Revit® Structure software works the way structural engineering firms work. A multimaterial physical model integrated with an independently editable analytical model delivers more efficient, accurate, and flexible analysis, design, and documentation. Improve coordination by leveraging crucial information from architectural files, whether 2D format or from AutoCAD® Architecture or Revit® Architecture files. Manage changes through bidirectional linking to popular structural analysis software, while parametric change management technology coordinates updates across the model and documentation. Utilize a complete set of drafting tools to complete your documentation in Revit Structure. And import and export design data through widely used industry formats for efficient collaboration.

Revit® Structure software offers concurrent modeling for structural design, analysis, and fully coordinated documentation.

Seamless Coordnation

Bidirectional Associativity

Project Organization

Because all information is conveniently stored in one file, design teams spend less time managing project content. The project browser helps users navigate through the various views, sections, elevations, details, schedules, and drawing sheets of a structural project, enabling them to customize project content organization as needed.

Parametric Components

Using Revit Structure, engineers can create all types of structural components, such as joist systems, beams, open web joists, trusses, and intelligent wall families. No programming language is required to use parametric components, also known as families. The family editor contains all the data to graphically represent an element in 2D and 3D at various levels of detail. The term family refers to an element’s ability to have multiple types defined within it, each of a different size and shape. Changes to a family or type definition ripple through the project and are automatically reflected in every instance of that family or type in the project. This capability keeps everything coordinated and saves the time and effort of manually tracking down components to update. Families are saved in a master database and can be conveniently loaded into new projects.

Design Options

With Revit Structure, engineers stay focused on structural engineering. Explore design changes. Develop and study several design alternatives to make key design decisions. Easily present multiple schematic designs to clients. Each option can be substituted into the model for visualization and quantity takeoff to help team members and clients make informed decisions.

Multiuser Collaboration

Revit Structure enables multiple team members on the same network to work together on a model, while their work stays fully coordinated. A complete range of collaboration modes provides flexibility to meet the project team’s workflow—from on-the-fly, simultaneous access to the shared model to formal division of the project into discrete shared units or individually managed linked models.

Digital Review and Markups

Accelerate reviews with the free* Autodesk® Design Review software, the all-digital way to review, measure, mark up, and track changes to 2D and 3D designs without the original design creation software. Because the Design Review markup capabilities combine with Revit Structure navigation and revision management capabilities, tracking changes is easy.

Project File Sharing

The Publish to Autodesk® Buzzsaw® functionality enables design teams to easily upload files from Revit Structure to a Buzzsaw project site and automatically convert Revit Structure files to either the DWG™ or DWF™ file specification.

Project Management and Review

NavisWorks tools help project teams collaborate, coordinate, and review project information crucial to the design and construction of a project. Autodesk® NavisWorks® Manage helps streamline and centralize workflow processes across the organization to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and all but eliminate change orders, while Autodesk® NavisWorks® Review helps design and construct/build teams streamline efficiency and optimize quality by accurately visualizing all types of models, regardless of file format or size.

Automatic Sections and Elevations

Creating sections and elevations in Revit Structure is simple compared to traditional methods. Because views are just a different representation of the entire building model, users get instant cuts throughout a structure. Use them at any time to work in the most appropriate view. When the construction documents are ready to print, section tags and elevation symbols of the views that are not placed onto any drawing sheet are automatically hidden.

Details

Revit Structure allows callouts for typical details and for specific ones. Entire sheets of typical details can be created from scratch in Revit Structure using its traditional 2D drafting tools. Designers can also import DWG details from AutoCAD® software and link them into Revit Structure, using the project browser to manage them. Specific details come directly from the views of the model. These model-based details are completed with 2D parametric components (metal deck, concrete masonry unit, anchor bolts in footings, fasteners, welded symbols, steel connection plates, concrete rebar, and more) and annotations such as text and dimensions. When the geometry gets complicated, Revit Structure offers 3D model-based details such as 3D representation of building expansion joints, steel connections, rebar in concrete elements, and more.

Coordinate Across the Disciplines

Workflow with Industry-Standard File Formats

The ability to import, export, and link to DWG, DXF,™ DGN, and IFC formats helps ensure fully compatible data exchange between engineering firms and their client architects. Revit Structure supports the traditional workflow in which structural modeling begins with 2D DWG files created by the architect using AutoCAD software. This workflow offers timesaving features such as the direct selection of DWG lines, with no need for tracing. Structural engineers can also import and export their models in CIS/2 format for coordination with steel detailers and fabricators.

Collaboration with Architects

Revit Structure also supports the workflow where structural modeling starts with an architectural design done in AutoCAD® Architecture software. Engineers can reference individual plan views from AutoCAD Architecture when they start their structural layout. For better coordination, structural engineers can export 3D Revit Structure models to AutoCAD Architecture. Architects using AutoCAD Architecture 2009 can review the exported structural elements as true AutoCAD Architecture objects. Engineers working with architects using Revit® Architecture software can experience the advantages of BIM and share the same underlying building database. Creation of the structural model is faster with integrated Revit platform tools. With interference checking between structural and architectural objects, engineers can quickly detect coordination problems before sending drawings to the construction site.

Collaboration with Engineers and Designers

Structural engineers working with mechanical, electrical, or plumbing engineers using AutoCAD® MEP software can improve design coordination. Revit Structure users can export their structural model into AutoCAD MEP, where the engineer can perform clash detection between pipes and structural elements. Revit Structure users can also import 3D duct and pipe objects from AutoCAD MEP into the structural model via ACIS® solids to detect interferences visually. In addition, structural engineers who are working with mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineers using Revit® MEP software can take full advantage of building information modeling.

Ready to Run

Autodesk Revit Structure 2009 runs on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

Reviewes by asti.com

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2392/CAD_Systems/Revit_Structure_2009.html

This product was reviewed three years ago in AECbytes when it went by the acronym ADT. Coincidentally, at that time I was writing a book on ADT called Mastering Architectural Desktop 2006. Since then, much has evolved and changed in AutoCAD and its architectural vertical. I am honored to have been asked to write this review and pleased for the opportunity to get back up to speed on AutoCAD Architecture 2009.

Although AutoCAD Architecture still has AutoCAD at its core, it is really a much more powerful and complex program. Some say that the biggest strength of AutoCAD Architecture is that it’s based on AutoCAD. However, at the same time, I have to say that the biggest weakness of AutoCAD Architecture is its AutoCAD core. You might ask—isn’t this a contradiction? Not exactly.

If you’ve used AutoCAD for a long time, then it’s natural to grow into AutoCAD Architecture because you can leverage the skills you’ve built over time while you learn new ones. If you’re using an older version of ADT or AutoCAD Architecture, then upgrading to this latest 2009 version has many important benefits which I will review shortly.

However, it is important to consider the big picture first. Think of AutoCAD Architecture as computer-aided design software that dreams of becoming a building information modeling (BIM) system. AutoCAD Architecture gets closer to realizing that dream with every release, but it’s never really going to get there because it has CAD at its core. Revit, on the other hand, was built from the ground up as a BIM program. But Revit is a very different animal, and ultimately comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges. Both have their places and assuredly have strong futures. For those who prefer the AutoCAD-based workflow, AutoCAD Architecture will remain their design application of choice, and it will allow them to derive at least some of the benefits of BIM, which AutoCAD alone cannot provide.

Updated User Interface

The first thing that you’ll notice is the new user interface (see Figure 1). Autodesk made the decision to go with a ribbon interface in both AutoCAD 2009, and AutoCAD Architecture 2009. If you are a Microsoft Office 2007 user, you will recognize this UI. Tools are grouped into panels that can be expanded vertically. Sets of panels are displayed on ribbon tabs, and you can toggle between showing just the tabs, tabs with panel titles, or the full ribbon.

AutoCAD 2009 makes full use of the ribbon interface, but AutoCAD Architecture 2009 has the ribbon turned on only in the Visualization workspace by default. Of course, you can show the ribbon in any workspace, but it only has base AutoCAD tools on it. AutoCAD Architecture still uses the Tool Palettes to host all generic and styled AEC objects. I can’t help thinking Autodesk dropped the ball on this, but I speculate that objects will find their way onto the ribbon in future releases.

All the tired-looking status buttons (like SNAP, GRID, ORTHO, etc.) have been turned into attractive icons, and navigation tools are conveniently included on the application status bar.

Figure 1. New user interface in AutoCAD Architecture 2009.

The “big A” in the upper left corner of the UI is more than a new logo—it’s the menu browser interface. Clicking the big A opens a large drop down window that lists all the menus in a vertical list. Clicking a title opens the menu in the adjacent column (see Figure 2). This interface is reminiscent of column view in the Mac Finder. Also included in the menu browser is a list of recent documents, open documents, and recent actions (more on actions later). Being able to open a file from a list of recent documents is a huge time saver—and I can’t believe it has taken this many years to see it implemented.

The horizontal menu bar is visible by default in three of four out-of-the-box workspaces. I recommend turning off the menu bar because the menus are in the menu browser and you can’t hide the big A. The menu browser has additional functionality—beyond menus—that is quite useful, so it may be worth training yourself to access menu items vertically.

However, why would anyone need to access menus both horizontally and vertically on the same screen? This is indicative of the problem with the UI—it’s growing way too complex. Autodesk is looking at ways to streamline all aspects of the UI without completely starting over, so for now at least it is good to have additional interface options.

Figure 2. The menu browser.

The quick access toolbar appears on the title bar just to the right of the big A—it appears in all workspaces and you can’t turn it off. The idea is to put tools that are useful in every workspace on the quick access toolbar (new, open, save, print, project browser, project navigator, undo, and redo are there by default).

Harnessing the Power of Search

AutoCAD Architecture command names are typically very long (i.e. DoorWinAssemblyAdd) so few users actually know command names or type them in like users might do in base AutoCAD. Therefore, a greater reliance is placed on finding tools through the graphical user interface. If you don’t know where to find a tool, you might navigate a series of cascading menus, look in the content browser, browse through palette groups and scroll through their palettes, study the ribbon tabs and panels, changes workspaces, open various toolbars, or seek the right icon on the document or application status bars by reading their tooltips. Whew!

As AutoCAD Architecture and its AutoCAD base grow more complicated over time, the sheer volume of information about the programs increases, and it gets harder to find what you’re looking for. Fortunately, several powerful search tools have been integrated into the UI.

The Search field at the top of the menu browser allows you to find any AutoCAD command or generic AutoCAD Architecture tool very quickly (see Figure 3). The menu path is shown next to each item in the list so you can try to remember where to find it later, but you might not need to. Once you get used to harnessing the power of search, you might find that it’s the fastest method for finding the right tool for the job.

Figure 3. Command and tool search in the menu browser.

There’s another search bar on the title bar called InfoCenter. Searching here opens a long popup window, as shown in Figure 4, that gives you integrated results from many help sources including AutoCAD Architecture User’s Guide, AutoCAD Architecture Stand-Alone & Network help, AutoCAD User’s Guide, Command Reference, Customization Guide, New Features Workshop, and Autodesk Online.

Figure 4. Get the help you need with one search.

The Communication Center icon is adjacent to the search bar and looks like a satellite dish. Clicking this icon opens another long window displaying live update maintenance patch status, Autodesk channel content, subscription information, Autodesk articles and tips, and syndicated feeds (see Figure 5). I was pleasantly surprised to find the popular Between the Lines and Between the Walls blogs subscribed to by default. In addition you’ll find the always-useful AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD knowledge bases and discussion groups set up as feeds. You can add as many additional RSS feeds as you want, but be careful or you won’t get any work done.

Figure 5. The Communication Center puts the AutoCAD & AutoCAD Architecture worlds at your fingertips.

Improved Feature Discoverability

It is much easier to get up to speed with AutoCAD Architecture 2009 as compared with earlier versions because of the new emphasis Autodesk has placed on “feature discoverability.” In other words, the software is more descriptive and this helps you figure out what is going on.

Object rollover tooltips are new and they display layer and style info about any object you hover the cursor over (see Figure 6). This can be helpful or annoying depending on your point of view and thankfully, this feature can be turned off if you feel that it obscures too much of the drawing window.

Figure 6. Object rollover tooltips.

Certain tools and editing commands automatically trigger “did you know” messages to appear, an example of which is shown in Figure 7. As a longtime AutoCAD Architecture user, my first instinct would be to get rid of them (and you can), but on second thought I suggest giving these messages a chance. They are quite helpful in the first month or two as you ease into learning the new features and workflows of the new version. Some of these messages can be expanded with a down arrow for more descriptive info and illustrations.

Figure 7. Context-sensitive “Did you know?” messages automatically appear.

The Project Navigator gets tooltips in AutoCAD Architecture 2009. You can change these to large, medium or small (large shown in Figure 8). In addition to showing a preview image, these tooltips also give “who has it” information so you can go talk to said coworker and ask them why they have a file-lock on the one drawing you so urgently need.

Figure 8. Project Navigator tooltips show “who has it” information.

How often have you been drawing walls, only to be confounded by the dreaded “red circle of death” (more properly called a defect marker)? In previous versions of the product, you would see a defect marker wherever there were wall cleanup problems. Maybe you were in the dark on why these problems occurred and at a loss about how to fix them. New to AutoCAD Architecture 2009 are Solution tips, one of the best ideas I’ve seen implemented in years (see Figure 9). Now you are presented with a description of the problem and several possible solutions—so you can take action without panicking.

Figure 9. Solution tips present the problem and possible solutions.

Sophisticated Navigation

ViewCube is a new intuitive navigation mode that is present across most of Autodesk’s 3D product line. The ViewCube works within style dialog boxes (see Figure 10) and in the Object Viewer, as well as in the drawing editor when a visual style other than 2d wireframe is used.

Figure 10. ViewCube: style and object navigation control.

The SteeringWheel is another example of a cross-product navigation control, and it works in the drawing window in AutoCAD Architecture (see Figure 11). The steering wheel has several different modes and options allowing intuitive first-person 3D navigation. It blows the doors off the old 3DORBIT and older DVIEW commands, and makes it very easy to compose an attractive view.

Figure 11. SteeringWheel offers many intuitive 3D navigation controls.

QuickView is yet another two word NavigationFeature. Clicking the QuickView icon on the application status bar makes interactive icons of all open drawings appear (see Figure 12). Each drawing’s modelspace and layouts are directly accessible.

Figure 12. QuickView lets you directly jump to another drawing’s modelspace or layout.

ShowMotion works very much like QuickView except it shows views within the current drawing (see Figure 13). Views can now be still, cinematic, or animated and ShowMotion can fluidly move between them.

Figure 13. ShowMotion gives interactive view access

Streamlined Workflow

Autodesk has taken a page from Adobe and included actions in AutoCAD Architecture 2009. Click the Record button, do something, and then click Stop (see Figure 14). Afterwards, replay your action at any future time. There is no easier way to “program a computer” than by recording an action—there is zero coding. Just like in Photoshop, you can pause an action to request input, or to display a message. It will be very interesting to see what innovative actions users come up with and share in the coming months.

Figure 14. Photoshop-like actions are now part of AutoCAD Architecture.

In previous releases you had to follow a convoluted sequence of steps to do something as mundane as turn off the display of a door frame—select door, right-click, choose Edit Door Style, click Display Properties tab, double click Plan display representation, turn off frame visibility, click OK and OK again.

Now it’s intuitive and much more straightforward—select door, click the display tab of the Properties palette, open display component drop-down and turn off frame visibility (see Figure 15). In other words, you can now edit objects just like you edit AutoCAD entities.

Figure 15. Intuitive AutoCAD Architecture object property editing more in-line with AutoCAD.

Quick Properties, shown in Figure 16, is a new feature that streamlines the Properties palette by showing a mini properties window at the cursor location when you select an entity. Unfortunately it only works for AutoCAD line work at this time, as it is helpful to be able to see and change properties at a glance.

Figure 16. Quick properties work only for AutoCAD entities.

Match properties (aka the paintbrush button) used to only work for AutoCAD entities in previous versions of AutoCAD Architecture. In AutoCAD Architecture 2009, Match properties works on objects as well—so you can copy style or object display overrides from one object to others (see Figure 17). This is a killer feature. It saves loads of time to be able to copy a style from one object to another, without having to learn the style name and open dialog boxes or popup lists to make the change.

Figure 17. Match properties command now works with styles and objects.

Each display configuration can be linked to a drawing scale in AutoCAD Architecture 2009. For example, you can link 1/2″=1′-0″ scale to the High Detail display configuration. This association is done in the Drawing Setup dialog box (AecDwgSetup command). This makes perfect sense because chances are every time you show a drawing at 1/2″ scale, you are looking at an enlarged plan or detail drawing where you’d want to show a high level of display information anyway.

The upshot is that this linkage simplifies things by essentially taking display configuration out of the picture. Now when you change scales, the appropriate amount of detail will automatically be shown, assuming your CAD or BIM manager has set up your company templates properly. Scale and display configuration linkage is drawing-specific.

Significant Object Improvements

Walls have been greatly improved in AutoCAD Architecture 2009. In the past, problems with wall cleanup have been difficult to sort out and resolve, partly because of an arcane definition called the graphline which may or may not have been in the same location as the justification line. The graphline has been internally merged with the justification line so they are now one and the same. Walls simply have fewer cleanup issues now because of this.

As I already mentioned, solution tips will appear if there are wall cleanup issues that need your attention. In addition, walls cleanup automatically across xrefs, no matter how many instances of that xref you have in a drawing. This is especially useful when you need multiples of the same element externally referenced into a construct—the walls cleanup, no worries.

In the past it was always a hassle to have to go to the Properties palette to change the direction or justification of a wall segment because this act interrupted the flow of drawing. Now you can use the Ctrl key to flip wall directions and the Shift key to cycle through justification options (see Figure 18). This might not sound like much, but it is a huge time saver when you’re drawing a lot of walls.

There is an Offset option within the AddWall command that allows you to space a new wall some distance from a wall you’ve already drawn, measured from any wall component. This means you can offset the wall directly from a structural component without having to do the math in your head to subtract the gypsum board on-the-fly while you’re in the act of drawing walls. Again, this is a big help.

Figure 18. Drawing walls has become more streamlined.

Custom wall and opening endcaps were another sore spot in the past. I am happy to say this has finally been sorted out as you can easily grip-edit existing endcaps in place (see Figure 19) or have AutoCAD Architecture automatically calculate new endcaps based on polylines that you draw in-place. The new endcaps you’ve edited or drawn can apply to just one object or to a whole new style.

Figure 19. Editing endcaps has been greatly improved.

The space object has been updated in AutoCAD Architecture 2009. In the past, you might have deleted and recreated spaces whose boundaries had changed. Now they will automatically update to their boundaries, much like hatch patterns. In addition, you can draw line work and have it automatically create spaces by changing the Bound spaces property to Yes (see Figure 20). This feature even works across xrefs, making it quite convenient.

Figure 20. Line work can now bound spaces.

One of the annoying things about attributed tags in previous versions of AutoCAD Architecture was that they often overflowed the spaces or rooms that they identified. In AutoCAD Architecture 2009, attributes support word wrap onto multiple lines and you can change the text justification with grips (see Figure 21), so there is no reason why you can’t keep things neat and tidy.

Figure 21. Multiline attributes support word wrap and justification can be edited with grips.

Increased Interoperability

Windows Vista now supports the DWF format natively through its XPS Viewer, which is nice for those who are on Vista as they don’t have to download anything to see DWF files. The XPS viewer has to be downloaded for use on Windows XP. AutoCAD Architecture 2009 imports and exports IFC files so you can exchange data with BIM systems that support this standard that defines intelligent objects. DGN version 7 & 8 are now importable into AutoCAD Architecture. All-in-all, AutoCAD Architecture 2009 sees a modest increase in interoperability.

Improved Visualization

AutoCAD Architecture 2009 features real-time viewport lighting and shadow casting, but the quality of these features depends on whether your graphics card is supported by Autodesk. AutoCAD Architecture 2009 works on my 3 year old PC which is still perfectly adequate to create production drawings. However, I don’t see any of the real-time visualization features because my graphics card isn’t on Autodesk’s approved list (even though it was for ADT 2006). The upshot is you may have to buy new graphics cards for older computers in order to take advantage of the new visualization capabilities in AutoCAD Architecture 2009, or in any Autodesk product.

In the visualization department there is an obscure system variable, VSLIGHTINGQUALITY, that can now be set to 2 for per-pixel lighting. This setting greatly increases realism at the cost of increased render time, so use it only for high quality output.

Analysis and Conclusions

AutoCAD Architecture 2009 has many notable improvements over last year’s version, including a new user interface, integrated search tools, improved feature discoverability, sophisticated navigation controls, a few streamlined workflows, significant wall and space object tweaks, multiline attributed tags, and slightly improved interoperability and visualization features.

Of these features, I believe the improvements to the wall and space objects will be the most helpful in day-to-day work and the integrated search tools and streamlined access to object properties (and match properties) great time savers. I don’t like how cluttered the UI has become but have come to expect it in an application that is built on top of an application that is now 27 years old. I appreciate the fact that Autodesk is trying to make it easier to use AutoCAD Architecture with various tooltips, help files, discussion groups, knowledge bases, blogs, and videos.

In conclusion, I suggest that it is worth upgrading to AutoCAD Architecture 2009 if you are an existing AutoCAD Architecture or ADT user and your firm is manifestly unwilling or not ready to switch to a true BIM solution, preferring to stay on an AutoCAD-based platform. However, I would not recommend AutoCAD Architecture, or even AutoCAD, to students or to firms who are able to allocate enough time to train properly on an application such as Autodesk’s own Revit Architecture that is purpose-built for BIM.

About the Author

Scott Onstott is the author of Mastering Architectural Desktop 2006 (Sybex/Wiley). He has a degree in architecture from UC Berkeley and has served as an instructor there, in addition to working in several prominent engineering, architecture, and interiors firms in San Francisco. Scott has contributed to over two dozen books and videos on AutoCAD, ADT, VIZ Render, Revit, 3ds Max, VIZ, Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver. He can be reached via: www.ScottOnstott.com.

Reviewed by Scott Onstott

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2277/3D_Modeling/AutoCAD_Architecture_2009.html

If you’re looking for a buzzword that sums up the new capabilities found in Autodesk’s AutoCAD 2008, your choices are annotations and interoperability with Inventor 2008. Okay, the second choice one is more than one word, but the Autodesk Inventor 2008 review will show you what I mean.

Back in the good old days when I started using Auto-CAD v2.18g in September 1986, drawing scales were a big problem. The manual was a detailed command reference, but it didn’t contain any tutorials. Night-school classes and third-party documentation weren’t available. In fact, that’s why Cadalyst was started, and one of my earliest “Learning Curve” columns in January 1988 covered drawing scales.
There was no paper space and, hence, no layouts in the early releases. Users finally figured out that we should draw full size and then scale the annotation and dimension sizes to suit the plot scale. Multiscale detail views could be a real nightmare; heaven help anyone who tried to change the plot scale later.

