I know I join all the other listeners in wishing you a healthy recovery, we’re all worried about you. but what better way to take away worries than to play with a fun piece of Mac freeware? I have to say it’s getting harder and harder to find things that have never been reviewed here before though. I found one good one I was excited about – only to run a search on surfbits and found that it had been mentioned THREE TIMES! I had to resort to some serious digging but I’m pretty sure this one is new to the Mac ReviewCast.
When Leopard came out, they said that there were really cool features under the hood, things we wouldn’t realize were there but that developers would take advantage of eventually and then we’d understand that we had something cool. I know other things have come to light but the application I’m going to tell you about today clearly has taken advantage of what’s called Quartz graphics. I wasn’t clear on exactly what Quartz Graphics is, so I looked it up in Wikipedia, here’s an exerpt:
Continue reading about LiveQuartz: Free Photo Retouching for Leopard
It wasn’t so long ago that there were very few options for Mac users in the graphics department. There was 800 pound gorilla, Photoshop, and Adobe Photoshop Elements for the rest of us. Adobe was behind on its product cycle and for Intel Mac users, Photoshop in any iteration was a slug.
In just one year, this space has completely turned around. Adobe finally got its act together and released CS3 and an Intel friendly Adobe Photoshop Elements version 6. Likewise, Apple beefed up the core animation, core graphics, and other elements of OS X to allow developers to create their own graphics applications. In short, there has been a boom of quality graphics software including Pixelmator, Acorn, and now Iris.
Continue reading about Iris Graphical and Photo Editing Software
This week I took a quick look at the recently updated Picturesque from Acquilla software.
Picturesque’s tagline is, or at least used to be, “beautify your images”, and it still does that really neatly. You drag and drop images in and then the new Leopard only interface allows you to edit the perspective of the image, add reflection, shadow, curve the image borders add a border or even crop the image.
Photoshop Elements 6. I feel like it needs little fanfare. The program has been updated from Elements 4. I’m not sure whatever happened to version 5 for the Mac. I guess when your a Mac user you can’t expect to get all the different versions. Elements has always been my recommended software for those who want to work with their photos and want take the next step up from the rudimentary controls in iPhoto. It continues to be the perfect step and the new version makes it even easier.
For those of you who missed the original review, OmniGraffle gives you a set of tools to quickly and easily make diagrams, charts, and other things visual. If you talk Microspeak, it is similar to Visio. Using the application’s built in stencil library, it becomes stupid-easy to quickly assemble very attractive charts and diagrams that can be used on their own or exported into documents and presentations.
The new version 5 has a new interface that feels better to me. It is more consistent with the general interface guidelines you see in Leopard applications and gets rid of the drawer that was in Version 4.
Continue reading about OmniGraffle 5: Diagramming Worth a Thousand Words
Basically, Pulp Motion takes your digital media and creates these weird and wonderful animated photo albums. The first thing I considered when I started reviewing Pulp Motion was how could I achieve a similar results without using a product a like this.
