBook by John Ray, Published by Que My MacBook provides step-by-step instructions with callouts to MacBook photos that show you exactly what to do. It offers help when you run into MacBook or Snow Leopard problems or limitations.
...Read More »
Alien Skin Eye Candy 6
Alien Skin Eye Candy 6 is the company's latest collection of filters and textures for Adobe Photoshop CS4 and other image editors. The cool thing about Eye Candy 6 is the fact that each filter and texture can be tweaked to your heart's content, with more than 1500 presets in specific filters and textures. There are myriad sliders to work with to get just the right look that you are trying to achieve with a particular effect or texture.
...Read More »
First Look: AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 3.0
AV Bros. Puzzle Pro 3.0 is a Photoshop plugin filter that enables you to create cool puzzle looks with your Photoshop images. When you launch AV Broz Puzzle Pro 3.0, the plug-ins interface opens which enables you to further tweak the puzzle look of an image.
...Read More »
Screentime mProjector 4 for Mac and Windows
Flash wrappers, as I tend to call the genre of software Screentime's mProjector belongs to, have been around almost as long as Flash itself. Whatever the reason for their rise (the decline of Director, needing offline access to online content, etc.), there are still several options out there for turning your Flash content into desktop applications. And while Adobe's own AIR technology seems to get all the press, there is no reason why mProjector shouldn't be considered one of the top dogs in cross-platform Flash desktop app creation.
...Read More »
X-Rite Colorchecker Passport
I've got bad news for you. Shoo the kids away from the computer first. Ready? Guys and gals, there is no Santa Claus and the sensors in digital cameras are not all created equal. I hate to break it to you but all sensors vary to some degree in their capturing of data, not only from manufacturer to manufacturer but even from model to model from the same company. Worse yet, sensor characteristics can vary even from batch to batch of the same model sensor!
...Read More »
New Wacom Bamboo Fun (Pen and Touch)
First off I should tell you I've haven't seen a graphics tablet I've liked in more than 20 years, and I've tried quite a few in that period. When the new Wacom Bamboo Fun came in I was ready to make another mark in my 'Hate it' column. I did struggle with it at first but that was more to do with problems with Snow Leopard than anything wrong with the Bamboo.
...Read More »
3.06 GHz 17-inch MacBook Pro
I recently had a chance to review the latest, top-of-the-line unibody MacBook Pro from Apple; with a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 8GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and many other great features, this is the fastest Apple laptop I've ever used.
...Read More »
Sorenson Squeeze 6
These days, it seems as though every company has an application for taking your edited files and processing them for the web, and many of those applications are included with the editing bundle you purchased. Adobe has Adobe's Media Encoder, Final Cut Studio has Compressor, and there are the standalone applications such as Episode, and even QuickTime can do it as well.
...Read More »
X-Rite's Color Munki Photo
Ever had the problem where you have a picture on your computer and then print it out and the color doesn't turn out the same? I can tell you from experience that that has happened to me many times before. But now I don't have to worry about this problem thanks to ColorMunki Photo by X-Rite. ColorMunki lets you calibrate displays, projectors and printers so that the colors in your pictures or media are accurate every time.
...Read More »
Book Excerpt: MacMost.com--Guide to Switching to the Mac
So you've decided to buy a Mac. Congratulations! Macs are great computers and your Mac will soon be a valuable tool for work, recreation, and communication. Perhaps, however, you're not sure which Mac to buy.You are not alone.There are many choices.Most people who switch to Mac have this same question. Which one? You've got three major choices in a desktop machine: the Mac mini, the iMac, and the Mac Pro. And you have three choices in a notebook: the MacBook,MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
...Read More »
Toolfarm's Professional After Effects Camera Training
The 3D world in After Effects has always been a difficult composition space to navigate. Even if you are familiar with world navigation in a 3D application, working with the camera in After Effects may not behave the way you might expect. Like any application, there is a workflow which will make working with these tools easier to understand. Toolfarm's new training shows you how.
...Read More »
Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)
Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), the new version of Apple's 8+ year old operating system, Mac OS X, is an impressive upgrade from Leopard (10.5), which came out in late 2007. While it doesn't sport many new features as in years past, it does feature many "under-the-hood" improvements that make it worth the upgrade.
...Read More »
Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet system
Wacom graphics tablets are the standard to which all other graphics tablets are judged, and for the most part, there aren't a whole lot of competitors that can match the usability and fit and finish of a Wacom. The Intuous 4 is a medium size tablet that features an 8.8 x 5.5 inch drawing area on a 14.6 x 10 inch platform. It sports 2048 pressure levels with +/- tilt sensitivity of 60 degrees.
...Read More »
Verbatim SureFire 500GB Firewire 800/USB 2.0 external hard drive
In today's world of digital cameras, home movies, music, and all of our other media, storage is everything. Convenience and reliability are two big sellers when it comes to storage, and this is where the Verbatim SureFire line of portable hard drives comes in. Sleek, portable, fast and large capacities are some important aspects to portable drives and the SureFire has all of those aspects.
...Read More »
First Look: Photo Mechanic 4.6.1
Photo Mechanic is an image management and organization tool that helps you to speed up the process of viewing and culling your digital images. The application is not an image editor, but rather, it helps you to better view your digital images and then organize and apply keyword and other text information to them to help keep your image collections manageable. The application is super fast, and enables you to quickly scroll through and manage a lot of images.
...Read More »
First Look: Pixelmator image editor for the Macintosh
The Mac OS doesn't have a whole lot of image editors available for it due in part to the excellent iPhoto application that ships with every Mac. Why should a developer build something for the Mac that when there is a like application that ships with every Mac? And not everyone needs the power of Adobe Photoshop, nor wants their hands held with Photoshop Elements (though Elements is a great image editor/organizer).
...Read More »
Class on-Demand training with Sue Jenkins
For those of us new to the Photoshop experience, Adobe's Photoshop Elements is the perfect way to start exploring the creative potential you have, and pushing the boundaries of your photographs into uncharted areas. However, you may need a guide to lead you through these waters. The latest class on demand DVD will help you figure out the application quickly and easily.
...Read More »