In theory, the current associative transspatial dimensions should take care of this adjustment, and for the most part they do. AutoCAD users draw in model space and then dimension and annotate in paper-space layouts. Even so, the debate rages as to where to place dimensions and annotations.
AutoCAD 2008 fixes all these problems with its new automatically scaled annotations. They show the same object at two different scales. As one would expect, the dimension text height and arrowhead sizes are the same and the dimensions show the same value. The surprising bit here is that the dimension and the word “SCALE” only exist once in model space. They have automatically scaled themselves to match each viewport scale.

You may think I’m cheating a bit here because the dimension and the word are in different locations in each viewport. Not so. They were created once in model space then two annotative scales were applied to each of them. Each scale setting can have a different associated position as well.

Point It out to Me . . .
A quick count of the new features suggests that approximately one-quarter of the new or improved capabilities in AutoCAD 2008 relate to annotation. Leaders alone have enough new features to be worthy of additional comment. For starters, users can decide to create leaders by selecting the start first, the end first or the annotation first. A single leader can have multiple leader arrows that lead to a single notation. Leader notation isn’t limited to Mtext; instead it can use a block definition. This notation makes it possible to create symbolic leaders. A group of leaders can be edited quickly so that all their annotations align to a single horizontal or vertical line, and several block-defined leader annotations can be collected into a single leader.

You Break Me Up . . .

It isn’t considered good drafting practice to have anything cross a dimension line, and similarly designers should avoid crossing extension lines. Unfortunately, these conditions can’t always be met in a crowded drawing, so the new Dimbreak command allows users to break out a section of the line being crossed. The beauty of this command is that the break specification can be automatic. The break will default to an order of precedence so that it will break extension lines before dimension lines.

As a bonus, the breaks are associative. If you move a crossing object, the break moves to follow. If you move the object to a position where it no longer crosses, the break heals itself. However, the break will reappear if you move the crossing object back into an overlapping condition.

A new inspection dimension allows users to include an annotation in a dimension that indicates the inspection rate as a percentage of total parts produced. By an amazing coincidence, Inventor 2008 also has added this same functionality.

If you need to list tabular data in an AutoCAD drawing, you’ll love the new tables functionality. In previous releases you could create only a static, unpopulated table into which you entered data. AutoCAD 2008 can create a table automatically based on data contained in a Microsoft Excel spread-sheet or generic comma-delimited (CSV) file. Tables created this way can be static, or they can be set up as an external reference so that they update if the spreadsheet changes. Even better is the fact that they can be set up to work both ways, so that changes made within the AutoCAD table reflect back to the spreadsheet.

Layer upon Layer . . .

With AutoCAD 2007, the old Layer Express Tools no longer exist; they’ve all been rolled over into primary functions. In particular, I mean the layer manipulation tools. As an added bonus, additional layer functionality has been added.

A very useful new layer option allows users to assign different colors to layers in different viewports of the same layout. For example, one viewport can emphasize the wiring in a machine while another highlights the hydraulics in the same machine. Each viewport can still display the other objects for reference, but in a greatly subdued color. Both views are derived from the same model-space drawing.

Two layer-management tools will help to ensure compliance with CAD standards. Both are personal favorites.

I’ve always maintained that object properties should almost always be specified by the layer on which they reside. When Autodesk added the Properties Override toolbar, it claimed that users had total control over object properties. Wrong! Managers effectively lost any control.

In AutoCAD 2008, a new SetByLayer command asks users to select objects. When they do, all selected objects will have any property overrides stripped off so that everything is by layer. This command is so-o-o-o good that it even works down through block insertions, block definitions and nested blocks. Hallelujah! It also can be configured so that only selected properties such as color or line weight are removed. The second new layer functionality is just as good. The first time a drawing is saved, AutoCAD 2008 compiles a list of its defined layers. Whenever a new layer is detected during certain operations, an alert balloon pops up to warn users that the new layer isn’t in the reconciled list. This functionality also applies to new layers created by Xrefs.

Looking Good!

Workspaces were introduced a couple of releases back, and many people wondered why. AutoCAD 2007 gave us a hint to the reason with the introduction of the 3D dashboard.
AutoCAD 2008 now gives users a 2D drawing and annotation workspace, which includes a new 2D dashboard. In effect, the dashboard is a super toolbar that includes the most commonly used 2D drawing, editing and annotating commands in one convenient location.

Before you comment about the amount of screen real estate that the dashboard occupies, don’t forget that it effectively replaces nine toolbars. If you right-click within the dashboard and then select Control Panels, you can add or remove different groups of commands that roughly correspond with their matching toolbars. In addition, the dashboards can now be customized through the CUI (customize user interface).

Let There Be Light!

AutoCAD 2007 totally overhauled the 3D modeling and visualization (rendering) environments. Even so, lighting is an issue with nearly every rendering software. AutoCAD 2008 helps to resolve this problem by introducing photo-metric lights. Instead of placing a light and then playing with its color, intensity and so on, all you need to do is to go to the Photometric Lights tool palettes. From there, you can insert light sources such as 100W incandescent or 75W halogen.

Finally, the question of compatibility arises. AutoCAD 2007, 2004 and 2000 will open and edit an AutoCAD 2008 file in spite of new things such as linked tables and annotation-scale capabilities. They don’t have full functionality in the older release, but they will survive a round trip back to AutoCAD 2008.

The perennial question from about 10 years back is “What can Autodesk possibly add to AutoCAD? It does pretty much everything a 2D-drafting package needs to do.” Nonetheless, Autodesk always seems to come up withsomething. AutoCAD 2008 definitely continues that trend. Highly Recommended.

Reviewed by Bill Fane

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http://www.softster.net/P972/3D_Modeling/AutoCAD_2008_.html

What’s New in AutoCAD 2009

AutoCAD® software lets you design, visualize, and document your ideas clearly and efficiently. Autodesk redesigned the user interface of AutoCAD® 2009 software to accelerate tasks, allow commands to be easily found, and help rapidly train new users.

Ribbon
With the ribbon interface, overall drafting productivity is increased as the number of steps to reach a command is decreased. The ribbon interface presents command options in a concise visual format. allowing you to quickly select commands based on the work you’re doing . Moving between applications is now quick and intuitive. The ribbon is both customizable and expandable so that it can be optimized for each user and meet each company’s standards.

ViewCube™ and SteeringWheels™
The ViewCube™ is an interactive tool used to rotate and orient any solid or surface model in AutoCAD. Selecting a face, edge, or corner of the cube brings the model quickly to that predefined orientation. Clicking and holding the ViewCube allows the model to be freely roated in any direction. Since the cube is in a fixed location on the screen, it provides at-a-glance orientation. The ViewCube will be introduced in all Autodesk products as a common tool for working with 3D models.

In addition to allowing quick access to the orbit command, the new SteeringWheels™ tool allows quick access to the pan, center, and zoom commands. The SteeringWheels is highly customizable so you can add walk through commands to help create and record a walk-through of your model.

Menu Browser
Reviewing and working with several files is no longer a tedious and time-consuming process. The new menu browser interface allows you to browse files and examine thumbnail images and provides detailed information about file size and file creator. Plus, you can organize recently used files by name, date, or title.

Action Recorder
The new action recorder saves time and increases productivity by automating repetitive tasks without requiring the skill or assistance of a professional CAD manager. Users can quickly record a task, add text messages and requests for input, then quickly select and play back recorded files.

Layer Dialog
The new layer dialog makes creating and editing layer properties faster and less prone to error. Changes are instantly reflected in the drawing as they are made in the dialog. The manipulation of the dialog box has been simplified, and columns in the dialog can be individually resized so the contents of that column or its title are not truncated. Individual columns can be fixed in place so that the rest of the columns can be scrolled through and referenced to a fixed column such as the layer name.

Quick Properties
The easily customizable quick properties menu increases productivity by reducing the steps to access properties information, ensuring that information presented is optimized for that particular user and project.

Quick View
The quick view feature uses thumbnails instead of file names, making opening the correct drawing file and layout faster and decreasing the time spent opening incorrect drawing files.

Autodesk Design Review

AutoCAD 2009 Tutorial First Level: 2D Fundamentals

And, by using Autodesk® Design Review software, the free* integrated solution to electronically review, mark up, and revise designs, you can give virtually anyone, anywhere the opportunity to participate in the review process.

This book contains a series of ten tutorial style lessons designed to introduce users to AutoCAD 2009. The new improvements and key enhancements of the software are incorporated into the lessons. Users will learn to use the new Dynamic Input feature which enhances the AutoCAD Heads-up Design interface. The AutoCAD WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) plotting feature, the Named Plot Style feature, and Layout plotting are also introduced in the lessons.

AutoCAD 2009 Certified User Examination

The content of AutoCAD 2009 Tutorial – First Level: 2D Fundamentals has been expanded to cover the performance tasks that have been identified by Autodesk as being included on the AutoCAD 2009 Certified User examination.

Special reference guides show students where the performance tasks are covered in the book. The DVD included with each textbook provides a video review of each of the performance tasks.

If you are teaching an introductory level AutoCAD course and you want to prepare your students for the AutoCAD 2009 Certified User Examination this is the only book that you need.  If your students are not interested in the AutoCAD 2009 Certified User examination you will know that your students will be studying the performance tasks that have been identified by Autodesk as important enough to include on the certification examination.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2233/3D_Modeling/Autocad_2009_x32_.html

After Effects CS3 had difficulty managing system resources, especially multiple core processors, so I wanted to touch upon this first. After Effects CS4 is generally an improvement over CS3 when it comes to handling resources and handling multiple cores in particular. CS4 has a “Memory & Multiprocessing” preference pane that gives the user control over how much RAM and processing power is available to the application. It also allows rendering of multiple frames simultaneously, which is possible with multiple CPUs.

Unlike many video professionals working with dual quad-core monsters, I’m using a MacBook Pro running with two 2.33GHz processors and 3GB of RAM. To test performance I rendered a project I did a couple years ago that had a particularly tough time rendering with After Effects CS3. This time around the rendering finished with no problems. I rendered the same project with the multi-frame rendering available in Memory & Multiprocessing, but it actually increased the render time substantially (4:35 versus 3:24). After Effects CS4 does recognize and employ multiple cores, so users with four- or eight-core machines will enjoy radically improved performance.

One more performance feature is OpenGL adaptive resolution, which will subsample large images and scenes to speed things up on screen. It works well and reminds me of the various OpenGL-based improvements in Photoshop CS4. In fact, it comes into use when working with 3D layers brought in from that application: After Effects CS4 will use a lower resolution when working with the 3D layer and then increase resolution when the user is finished.

Increasing efficiency: The interface, CS4 integration and metadata

In After Effects CS4, you will find a lot more efficiency improvements than you’ll find new features and tools. The After Effects team has made it clear that this was a primary goal for this product cycle. There are several changes to the interface:

• The Welcome screen gives easy access to the Tip of the Day, recent projects and several handy links. Ironically, I almost always turn these Welcome screens off because I usually need to do something not accessible in the Welcome screen.
• After Effects CS4, like several CS4 apps, now have search capabilities—you’ll find the QuickSearch field in the Project panel. In After Effects’ case, one can search for elements, effects, properties, footage and more. This is really handy for large projects with a lot of assets, and I expect search to be further integrated with future versions of the Creative Suite.

The QuickSearch field, found just below the “1.1 Search Timeline” tab in this image, allows for fast access to properties, effects, compositions and most any other element in After Effects CS4.

• Flash users have long had a “breadcrumb trail” to help them navigate around the Stage and symbols in that application. After Effects CS4 now features a similar Composition Navigator at the top of the Composition panel. I’m very keen to keep my compositions organized and I use the Composition Navigator quite a bit to move up and down the asset trail. There is also a Mini-Flowchart accessible for each composition in the Composition Navigator: click the arrow and you’ll see how other compositions relate to the selected composition. However, I don’t use this feature as much.

The Composition Navigator provides great detail about a composition and its various assets and outputs.

• The 16:9 widescreen Title/Action Safe overlays now show the 4:3 TV-safe areas as well. This is a new feature for those who find themselves republishing video content for the two screen formats. Since I do most of my After Effects work for the web this has not been a concern, but video professionals should find it useful.
• After Effects CS4 can now calculate resolution automatically based on the user’s zoom settings, basically making it smarter when it comes to choosing how to render things on screen for the user. This is another one of those efficiency improvements that is great for the user but doesn’t necessarily extend After Effects’ abilities. Still, I’m glad to see this improvement because resolution is the type of thing I never liked handling manually, and I use auto resolution nowadays.

Flash CS4 Professional can import projects exported from After Effects CS4, with transformations intact, and users don’t have to handle the transcoding of some file formats such as FLV, PNG and JPEG—After Effects CS4 takes care of the process. This is all possible with the new XFL file format that InDesign also uses to pass files over to Flash. I think the Flash/After Effects integration is exceptional, with support for embedded cue points, changing footage width within Flash CS4 Professional and editing transformations within Flash. This really helps me improve my workflow for using After Effects in my web design work, because now I can create footage in After Effects CS4 and move it directly to Flash CS4 Professional, without an intermediate step such as rendering to QuickTime and encoding the footage as FLV.

After Effects CS4 and Flash CS4 Professional have come a long way with the CS4 upgrade, thanks to the new XFL file format and Flash Video (FLV).

There are also a lot of great After Effects/Flash integration features emerging that revolve around ActionScript. Michael Coleman, After Effects Product Manager, has an awesome tutorial here that shows how a Flash movie with ActionScript 3 can control the content in an After Effects CS4 project. This particular demonstration also employs Mocha, a new addition to After Effects CS4 that is covered later in this review. Flash and Flex developers will be particularly excited by these new features, and since the Flash runtime is now native to Acrobat 9 I see After Effects becoming more relevant to designers creating interactive PDFs and other PDF-based media.

After Effects CS4 is fine-tuned to work with Device Central CS4 to create content for mobile devices.

After Effects CS4 ships with Adobe Device Central CS4, an application that aids development of content for mobile devices. Last year at Adobe’s headquarters I was given the opportunity to work with a composition in After Effects CS4 and test it for a variety of mobile devices within the application thanks to Device Central CS4. The workflow is similar to optimizing web graphics in Photoshop or Fireworks CS4.

The other major feature involving CS4 integration is new support for Photoshop’s 3D output, discussed in the next section.

The final component of After Effects CS4’s efficiency improvements come in the form of support for XMP metadata, which is awesome for larger shops with complex projects requiring project management support but may not be needed for small groups (and especially for sole proprietors like myself). But metadata support is important for anyone who demands organized assets and projects, and it converges with Speech Search (a speech-to-metadata conversion now possible in Premiere Pro CS4 and Soundbooth CS4) to allow something close to searchable video footage.

After Effects CS4 does a lot more with XMP metadata than its predecessor. In the Output Module Settings, you can see how output can include source metadata.

Those who read my review of Soundbooth CS4 will know that I found it hard to get quality results with Speech Search, which of course will make it hard to get good speech metadata into After Effects CS4 projects. If metadata is important for your organization or work, then After Effects CS4 may be an essential upgrade for you; if not, then look at some of its other new features for a reason to buy.

Handling Photoshop Extended’s 3D output

Those who have Photoshop CS4 Extended and are looking to work its 3D features should consider purchasing After Effects CS4, because it’s become fairly easy to work with Photoshop’s 3D layers in that application. After Effects CS4 can work with cameras and such to create video with the 3D objects, though Photoshop can do similar things with its own Animation panel. But After Effects has Photoshop beat when it comes to special effects, and there’s obviously more flexibility when using After Effects to render footage to video.

Photoshop CS4 has improved its 3D features, and After Effects CS4 handles Photoshop’s 3D layers natively so it makes sense to put the two together in one 3D workflow.

I still do not use Photoshop CS4 for 3D work, opting instead to use Strata 3D or another dedicated 3D application. The 3D features in Photoshop CS4 are fun to work with and can do some cool things but it’s still not a dedicated application for that purpose. Those who like the idea of an integrated workflow for working with 3D objects (such as painting them in Photoshop) and then adding special effects with After Effects CS4 should look at these two applications, especially if they will be purchasing a CS4 suite anyway.

The Unified Camera tool and independent axes

The Unified Camera tool is fun to use and combines previous tool functions in one comprehensive feature.

After Effects CS4 has two other major improvements to its 3D compositing tools:

• The Unified Camera tool, which basically will control camera orbit, x-y tracking and z-tracking with one tool. However, it’s somewhat complex and really designed for a three-button mouse. I use a Logitech MX Revolution and it has enough buttons, though I’ve never programmed one to be a middle-click button. Even though this is technically a new tool in After Effects’ arsenal, to me it seems like another efficiency aid: there are other (separate) tools to execute the same functions.
• Independent x, y and z axes can be keyframed separately in After Effects CS4. This is a nice improvement that allows greater control over 3D animating. The independent axes can be combined again as needed.

New effects: Cartoon, Bilateral Blur and Turbulent Noise

For an effect-heavy application such as After Effects (it has more than 250 effects), I’m surprised Adobe found three new effects to add to it:

• The Cartoon effect recreates an animated or painterly style, reminiscent of what I can get with Illustrator’s Live Trace feature or some of Photoshop’s artistic filters. I thought the effect worked well enough but made for some fairly rough artwork—those attempting to transform footage into perfect cel animation should probably lower their expectations. But other than that the Cartoon effect is slick and also GPU-accelerated which allows for fast rendering.
• The Bilateral Blur effect is probably the most useful effect of this new bunch. Bilateral Blur will smooth a clip’s soft features while preserving sharp features—compare it with Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen filter. Users can create some nicely stylized video with this effect or clear up imperfections.
• Fans of the Fractal Noise effect in After Effects will enjoy the new Turbulent Noise effect, which creates fractal-based noise useful for creating fog, clouds, fire and other natural effects. Turbulent Noise is basically an improved Fractal Noise effect, using GPU acceleration for smoother animation and rendering. While Bilateral Blur might be my most useful new effect, Turbulent Noise is definitely the coolest—natural effects come out really nice with this effect.

The Bilateral Blur effect softens soft features and preserves sharp features—the results are shown in the lower-right of this image.

Delicious Mocha

Perhaps the most eye-popping feature of After Effects CS4 is Mocha, which is actually third-party software. Here Mocha has mapped the text to the door window.

One of the most exciting new features of After Effects CS4 isn’t even in the application: it’s Mocha for After Effects CS4, produced by UK-based Imagineer Systems. Mocha is a standalone application shipping with After Effects CS4 that allows for planar motion tracking; with it you can apply flat artwork to a two-dimensional shape in footage and animate it easily within the 3D space the footage occupies. It works great for things such as words on a paper, lettering on an door or art on a cell phone display. It works exactly as advertised, has an easy learning curve and creates some very powerful special effects! It looks like the Imagineer site still sells Mocha for versions 5–CS3 for $199.99, but After Effects CS4 offers it as a free add-on.

Conclusion

After Effects CS4 is a difficult product to judge—it’s an improvement over its predecessor but I feel some users out there will find it underwhelming. A lot of its improvements are focused on efficiency and there’s not many slick new features—though some of the things happening with After Effects/Flash integration is groundbreaking in my opinion. My favorite feature is probably the addition of Mocha, but it’s really just a standalone product bundled with After Effects CS4. I would recommend the upgrade to hardcore professionals who need to stay up with the current technology and need specific features such as metadata support or CS4 integration. For other users, it’s a harder sell but the upgrade’s $299 price keeps it a competitive deal—consider it a purchase of Mocha at full price and the After Effects CS4 upgrade for just a hundred dollars more!

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2821/Digital_Video/After_Effects_CS4.html

Adobe’s FireWork CS 4 (actual version 10) is the new “tool” of the trade for (web) developers and designers that want to create: websites, RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), UIs (User Interfaces) and any kind of design or layout that will interact with users. FireWorks is not very popular in the design market, since most of the users prefer Photoshop to create their layouts. In this short review/presentation I will focus on three things: a) what are the new features of the program, b) whether the FireWorks CS4 was really improved from the previous release and c) what new features Adobe should have included and they didn’t. In (the rare) case you are not familiar with FireWorks, then you will have to see and use it ASAP, especially if you are a (graphic) design and you are using other products of Adobe’s Family (Flash, DreamWeaver and Flex) in your business or creative workflow.
My history with this software is long…I’ve been using it for almost 8 years now. Since the days of Macromedia ownership, FireWorks was the tool of my choice in order to design and conceptualize websites and multimedia applications. When Adobe acquired Macromedia, I was really worried as of what will happen to FireWorks, but thank god (or Adobe…it’s the same thing now days ) FireWorks dominated over its “competitor” the ImageReady. Now that I mentioned it, do you remember ImageReady? I never understood that program, it was something like “PhotoshopZERO” but since there was Photoshop Elements, it had no real use! Anywayz it is quite impressive that twice Adobe preferred Macromedia’s software than her own: once with DreamWeaver over GoLive (which was the right thing to do) and twice with FireWorks over ImageReady. Enough for the chit-chat onto the introduction.

What is FireWorks?

Before I proceed with the review/presentation of FireWorks CS4 I would like to stall a little bit longer and talk to you about the concept of this software and the misconceptions of most of the user regarding its usage. Unfortunately FireWorks is not a popular piece of software. Most user tend to prefer Photoshop over FireWorks for jobs concerning layout and design. My opinion regarding that matter is that Photoshop is for heavier duties, duties that Fireworks could never perform like retouching photos, sketching, coloring and now even some limited 3d.
But let’s take it one step at a time, before I say what FireWorks is let’s see what FireWorks isn’t…FireWorks is not here to replace neither Photoshop (bitmap) nor Illustrator (vector). Although it perfectly combines both vector and bitmap features and capabilities it’s not meant to compete neither Photoshop nor Illustrator (I repeat it a second time to emphasize it). So for all of you that are hardcore fans of the 2 big brothers of Adobe (Photoshop & Illustrator) have no fear, FireWorks is not an enemy.
As far as I know FireWorks is the only graphics design software that is focused on design, layouts and UIs. If you want to create a layout for your new website, visualize the user interface of your new RIA or create the concept for a multimedia CD/DVD presentation, then you have to use FireWorks. Yes, you can use PhotoShop too and most of the people nowadays use PhotoShop for this kind of work, but PhotoShop is a) bulky, b) slow in the design process, c) doesn’t handle well vectors (buttons, menus etc) and d) most of the bitmap techniques used in the process are destructive for the graphics.
The truth is that FireWorks wasn’t always like that, it had all the prerequisites but it wasn’t so focused in design/UI and layouts…probably that’s why most of the users dismiss the idea of FireWorks. The turn towards design, UIs and layouts started from the previous version (CS3) and it is now complete in version CS4. First of all FireWorks is closely related and cooperates excellent with 3 major software that created designs, layouts and UI envinroments: Flash, DreamWeaver and Flex. Secondly it enhances the creative workflow of layouts and UIs and finally is faster, better and more visual appealing than ever. Since we clarified all that let’s see the new goodies that FireWorks CS4 is offering!

New Features

• The most notable change in FireWorks CS4, is the change in the working environment and the UI. I will not focus into that, since the changes are the same with Flash CS4 (you can read my review here). The only discord is that although in Flash CS4 all numeric fields have been upgraded and you can change them either by dragging left right or double clicking, if FireWorks CS there has been no change since the previous version. Number fields are still number fields and you must type the values by keyboard. Although I prefer it that way, I think that Adobe must have consistency across its software it should have included this nice feature in FireWorks CS4. At least in FireWorks CS4 Adobe fixed the “tab” issue that numeric fields had in previous versions. Now if you hit tab while in a numeric field, the self-explanatory will happen, the cursor will move to the next field (in previous versions you just lost focus)!



• The new vector manipulation panel called Path is greatly improved and enhanced. The available options and functions are so many that I think it competes Illustrator’s famous “PathFinder” and in some parts it is even better! From the 6 methods that were available for combining paths in CS3 you now have 9: Join, Split, Union, Intersect, Punch, Divide, Exclude, Trim and Crop. Take a note though, those new methods are not available under Modify > Combine Paths, but it’s under Window > Others > Path (which is rather strange place to hide such a useful tool). Additionally you have more than 10 tools to alter the path of a vector object, 20 tools for point editing and many many more options that new “powers” to FireWorks. For more information about the new vector tools visit: Adobe Dev Network
• Two new vector shapes are added on the list. The first one is the Arrow Line, which could be implemented better if doesn’t had only two points and the other one is the Measure Tool which can come very handy later on, when CSS is applied, because it measures (only in pixels) the distance between two points.



• The Align Panel, one of the best around (along with Flash’s) has been upgraded it, with a very nice and important little featured that enables you to fully control the distance (space) that you put between 2 or more objects, instead of spacing them evenly (which was the default option until now). The one thing that I don’t understand is why Flash CS4 didn’t got the little “trick”, since they did once in FireWorks I don’t understand why they skipped it in Flash. Anywayz…
• At last, the much need Text In Path (!) feature is added to the arsenal. Now you can place text inside ANY kind of vector.
• Styles are greatly improved, organized and have the ability to be dynamically linked with the items! In previous versions of FireWorks if you had applied one style in any number of objects and then you have decided to change that style, the changes would not be reflected back to those objects…not anymore. Now you have the ability to change the style one once object click the “Redefine Style” button and change the style in the library and all “linked” objects. If you want to cut the connection between the style and the object you can click on the “Break Link to Style” object and cut it loose!
• Following Illustrator’s paths, FireWorks has SmartDrag enabled by default. That means that once you click & drag an object various purple dashed lines appear auto-aligning the object. This purple lines are the SmartDrag that has autosnapping abilities and can help you properly align the object in your canvas. Nice trick!
• Various new panels appear in FireWorks CS4 as in other members of creative suite family, like the Kuler which can help you with color management and consistency.



• The Common Library know contains many ready graphics and assets that allow you to instantly add useful UI elements and graphics to your design. Buttons, Flex Components, Icon Graphics, Menu Bars, Loading Animations, HTML Objects and many more graphics are at your disposal. This simple but very useful enhancement greatly reduces the development time, since each objects has its own customizable properties accessed via the Symbol Properties panel! Thus the web/Flex/UI designer can create complete forms, layouts and user interfaces, communicated them with the client and deliver them to the programmers/developers via exporting, since FireWorks CS4 can export to HTML/CSS and Flex.
• Improved Acrobat Reader 9 support. Actually this is an improvement on behalf of the new Acrobat, but since both Flash and FireWorks can benefit from that I think I can mention it here. By creating a design in FireWorks, you can export it to PDF file format, give it to a client and interact with it via Acrobat, with no need of FireWorks. Well done Adobe!

What they missed – Proposals for FireWorks CS5

I just can’t help it…I always want mooore and I love to write wish lists, so here’s what I would like to “see” in FireWorks CS4, I didn’t “see” it so the following could be used as a wish-list for FireWorks CS5.

• More Filters & Effects! Filters are never enough, and FireWorks has the same “boring” filters for 2 versions now. Apart from the “smart” add-on of “Photoshop Live Effects” that we saw in version CS3, nothing new was added in CS4. Common people, (I mean Adobe) you don’t have to be very inventive or intuitive, just replicate effects from other software. You could add some very cool 3d effects from Illustrator, or Photoshop, or even better After Effects (excellent piece of software). You want more ideas…mimic the “Alien Skins Plugins”! You don’t have time to “mimic”, buy them out…but for god’s sake give us more Filters & Effects!
• More ready-made 2d Shapes. From all the vector packages out there FireWorks has the most useful and easily manageable 2d vector shapes. Until now I haven’t find any other software package than can create faster than FireWorks a rounded rectangle with customizable corner radius and shapes! But as always, I want more…maybe some kind of charting & statistics 2d/3d shapes!
• 3d vector shapes. I haven’t made it quite clear to myself yet, but I have been imagining 3d graphics in FireWorks for a long time. I am not sure (yet) if I like the approach of Flash CS4 on 3d graphics, but I believe that some moves must be done towards 3d vector shapes (not extruded). Probably a simple 3d camera or scene would suffice…
• FlowCharts. Since FireWorks is a tool used for interfaces, web sites, RIAs etc Adobe could “open up” to the visualization market with some kind of tools that will create dynamic SiteMaps, Flow Charts, object connection, diagrams and other similar goodies. If you don’t know what I mean, check out ConceptDraw series, excellent piece of software!

…hmmm, that was quick! I cannot imagine anything else missing from FireWorks! Shit . Is it perfect or am I lucking inspiration, I don’t know…but I surely expect your comments on that!

Conclusion

While I was marching towards the end of this review, I was pushing myself to decide whether or not FireWorks CS4 has improved significantly in comparison to its predecessor. It’s something very common in software-review in magazines and for the authors it seems to be a very significant factor of whether or not the reader should “buy” the software or not (I see it a lot in two of my favorite magazines: 3d World and Computer Arts).

I don’t want to cross that road.

Surely FireWorks CS4 is an improved versions of CS 3, I don’t know if it is enough for every kind or type of user to buy it, but for me it’s enough to recommend it blindfolded. FireWorks is slowly establishing its position in the market and it is more stable and faster than ever, communicates better than ever with Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator and (the new kid of the block) Flex and most important it offer a robust, intuitive and fast environment to conceive and design!

Reviewed By Nikos “DuMmWiaM” Kontis

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2826/Web_Development/Fireworks_CS4_10_Multilingual.html

It’s fun to watch programs grow and develop. Some features seemed like good ideas and showed a lot of promise but are dropped, while seemingly neat features blossom into fantastic tools. Illustrator CS4 has all this and more. Some of the new features have been begged for by users for years and years (that’d be Pages) while other snuck up on us seemingly out of the blue (that’d be Blob Brush). Yet, other features continue to sit idle with no change or update in sight (that’d be 3D effects). So, let’s take a trip to see some of the highlights in Illustrator CS4, a worthy upgrade.

When you first open Illustrator CS4, you will encounter the new OWL 2 interface that all of the Suite’s programs have (except the Video programs and, of course, Acrobat). While I still have no use for the Application Frame, I do like the tabbed interface in Illustrator. The good news is that you can turn these features on or off as you so see fit. As you look around, one of the things you might notice is that a whole menu is missing; the Filter menu is gone, missing, removed, kaput. You will need to look around, but any Filter menu selection that was worthy of being kept is still there, it’s just been moved to a new location. Since the Filter selections were not editable (like the Effects menu selections), I will not be missing them.

Like most of the applications in the Adobe Suites, there are so many new features that it is impossible to elaborate on them all. As such, below I’m focusing on the new features/improvements that effect me and have made my life easier when using Illustrator. As always, there are many many other features and improvements that are there waiting to be discovered in Adobe Illustrator CS4 (AI-CS4).

Artboards

One of the new features in AI-CS3 was the Crop Tool. You can read about that in my review of Adobe Illustrator CS3. That seemed like pretty a handy tool back then. What I didn’t know about at the time was that it was leading us to multi-page—or rather, multi-artboards—in AI-CS4.

The distinction between pages and artboards is more than academic when you think about the differences; when you talk about pages, you realize that all pages in a book need to be the same size. Books that have different size pages are unwieldy.

If you zoom out far enough in Illustrator, there will be a dark “outside,” within which is the “Canvas,” a light region upon which you can draw as many “artboards” as can fit. I’m not sure of the full potential here, but in the image below, the artboard containing the triangle measures about 40 inches across. Artboards can all be the same size, or, as seen below, any size you want. When creating more artboards, you can pull from dropdown menus and select standard page sizes or common “use” sizes such as web banner dimensions. When you’ve completed a drawing, you can always have the artboard shrink to fit the image. You can also draw or drag objects outside the artboard if you need a place to store pieces. Also, each artboard can have its own bleed as needed.

My only complaint with artboards is that you cannot name them. As shown below, they receive a number as they are created that shows up in the upper left corner. The view below is what you see when you select the Crop tool. The Canvas region becomes as dark as what you normally see beyond the canvas region, and only the artboards light up. Any artboard you click on is the active artboard and can be resized, moved, or deleted. As you create new artboards or move around existing artboards, Illustrator’s improved Smart guides pop up from any and everywhere to let you place or move items according to the placement of other items or other artboards. This can be very handy if you are making multiple mockups of the same artwork and wish things to be aligned similarly.

Illustrator’s multiple artboards have been well integrated by InDesign. If you initiate a “Place” operation from InDesign to an AI document with multiple artboards, each artboard can be independently selected. This means that if you are creating AI illustrations for a piece of written work, you do not need to have one AI document per illustration, but can have one AI document per chapter and have many many illustrations within that document to select and Place into the InDesign document.

Smart Guides

In the image above, you can see the Smart Guides helping you to align the various components of your drawing to other components and/or the artboard. Other enhancements include showing a component’s location and/or dimension as you move, create, or resize an object.

I have to admit that since I’m not using Illustrator for any CAD work, which can’t be realistically done anyway since Illustrator is not a CAD program, showing dimensions doesn’t make much sense to me. Fortunately, in the Smart Guides Preferences, you can turn on or off any of the dynamics. Surprisingly, I find the features of InDesign’s Smart Guides more powerful and useful than those in Illustrator’s. Specifically what’s missing are the guides that let you space and rotate objects equally as you place them on a page.

The Appearance Panel

Without a doubt, one of my favorite features is the newly improved Appearance Panel. The Appearance Panel has been around for some time, letting you know the specifics of any object in a drawing. You could look, but that was about it. Well, now you can adjust any component of an object right from the Appearance Panel. If you have a stroke, by clicking on the stroke name you can change the thickness or color. If you click on the Opacity you can change the opacity. If you have an effect, you can click on the effect’s name and make alterations. You can turn the eyeball off or on to see and experiment on what’s the best way to present an object. In short, the Appearance Panel rocks.

By selecting an item in the Appearance Panel and then going to the Select (menu) -> Same -> and then selecting an attribute, you can affect a number of items with the same attribute in the Appearance Panel.

It’s very hard to underestimate the incredible power and capabilities that can now be harnessed via the Appearance Panel. You will be limiting your capabilities considerably by not working with this updated tool.

The Blob Brush

You have to wonder how many terms, definitions, and names that Adobe must have gone though to finally settle on the name The Blob Brush. Like the name or not, it’s very descriptive and provides a significant new tool to Illustrator.

The Blob Brush, like the standard Brush, shares a number of the same Preferences as shown below. Of particular note is everything on the top half which cannot be found in the Brush’s Preferences. Notice that both can take advantage of a Wacom Tablet.

Below are a series of screenshots of the same two lines, the top one is a standard Brush and the bottom one is made with the new Blob Brush. In the top image, they are essentially the same. In the 2nd image, I’ve selected them with the Select Tool and you can start to see the difference: the Brush leaves an Open path while the Blob Brush leaves a closed path.

The significance of this can start to be displayed when I give the Blob Brush object a red stroke on its path. The size of the stroke can be varied just as any stroke can be varied. The Brush line, since it is the stroke, cannot be outlined and in fact the only place I can provide any variation on it is to change the fill (where I selected the same red as the stroke in the Blob Brush line).

A last example of the differences is by using the Eraser Tool on each. Since the Blob Brush is a closed path, the Eraser tool simply “ate” away on the side of the line. The Brush line, however, was chopped in two as soon as I crossed the stroke line in the middle (and lost the Wacom’s pressure dynamics as well).

Some other attributes of the Blob Brush are that if you are painting with the same color, you can add to the blob at any time. If you are painting with a different color (shade, whatever), that will be a different object and cannot be joined with the original. In addition, if you have a Blob Brush object selected and then paint over it with the same color, that object will be merged with the new BB, and other objects, not selected, will not be even if they are the same color. In the image below, the “L” shaped thing in the middle merged with the left object (which was selected) and not with the right (which was not selected). [Please note: the orange and blue outlines were added after the 2nd BB stroke to visually help display what happened. If they had the different strokes prior to the "L" stroke being added, the items could not have merged.]

Isolation Mode

Isolation Mode was introduced in CS3 so it’s not a new feature, but it has been improved in a very important dynamic. Previously you could use Isolation Mode to separate a grouped object from a page of other objects. If the object wasn’t already grouped, one option you had was to Group a single object to satisfy how Isolation Mode worked. Now you can isolate anything from a simple object to a grouped object. In fact, if you have several items grouped together, you can double-click the grouped object to isolate it from the rest of the items on the screen and then double-click a component from the grouped object to isolate it from the group to alter and/or adjust that item without having to un-group the items.

Below is a collection of stars, one of which also has some lines grouped with the star. If I double-click that star, it rises to the top of the stack and all other objects on the page become washed out in color, meaning you cannot access, click on, or do anything to the other objects on the screen. If I then double-click one of those lines I can separate it from the grouped object, and it rises to the top of the stack (the rest of the group falls back into its previous location) and I can do what I want/need to do to that line.

Once the adjustments are completed, simply double-click anywhere on the page to return to an un-isolated page, tap the Escape key, or click on the left facing arrow in the gray strip that appears on the top of the screen once you enter Isolation Mode (see the above middle and right images). [Also note above that your "bird trail" path appears as you progress on your isolation objective, showing you what you are doing and from where that path of access to isolation started.]

Gradients

There has always been a bit of magic and crossed fingers to gradients. You select the Gradient tool and drag across your object and mull over it, re-drag and mull, and this continues until you are mostly kinda sorta satisfied. Well, the need to futz and play and mull are still going to be around, but at least you now have a object to futz with. And it’s pretty cool.

Oh yeah, we also have transparency gradients.

The deal has always been that you create your object and then select a gradient from a swatch or the Gradient Panel and then take the Gradient tool and drag across the object. Once the drag was complete and you released the mouse. If you didn’t like it, you’d have to re-guess where to start and/or stop the next drag to fine-tune what you wanted. Now, we have an actual widget to work with.

The initial setup for creating the gradient is no different. However, now when we drag across the object, something remains. The anatomy of the Gradient widget is effectively no different from the Gradient Panel. There will be two squares on both ends where you can double-click directly on the little squares. This will bring up an option to replace the color with a swatch, or you can select a tool from the color picker. If you drag the square along the widget, you will move where that color’s location appears on the gradient. Below on the left image you can see I’ve clicked where there was no swatch square and created one in the middle. Besides setting a color for each swatch square, you can also set the transparency. Between each swatch square is a small white dot which represents the mid-point of the color transition. These can be slid back and forth on the widget to move where the mid-point of the transition is located.

On the left side is the “fulcrum” of the widget. You can move this fulcrum around the object for placement. On the right side you can grab the end with your mouse and increase or decrease the length of the widget. If you move your mouse off to the (lengthening) side, you will see a rotation icon, meaning you can drag to rotate the widget. It seems you should be able to mouse-down on the end of either side of the widget and simply drag from there to rotate, but unfortunately you can’t do that; you must slip off to the side to rotate.

One other “it seems like it should…” is that to convert from a linier to a radial gradient, you should be able to right-click on the widget and convert from there. Unfortunately you either have to select an appropriate swatch or select from the dropdown menu on the Gradient Panel.

Before I leave gradients, let me also point out that if you have a radial gradient, you can grab one quarter of the circle around the radial gradient and pull down to form an ellipse as shown below.

Graphic Styles

In the past, when you clicked on one Graphic Style and then the next, each style would remove any aspects of the proceeding style. Now you can have cumulative styles. That is, let’s say you have one style of a 4 pixel red border, another style of a drop shadow, and another style of blue fill. By pressing the Option key when clicking on any of those (or other) styles, you’ll be adding any style to any previous style your object already had.

Adobe has enhanced this feature by providing a batch of pre-built styles to use. If you go to the side menu in the Graphic Styles Panel, the 2nd option from the bottom is “Open Graphic Styles Library.” There are new libraries with the word “Additive” as part of the name.

By the way, if you Command-click (and hold) on a Graphic Style now, you can see what the effects of that style will be on your object. (Unfortunately, right-clicking on a Graphic Style does not work on a Mac.) While this is nice, it does have limited potential because the size of the pop-up image is not very large. It’s quite possible, depending on the size of your object, that it will be more effective to simply select your object, click on the Graphic Style, and then undo as needed.

Clipping Masks

Clipping Masks provide clean cut lines and objects to the exact ends of the desired shape. Well, now they do. The top image of the two images below shows a clipping mask over two lines created in AI-CS3. When the object is selected, the trails of the original lines leak out way past the clipping mask. However, in the lower of the two images created in AI-CS4, note that when the object is selected, the line trails are no longer visible. If you actually click on the line, then that line becomes active and you do have access to the entire length of the line. The significance of this is that you no longer will accidentally be grabbing them, hiding them from access, or trying to explain to a client that they are not really there. Now, they are not.

Alignment Trick

This is only an enhancement of an old feature but one that is so nifty, I have to mention it. One of the long-time “hidden” tricks of Illustrator is aligning a group of objects to the location of one of those objects. To do this, after selecting all of the objects you want to align, do one last click on the object that you want the object to align to. Than, after selecting the align options, that one object will not move and all the rest will move to align to that one object. The only catch in the past was that there was no feedback to see which object you last clicked on, you had to just “know.” Now there is feedback, as the last object you clicked on will get a blue outline, as shown below (the cursor is pointing at the “last clicked” object). This function has been around for a long time, but it sure is great to have some feedback about what we are doing.

The only problem with this new feature is that you cannot change the highlight color. You’ve got that one “blue” with that one size stroke and that’s it.

Conclusion

The multi-artboards and the Appearance Panel are worth the price of the update, but the advantages are not limited to those two. When you add the Gradient Widget, the Isolation Mode advances, the Clipping Mask improvements, the Blob Brush, Smarter Smart Guides, and dozens of other subtle, but no less important improvements, this is one heckofa update.

Unfortunately, one can still not change the radius of round-corner rectangles, stars, or other objects once you let go of the mouse. The 3D tools have remain unchanged for years, the Kuler and Color Edit tools remain more confusing than they should, etc. Oh the humanity…

But seriously, this is a great update. But besides giving us great new features (and they are), it would also have also been nice to go back to some of these earlier issues and do some clean up. As such, I’m giving this a full five “A” rating with the understanding that if I could give half points, I’d chop this down some due to the long, long, long lingering items that certainly need to be dealt with at some point.

Reviewed By Gary Coyne

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2827/Illustration/Illustrator_CS4.html

In my review of Adobe InDesign CS3, I complimented all the various aspects about that new version, but lamented how Adobe still had a lot of work to do to fill in the shoes of the missing FrameMaker for Mac. They did it! Well, mostly. There still are some corners to sand and polish, but, for the most part, one can finally, really, truly do long format documents again on the Mac. Now, InDesign CS4 has Conditional Text and Cross References, not to mention Smart Guides, GREP nested styles within paragraph styles, and a whole lot more. If you use InDesign, this is one of the best upgrades in many years. Needless to say, there are many many new features in InDesign CS4. In this review, I will be focusing on some of the biggies—there aretoo many to cover them all.

One of the first things you will notice when you open the new InDesign is the OWL2 look seen throughout all of the CS4 programs (except Acrobat, of course). The tabbed document structure is great for programs like InDesign. If you are working on multiple chapters of a book, multiple articles, or needing to look at different iterations of the same document, working with tabs is excellent.

Smart Guides

From the moment you start to place items on a new document, you will encounter Smart Guides. From images to text boxes (or any kind of frame), Smart Guides will start to appear, letting you know you have placed something that is aligned with something else. This might be another object on the page, or the page itself. Below, I’ve placed one text frame on the left in a Master page and am in the process of increasing the vertical height of the text frame on the right side to the one on the left. As soon as I’ve stretched the height on the right text box to match the left side, a Smart Guide pops up and not only establishes when I’ve set the height, but also displays the objects width and height.

Now when Placing animage, if you drag out the frame for placement, the aspect ratio of the image in the Image Gun is maintained, and the Smart Guides will display what percentage of the original image you are creating. As you place the images, any alignment is snapped to any previous image. Lastly, as you drag the image, it will snap to the placement between the previous image(s). In addition, if you rotate one image, any rotation of subsequent images will also snap to match the previous image’s rotation. Getting your ducks in a row has never been easier.

Smart Text Reflow

If you are like me, you compose in InDesign (ID). The thought of composing in Word or something else and then pasting into ID has always seemed wrong. However, one of the problems when composing in ID shows up when you get to the last pre-made page, and you are not finished writing. In the past, you’ve had to stop, add some pages, perhaps some text boxes, and then try to go back to where you were as if nothing has happened. Tedious at best, and, truth be told, it’s not conducive to the creative process.

Finally, ID has automatic page generation. So, if you’ve reached the last page, you can keep on typing, and new pages will appear just as they do in any other program. Alas, there are some catches, and you do have to prepare for this feature. Part of the problem is that there are two ways to do this: whether you use Master Pages and, regardless if you do, you still have to lay the groundwork for Text ReFlow to properly work.

If you use Master pages and you use Master Text Frames, you are good to go, sort of. Smart Text Reflow is on by default and can be seen in the Preferences under the Text option. Also set by default is the “Limit to Master Text Frames.” [Note that there is also an option to "Delete Empty Pages," this is turned off by default.]

The interesting catch here is that you do need to check “Use Master Text Frames” when setting up a new document because that option is not automatically set when starting a new document.

But you are not done yet. Now, you also need to set in your Master Text Frames on your Master Pages, and you have to set the overflow link between those two text frames on the Master Pages as shown below. Note in the image below that I’m showing a three column page setup, but I’m only using the bottom part of the spline’s inner two columns. This is a good example of why one would use Master Text Frames in the first place: if you have uniquely shaped, or placed text frames, using them from the Master Pages will lock the size and location of those text frames for you. [An arrangement like this is very good is you want to have a built in sidebar on your pages].

If you do not want to bother with Master Pages and Master Text Frames, no problem (sort of). You do have to go into your preferences and turn off “Limit to Master Text Frames,” as that will be on. However, you do not have to turn off “Master Text Frames” when creating the page, as that will be off. The unfortunate catch when not using Master Text Frames is that InDesign will default to the full page region for subsequent pages or mirror multiple columns, not span across multiple columns as I’ve done above.

Another limitation when not using Master Text Frames is that you have to have two pages of linked text created before Text Flow will initiate. This makes sense insofar as you have to formally let ID know what your intentions are with these pages and any frames therein. In addition, if you have multiple text boxes, only one threaded set will be used as the initiator for Text Flow. Again, this makes sense, but admittedly it might frustrate some.

Text flow is probably best for those who are not using a fancy page setup or unique text frame layout, or someone who is and is using Master Text Frames. For publications like newsletters with multiple text columns and many split stories, it is not going to be viable. Also, be warned that unless you have every duck in a row, and there are a number of ducks to line up with Text Flow, it will not work as advertised. Text Flow can be very frustrating until you learn about all the ducks and how to line them up. It works, but it is not user friendly.

Conditional Text

Conditional Text is here. First of all, what is it and why would one use it? The reasons and uses are many:

• You can have multiple language documents and turn on the appropriate language for each printing.
• Often, teachers and professors make multiple versions of an exam so that people sitting next to each other can’t cheat. Now, rather than writing two (or more) separate documents, one exam can be created with every other question being conditional. In addition, the teachers can also write the answers directly into the exam and turn them off prior to either version being printed (if the answers use red text, it’s easy to know that they are on or off prior to printing).
• If you are creating multiple versions of the same contract, you can conditionally turn on or off sections as needed.

Admittedly, everything I’ve mentioned or could mention can be done on multiple documents. However, by having different documents all in one, that means that any text or images that are common across all variations of the document does not have to be duplicated. This means that you do not need to update each and every document if any change is made across the common material for each document. For example, let’s say you are setting up a contract and it’s late in 2008. By the time 2009 comes around you fix the date in one contract and not the other. Now you have two variations of the same contract, but one with the wrong date. This is a simple example of why it can be much more efficient to have any variations within the same document, and now that can be done with Conditional Text.

To create Conditional Text is simply a matter of bringing up the Conditional Text Panel (buried in the Type & Tables dropdown in the Windows menu). Create a condition within the Panel, then you simply select any text you want applied to that condition and check the appropriate condition box. The wavy colored lines are visual indicators that that text has a condition applied to it. You can choose to have them display, print, or neither, the default is for them to show up and not print.

At that point, it’s simply a matter of checking or unchecking the “eye” associated with that condition to let it be seen or not. This is no different from turning on or off layers in Photoshop, Illustrator, or any other Adobe application that has “eye” options.

The biggest limitation I could find is that you cannot select non-contiguous text in InDesign. That means that you cannot select (as in this example) just the Group B text, and then check the Group B Conditional Text box; you have to select text, check the Group B Conditional Text box; select text, check the Group B Conditional Text box; etc., and repeat again as necessary because you do have to do each non-contiguous block of text one at a time. Hopefully, non-contiguous text selection is something that will be added in CS5.

Cross-referencing

The other really really big new feature is cross-referencing. What is this and why is it important? Simply put, cross-referencing lets you reference an item in a story or book in a different part of the story or book. The classic example is if you have a Figure in Chapter 8 of a book (let’s call it “Figure 8-3″) and earlier in the book—say, in Chapter 2—you want to reference that Figure. In the past, you had two choices:

1. Identify the reference to Figure 8-3 (and/or Page 568) with the intention that just before publication you need to verify that neither the Figures number nor its page location has changed since you last looked (along with every other reference in the book).
2. Simply state “See a Figure in Chapter 8.”

Cross-referencing lets InDesign properly maintain the latest Figure number and its proper page location. That means if, due to editing and other changes, that image later becomes Figure 8-5 and ends up on page 608, no problem—InDesign is properly tracking these links.

Setting up auto-numbering in your paragraph styles is not necessary for cross-referencing, but is worth it in the long run, and you will need to use InDesign’s Paragraph Styling’s auto-number formatting (improved in CS3).

Once you have the text created where the cross-reference is to be placed and you have the text or paragraph that you want to cross-reference (you can’t link to nothing, and you miust have somwhere to place the reference), you bring up the Cross-reference window from the Type menu (Hyperlinks & Cross-references). From there, you look for the Paragraph style on the left side of the window (see below), and on the right side of the window you locate the specific paragraph to which you want to link. Once you’ve done that, you select how you want the cross-referenced text to be placed in the Cross-reference. As can be seen below, there is an excellent range of options. If you want more, you can click on the Pencil icon (to the right of the cursor below). That lets you create more options as well as customize how they apepar. In addition, you can use Character Styles to customize referenced text (e.g., all referenced text will be italic). [Also note from the image below that you can place Text Anchors on a page if you need to link to a page or a block of text but no specific item or paragraph.]

To maintain these cross-references, in the Hyperlinks Panel you will find a new region for Cross-references which displays the cross-references in your text, and can take you to the source or destination of the references.

As someone who’s written books, long articles, and manuals, I cannot express how important a feature this is.

New Character Style…

It’s always a pleasure when little things are placed in a program simply to make you more efficient by overcoming your absentmindedness. Case in point: you go to create a nested style, and during the process you have the Paragraph Style window open and you need to enter your Character Style you want—but you forgot to create the Character style you want before going to the Paragraph style. In the past, you’d have to close the Paragraph window, open Character Style Panel, create a new Character Style, name and customize the style and then go back to the Paragraph style to set the Nested style you want.

Well, absent-minded folks all over the world can now rejoice! Every dialog box, window, Panel, anything that lets you set a Character style now lets you create one as well from the window’s Character selector menu. As seen below in the Nested Style window, in the drop-down menu where you can select the Character style is now a new option on the bottom “New Character Style…” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve…

GREP Styles

As long as I’m in the Paragraph Style window, let me point out a spectacular new option, GREP Styles. GREP is a profoundly geeky UNIX tool that lets you look for patterns within text as opposed to specific text, using characters, letters, and punctuation in seemingly random (but certainly not random) order. The Find and Replace window had GREP added in CS3, letting users locate general formats like telephone numbers (e.g., xxx-xxx-xxxx). Using GREP in the Find and Replace window lets you stop and start all over your story to catch to change and/or alter text. What GREP styles let you do within Paragraph styles is to let you create, in effect, uber-nested styles.

Above, I’ve set this to set the GREPed text to use the Character style I’ve created for Bold. The default GREP setting is to look for one or more digits. If you are not fluent in GREP (and I am certainly not), there are cheater fill-ins that can be accessed when clicking on an “@” character icon at the end of the GREP field.

One example might be things like chemical formulas. If you are using an OpenType font, the appearance of OpenType super and subscripting is vastly superior than using InDesign’s built in display of Super and Subscripting. However, the catch is that accessing this format is very, very PIA. If you are typing a large number of chemical formulas, it isn’t worth the effort to obtain the better quality. However, using GREP Styles, I was able to take a Character Style that used the OpenType subscripting and every time I typed a number after a character, InDesign would automatically slip into the preferred subscript as I typed. I did not have to do anything to subscript the numbers, as I typed the numbers subscripted. This is oh so cool.

As cool as it is, there are some strongly needed enhancements. What this window desperately needs is an “interpreter” for what you’ve created in GREP. It could be located below the “New GREP Style” button, where it could state what you’ve created, like “all text between paragraphs unless it contains numbers” or the like. This window does provide a Preview option, but that doesn’t mean much if you are making a mistake and are not sure if what you’ve created is what you want. Think of walking into a restaurant in a foreign country, holding your phrase book, and asking “please to eat a chicken cooked with tires.” In other words, unless you know how to read GREP, there’s no real way to know what you’ve created and why it does or does not work. Another desired feature is to let us save the GREP creations so they can be shared with others. Rather than having to retype, copy/paste, whatever, it would be great if these could be saved with identifiable names and loaded on other computers. This addition would make the full power of GREP more accessible to more people.

Better Preflight

Nothing is worse than completing a project, printing it out, and then discovering there was a problem. To avoid this situation, there has been a Preflight Panel in ID for some time. The problem is that unless it was out in front, people occasionally left out that “one last check” before printing, requiring “one more” fix before “one more re-print.” Now, in the bottom left side of the document’s window is the Preflight warning light. It’s just a small red dot (sitting to the right of the page navigation) that lights up if there are errors.

Just to the right of the red dot is a dropdown menu that lets you select either “Define Profiles…” where you can create your own set of conditions or issues you want to be warned about as shown below.

If you select the Preflight Panel, it opens to show you the error(s) in the document and the specific page where the error occurs in the document. If the problem was a simple overset text (more text than can fit the text block), clicking on the page will bring you to that page where any overset text can can be fixed right then and there. If, however, the problem was a missing link or font, you can’t fix the problem from the Preflight Panel and you need to move over to the Links Panel. Because of that, I keep both the Preflight and the Links Panel together in any workspace I create.

The Links Panel has been significantly improved in CS4 with the ability to establish a wide variety of items that can be displayed either in the columns view on the upper half and/or in the Link Info region on the bottom half.

Bonus feature with Illustrator CS4

While there are a number of other new features within ID that warrant mention, to keep this review from going on and on, I will pass on them, but for one. This feature bleeds into the new Adobe Illustrator (our review for which will be posted very soon). One of the new features in Illustrator CS4 is that now you can have multiple pages within each Illustrator document. There’s a lot more to it than just that, but the reason why I bring this up in an InDesign review is the manner in which ID lets you Place images from an Illustrator document. Below I’m showing three separate pages from one AI document.

If you open this Illustrator CS4 document from InDesign’s Place command, and check the box for “Show Import Options,” you get the window shown below. On the left side you can scroll through the various pages in the Illustrator document until you get to the image/page you want, and then Place that image.

The significance of this is huge: let’s say you are working on a book and are doing your illustrations in Illustrator. Now, instead of having multiple documents, one for each image, you could have one document for each chapter in the book and different pages for each image.

The obvious limitation here is that since you cannot name each page, you cannot scroll for individual images via their name. Nonetheless, this is a significant improvement over past interactions between ID and AI.

InDesign is still not perfect…

Despite all these improvements, there still are some major missing pieces:

• Still no endnotes. There are ways to work around this gap, but the lack of Endnotes continues to make InDesign a larger challenge for academic work than it should.
• Footnotes still cannot wrap around objects. Even worse, if you have a multi-column page, Footnotes still cannot straddle multiple columns and are limited to exist within the same column as the footnote source.
• And speaking of text wrap, it only works “after” an anchored object, not on the same line of the anchored object nor above.
• Aligning objects in InDesign still doesn’t have the “trick” that Illustrator has where the item last clicked will be the focused object to which other objects will align. Thus, if you have objects to align, they will align to the average location of the objects meaning that EVERYTHING will move.

Obviously some of these are not as significant as others, but that depends upon what you are doing at the time and how much the lack of that feature effects you. However, in the grand scheme of things, the complaints I’ve had (or am having) with InDesign are decreasing in number. While InDesign is not perfect, it’s getting closer and closer.

In short, if you are writing a letter or a simple report, you do not need InDesign; Word or Pages should be more than ample. Likewise, if you are doing simple calculations you do not need anything more than a simple calculator. However, if you are doing complex calculations, you need a scientific calculator and if you are creating any level of complex documents, you need InDesign. This release delivers.

Reviewed By Gary Coyne

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2828/Illustration/Indesign_CS4.html

Now that Adobe is heavily locked into a strategy of suites rather than individual applications, most of the company’s software gets a revision at the same time. So whilst much of the excitement has been about Photoshop CS4 and its alleged GPU acceleration, Adobe’s video apps have new versions as well. This week we look at Adobe’s workhorse video editor, Premiere Pro CS4.

As the oldest video editing app on the PC platform, Premiere has an illustrious history. The switch to Premiere Pro accompanied a complete change of the codebase, but the interface has simply evolved. So CS4 doesn’t look significantly different from CS3, although it does have a couple of important innovations. The New Project dialog no longer sets an overall format, just your preferred capture configuration. This is because individual sequences within a project can now each have their own base format. This will come in handy if you shoot with a variety of disparate camcorders. You can edit each natively, then nest the sequences together.

But the most significant development ‘under the hood’ is that, like Adobe Premiere Elements 7, AVCHD files are now supported. Whilst this is predominately a consumer format, Panasonic in particular has been backing it with professional models, such as the AG-HMC151, which we will be reviewing next week. Consumer models have also reached a level where they could well be called upon for occasional shoots. So Adobe has added AVCHD just in the nick of time.

The delay seems to have been worthwhile, though, as Adobe’s implementation is very slick indeed. Editing is extremely fluid. Naturally, frame rates drop more rapidly than with HDV as you add effects and layers, but it’s still the most responsive AVCHD editing we’ve experienced yet. This isn’t the only new format support added, either. Premiere Pro can now edit footage from the Red One, Panasonic’s P2 cards, and Sony’s XDCAM EX and HD, which covers pretty much every professional tapeless format currently available.

The other significant change is that Premiere Pro has now radically altered the way it outputs. Recording back to tape follows the same process as before, but the media encoder has been broken out as a separate app. So there is no longer the facility to export a file straight from the timeline. Instead, exporting media adds an entry to the Media Encoder’s batch list. This is a little more complicated, but it has some major benefits. Aside from being able to queue up lots of encoding jobs in succession, you can also load up Premiere Pro sequences and After Effects compositions directly. So you can encode multiple Premiere Pro timelines as a batch – a major productivity boost over having to load and encode each one manually. The one downside we encountered was that it is now much harder to grab a frame of video.

The Media Encoder also plays a part in another of Premiere Pro CS4’s major new features – speech recognition. This isn’t a unique Adobe capability, as Avid Media Composer 3 gained a similar facility in 2008. But it’s nonetheless a potentially useful addition. The speech recognition works in tandem with another new feature, the metadata panel. This displays XMP metatag information for a selected file. Click the Transcribe button at the bottom and the audio track will be analysed and converted to text. This is then attached to the file as another metatag with each word linked to its location within the file.

In our experience, the transcriptions were not very accurate. But they were just about close enough to be useful in some circumstances. For example, if you have a clip containing multiple takes, and only the last one is good, you can find it without having to listen through every single attempt. But the inaccuracy will reduce the feature’s benefits for finding a particular point in a long monologue. You can correct individual words, but that is going to be extremely laborious. The Find box also supports searching the transcripts. In the project window, you can look for files containing a given word, and in the Metadata window the word can be found within the file. But you can’t search for consecutive words or whole phrases.

Also aiding file location is the new Media Browser tab, which brings the search and import of assets within the Premiere Pro interface itself. You can open the files you find directly into the source window to play back their contents. If you then add them to a Sequence timeline, they will automatically be imported into the project. Alternatively, you can highlight a bunch of files in the Media Browser and import them. Either way, the workflow is streamlined, which is always welcome.

Our favourite feature amongst the more minor tweaks is the ability to apply effects to multiple clips on the timeline at once. So, for example, if you want to use a single colour correction preset on lots of footage simply highlight all the clips you want to be included, then drag the preset to one of them and it will be applied to all – a real time saver.

However you opt to purchase Premiere Pro CS4, you will get more than just the core app in the box. Buying Premiere Pro CS4 on its own provides the Encore CS4 disc authoring app and OnLocation CS4 hard disk recording software in the box. The Production Premium bundle adds Illustrator CS4, Flash CS4, Photoshop CS4, After Effects CS4 (which we will be reviewing in a future week), and Soundbooth CS4, for £800 extra.

Encore CS4, like the Media Encoder, can now import Premiere Pro sequences, so you can include these directly in your authoring and sidestep an entire intermediary encoding stage. OnLocation CS4’s biggest change is bringing all the interface elements onto one screen, although this is also the first version to offer Mac support. You can now import OnLocation projects directly into Premiere Pro CS4, too.

Verdict

Unless you need AVCHD support, the core Premiere Pro CS4 is not a huge upgrade on its own. But the new batch Media Encoder, with its direct support for Premiere Pro CS4 sequences, is a unique and extremely useful addition. Current Premiere Pro users could well find this feature alone makes the upgrade worthwhile, and it’s a pretty compelling capability for newcomers as well. In a world where the same or similar content must regularly be repurposed in many different formats, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is well positioned to meet the challenge.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2831/Digital_Video/Premiere_Pro_CS4.html

Adobe Soundbooth CS4 is an audio editing application for the video editor, it integrates well with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and the other applications that go with the Production Premium Suite. Soundbooth CS4 is still targeting a specific audience as opposed to the fully trained professional audio editor.

As a previous user of CS3 I was very happy to learn and experiment with the new features of this application.

New Features

Multi-Track Editing

In my opinion the most important new feature, creating a multi track environment is a simple process, just drag your movie and audio files into the editor panel, each track has its controls for “Mute, Solo, Volume, Pan” along the right hand side is the wave, and at the top is the master volume control.

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Audio tracks include the ability to add fade in’s and out’s, as well perform keyframe volume adjustments by clicking chosen points along the volume timeline, you are then able to drag up to increase volume and drag down to decrease volume. To perform additional edits such as adding markers, cutting and pasting, audio to text transcriptions you must open the selected track in a separate edit panel, which would have been nice to do without performing this necessary step.

Speech Transcription

Sometimes new features can always do with some improving, this is no exception. Adobe have provided a built-in audio to text engine, yes thats right the spoken word into text which does a half decent job, which no doubt in time will be improved. Once you have transcribed a track you can then highlight words in the transcript and then carry on from that point. A search field is provided so you can navigate to unique words. However navigation is limited to when the finished track is in the edit panel.

Non Destructive Editing

Non destructive editing is another welcome feature within this version, in order to make this possible Adobe have created the Adobe Sound Document format (.asnd) this allows easy undoing of changes without affecting the source file. What this format does is hold all the original assets and snapshots you made in your project, although if the project is a large one it can take some time to save. However you will find that this will integrate well with other CS4 applications when it comes round trip editing.

Volume Matching

Volume matching is another useful but simple feature, all you have to do is to drag in your selected audio files in the volume correction panel and Adobe Soundbooth CS4 does the rest, it balances the volumes giving satisfactory results.

MP3 Compression Preview

This is going to be a well used feature for me. at the point of saving I will be able to preview what the prospective file will sound like when it has been encoded at a particular bitrate.

Conclusion

Adobe Soundbooth CS4 continues to uphold features that can simply be operated by video editors and presenters, its best use is for those that purchase an Adobe suite as it integrates well with the other applications. There has been considerable changes within the application that makes this a great reason to upgrade. I am very happy overall with the new features and feel with a few more tweaks we can have more accurate transcriptions, quicker saving times on the Adobe Sound Document format.

If you do require a simple audio editor for your projects, Adobe have refined Soundbooth CS4 with enough features to keep any video editor or presenter happy.

Reviewed By Chris Watts

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2832/Digital_Audio/Soundbooth_CS4.html

Perhaps you remember watching your first Formula 1 race after thinking a Soapbox Derby was pretty fast. Maybe your favorite Japanese restaurant was great until you had dinner at Morimoto’s restaurant. For some things, the term “raising the bar” does not do justice to the fact when you are not just taking it up a notch, but climbing an entirely new ladder.

As a long-time Adobe devotee, I was excited to hear about what was in store for their latest versions of the acclaimed Creative Suite packages, but I had no idea that they would leave anyone who dared to think of themselves as “the competition” as just a memory. A distant, nearly forgotten (and now un-installed) memory. The Master Collection of the Adobe Creative Suite CS4 (US$2,499; upgrades from CS3: $899) is not just your Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign bundle, mind you. This collection has it all for the creative professional and for a huge variety of mediums and formats. With that said, the price is steep, but you won’t look back if you are a serious professional working in print, video, online, digital photography or other media types.

What’s in the box?

I’m so glad you asked. The simple answer is “everything.” New and improved versions Adobe’s mainstay applications and more. Adobe has updated the interfaces so that more features are within easier “reach,” and you will not struggle to find much if you are used to the previous versions. The changes are intuitive and just make sense once you begin to actually use them. Since there is so much to cover, here are the applications and the focus here will be on their new features for CS4.

Photoshop CS4 Extended Edition
Flash CS4 Professional
InDesign CS4
Illustrator CS4
Dreamweaver CS4
Fireworks CS4
Contribute CS4
After Effects CS4
Adobe Premier Pro CS4
Soundbooth CS4
Adobe OnLocation CS4
Encore CS4
Acrobat 9 Professional
Adobe Bridge CS4
Adobe Device Central CS4
Version Cue CS4
Dynamic Link

Two significant improvements worth mentioning are the 3D tools and collaborative workflows now incorporated into CS4 across the board. There is so much more within your reach and each application features improved navigation from updates in the interface of each title. Things are where you would go for them first since Adobe has responded so well to their customer feedback based on previous versions and “wish lists.” Performance has improved as well, but, given the very thirsty system requirements, you may want to be certain that your gear has beyond the minimum requirements in order to achieve the best results. This is nothing new for “power-users” of Adobe products and, as always, Photoshop continues to be a performance benchmark in computing. Again, let us focus on the new features that really elevate CS4 to new heights … and dimensions.

First, Soundbooth. This is not just some lightweight sound editor tacked on, but a full-featured multitrack application. Adobe has added a new file format of .asnd for tighter non-destructive integration with its other applications. The new Speech Search function allows you to do just what it implies so that you can find the sections of dialog you are looking for within a file. With Adobe Dynamic Link incorporated into SoundBooth, there is no real rendering time for your soundtrack and changes are realized throughout the CS4 applications in real-time. The media encoder will export to all popular file types including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, .WMV, .FLV, and all of the tools are there to improve, enhance, and clean up your audio as well. The Radius engine (iZotope) did a surprisingly clean job of pitch and speed correction when I tested it with an old audiocassette that was tracked too slowly. The support for Core Audio and simple things like Volume Correction make this a powerful tool for everything from soundtracks to web-based video content.

Of course, Adobe Photoshop is the application-turned-verb that continues to be my most frequently used title in the collection and I am always looking to be impressed. Going back to the earliest version as an end-user, my first reaction was “they’ve done it again!” It is faster, easier to navigate, and actually more fun to use in CS4. The canvas rotation tool is a completely new perspective – literally. Shy of the fact that I end up accidentally triggering it with Apple “gestures” on my track pad when working on my MacBook Pro, this is a great feature to improve the way you look at, edit, and present your images. The new adjustments panel gives quick access to correction and enhancement tools and, in this case, does a superior job compared to some of my tried-and-true third-party plug-ins used for some of these tasks. The new scaling tool is excellent and, for things like event photography or web design, allows the clear resizing of an image while changing the aspect ratio. No more squeezing/cropping for your limited output area in your projects. The new masking tool is much better than previous versions as it is now its own adjustment panel. Selecting your targeted subject matter is much faster and more accurate. Again, something that was always better in third-party plug-ins is now onboard. The 3D tools are now greatly improved as well with truly dynamic looking output and depth. All of the 3D editing, including animation tools, seem to bring the images to life. 2D to 3D conversion is fast and is limited only by the amount of time you have.

Adobe Illustrator goes well beyond its description having also come a very long way from its earliest carnations. One of my favorite improvements has to be how easily it is to work with gradients in CS4’s version of AI. Real manipulation and control of what may seem to be a very simple part of a design or layout is now easier and requires fewer step (or “tricks,” if you will) to get the output to match the screen. The ability to control the transparency of a gradient in a 2D or 3D environment allows for both subtle and dramatic effects that save time and energy. Another great time-saver is the addition of multiple artboards allowing your layout to take on many shapes, sizes, and resolutions for more cohesiveness throughout a project. This is great for things like corporate identity whereby a theme, campaign, or just a single project are able to maintain the core design for a huge variety of output formats.

have to admit that Adobe InDesign was always a love/hate item for me early on, but the addition of new “pre-flight” features that give you information in real-time made me a believer. No more “wait-and-see” or third-party tools, yet again, and the output tells the tale. Faster, more intuitive and superior integration bring all of the other CS4 applications to life. The new Smart Guides align all of the elements properly without the ol’ “eyeballin’ it” tricks. In this case, the perceived output is still spot-on visually because…well…it is. Like Illustrator, your output easily translates to many sizes and formats, but InDesign now adds Conditional Text to take it a step further and allow for different languages, localizations or other elements of your text that may change based on who will see it. A huge time-saver over the old ways of file version after file version creation. Clearly, Adobe has again responded to its customers by adding the much sought-after ability to export to Flash and Shockwave. Animations and effects come alive in whatever output you choose. There are so many excellent workflow improvements that I do recommend the tutorial videos from Adobe and other training resources to truly realize the full scope of the power of InDesign.

As a longtime GoLive devotee, the world of Dreamweaver always seemed like a distant cousin-by-marriage that would show up at the door asking you to come to the family reunion, but it turns out that it is more like the next generation of the CS family that has matured nicely, but slowly. The biggest addition in the CS4 version of DW seems to be the addition of Live View rendering, an ongoing theme in CS4 products, giving the user access to both the code and the content during previews. Although still relatively new to the Adobe lineup, you can create Adobe Air-based applications from within Dreamweaver as well, but there is a learning curve here. Once again, videos and seminars will help you master the newer app type that is still in its infancy. My favorite new feature is in how well DW handles Photoshop .PSD files and creates Smart Objects that you can edit and update from within the application. This big timesaver saves a lot of steps.

Again, going back to version 1.0, Fireworks has grown better with age (one would hope), and adds a big speed boost under CS4. Like its other CS4 brethren, FW is now much better suited for collaboration and can employ Adobe’s ConnectNow online meeting services. The updated interface includes improved Styles control and Live Styles for faster access to your libraries. Adobe touts PDF exporting as a new feature, but the real benefit is in the relative security that this provides when you only want specific people to have access to specific output options from your file. FW allows separate passwords to be created for specific tasks – again, more of a time saver than anything, to save steps.

As someone still learning pro-level video after working in analog for so long, this is a natural progression with AfterEffects CS4 as it continues to be a powerful animated graphics tool that creates 2D and 3D output for just about any need. What comes to AE follows the same crossover workflow and collaborative enhancements that make all of the CS4 applications so valuable. Employ new effects and styles even faster that now include the addition of Imagineer Systems’ Mocha so that your own elements can follow the movement(s) of your subject matter. In addition, like the other CS4 applications, there is more 3D support with the tools found more often in a stand-alone application. New nested comp navigation makes it easy to search for and employ the effects you want in your project.

Premier Pro CS4 is the real standard for video editing and it works even more seamlessly with the rest of the Creative Suite than ever. While it requires a lot of power to perform at its best, it is the best in its class and now offers support for the latest technologies in video, including Blu-Ray, tapeless formats (AVCHD, XDCAM HD and others), and the long sought after ability to transfer projects from Final Cut Pro. Like Soundbooth, Premier Pro CS4 has Speech Search that can find the dialog you need and even translate it into text, or find a passage you need in the project. All of those assets, and your metadata, are now incorporated into your projects’ output making content searchable and trackable online or off. I did find a few of the features that are in both AE and Premier Pro were a bit redundant, but, again, saving time between switching between applications is improved this way.

Acrobat 9 Professional is included in the Master Collection, but its abilities are almost a part of each of the applications all as well. With PDF’s more standardized than ever and showing up for everything ranging from pre-press to web-based content, having the original title does have some advantages of its own. For example, its PDF optimizer and “reduce file size” functions do an excellent job of taking a huge PDF a size that might work as an email attachment or fit on a flash key drive. One great new feature here is the ability to combine various files and documents into one PDF “Portfolio.” Adobe PDF’s now support 256-bit encryption passwords to help secure your file further than ever.

Finally coming into its own in CS4, Adobe’s latest version of Flash is the polish for your animation that takes it all to your desired audience. Also sporting big improvements to its 3D capabilities and collaborative workflows, FL adds object-based animation control for nearly drag ‘n drop simplicity. Smoother, more natural looking 3D animations and transformations now get improved effects and a new motion editor for even the most precise fine-tuning. Flash is the standard for screen-based animation, and in my opinion, still slightly disjointed from the other CS4 titles as it was in previous versions; however, and with even more collaborative tools, it presents a major leap forward in both quality and usability.

Clearly, there is more in the box that I did not get to, but sufficed to say, the value there for creative professionals who work cross-platform and in multiple types of media. If I had to find a gripe in all of this, the only stumbling blocks (shy of my new thirst for Scott Kelby books and videos to learn even more) for me were the few things that have always perplexed me in Adobe CS packages. These are my obstacles, but, if you have read my previous reviews of Adobe’s products, you know that I love the fact that they work on many levels. There is so much more to learn from master users and, as I understand it, they still pick up new tricks from each other all the time. For example, I’m told that I should make better use of the Adobe Bridge, but I just cannot seem to get the hang of using it. I know that I could use more of the shortcuts if I could only remember them all. There simply are not enough hours in the day, but you may just find yourself wanting to spend more time playing with the applications in The CS4 Master Collection – just to see what it can do – and go beyond your work.

I know that I did not cover each and every title in this suite, but there is just that much and more. This is not just another version of Adobe’s Creative Suite, this is the Master Collection for dedicated graphics professionals that not only provides all the tools you need out of the box, but the compatibility with the third-party plug-ins and tools you love. You are only limited by your available time as I would highly recommend some freeform, old fashioned, “winging it” to see what you can do with CS4. This is the standard as it can be used, in some form, by just about any level of user and Adobe makes you want to learn more. Your ideas have fewer limits, your output looks better, and you may even find yourself being more creative. As Adobe slowly continues to push its Air format, these tools will also mature. At any level and at every level, Adobe’s flagship collection is worth every penny. Call the concierge, make your reservations, grab a paddock pass, or sing for your supper. If you are ready, have the means, and have the need – CS4 is the ultimate design collection.

Minimum system requirements:

Multicore Intel-based Mac
Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later
Java Runtime Environment 1.5
Minimum 2 GB RAM
Minimum 26.3 GB available disk space
1280 X 900 display with OpenGL 2.0-compatible card
Shader Model 3.0 graphics support
Dedicated 7200RPM or better hard drive for DV and HDV editing
DVD-ROM drive
Blu-Ray burner (for appropriate output as needed)
Core Audio-compatible sound card
QuickTime 7.4.5 or later
Broadband Internet connection for online-based services

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2823/Development_Software/CS4_Master_Collection_Final_Mac_OsX.html

http://www.softster.net/P2822/Development_Software/CS4_Master_Collection.html

New InterBase 2007 combines performance benefits of a multi-generational architecture with peace of mind of log-based journaling and disaster recovery. Easy installation, small footprint, automatic crash recovery, self-tuning, Unicode, SMP support, SQL 92 compliance, and near zero maintenance makes InterBase 2007 the ideal database for embedded and business-critical small-to-medium enterprise server applications.

New in InterBase 2007

Journaling and Journal Archiving, utilizing Write Ahead Logging (WAL) technology, improves VLDB management, OLTP performance, and facilitates disaster recovery (Server Edition only)
Online Dump, provides backup for seamless incremental backup
Batch Updates allow sending multiple SQL statements, reduces the network traffic resulting in improved performance, especially in LAN and WAN environments
Point-in-time-recovery allows journal based recovery based on timestamps for greater recovery flexibility (Server Edition only)
Extended International character support via Unicode UCS-2 and UTF-8
InterBase Developer Edition
New CodeGear InterBase 2007 Developer Edition provides all developers the best cross-platform database to build and test database applications for embedded and SME segments. Developers are free to choose the standard connectivity they want, and make use of a mature SQL92 compliant database for their applications. Database Performance monitoring allows the developer to streamline applications for optimal deployment.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1897/Development_Software/InterBase_2007_SE_v8.html

New features in Borland Enterprise Server 6.5

• Expanded JMS support (OpenJMS, Tibco, and Sonic options).
• Right-click BES application profiling by integrating with Borland OptimizeIt/ServerTrace.
• JMX instrumentation of BES Partitions following the JSR 77 model.
• Ability to store datasources (or any DAR object) in the standard CosNaming tree instead of serial://
• New Op-Center Templates for BES sample Configurations.
• New VisiBroker Templates for 5.2.1 and 6.5 VisiBroker and all its services.
• IIOP Connector – Compact Session Id mode.
• Enhanced Management Capabilities including instrumentation of BES Partitions following the JSR 77 model.
• UNIX only: iaschangeowner script for changing the ownership of an installation has been replaced by the setuser tool. For more information, go to the BES Installation Guide, Installing BES on Solaris and Linux, Using the setuser tool to manage ownership section in the online Help Topics or on the BES TechPubs web site at: http://www.borland.com/techpubs/bes.
• Tooling/GUI enhancements including:
  • Web server IIOP connector and IIS redirector configuration.
  • Ability to apply a license to a remote server using the Management Console.
  • Enhanced logging views which provide better searching.
  • Improved experience for Template selection when building Configurations.
• Management infrastructure based upon Op-Center and thus inherits most of its features.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/B31/Borland.html

New features in Op-Center 6.5

• Interactive or scheduled execution of remote scripts and processes from Management Console
• Availability lifecycle scheduling (chron-like) for any Managed Object.
• Enhanced Template selection experience when building Configurations.
• Right-click profiling of J2EE application performance using seamless integration with Optimizeit Profiler and ServerTrace.
• Right-click JMX monitoring for supported J2EE application servers.
• Expanded Templates for popular J2EE servers, VisiBroker and all its services.
• Enhanced and new logging views which permit easier searching.
• VisiBroker information available for VisiBroker Managed Objects in Op-Center Management Console.
• Remote editing of most files related to a Managed Object, for example, vbroker.properties file.
• Remote licensing of installation from Op-Center Management Console.
• Enhanced group recovery logic.
• UNIX only: iaschangeowner script for changing the ownership of an installation has been replaced by the setuser tool. For more information, go to the BDOC Installation Guide, Installing BDOC on Solaris and Linux, Using the setuser tool to manage ownership section in the online Help Topics or on the Op-Center/BDOC TechPubs web site at: http://www.borland.com/techpubs/opcenter.
• UNIX only: Multi-User Mode (MUM) allows Op-Center to control processes belonging to different users.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P72/Development_Software/Deployment_Op-Center_v6_5.html

Borland’s Delphi 2005 has just hit the streets here in Australia. Glenn Stephens takes the new IDE out for a spin.

Delphi has grown up since it launched nearly ten years ago. The latest version – Delphi 2005 provides support for developing Win32 and .NET applications as well as now supporting the C# language as well. There are many enhancements to almost all areas of the new release with the main goal of increasing developer productivity.

IDE enhancements – multiple targets, multiple languages

The main changes in the Delphi 2005 IDE is now support for Delphi Win32, Delphi for .NET and also C# support development. This seems like a good move by Borland as many of the developers I have spoken to want to develop for .NET, are not sure if they will use Delphi or C#, and to add to that they still have Win32 applications to support. It seems that Borland have been smart to provide a solution that will work for existing Delphi developers no matter what development path they take.

Unit Testing

Delphi 2005 includes wizards to incorporate automated unit testing within your applications with support for DUnit for Win32 applications and NUnit for .NET applications. Using the wizards it was painless to create a unit testing project for an existing project. The integrated unit testing simply worked and after some quite simple questions you can create a blank unit test classes against classes in an existing project.

The Code Editor

For those who have developed with Delphi since version one, the editor has remained consistent, and hasn’t deviated from its original design until Delphi 8. Most of the improvements that Delphi developers have seen have been in the area of code-completion and other productivity enhancements. The editor in Delphi 2005 is much slicker than previous versions and handles things like code folding, displaying of line numbers, better handing of code completion, and the very nice history of changes. The biggest improvement in the editor is its refactoring support. This is solid improvement over previous Delphi code editors.

Web Applications

There were many subtle things that needed to be improved in order to do real ASP.NET development using the Delphi product. Little things such as the ability to edit template columns in a DataGrid or DataList or the ability to convert a HTML control into a server control. The good news is that Delphi 2005 now supports these changes. The new structure editor also provides a display of the HTML editor in an easy to use way, and the code completion features of HTML, ASPX and CSS pages are extremely helpful. These little things improve the development time of an ASP.NET application, and I’m glad that there is also improved stability in the Web editors. At last Delphi 2005 becomes a good tool to create ASP.NET Web applications.

For Win32, Delphi still includes support for Intraweb for developing Web Application, but Delphi 2005 also includes a .NET version so that existing Intraweb applications can take advantage of the .NET framework.

Database Development

The notable improvements in Delphi database development include an improved Data Explorer to allow testing stored procedures, migration between Borland Data Provider data and even database metadata modification amongst others. Much of my work with .NET applications has been against SQL Server and it is refreshing to now see design-time support for the SqlConnection component.

For VCL developers on .NET you will be pleased to know that the dbGO ADO components have finally been ported to VCL.NET, to assist in porting your VCL/ADO applications to .NET.

Win32 Development

Delphi Win32 developers don’t get left behind with this release and for many companies developing for Win32, this will be their first real upgrade for some years. The main thing Win32 Delphi developers will receive are improvement in the productivity gains of the IDE such as refactoring, the Unit test wizards, Star Team Integration and the Database explorer.

Integration

Another important part of the Delphi 2005 experience is the level of integration with other tools in the system such as the unit testing with DUnit and NUnit, Star Team for source control as well as tightly integrating the Borland Janeva product to support calling Java and CORBA solutions easily.

Object Pascal Language Changes

The most notable language change is the introduction of the for..in loop construct. This is similar to the foreach construct that you see in languages like C#. Luckily this change is not limited to the .NET framework and can be used in your Win32 applications as well.

ECO 2 – The Gold Nugget of Delphi 2005

The most outstanding feature in Delphi 2005 is its Model Driven Architecture Solution (MDA) called ECO 2. ECO 2 allows you to design classes using Borland’s Together technology, and then use the classes against a persistence store such as a Microsoft SQL Server, or other supported databases such as Oracle, Interbase, DB2 or even an XML file. What makes this so good is that it gives you a persistence layer with Model-View-Controller support. When you consider that you can define your classes to store their objects history as well, and perform undo operations against changes in your objects you begin to see the true power and value of ECO. Delphi 2005 and ECO create a good foundation to build commercial applications easily. In Delphi 2005, ECO 2 also provides support for creating ECO enabled ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET Web Services.

Another powerful feature of ECO 2 is the ability to reverse engineer an existing database. Testing against an internal database I had developed proved quite simple and once the database was reverse engineered, working against the data within the object model was an absolute breeze. Within roughly five minutes I had a running application showing both one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. Pretty powerful stuff.

Conclusion

Overall Delphi 2005 is a solid product with great productivity enhancements over previous versions. After using Delphi 2005 you can feel that the product speeds your development through its support for refactoring, unit testing and ECO 2 support as well as its multiple languages. I think that Delphi 2005 is good value for existing Delphi developers and also developers of .NET systems who might want to take advantage of the MDA features of Delphi 2005.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P71/Development_Software/Delphi_2005.html

CodeGear RAD Studio Professional gives you a highly productive IDE with hundreds of ready-to-use components and features like refactoring, code completion, syntax highlighting, live templates, full-featured debugging, unit testing and local database connectivity to Blackfish SQL, InterBase and MySQL.

CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 combines Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++Builder in one environment for rapidly developing Windows and .NET 2.0 applications on and for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. You get all the tools you need to create AJAX powered web pages using ASP.NET 2.0 and VCL for the Web and database applications with local database connectivity. And deploy your applications, with no additional charges, on the Windows platform or your choice.

CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Rapid Development of Native Windows and .NET applications

• Includes Delphi, Delphi for .NET and C++Builder
• Build AJAX powered websites with ASP.NET 2.0 and VCL for the Web
• Blackfish SQL – the managed SQL database with support for Delphi language stored procedures and triggers
• Delphi for .NET language support for parameterized types

WHAT’S NEW IN CODEGEAR RAD STUDIO 2007
Includes Delphi for Win32, Delphi for .NET and C++Builder

NEW FOR DELPHI FOR .NET DEVELOPERS

• .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 – RAD Studio 2007 supports ASP.NET and VCL.NET within Delphi. New in Delphi for .NET are ASP.NET templates that provide numerous pre-built templates to significantly accelerate your start-from-scratch velocity for building ASP.NET applications.
• Enterprise Core Objects (ECO) IV – ECO IV creates a transparent way for objects to persist in the database, with Object persistence, Object Relational mapping and object transaction all wrapped in a Model Driven Development (MDD) framework.
• Parameterized types (Generics) in Delphi for .NET – New support for creation and consumption of parameterized types (Generics) in Delphi for .NET so you can write collections, lists and other data structures that take advantage of generic types.

New for Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++ developers

• Build web applications using AJAX with VCL for the Web – VCL for the Web lets you quickly and visually build interactive and responsive web pages that support AJAX techniques.
• Blackfish SQL database and deployment license – Freely deploy your applications with the included Blackfish SQL embedded database. Blackfish SQL is a fully managed SQL-compliant highly portable, embedded database that can be deployed with your application.
  • CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Enterprise and Architect include unlimited Blackfish SQL database deployment on systems with 1 CPU, up to 5 users / 20 connections, and support for databases up to 2GB.
  • CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Professional includes unlimited Blackfish SQL desktop database deployment on systems with 1 CPU, for 1 user / 4 connections, and support for databases up to 512 MB.

New for C++ developers
C++Builder leaps forward with full support of the Windows Vista API, easy creation of web applications that support AJAX, and streamlined enterprise database connectivity. Plus, save time by developing once on your choice of Windows 2000, XP, or Vista and deploy to all. Other new features include:

• Improved compiler and debugging – You get the latest standards with improved conformance and compatibility to ANSI C++, Dinkumware and Boost Library.
• Indy 10 Internet suite – We’ve updated our sockets library to the Indy 10 Internet Protocol Suite including client and server support for TCP, UDP, raw sockets, as well as over 100 higher level protocols such as SMTP, POP3, NNTP, HTTP, and many more.
• Faster build times – You’ll radically boost your performance with up to 5x faster in-IDE build performance — as fast as or faster than command line builds.
• IDE enhancements to help you work smarter and faster – IDE enhancements include Virtual Folders, which make it easy for you to visually organize and simplify your project’s file clutter and confusion.
• Unit testing with DUnit – C++Builder 2007 now ships with built-in support for DUnit for improved application stability. The IDE provides wizards that allow you to quickly and easily create unit tests for existing code libraries.
• Complete development solution – In total, CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 provides a comprehensive development solution with new features across the Delphi for .NET, Delphi for Win32 and C++Builder personalities all in one integrated IDE.

CodeGear RAD Studio Professional gives you a highly productive IDE with hundreds of ready-to-use components and features like refactoring, code completion, syntax highlighting, live templates, full-featured debugging, unit testing and local database connectivity to Blackfish SQL, InterBase and MySQL.

CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 combines Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++Builder in one environment for rapidly developing Windows and .NET 2.0 applications on and for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. You get all the tools you need to create AJAX powered web pages using ASP.NET 2.0 and VCL for the Web and database applications with local database connectivity. And deploy your applications, with no additional charges, on the Windows platform or your choice.

CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Rapid Development of Native Windows and .NET applications

• Includes Delphi, Delphi for .NET and C++Builder
• Build AJAX powered websites with ASP.NET 2.0 and VCL for the Web
• Blackfish SQL – the managed SQL database with support for Delphi language stored procedures and triggers
• Delphi for .NET language support for parameterized types

WHAT’S NEW IN CODEGEAR RAD STUDIO 2007
Includes Delphi for Win32, Delphi for .NET and C++Builder

NEW FOR DELPHI FOR .NET DEVELOPERS

• .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 – RAD Studio 2007 supports ASP.NET and VCL.NET within Delphi. New in Delphi for .NET are ASP.NET templates that provide numerous pre-built templates to significantly accelerate your start-from-scratch velocity for building ASP.NET applications.
• Enterprise Core Objects (ECO) IV – ECO IV creates a transparent way for objects to persist in the database, with Object persistence, Object Relational mapping and object transaction all wrapped in a Model Driven Development (MDD) framework.
• Parameterized types (Generics) in Delphi for .NET – New support for creation and consumption of parameterized types (Generics) in Delphi for .NET so you can write collections, lists and other data structures that take advantage of generic types.

New for Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++ developers

• Build web applications using AJAX with VCL for the Web – VCL for the Web lets you quickly and visually build interactive and responsive web pages that support AJAX techniques.
• Blackfish SQL database and deployment license – Freely deploy your applications with the included Blackfish SQL embedded database. Blackfish SQL is a fully managed SQL-compliant highly portable, embedded database that can be deployed with your application.
  • CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Enterprise and Architect include unlimited Blackfish SQL database deployment on systems with 1 CPU, up to 5 users / 20 connections, and support for databases up to 2GB.
  • CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Professional includes unlimited Blackfish SQL desktop database deployment on systems with 1 CPU, for 1 user / 4 connections, and support for databases up to 512 MB.

New for C++ developers
C++Builder leaps forward with full support of the Windows Vista API, easy creation of web applications that support AJAX, and streamlined enterprise database connectivity. Plus, save time by developing once on your choice of Windows 2000, XP, or Vista and deploy to all. Other new features include:

• Improved compiler and debugging – You get the latest standards with improved conformance and compatibility to ANSI C++, Dinkumware and Boost Library.
• Indy 10 Internet suite – We’ve updated our sockets library to the Indy 10 Internet Protocol Suite including client and server support for TCP, UDP, raw sockets, as well as over 100 higher level protocols such as SMTP, POP3, NNTP, HTTP, and many more.
• Faster build times – You’ll radically boost your performance with up to 5x faster in-IDE build performance — as fast as or faster than command line builds.
• IDE enhancements to help you work smarter and faster – IDE enhancements include Virtual Folders, which make it easy for you to visually organize and simplify your project’s file clutter and confusion.
• Unit testing with DUnit – C++Builder 2007 now ships with built-in support for DUnit for improved application stability. The IDE provides wizards that allow you to quickly and easily create unit tests for existing code libraries.
• Complete development solution – In total, CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 provides a comprehensive development solution with new features across the Delphi for .NET, Delphi for Win32 and C++Builder personalities all in one integrated IDE.

CodeGear RAD Studio Professional gives you a highly productive IDE with hundreds of ready-to-use components and features like refactoring, code completion, syntax highlighting, live templates, full-featured debugging, unit testing and local database connectivity to Blackfish SQL, InterBase and MySQL.

CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 combines Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++Builder in one environment for rapidly developing Windows and .NET 2.0 applications on and for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. You get all the tools you need to create AJAX powered web pages using ASP.NET 2.0 and VCL for the Web and database applications with local database connectivity. And deploy your applications, with no additional charges, on the Windows platform or your choice.

CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Rapid Development of Native Windows and .NET applications

• Includes Delphi, Delphi for .NET and C++Builder
• Build AJAX powered websites with ASP.NET 2.0 and VCL for the Web
• Blackfish SQL – the managed SQL database with support for Delphi language stored procedures and triggers
• Delphi for .NET language support for parameterized types

WHAT’S NEW IN CODEGEAR RAD STUDIO 2007
Includes Delphi for Win32, Delphi for .NET and C++Builder

NEW FOR DELPHI FOR .NET DEVELOPERS

• .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 – RAD Studio 2007 supports ASP.NET and VCL.NET within Delphi. New in Delphi for .NET are ASP.NET templates that provide numerous pre-built templates to significantly accelerate your start-from-scratch velocity for building ASP.NET applications.
• Enterprise Core Objects (ECO) IV – ECO IV creates a transparent way for objects to persist in the database, with Object persistence, Object Relational mapping and object transaction all wrapped in a Model Driven Development (MDD) framework.
• Parameterized types (Generics) in Delphi for .NET – New support for creation and consumption of parameterized types (Generics) in Delphi for .NET so you can write collections, lists and other data structures that take advantage of generic types.

New for Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++ developers

• Build web applications using AJAX with VCL for the Web – VCL for the Web lets you quickly and visually build interactive and responsive web pages that support AJAX techniques.
• Blackfish SQL database and deployment license – Freely deploy your applications with the included Blackfish SQL embedded database. Blackfish SQL is a fully managed SQL-compliant highly portable, embedded database that can be deployed with your application.
  • CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Enterprise and Architect include unlimited Blackfish SQL database deployment on systems with 1 CPU, up to 5 users / 20 connections, and support for databases up to 2GB.
  • CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 Professional includes unlimited Blackfish SQL desktop database deployment on systems with 1 CPU, for 1 user / 4 connections, and support for databases up to 512 MB.

New for C++ developers
C++Builder leaps forward with full support of the Windows Vista API, easy creation of web applications that support AJAX, and streamlined enterprise database connectivity. Plus, save time by developing once on your choice of Windows 2000, XP, or Vista and deploy to all. Other new features include:

• Improved compiler and debugging – You get the latest standards with improved conformance and compatibility to ANSI C++, Dinkumware and Boost Library.
• Indy 10 Internet suite – We’ve updated our sockets library to the Indy 10 Internet Protocol Suite including client and server support for TCP, UDP, raw sockets, as well as over 100 higher level protocols such as SMTP, POP3, NNTP, HTTP, and many more.
• Faster build times – You’ll radically boost your performance with up to 5x faster in-IDE build performance — as fast as or faster than command line builds.
• IDE enhancements to help you work smarter and faster – IDE enhancements include Virtual Folders, which make it easy for you to visually organize and simplify your project’s file clutter and confusion.
• Unit testing with DUnit – C++Builder 2007 now ships with built-in support for DUnit for improved application stability. The IDE provides wizards that allow you to quickly and easily create unit tests for existing code libraries.
• Complete development solution – In total, CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 provides a comprehensive development solution with new features across the Delphi for .NET, Delphi for Win32 and C++Builder personalities all in one integrated IDE.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1884/Development_Software/CodeGear_RADStudio_2007_v11.html

I know… I’m way behind on this one! Back in January 2006 I contacted Ahead Software, the makers of Nero (the CD/DVD burning software) asking to do a review. They promptly sent me the packaged product in the mail along with some PR material. I started to use it right away, and have been impressed with it every step of the way. The product has been updated a couple of times since then, and just recently it was announced that version 8 would be coming out soon (it’s out now). After having the product for 2 years, I figured it was about time I put something together.

This may sound like a lame excuse, but the biggest problem with doing a review for this product, was the number of features there were in the product. At one point or another, the suite came with the following features:

• Nero Home
• Nero Burning ROM
• Nero Scout
• Nero StartSmart
• Nero Express
• Nero Vision
• Nero Recode
• Nero Wave Editor
• Nero SoundTrax
• Nero Cover Designer
• Nero ShowTime
• Nero PhotoShow Express
• Nero PhotoSnap
• Nero PhotoSnap Viewer
• Nero MediaHome
• InCD
• InCD Reader
• Nero ImageDrive
• Nero BackItUp

Over time, I’ve had a chance to use many of the features. In previous version of the suite, Nero Burning ROM was the star. It is a powerful CD/DVD burning utility that gives you access to a lot of different options. However, most users will use Nero StartSmart and Nero Express. Nero StartSmart is a front-end program that runs and from there you choose what you’d like to do and then the appropriate program starts. There is a regular user mode and a “geek” mode that offers more options. More often than not, you end up using Nero Express. This is the wizard-driven CD/DVD burning utility. I use this for almost all of my burning. It is very easy to use.

Nero Vision is the DVD authoring tool. You can use this program to create a DVD that is playable in a standard DVD player. You can import video either directly from a video camera or by choosing existing video files on your computer. You then have options for create menus, chapters, and more. Burning a DVD for use in this way takes much longer than creating a data DVD as the movie usually needs to be recoded to fit on the disk better. I’ve used this tool to create my own DVDs. It took some practice to understand the different features, but the end products look very nice.

Nero PhotoSnap with the associated viewer is an image editing/viewing program. This was a bonus program as I wasn’t expecting it in the package. Ahead Software has turned Nero into an all-encompassing multimedia suite of tools, so an imaging program was needed. One of the best things about the program is that it reads many different image formats. For instance, I had some Photoshop files (PSD) on my memory stick, and Nero was able to display the files.

The packaged product came in a very cool box and a QuickStart Guide that described the programs it came with. The basic requirements are for a PIII 800MHz processor with 128 MB of RAM. Depending on what features of the program, higher speeds are recommended. The install itself takes up to 600MB, but it is recommended there be 9GB or more free space for working with videos. At the initial release of version 7, the program still worked with Windows 98.

As I mentioned at the beginning, with version 8 out now, all of this information is out-dated. But if history proves anything, it will be that version 8 will be even better. I’ve used the last 3 version of the Nero suite, and the program has always been stable and each new version has included useful new features. If you don’t want to spend the money on version 8, but can get you hands on Nero 7 for a good price, it will be well worth the price.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P37/CD-DVD_Tools/Nero_7_0_Ultra_Edition.html

Apple Service Diagnostic is a diagnostic tool for detecting problems with your computer’s internal hardware components such as the logic board, memory, and video RAM. It does not check externally connected hardware components such as USB devices or FireWire devices; it does not check non-Apple devices such as PCI cards from other vendors.

Before using Apple Service Diagnostic, disconnect external devices (excluding Apple keyboard, mouse, and display), and remove any non-Apple cards that were not included in the original shipping configuration of your system. It is also recommended that you disconnect any Ethernet network cables.

Apple Service Diagnostic does not check your computer for problems with the Operating System (OS) or other software related problems such as application or extension conflicts.

To use the Apple Service Diagnostic, restart your computer while holding down the C key until the “Loading…” screen appears, then you may release the C key. Loading will take approximately 30 seconds. The Apple Service Diagnostic main screen will appear.

Apple Service Diagnostic for Xserve version 1.0 is distributed only with the Apple Xserve, and will not work with any other computer.

If you suspect your computer has a hardware problem, the information provided by Apple Service Diagnostic can help identify the problem. If Apple Service Diagnostic detects a problem, an error will be displayed. Please make a note of the error before pursuing support options. If no hardware failure is detected, the problem may be software related.

Known Issues

While testing the Video RAM, the screen display may appear blank or appear to be turned off for extended periods of time, depending on how much Video RAM is installed; this is normal.

Recommendations

Apple Service Diagnostic is one of several tools and procedures you can use when your Macintosh is having trouble. Here are some steps you can follow to help resolve problems. Please back up your data before performing any of these steps.

1. Turn the computer off and on.
You can often eliminate problems by selecting the “Shut Down” option from the Apple menu to fully shut down the CPU, then restarting your system.

2. Check cables, peripherals, and user controls.
Shut down your computer. Then disconnect and reconnect all cables. Disconnect all peripherals (such as printers, scanners, cameras and external mass storage devices) to see if they are causing conflicts with your system. Adjust user controls on your monitors and other peripherals to see if this helps.

3. Start up from the Apple Service Diagnostic CD.
If the system does not work properly when started (booted) from a known-good system CD, you can generally assume that the problem relates to your computer’s hardware components. The Apple Service Diagnostic CD can often be used to start up your computer even if it will not boot into the Mac OS. If Apple Service Diagnostic passes tests, the problem may be software related. If Apple Service Diagnostic detects a problem, make a note of the error.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P714/Macintosh_Software/Service_Diagnostic_v2_63.html

Create and produce music like a pro

Create your own music using an advanced spectrum of features and tools for computer based music production. Logic Express provides a step up from GarageBand for aspiring musicians, producers and composers without breaking the bank. With the same flexible layout as Logic Pro, you can dive deeper into the creation and manipulation of audio and MIDI.

Logic Express lets you produce a convincing demo of your band, create a remix of your favorite track or score QuickTime movies. This affordable virtual studio integrates a rich feature set for both music and audio production in one application. In addition to the Apple Loops you’re familiar with from GarageBand, you’ll enjoy the wide variety of software instruments. These provide, for example, faithful emulations of vintage keyboard classics as well as synthetic sounds, ranging from digital to virtual analog. Composers and music theory teachers will also appreciate the full-featured score editor.

Grow Your Own Loops
Aspiring remixers and electronic music composers can’t live without loops. Logic Express offers the familiar Apple Loops browser of GarageBand, hosting a multitude of Apple Loops. Browse quickly through the largest libraries simply by specifying instrument, genre or mood. Preview them instantly at your song’s tempo and pitch. Logic Express configures the channel strip automatically for Apple Loops on software instrument tracks. What’s more, you can construct your own Apple Loops from conventional audio files such as recordings or bounced phrases produced with software instruments using the Apple Loop Utility.

High-Quality Software Instruments and Plug-Ins
For in-depth sound creations, the range of synthesizers provided in Logic Express proves itself as a priceless resource. Offering a richer set of parameters, they feature precise control on every single shade of the sound. Seamlessly integrated in the Track Mixer, you can effortlessly record and edit parameter changes. The stylish, accessible FM synthesizer EFM1 creates a wide range of digital sounds that characterized the music of the 80s. Generating the sounds from frequency modulation technology, you can play crystal-clear bells as well as deep bass or string pads. The virtual analog beast ES1 provides sounds to enrich every production – from massive basses to rich pads or ultra-sharp percussion. Plug-ins like EQ and Reverb provide precision treatment of your sound. Others, such as the Autofilter and Guitar Amp, invite you to experiment wildly.

Total Score
Songwriters can produce impressive demo songs by incorporating audio recordings, sample-based sounds and virtual instruments entirely on the computer. But users will find it easy to share compositions with other musicians in a traditional way with Logic Express as well, since it now houses the full-featured score editor from Logic Pro, for simply stunning results.

Logic Express 7.2 Specifications

37 high-quality audio plug-ins including Guitar Amp, Channel EQ and PlatinumVerb
18 expressive software instruments including EXSP24 mk II sample player, ES1, EFM1 and all the GarageBand instruments
Over 1,000 Bundled Apple Loops
Audio resolution of up to 24-bit/96 kHz
Up to 255 stereo tracks
Up to 64 simultaneous software instruments
Track Freeze to expand plug-in capacity
Support for up to 12 input and output audio channels
8 buses
Score editor with comprehensive notation creation, editing, and printing
Adaptive Track Mixer that displays tracks in use
5 unique windows for MIDI editing and processing
High-resolution automation system for mixing, effects, and software instruments
User-definable key and MIDI commands
Screensets and interactive edit windows
Setup Assistant for easy system configuration
MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless import and export
Universal application runs on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macintosh computers

System Requirements:

512MB of RAM
Mac OS X v10.4.3 or later
QuickTime 7.0.3 or later
6GB of available hard drive space
DVD drive for software installation
Low-latency multi-I/O audio hardware and MIDI interface recommended
1 USB or MIDI controller recommended
2 Separate audio interface required

3 Separate hard drive recommended for high-resolution audio tracks

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1416/Digital_Audio/Logic_Express_7_2.html

Apple Remote Desktop has always been a great, and useful tool, even back to it’s ANAT days. Back in the mid 90’s, the Apple Network Administrator’s Toolkit was mainly a window sharing, observation and control tool best suited for school lab environments. It grew into Apple Remote Desktop, adding features and usefulness to more and larger labs, as well as adding features that made it more attractive to business installations.

It’s here!

Version 2.2 had a great feature set; sending Unix commands and getting the results back, installation of .pkg and .mpkg installers, and a myriad of other goodies, some of which even worked. With the release of version 3, Apple has stepped it up again. Improvements to the GUI, layout of the tools, better command and control, and reporting that even works!

New and improved

The interface of ARD 3 is, we think, a great improvement over 2.2. The one thing that might catch you is the smaller size of the text. If you’re squinting now to read the screen, it’s time to up the prescription. Figure 1 below shows the old ARD 2.2 interface, figure 2 shows the ARD 3 window.

One of the great things about the main window of Remote Desktop 3 is the amount of information available. At a glance, you get a better snapshot of the state of your client systems. Much better than what the 2.2 GUI showed you.

Another enhancement is the listing of scheduled, active, and past actions taken. In 2.2, actively running tasks and the history were displayed in a pane of the main window below the client list. When you clicked on the Saved Tasks icon, the main window was completely replaced with that listing. Now, those

Figure 1: ARD 2.2 main window

features are listed in the left column (the bottom pane of the main window is gone altogether now) in hierarchical lists. In 2.2, the history would clear every time the program was quit and

Figure 2: ARD 3 main window

relaunched, but now you can set, in the preferences, how many and/or for how long the history will preserve.

Yes, you can actually know what’s there

With ARD 2.2, there was the potential for some great reporting tools. They didn’t happen to actually work, however. Some admins were able to get reports back, some of the time. Most were not. You had to resort to shooting out various Unix commands and deciphering the results to glean useful inventory and other data from client machines. Now, however, reporting actually works reliably.

There are a myriad of reports you can query the client systems on, gather and hold that data in a SQL database. That database can live either on the administrator’s workstation, or on a Task Server (see below). Also, because the database is standard SQL, you can run custom queries, scripts, and reports against it, exporting that data for use in other applications.

All the usual reports are there. Versions, system overviews, hardware, and software differences, among others. A new feature in ARD 3 is the ability to use Spotlight to query for specific files and folders, the information updating as changes occur on the client systems.

Task Master

New to version 3.0 is the Task Server. What this feature boils down to is the ability to off-load scheduled tasks (reporting, installations, etc.) to another copy of ARD running on a server. This lets you free up an administrator workstation, lets multiple admins run various task from a single location, and lets you consolidate your inventory and reporting data. By running

Figure 3: Setting up a memory report

Figure 4: Gathering the report data

all of that from a Task Server, you have everything residing in a single SQL database.

It’s scriptable

The Remote Desktop application now has a fairly extensive AppleScript library attached to it. You can control and command ARD for most things using AppleScript, although it does lack in a few areas, such as reporting and application preferences. Apple includes a fairly long list of prebuilt Automator actions that make use of the AppleScript dictionary. MacTech columnist John Welch has good coverage of the AppleScript integration, as well as several example scripts up on his web site, <www.bynkii.com>. Look in the April archives. You can get a look at the Apple included Automator functions by opening the up the app’s contents, then navigating through the Library, to the Automator directory (Figure 5). We’re willing to bet that AppleScript and Automator support are going to be the new features, along with the Task Server, that will really make a difference for admins as time goes on.

Figure 5: The location of the included Automator actions in ARD

Complete copy

Added in Remote Desktop 3 are more options for copying files to client machines. Before, it was copy replace, and little more. Now, as you can see in Figure 6 below, there are several more options provided, most notable being the ability to encrypt the data as it is streamed over the network. This can be particularly useful for transmitting sensitive data over open networks. The encryption of copies, as well as commands, lets you send out password data without having to worry about it being sniffed out, compromising your systems.

Roll your own

While it would be nice for either all third party vendors to provide their installers in .pkg format, or for Apple to include support for the myriad other installers available out there, it just isn’t so. That’s not the end of it, however. Package Maker has been a part of Xcode from day one, and with version 3, it is now included in the install of ARD (for both 10.3 and 10.4). We won’t go into detail on Package Maker here (that’s a whole separate article’s worth of information), but suffice it to say, it’s an incredibly useful tool for getting files, and updates out to the clients. There are also instructions, beginning on page 108 of the user manual, for what to do to get third party installers run on clients.

docs

There is a very thorough and complete manual provided in PDF format with Remote Desktop 3. At 184 pages, it is heftier than you would think it needs to be, but provides plenty of information for both new ARD admins, as well as old hands. It

Figure 6: The copy set up window.

Figure 7: Package Maker

covers areas including setting up admin access privileges using Directory Services (pgs. 62-65), VNC control set up and options (Chapter 7), and PostgreSQL Schema Samples (Appendix D), among many others. Making sure to keep TCP and UDP ports 3238 and 5900 open (mentioned several times in the manual) helped us out during testing.

Best of the Rest

Of course, there are tons more features in version 3 than just those listed above. Scheduling, messaging, locking out computers, computer smart lists (like those you’d find in iTunes), observing (one or more systems) and controlling, to name a few. Some are familiar to users of earlier versions, some are new, but all of them are useful, and make the program ever more valuable.

Figure 8: Observation of multiple client computers with status icons displayed

In Closing

At $499 for one admin seat that will control an unlimited number of clients, ARD is a steal. For $1000, you can set up a Task Server, have an admin workstation, and be able to manage, control, assist, update, and inventory any number of computers. Reporting that works, and AppleScript integration alone are more than worth the price of admission. Task Server is icing on the cake. If you manage any number of Macs, Apple Remote Desktop is quite simply a tool you cannot do without. We can’t recommend it enough.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1508/Macintosh_Software/Remote_Desktop_v3_1_Mac_OsX.html

If you asked Mac IT people what previous versions of Mac OS X Server have been missing, a calendar server would be at the top of most lists. Mac OS X 10.5 Server fills that gap.

For the most part, iCal Server is easy to set up. The only big problem we had was trying to get delegation – which enables users to access and edit each others’ calendars – to work.

Part of the problem could have been our particular setup (we had Mac OS X Server participating in a Windows Active Directory network). Even though the problems aren’t endemic to iCal Server, be aware that delegation in iCal Server can be fragile.

The other big issue with iCal Server is in its support for the CalDAV group-scheduling standard. Right now, iCal 3.0 – the version that comes with OS X 10.5 Leopard – is the best CalDAV client for the Mac. That means clients on your network will have to be running OS X 10.5 to get the full benefits of OS X 10.5 Server’s calendaring services.

If your company is all-Mac, that iCal-requirement probably won’t be a big issue; just make sure all your clients have upgraded to Leopard. But if you’re in a mixed environment, or if you’re switching from some other group-calendaring platform (such as Exchange), iCal Server could be limiting. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t directly support CalDAV; the plug-ins that would allow this are still being developed. Without Outlook support, trying to combine Windows calendaring clients with iCal Server is more work that many small- or medium-sized companies will want to take on.

Mac OS X 10.5 Server also provides several improvements to its iChat service. For many companies, its new logging tools will be the biggest change. If you have to deal with the myriad corporate regulations about data retention, chat logs are a requirement if you’re going to provide IM services on your network. You could log chats in Mac OS X 10.4 Server, but it required third-party software and setup was not simple.

With Mac OS X 10.5, logging just another option in the administration interface. The new iChat Server also offers “store and forward” messaging, so offline users can collect instant messages. Finally, you can set up iChat server to talk to other IM services via federation; unfortunately, the only major public IM services with which iChat Server can currently federate is Google’s.

In an all-Mac environment, iChat Server is a great way to implement instant messaging. But as with the calendaring service, it’s trickier if you’re in a heterogeneous environment.

Since iChat server is based on the Jabber protocol, you have to use a Jabber-compatible client. While there are many such clients available for text chat functionality, support for file transfers and A/V is more hit and miss.

Mac OS X 10.4 Server offered decent, if limited, support for blogging. With Mac OS X 10.5 Server, Apple has revamped that support. It’s easy for network users to set up wikis (collaboratively edited documents) quickly, with the ability to track changes, revisions and users. Wikis are perfect for creating company documentation; for example, we use them to develop online IT manuals.

Mac OS X 10.5 Server’s implementation is simple to use; it doesn’t, for example, require any special coding. You can define different levels of access, so you can lock down who gets to write and edit.

Mac OS X 10.5 Server makes it easier to implement these and other services by offering several new installation types; these let you install Mac OS X Server without having to manually configure every detail of every service. The “Simple” and “Workgroup” installation types allow you to quickly set up servers either in standalone mode or as part of an existing directory service.

You manage these new installation types using the new Server Preferences administration utility. Server Preferences looks and works like Mac OS X’s System Preferences, allowing you to manage services quickly and relatively easily. Neither the Simple nor the Workgroup installation offer access to every service Mac OS X 10.5 Server provides, but that’s the idea: that you don’t need every service. To access all of Mac OS X 10.5 Server’s services, you can still use the Advanced installation type.

These new installation types are handy, but they do have some problems. For example, if you upgrade a Workgroup installation to Advanced, you can’t revert it to Workgroup. To administer Advanced installations, you have to use the Server Admin application instead of the simpler Server Preferences.

That said, Server Admin has received a major facelift. The UI has been changed to better deal with large numbers of servers, and it has better monitoring features to help you keep tabs on those servers.

There are also new Dashboard widgets that show you the state of your servers at a glance.

For more advanced installations, you use the Server Admin utility to manage services; for managing users and groups, you use the Workgroup Manager

But the management interface isn’t yet seamless. For example, if you want to manage services, you use Server Admin. But if you want to manage users, groups, and machines, you need to use Workgroup Manager.

Both Server Admin and Workgroup Manager rely on Open Directory, Apple’s LDAP-based directory service. But if you want to see the actual directory records, you can only use Workgroup Manager or the command line.

The Workgroup Manager interface itself is quirky. For example, when you increase the size of its window, only one part of the window actually expands. You can’t view your directory as a directory; you can only view individual containers within the directory.

In Active Directory and Novell’s eDirectory, moving users or machines between groups and containers is a simple drag-and-drop operation; Mac OS X 10.5 Server requires a more complicated multi-step process in the GUI or use of the command line.

Finally, you can’t use Mac OS X 10.5 Server’s administrator tools to manage Mac OS X 10.4 Server or older without upgrading those servers to Mac OS X Server 10.4.11; that limits its usefulness as the backbone of a larger network.

Mac OS X 10.5 Server has been improved in some ways when it comes to working in heterogeneous environments. Active Directory integration now allows both server and client versions of Mac OS X 10.5 to work correctly with Windows SMB packet signing. In addition, Apple has introduced the concept of “augmented” users, or users imported from other directory services.

This makes managing Mac users in non-Apple environments easier. In my testing, I found I could manage Active Directory users within my Mac environment almost as easily as Mac-only users.

System requirements

Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor; 1GB RAM; 20GB hard disk space

Verdict

Is Mac OS X 10.5 Server worth the £319 retail price (for the 10 file-sharing user version; an unlimited client version, no CALs required, sells for £629)? (If you buy a new Xserve, you get it for free.) It depends. If you don’t already have a directory service or dedicated servers, and are just now thinking about implementing such things for the first time, Mac OS X 10.5 Server is a compelling product; just keep in mind that some of its services don’t work as well as they should in a heterogeneous environment. On the other hand, if you’re an experienced administrator, you’ll likely be frustrated by the limitations in Apple’s GUI server tools; fortunately, OS X Server is based on Unix, so you can have all the control you want via the command line.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1955/Macintosh_Software/Mac_OSX_Leopard_Server_v10_5.html

OSNews reviews Apple’s latest OS upgrade. Is it an overpriced, glorified point release or a truly worthy upgrade with major new functionality? Is it a Longhorn killer or just more of the same? We’ll take a look, and try to see what’s on the surface as well as what’s under the hood.

First, a disclosure: I’m a dedicated fan of Mac OS X, though a daily user of a Windows desktop and Linux server. My personal machine, a 1.25 GHz 15″ Powerbook with 1 GB of RAM, is the seventh Powerbook I’ve owned. Just as I have enjoyed the highs (2300c, current 15″ Aluminum) and lows (5300) of the Powerbook line, I’ve done the same with the Mac OS. I was one of the many Mac users who was losing patience with the old Mac OS, which had gone downhill since version 7.6, and was very excited about OS X, only to be a bit disappointed with its real-world quirks. But, just as it’s a really good time to be a long-time Apple stockholder today, it’s a really good time to be a Mac user.

Across the board, today’s crop of Apple hardware is beautifully conceived, well-built, and priced fairly. The Mini and the iBook, in particular, are machines that I would recommend to anyone who needs a new computer and is interested in trying out the Mac. And Tiger, the latest version of the Mac OS, is a very good operating system.

Bloat is a common problem in software today. Software companies only make money if they sell software, and since software doesn’t get used up or wear out, like a tube of toothpaste or a pair of shoes, the only way companies can earn more money from current customers is to make people buy newer versions. Aside from the dirty tricks that some companies use to force upgrades, the most common way to entice users is to add functionality. Sometimes this added functionality is superfluous, even useless, and often its presence only serves to make the software larger, slower, less stable, and less usable. That’s called bloat, and users complain about it all the time. We’ve become accustomed to new versions of software requiring faster hardware to run slower with each new release. With the Mac OS, Apple has been bucking the trend. Each version seems a bit cleaner and runs a bit quicker than the last.

A cynic would say that each version of the Mac OS is cleaner and faster only because the earliest versions were so slow and cobbled-together that there was huge room for improvement. And that cynic would be partially right. Turing the already-aging NeXT OS into Apple’s “modern” OS was a huge task, and I’m sure developers took many shortcuts to make it happen on schedule. But every version since 10.1 has been perfectly serviceable by today’s operating system standards (which are pretty low). Tiger continues this trend, as expected. On my same old Powerbook, everyday tasks happen just a bit quicker, and the dreaded “spinning beachball” that appears when the system is bogged down or even frozen has rarely showed its face in the four days I’ve been using the new OS. I don’t have any scientific benchmarks, just plain old subjective observation, but Tiger is faster and a bit less prone to hiccups than Panther was.A couple of the areas where Mac OS X 10.3 felt especially slow when compared to other platforms and technologies — web browsing and search — have been improved dramatically. Browsing with Firefox or IE on Windows has been faster for as long as I can remember. For most of my time as a part time Mac/part time Windows user, I have generally liked the functionality of the Mac browsers better, even preferring the Mac version of IE to the Windows one, features-wise, but lamenting the fact that page rendering performance on Windows was generally better. Especially as Mac IE was stagnating and before Safari came out, this was particularly painful. Safari was a great step forward, but I still recognized that Windows was snappier. No more. My non-scientific tests with Safari 2.0, new in Tiger, and Firefox 1.0.3 and IE 6.0 on Windows XP find very little difference in perceivable rendering speeds across the board. Some browsers render some sites a bit more quickly, but there is no clear loser. Safari 1.x was clearly slower on most sites.

Similarly, though the native Windows search feature has never been particularly good, the arrival on the scene of Google Desktop Search and its ilk have raised the bar significantly. Apple’s new Spotlight feature is a fast new indexed search that is perhaps still not as mind-blowingly fast as Google’s appears to be, but is much more useful. A Spotlight search for “business plan” on my hard drive yields up not only the various MS Office documents related to schemes past that are buried on my drive, but also email messages, PDFs, and other files that mention the term. Spotlight also indexes my iCal events, Address Book entries, images, and Safari bookmarks. It’s not only one stop shopping, but its various tools for narrowing searches by date, location, and kind are so intuitive that I predict that within 18 months every desktop operating system will be copying it. Keeping track of 80 Gigs of old crap has never been easier..

Now one thing that I noticed immediately about Spotlight is that it hijacked the command-space key combination that the groundbreaking utility Launchbar originally used. I consider Launchbar, or its work-alike cousin Quicksilver, to be the number one most essential Mac OS utility of all time. I mean that. What these apps do is essentially allow you to bring up any application (or launch a bookmark, compose an email to someone on your list, or perform other tasks) merely by typing in the first few letters of the name. When I want to launch Photoshop, I type command-space, then P-H-O in rapid succession, hit return, and Photoshop launches. It’s such a vastly superior method for an experienced computer user to do perform common tasks, compared to putzing around with the mouse and menus, that I can’t believe I ever lived without it. It’s the marriage of the best qualities of the GUI and CLI.

Apple’s appropriation of Launchbar’s default key combo is no accident. Spotlight, in practice, works the same way as Lanuchbar. Its menu even pops out of the same corner of the screen. Spotlight can be used as an everyday tool to launch applications, bring up sites in your bookmarks, play iTunes songs, etc. But because Spotlight is more ambitious than Launchbar, it’s quite a bit slower, because it’s pulling up a lot more stuff when you search for P-H-O. You can customize Spotlight so it only indexes a few types of items, thus making it work more like Launchbar or Quicksilver, but that makes it less useful for what it’s really good for. I ended up changing the key combo of Spotlight, and keeping Quicksilver set to the old command-space key combo that I originally became accustomed to with Launchbar.

So Apple’s up to its old tricks again, systematically cribbing the cool ideas from essential shareware apps and integrating them into the OS, just as it did with Watson/Sherlock. But just as Sherlock was enough like Watson to kill it off but not enough like it to be a complete replacement, Spotlight is too feature-rich to replace Launchbar or Quicksilver for me.

On the subject of Apple ripping off ideas for shareware apps, one of Apple’s most visible new features is Dashboard, which is nifty, but mostly for eye candy purposes. The push of a button superimposes several handy “widgets” over the desktop: a cute clock, a calendar, a nice weather forecast, and a calculator, with the ability to activate and download others. The coolest part is when you add a new one, it’s “dropped” onto the screen with a ripple like water. Wow! It’s beautifully conceived, and should prove to be handy.

It’s also a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, a shareware app. But Konfabulator costs money, and Dashboard is better-integrated and even more beautiful. So while Apple’s appropriation of ideas from the shareware sphere might be bad news for those developers, overall it’s a big plus for Mac users. And while I’m personally sympathetic for their plight, I don’t fault Apple for doing it. They have to get cool new features from somewhere. Heaven knows that once one person has thought up something cool to do with software, eventually everyone else will copy it. It’s a logical progression: Mac Shareware authors –> Apple –> Microsoft –> Linux. (Just kidding, everyone!) But if we were to try to prevent it, we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot by stifling innovation. So, sorry Launchbar and Konfabulator developers. Imitation is the best form of flattery, and your ideas were really cool. Just hope that Apple never gets around to completely replicating your functionality.

On the subject of eye candy, Tiger sports a refined user interface, with somewhat flattened and softened features. I still hate the brushed metal, and it’s still used all over the place for no good reason, but overall the subtle UI changes make Tiger look different enough to be distinctive, and a little better looking, in my subjective opinion.

In addition to the speed increases I mentioned before, Safari 2.0 also has integrated RSS support. I’ve only started playing around with RSS recently, and the way that Safari implements its support is a little different than I’m used to. You can set folders on the bookmarks bar and fill them with RSS feeds on different subjects and view them all together, which is handy, but Safari’s implementation doesn’t lend itself to at-a-glance monitoring of dozens of different feeds as well as NetNewsWire, the most popular RSS aggregator for OS X. Safari does display it very prominently when sites have RSS feeds available, though, so I think this added functionality will do a lot to promote RSS use among Mac users.

One of the nifty features in Tiger that hasn’t generated much buzz yet is Automator. Now, the Mac OS has always had some powerful automation capabilities thanks to the powerful but misunderstood Applescript. But I’m about as experienced a Mac user as you can get and every time I’ve tried to do anything meaningful with Applescript it’s ended in frustration. Automator takes a lot of the capabilities that have been there all along and integrates them into an easy-to-understand drag and drop environment. Not only can you automate file-management and other OS tasks, but also most actions in the standard Apple applications, such as Mail and the iApps. I guess you can say it’s Xcode for non-programmers. While it may not prove to be quite the tool that Perl is to Unix hackers, I’m waiting eagerly for an opportunity to need Automator for something.

iChat AV has some cool enhancements, like audio and video conferences with multiple participants, but I don’t have an iSight, so I didn’t try the multi-screen videoconference. Thanks to Quicktime 7, iChat and other A/V applications have various under-the-hood improvements for higher quality audio and video. iChat also now includes support for Jabber as well as AIM.

Apple touts Tiger’s “200+” new features, and they’re not lying, though many of them are more along the order of small tweaks. There are some useful new network utilities, new functionality for Mail, Address Book, iCal, and other integrated apps, and some under-the-hood improvements like secure WebDAV, improved SMP capabilities, 64 bit VM, and some cross-platform networking improvements, to name a few.The only problem that I had doing the upgrade from Panther was with one of these “improved” applications. I did an “archive and install” upgrade, preserving my settings, but when I booted into Tiger and launched Mail, not only were my several years of organized messages not properly imported into the new version of Mail, the Mail application was sluggish and refused to quit when asked. I was forced to trash the mail database and re-import my messages manually, from three different repositories, associated with different email accounts. Everything seems to be working well now, and it’s probably a result of my convoluted setup with five years of archived mail that had been imported from Entourage a while back. The new Mail version has a new look, and a bunch of new features, apparently, but none that I need or use.

Since the announcement of Tiger, some have been quick to complain, yet again, that Apple is charging another $129 for a new version that doesn’t seem to be all that much different than the old one. Is Tiger as much of an improvement over 10.3 as Longhorn is supposed to be over XP? Well, we’ll see what features Longhorn actually ends up having before we answer that. Frankly, I think that all of the myriad non-sexy, under-the-hood improvements that result in modest speed and functionality improvements the OS and its included utilities and apps like Safari would qualify Tiger for major-release status by themselves. The nifty new applications like Spotlight and Dashboard are just icing on the cake.

Back on the subject of bloat, why does bloat happen anyway? It’s because consumers become obsessed with receiving flashy new features for their upgrade dollars instead of demanding basic, incremental advancements in the core functionality. I guess it’s the same reason why the redesign of a car’s sheet metal exterior excites much more passion than a 15% increase in efficiency and horsepower and several minor new safety features would.

The new Mac OS has just enough flash to get people’s attention and make you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth, while the real value is in the “200+” minor improvements across the board. I think that Tiger is a lot more like Windows XP was to 2000 than SP2 was to SP1, despite what anti-Apple nay-sayers proclaim. Of course, there are many people who still believe that Windows XP wasn’t that much of an improvement over Windows 2000 (or was a step back), and I think the same could be said for Tiger, but honestly, you’re not going to find people in six months pining for Panther. Tiger is all around better.

On the other hand, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, and Panther is still a pretty good OS, so there’s no reason to rush out and buy it unless you’re like me and have to have the latest and greatest. Are you planning on buying a new Powerbook when the next crop comes out? You might want to save your $129 and just wait to get it for free with your new computer. Likewise, if you’ve been on the fence about buying a new Mac Mini, you might just want to buy one now, and get Tiger thrown in with the deal.

So is Tiger the end-all-be-all perfect OS? Hardly. As I’d mentioned before, the barrier is still set pretty low, so Tiger does look pretty good in comparison, but there is still plenty of room for improvement, in usability, performance, and functionality. Faster as it may be, it’s still not as snappy as the BeOS, or possibly even Windows Server 2003 for that matter.

It also still has some annoying usability quirks and I’m not talking about matters of UI dogma like universal toolbars, but rather some lapses in the Finder’s otherwise excellent usability, such as the dock that’s still too big, too centered, in the wrong place, in the way, that performs too many roles, and fails to differentiate between them properly. It’s all easily solvable by making it smaller, pinning it to the right bottom of the screen using Tinkertool, and only using it as a small visual indicator of open applications, with Launchbar/Quicksilver/Spotlight as the way of opening new ones, but why should I have to fight the defaults and use two or three separate hacks just to make application selection work right? And the Finder is still choked with superfluous functions that I rarely if ever use, file browsing is still a little clunky, and support for previewing multimedia files in the Finder is still a bit weak compared to Windows. And did I mention the ugly brushed metal interface and how it seems to be implemented willy-nilly for no reason?

What I really can’t figure out is why, when Apple has been so eager to pillage the shareware world for nifty eye candy like Konfabulator/Dashboard, why are there still aspects of everyday usability that aren’t build into the OS? How about a good, transparent backup utility, for example? Is that not one of the most important things that a typical computer user never ever does? How about support for more IM protocols in iChat? And why isn’t there more capability to customize the look and feel of the Mac experience? I’d like to remove or move around some of the menu options, get rid of the dreaded brushed metal, and, you know, make the place my own. Right now it’s half mine and half Steve’s. Steve, it’s time for you to move out. And will you just make an Apple-branded two button scrolling mouse, for goodness sakes! It’s already fully supported int he OS! Jeez!

In conclusion, Tiger is a great OS update, precisely because it’s focused on a raft of incremental improvements rather than ambitious, flashy, ultimately useless features. You may not need to run right out and buy it, but if you do, you won’t be disappointed. It doesn’t solve all of my gripes with the Mac OS, but would it ever? You just can’t be all things to all people, but you can try to build something with a commitment to excellence, and that’s what Apple has done here. I give it a 9/10, knowing that the day an OS earns 10/10 the sky will fall.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1542/Macintosh_Software/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_10_4_9_X86.html

Soundtrack Pro is an audio postproduction triple threat. Introduced at NAB, it’s a robust environment for audio editing, analysis, and effects processing that offers seamless file exchange with Final Cut Pro and Apple’s other professional applications. It’s a powerful platform for loop-based arranging and mixing. And, it can be used as a standalone program for recording one mono or stereo track at a time.

Although Soundtrack Pro can import any Quicktime movie or MPEG-2 file (with QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component installed), it is a dramatic workflow enhancer with Final Cut Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio Pro. Apple’s Final Cut Studio boxed set bundles all four applications together (MSRP $1,299), and Soundtrack Pro can also be purchased as a standalone program (MSRP $299).

Sending a file from Final Cut Pro to Soundtrack Pro is as easy as using a plugin. There are two ways to do this: as an Audio File project or a Multitrack project. Which one you choose depends on what you want to do. Sending the track as an Audio File opens it in Soundtrack Pro’s Waveform editing window, for analysis, processing and editing. Sending it as a Multitrack project opens it in the Project window, where additional tracks can be added and blended with the original track. To send the file from Final Cut Pro, you right-click it and choose Audio File Project or Multitrack Project.

I tried both methods and they each worked perfectly. Audio File Project offers a smooth efficient path for video editors needing to clean up and process an audio track. Multitrack Project gives sound designers and composers an excellent way to bring a video project into a rich audio environment where they can layer and massage sounds across multiple tracks.

Audio File Project

To add effects to a stereo video track in Final Cut Pro, I sent it as an Audio File Project. The track then opened in Soundtrack Pro’s Waveform editor, and I opened the video track in a separate floating utility window for playback in sync with the audio. Soundtrack Pro includes more than 50 effects plugins — professional reverbs, compressors, and EQs — drawn from Apple’s Logic Pro Audio DAW application. I opened the Effects tab on Soundtrack Pro’s Browser pane and found two groups of plugins: Mac OS (Audio Units) and Soundtrack Pro. I went for the Soundtrack Pro collection, where the Logic plugins are.

The audio track in question was hard to hear in places, since it was shot outdoors. But there were several loud passages that redlined when I raised the overall level. Soundtrack Pro’s Multipressor, a compressor that gives control over four frequency bands, did the job — bringing up the overall audibility up while taming the loud passages. For good measure, while I had the file open in Soundtrack Pro, I added an AU High Pass EQ to the track to reduce some low level traffic rumbling below 100Hz.

Then I saved the file, closed Soundtrack Pro, and played the file in Final Cut Pro. The processed audio file was there, with greatly improved clarity. Needless to say, this is a big timesaver compared to exporting the file, importing it into a third-party audio application, editing it, then exporting the edited file from the audio application, and importing it back into the video application.

Multitrack Project

Next, I sent the file to Soundtrack Pro as a Multitrack project. This time, it opened in the timeline-based Project window, where I could add as a many new audio tracks as I wanted. My intention was to add an audio bed, bringing it up in places, and then pulling it back at key dialog moments. The file came into Soundtrack Pro’s Timeline with the video track at the top and the stereo audio track next.

The first thing I did to the file in Soundtrack Pro’s Project window was to place markers around the problem audio sections. I placed other markers around sections I wanted to keep. Markers can be put anywhere by placing the cursor where you want them and pressing the Add Time Marker button at the top of the Project window. Next, I opened the envelope track below the video’s audio track by pressing a small triangular button next to the track name. Double-clicking on the volume envelope creates nodes that act like handles to automate the volume up and down.

Then, for a music bed, I dived into the 5,000 Apple Loops that come with Soundtrack Pro, assembling an uptempo groove with a Prophet bass, a funky guitar and a processed drum kit. Finally, I added volume envelopes to each of the three music tracks to raise their level in areas where the video’s audio track was lowered. The end result was a professional-sounding track; faced with lemons, Soundtrack Pro made lemonade.

Since this was a completely new audio track, saving it would not automatically update Final Cut Pro. The mix must be exported and then imported into Final Cut Pro (or DVD Studio Pro or Motion). This didn’t bother me, because it’s a natural part of the workflow. The multitrack file would have to be mixed down and exported at some point, whether in Soundtrack Pro or Final Cut Pro. And, it should be noted that sending the file straight from Final Cut Pro at the beginning eliminated the export-import step that would have been necessary with a third-party audio editor. After a mix has been imported and saved into Final Cut Pro, it can be sent back to Soundtrack Pro as an Audio File for tweaking if need be. Then when it’s saved it will be automatically updated in Final Cut Pro.

That covers the two main ways of working with Soundtrack Pro. But many other features of this asset-rich program deserve closer examination. I’ve already alluded to the Apple Loops, the audio effects, the editing environment and other aspects, and now we’ll go into more detail.

Loops

The Apple Loops that come with Soundtrack Pro comprise an outstanding collection that adds substantial value to the application. The sound design and Foley libraries cover a wide range of sounds, including people, explosions, transportation and sports & leisure. Plus, an extensive instrument collection spans Classical, Rock, Hip Hop, Country and other genres. Apple Loops automatically match a project’s tempo and key (if they’re tagged for looping), which makes it easy to find appropriate sounds or instrumental loops. You can scroll through the files manually on any drive attached to the computer, search by category, or type in keywords to search for specific instruments or sounds. Clicking on any file will preview it. Clips can be dragged into tracks in the Project window from the Browser or Search tabs in the Media and Effects Manager.

Other loop collections and non-looping audio files can be used, too — Soundtrack Pro handles AIFF, WAV (including ACID loops), MP3, AAC, Sound Designer II and QuickTime (.mov) audio files. The entire library can be made searchable by keyword. Wave or AIFF files can be tagged using the Apple Loops Utility, which converts any looped file to an Apple Loop, and allows MetaTags to be added to non-looping files for indexing in the search engine.

For those who want to supplement the loops by recording their own tracks, Soundtrack Pro is a capable digital audio recorder with support for sample rates up to 24-bit/96kHz — although it records only one track at a time. Mobile recordists can record with Soundtrack Pro on a laptop, and then edit and arrange with Soundtrack Pro in the studio (sync options include MIDI time code and SMPTE). Composers can start with a rhythm track or any looped source, then record additional digital audio tracks directly into the timeline. Those who prefer to record via MIDI will have to use a third-party application, however — Soundtrack Pro does not have MIDI recording and sequencing capability. But it can receive MIDI clock and MTC signals from a MIDI application or external device.

Project Window

The main Project window is a clean interface that eliminates clutter by providing floating window access to important functions such as the Media and Effects Manager, the Waveform editor, the Mixer and the Utility window. This way, only the windows you need are open. Multitrack projects can be started from scratch here by dragging loops and other audio files from the Browser or Search tabs in the Media and Effects Manager. Once in the timeline, clips can be moved left or right to align them with other clips or with video events. Snap properties can be adjusted so that clips will align to Ruler Ticks, Seconds, Frames and Markers — or snapping can be disabled to make small movements possible.

Clips can be viewed at any size in both the Project window and the Waveform editor, using the Timeline view controls at the bottom left. These offer multiple ways to quickly view the entire project or one portion of a clip all the way down to the sample level. A slider control adjusts the horizontal clip width, while four clickable boxes instantly resize the vertical clip height up or down. The Scroll bar not only moves the view left to right, it can also adjust the horizontal view when its edges are moved in or out. At the top of the interface, the Global Timeline view shows the entire Timeline and the playhead position in miniature, and can be used to zip vertically or horizontally through the project. Finally, a handy little button at the very top of the interface called Fit in Window offers a one-click project overview.

Effects

When it’s time for spit and polish, Soundtrack Pro’s effects lineup rivals that of any audio editor. That’s not too surprising when you consider the source of many of these effects: Logic Pro Audio. They’ve been carefully selected to provide a good blend of video-oriented tools and multipurpose audio tools. Two great tools for video editors are the Denoiser and DeEsser effects, although more audio-oriented users will appreciate them, too.

The Space Designer convolution reverb is an outstanding impulse response reverb, which can load and modify acoustic signatures captured from noteworthy acoustic spaces. Space Designer can modify existing impulse response characteristics such as dynamics, timbre, and length, for a literally unlimited variety of reverb types. Impulse responses of many spaces are widely available for free download on the internet. It’s also possible to create impulse responses with Space Designer. Another noteworthy effect from Logic Pro Audio is Match EQ, which is able to capture the EQ curve of any sound source played through it and apply that curve to any other audio file.

Other Soundtrack Pro effects include: Low and High Pass Filters, Compressor, Limiter, Ringshifter, Platinum Verb, Pitchshifter, Vocal Transformer, Stereo Spread, Distortion and Fat EQ.

Waveform editor

Like the Project window, the Waveform editor is a clean and uncluttered environment. The selected audio waveform dominates two-thirds of the window, making it easy to get deep inside it, down to individual samples. Double-clicking on any audio clip in Soundtrack Pro brings it up in the Waveform editor. A dialog box offers you the choice of editing a copy of the file non-destructively or editing the original, which will be overwritten when you save. Only one audio clip can be displayed at a time, mono or stereo.

There are good tools for common functions such as trimming, cropping, splitting, nudging and copy/paste, plus a few innovative functions, such as the Next/Previous arrows at the top of the Waveform editing interface. These let you jump between the next and previous areas defined by markers you’ve placed in the file. This is a great way to line up different sections for editing, analysis, or applying different actions to each section (effects, for instance).

Double-clicking anywhere between two markers jumps to that section. In a large file with numerous markers, this functionality saves significant time. Selecting any area of a file is done by dragging the mouse from the cursor position to the desired end position. This also works for sections of individual Left or Right channels in a stereo file.

But the Waveform editor’s Analysis tools are among Soundtrack Pro’s most useful features for video editors. Accessible from a button at the top left of the Waveform editor, the Analysis function presents six types of problems to search for: Clicks/Pops, Power Line Hum, DC Offset, Phase, Clipped Signal and Silence.

Analyzing a file for these problems is simple: Click a box next to the issues you want to check, and press the Analyze button. All of the buttons can be selected, or just one or two. A progress bar appears as the analysis is performed, and then a report on each problem found is displayed. It tells the status of the problem, what it is, where it starts, how long it lasts, and whether it’s in the left channel, the right channel or both. Pressing the Fix button repairs the selected issues — again, this operation can be carried out problem-by-problem, or all at once.

Mixer

This virtual mixer has channel strips for each track, bus, and output. As Soundtrack Pro’s finishing module, it’s the place to tweak final fader levels, apply effects, and set panning.

It also allows the creation of submixes for processing groups of channels separately. Volume and pan changes are automatable, which makes it possible to create dynamic interest and movement in a mix.

Automation can be applied by selecting either Touch or Latch in the project controls, and moving the volume and pan controls as desired during playback.

But those who prefer tactile mixing control (like me), will be happy to hear that Soundtrack Pro is compatible with the Mackie Control Universal, an external hardware controller. I connected a Mackie Control unit, and found that Soundtrack Pro’s functions are fully integrated. Once you try this, it’s hard to go back to a virtual mixer, no matter how good it is. As an interesting sidenote, Soundtrack Pro’s virtual mixer can record automation of control surface movements.

Conclusion

If you couldn’t tell by now, I think this is a great program. It is a transparent companion to Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and Motion that processes the audio with first-rate tools, and it does so quickly and efficiently. Anyone who uses those programs on a regular basis should have Soundtrack Pro. As a powerful extension of their audio editing capabilities, it’s a no-brainer. For loop assembly and multitrack arrangement, Soundtrack Pro is equally adept. Of course, the inclusion of 5,000 Apple Loops makes this process all the more fruitful, with dozens of quality choices for nearly any kind of project.

As the program evolves, there are some things I would like to see incorporated that would make it even stronger. One feature that would prove popular with many users is the addition of Broadcast Wave format to the export options. Currently, Soundtrack Pro exports AIFF and QuickTime movie formats, although it can import Broadcast Wave files. Soundtrack Pro does have a good encoder for export, the Compressor, which permits video to be preserved or encoded to a different video format. It would also be very useful for audio-oriented users to have true multitrack recording capability, instead of just one track at a time.

Another thing on my wish list would be VST plugin compatibility, opening a wide range of additional plugins that could be used in Soundtrack Pro. Also, for composers and sound designers, the addition of a MIDI sequencer (or ReWire compatibility) would make it possible to record tracks via MIDI that could be voiced differently later on, when the producer screams that he hates the keyboard sound.

Soundtrack Pro has a solid foundation already, however. It’s staked out an increasingly crucial niche, bridging the audio and video worlds better than any other program I’ve used. Clearly, the intersection of audio and video is the place to be, not only for professional users, but for applications as well. And that means there’s a bright future for Soundtrack Pro, particularly because of its seamless exchange with Apple’s other professional applications. I would highly recommend Soundtrack Pro to anyone working with audio and video. Its great control over audio file manipulation results in a much better finished product — and besides, it’s great fun to use.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P253/Digital_Audio/SoundTrack_Pro_MacOsx.html

Apple on Monday released DVD Studio Pro v4.0.2. The new version of the DVD creation tool for professionals “addresses isolated stability issues,” according to Apple.

Specifically improved in this release is font size in PAL templates, menu duplication when Text Objects are active, simulation of long PAL MPEG2 stream with MP3 audio, and an isolated issue involving recognition of certain media.

System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later, DVD Studio Pro 4.0 or 4.0.1 and QuickTime 7.0 or later. General requirements for DVD Studio Pro 4 also call for a G4/733MHz or faster, 8MB VRAM, 512MB RAM and AGP Quartz Extreme-compatible graphics card.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P250/Digital_Video/DVD_Studio_Pro_v4_MacOsx.html

Generally I don’t review point-one software updates. But Shake 4.1 is something different. Not that the program has changed all that much, but it’s now available in Universal Binary form, so it runs on Apple’s Intel-based hardware (extraordinarily well, as we’ll see). And, what’s more, the price has been lowered drastically to make it affordable for any visual effects professional using Final Cut Studio.

Then and now
Before we begin with the review proper, let me give you a little perspective on Shake.

When I started here at DMN back in 2000, Shake (then owned by Nothing Real) was in version 2.1, and a single license cost $9,900 plus an annual maintenance of about $1,500. Additional render-only licenses ran $3,900.

Apiece.

The software ran only on Irix and Windows NT. And in order for a reviewer like me even to get my hands on the software, I’d have had to have proved my proficiency with it, or Nothing Real wouldn’t even consider sending out a time-limited trial version so that I could have the privilege of giving them some free publicity. In other words, Shake wasn’t exactly made for public consumption. It was the province of high-end effects houses and studios doing the effects and compositing on extraordinarily expensive projects (which, by the way, it continues to be used for).

Then in 2002 Apple bought Nothing Real and released a version of Shake for Mac OS X, lowering the price to $4,950 for Mac users with an annual maintenance fee of $1,199. Shake 3 came out in ‘03 at the same price, adding unlimited render licenses at no additional cost. With Shake 3.5 in ‘04, the price dropped to a mere $2,999 for Mac OS X. Shake 4 came out in ‘05 at the same price. Now, in ‘06, Apple has released Shake 4.1, and the price has dropped to an incredible $499–a twentieth of the original price (considerably lower even than some plugins) with no maintenance and free render nodes. The upgrade price from version 4.0 is $49, which is about one-sixteenth the previous lowest price for a Shake upgrade, which was $799 for Shake 3.5 from version 3.

And so, finally, the once-exclusive, cost-prohibitive Shake is now firmly positioned in the price range of just about anybody who makes a living in the visual arts. Just think: You can now produce wedding videos with the same compositing software used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Of course, Lord of the Rings used something like 80 full licenses and 190 render nodes, but that’s beside the point.)

Considering just how powerful a compositing system Shake is and just how exclusive it used to be, this is simply an amazing development. And hence my willingness to write up a review of a “mere” zero-point-one software update.

Features
This being a review of the Shake 4.1 update, and not a full release, I’m not going to spend too much time talking about Shake in general. But I will give you a brief overview of the basics, since most of you are probably unfamiliar with the software.

At the most basic level, Shake is a 2D and 3D compositing and visual effects tool. It’s used for things like compositing together a huge number of individual elements into something that can be called a scene; adding effects and corrections to those elements or to the scene as a whole; matching the grain of specific film stocks for blending animated imagery with photographic imagery; stabilizing footage; motion tracking/matching; retiming footage with incredible precision; keying; color correction; warping; morphing; painting; et cetera, et cetera.

Now, obviously there are plenty of tools out there for doing most of these things as it is–After Effects and Combustion, to name a couple. And I’m not going to detract from those by saying that Shake is better than them in every way. Just in some ways. Let me put it like this: Nobody was spending $10,000 for a one-year license of Shake because it was inferior to retail compositing and motion graphics packages.

First off, there’s quality. Shake is designed to produce results that will look incredible on theater screens. The color correction tools are superb; the keyers provide a tremendous amount of control;  and the render quality is fantastic. Just take a look at any major special-effects-heavy movie released in the last few years to see for yourself. (You can see a list of the ones that used Shake on Apple’s Web site.)

Second, there’s control. Shake uses a node-based system for controlling elements in a composition, which means you can control the entire flow of any number of elements by simply dragging connecting lines between nodes and rearranging elements in the Nodes view. And you can see the effect of any branch of a node tree simply by double-clicking on a particular node. (For example, if you have a color corrector and a blur filter applied to an image, you can double-click the color corrector node to see the correction without the blur.)

It takes a little while to get used to a node-based workflow, but, once you do, it’s difficult to go back to the “simpler” interfaces used in other programs. (You’ll see what I mean. At first you’ll be frustrated and confused by Shake’s interface, and then things will start to click, and you’ll wish everything were designed this way.)

But nodes aren’t all that Shake has going in the way of control. Most elements in Shake have a huge number of parameters that can be adjusted to give you maximum control over their effect. For example, with the AdjustHSV color corrector, you have control not only over the hue, saturation and brightness values, but also things like offset, range, falloff and sharpness for each of those elements. And if you want to add more parameters to give you even more control over any given node, you can do so manually by right-clicking in the Parameters pane and choosing “Create Local Parameter” from the contextual menu. You can add sliders and text fields, including text fields that support mathematical formulas and other types of expression.

Which brings us to another point about control in Shake: Every parameter can be controlled by an expression. Every one. For example, you might set the hue offset in a filter by setting its value to the cosine of the current time just by typing “cos (time)” into the parameter’s text field, rather than typing in a number, creating a constantly shifting hue effect based on the current frame of the composition. Of you could create a custom camera shake effect by using a float modulus based on the current time and the tangent of the current time, which would be written as “fmod(tan(time),time).” Whatever. If you can type it, it will probably work as an expression.

And, in fact, you can even retrieve the values of parameters stored in one node and use those as the basis for the values of parameters in another node.

And then there’s customizability. Pretty much anything in Shake can be customized, including, as I mentioned, adding parameters of your own to a node. You can also record macros in Shake, allowing you to record sequences of actions and hiding or enabling access to various parameters involved in the sequences. In fact, even the project files themselves are really just scripts, which you can open up and edit in any text editor (to change the path of a source video file, for example, without bothering to open up Shake itself and replacing the file through the GUI).

So, in short, Shake’s quality is great; it’s workflow, while requiring a bit of mental adjustment at first, is just great; it provides a great degree of control; and it’s customizable to do pretty much anything you want it to do through the use of scripts, macros and expressions. And, hey, if you really want to go nuts, you can even download the Shake SDK from Apple’s developer site and write our own full-featured plugins.

Finally, before we get into the specifics of version 4.1, I should mention that you Final Cut Studio users out there are Apple’s new target market for Shake. And so Apple has added in some integration features that will help you work more easily between programs like Final Cut Pro and Motion. With Final Cut Pro, you can select individual elements in your timeline, then bring them into Shake, where the elements are converted to nodes for further manipulation (such as using one of Shake’s keyers). Changes you make are then brought back into the FCP timeline as a composite placed over your original footage. (See Apple’s Web site for a video walkthrough of this process.) For Motion users, integration isn’t as powerful. But Shake does have the ability to import unrendered Motion project files, which is useful, say, when you want to integrate Motion particles into a Shake project. (But really, I think Shake would be better off with its own particle system.)

Okay, so that’s it for the basics. I haven’t covered much; so, if you want to see more, be sure to visit Apple’s site to download a 30-day demo (http://www.apple.com/shake).What’s new in Shake 4.1?

Okay, so now that we have some of the basics out of the way, what’s actually new about Shake 4.1? The one major change to the software itself is that Shake is now a Universal Binary, which means that it can run natively on Intel-based Mac hardware, as well as PowerPC-based Mac hardware. What ought to be particularly interesting for you about this for you is that, at the moment, the only Intel-based Mac systems are notebooks and consumer-level desktops (iMac and Mac Mini). So is it feasible even to think about running a program like Shake on one of these systems?

Indeed it is.

I mentioned back in April that I had a chance to see 2k compositing happening in real time on a 17-inch MacBook Pro. That’s amazing in itself. What’s even more amazing, though, is that Shake 4.1 actually runs on a 13-inch MacBook–and pretty darned well at that. We’ll detail the results of our benchmark tests comparing Shake 4.1 on a 13-inch MacBook (compared with a dual 2.0 GHz G5) in a separate article coming this week. Just to give you a little preview, the MacBook trounced the G5 in every test, coming in at as much as double the performance of the desktop system in rendering speeds. Again, more on this later this week. (Update: The Shake 4.1 benchmarks are now available. You can read them by clicking here.)

The other major change to Shake, as I emphasized earlier, is the new pricing. And that’s just huge. It can’t be overstated. Shake has gone from a $10,000 application with an annual renewal fee to a $500 off-the-shelf software package, while continuing to get better and better with each subsequent release. It is just amazing.

On the minor feature changes front, Shake has also received some minor bug fixes, or so I’m told. At any rate, there seems to be absolutely nothing buggy about the current version, although there is some room for a few enhancements, such as full support for trackpad gestures in the GUI and in Shake’s open and save dialogs. (For example, you can’t currently use two fingers on the trackpad to scroll in Shake.)

The bottom line
Shake is and always has been one of the major powerhouses in compositing tools. Version 4.1, though, is the best to date, for its ability to run on Intel-based Mac hardware, for the performance enhancements it gains on those pieces of hardware and for its new breakthrough price of $499. At that price and with the kind of power Shake offers, it ought to be irresistible to anyone working professionally in the visual arts. I give it a Must Buy recommendation, making it the tenth application that has received that recommendation to date. (Apple now has three of those 10, including Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro.) To receive a Must Buy recommendation, a piece of software must be the best in its category; it must be a tool central to the workflow of creative professionals; it must be an outstanding application in its own right, apart from what else is out there in the market; and it must be priced within reason. Shake easily makes it on all four counts.

Mac System Requirements

• Power Mac G5; Power Mac G4 or PowerBook G4 with 1GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor; or any Intel Core-based Macintosh computer
• Mac OS X v10.4.6 or later
• QuickTime 7.0.4 or later
• 512MB of RAM or more
• 1GB of available disk space for caching and for temporary files
• AGP graphics card with at least 32MB of video memory and OpenGL hardware acceleration
• Display with 1280-by-1024-pixel resolution and 24-bit color
• Three-button mouse
• Optional: AJA Kona or Blackmagic DeckLink card required to preview composites on a broadcast video monitor

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P486/Digital_Video/Shake_v4_1_Mac_Osx.html

Quick-preview mode is a new version of viewing that allows very speedy scanning through libraries. Faster still is the compare mode, in which you drag several images into the main screen to decide which is the best.

Searching is as advanced as the program’s tagging. You can assign keywords, search via metadata, set ratings, and arrange pictures via the time they were taken. This all makes logging and searching easy and fast. The program now also adds background exporting, so you can export a large number of images out to various file formats while you continue to work with your libraries.

Camera tethering is now included — simply hook up your digital SLR to your Mac via USB or FireWire. Just about every major camera from the past several years is supported. Now when you do your photo shoot, every image pops up on your Mac and is automatically added and archived in your project.

I used this recently during a model shoot. The vibrancy of the outfits was very important, and tracking how the light hit was crucial. Not only was I able to able to view the dynamic range of the shots instantly on my Mac’s screen, I could examine my lighting via the levels in Aperture’s HUD and immediately tweak my setup before the next shot.

For one outfit, the red had to pop. After a few shots, I could see onscreen how it looked, and I realized it needed a bit more. So I amped up the color saturation on the camera, took a few test shots, and could see onscreen the newly vibrant results. Not only that, I needed some versions for black-and-white print. I was able to shoot color while tethered, and back at the computer screen, with one click, the pictures were B&W. I received information from the levels and metadata within Aperture that told me to tweak the camera’s ISO and aperture a bit for a slightly crushed black/white point. This helped me produce a more dramatic monochrome image.

Some of Aperture 2’s biggest advances are found in its new image-processing tools. Of course, it can’t do all that Photoshop can do. But now you have all the cropping, adjusting, and touch-up tools you need without having to step out to a separate image-processing program.

Vibrancy is a new version 2 tool that adds punch to images by adding saturation to colors within the picture that needs it, while protecting parts such as skin tones. Recovery is a slider set that reduces blown-out highlights and stops blacks from crushing out all your grayscale dynamic range. Your level controls are still there for white-and-black points, but Recovery now makes it so easy to adjust unbalanced images.

In fact, you can set the program to highlight cold and hot areas (which display as red and blue pixels), step into the exposure mode and move the recovery and black-point slider, and add a dash of vibrancy and a finishing touch of sharpen. That way, in about 20 seconds, you can perform what previously would have taken dramatically longer as you messed around with level and color controls. Making images look professional — quickly — is something version 2 does very, very well.

Also new in version 2 is the ability to add plug-ins to Aperture. Apple just released the Aperture SDK, and already several companies are developing plug-ins — including Tiffen, dvGarage, Nik Software, and Image Trends. You can check out some of the new plug-ins via a link on the Resources page of the Aperture section of apple.com. Plug-in development for other Apple programs, such as Motion, has been slow but steady. Aperture, on the other hand, could create a wave, because there are so many image tools that users want. In addition, during the course of this review, Apple released Aperture 2.1, a patch that further improves performance. The dedication is clearly there.

Aperture 2 is a fantastic program, but is it a good fit, or even necessary, for media artists who do video and film production? Absolutely. Chances are very good that you have stacks of CDs holding thousands of images. Why not move them all to a hard drive so you can quickly search and sort them? Treat your images the same way you archive and bin-sort your video clips. Plus, Aperture can handle any image file, so you can use it to import all your design elements and logos.

Aperture will probably be most useful for touchups. You might have struggled with Photoshop as you tried to make pictures really pop; Aperture can make it happen in a fraction of the time. It might feel natural to use it as a stock photo-tweaking tool for video/film projects before dragging the images into Adobe After Effects or Apple Motion.

Aperture also has great client display options. You can export a gallery of images to a full website or an animated scrolling web gallery. Tight integration with MobileMe (formerly .Mac) is built in, of course, but you can also use your own server. Select a bunch of images and click on a button, and Aperture creates and uploads a polished and professional web gallery — right to your Mac account, all in the background while you continue to work. Apple has a demo of Aperture 2 on its website, so you can take it for a test drive.

At the new price point, with all the new and improved features and with dramatic advances in speed and usability, Aperture 2 is a fantastic tool that just keeps getting better. It’s a must-have for photographers on the Mac platform, of course, but digital content producers will also find much to love in this new version.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2458/Macintosh_Software/Aperture_v2_1_Mac_OsX.html

Apple fans will be well aware of the company’s policy of releasing yearly operating system updates. Unlike Windows, which sees a major release every three to four years, new releases of Apple’s system are much more incremental, and have been since the release of OS version 10 (or X, to use Apple’s term) way back in 2001.

Since then, iterations of 10 have slowly increased performance and added features, with each yearly release carrying a few headline improvements and lots of little tinkerings. The latest release, codenamed Leopard, is version 10.5 (its predecessor is Tiger, version 10.4). It hit the shelves just last week, and we’re here to take a look at what funky new moves it brings to the party.

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Mister Vister

Of course, Leopard finds the computing world it enters in rather a different state from the one Tiger landed in – and the reason for that is Vista. Thanks to the delay of Leopard (which was originally due to be out earlier this year, but was postponed by Apple due to work on the iPhone) Vista has stolen a march on the operating system market and hugely improved upon Windows XP, the creaking old OS that Tiger competed with. Indeed, one of the things most noticeable about Leopard upon first glance is the amount of new eye candy, and it does appear that Apple has attempted to out-alpha Microsoft in the transparency stakes. But Vista also raised the bar when it comes to security and even reliability, so Apple has to compete with a reinvigorated Microsoft since despite what loud-mouthed fanboys may say, it’s clear from consumer reaction that Vista is at least a moderate success.

Now unlike Vista, which costs upwards of £150 even for an upgrade license, Leopard costs just £85 for the full version, which can be used as both a clean installer and an upgrade disc. For that £85 you get what Apple claims to be a list of over 300 new features – several big ones and many more little ones (and many more non-existent ones, but we’ll come to that later). Let’s dive in and take a look at some of the biggies.

The OSX interface has been fairly consistent since its first release in terms of the general big themes – menu bar at the top, dock at the bottom, unless you choose to move it. What’s changed has been the graphical implementation of these elements, as well as the windows and boxes that make up the rest of the applications. The interface improvements in Leopard are a mixture of eye candy tweaks and actual useful changes to the way things work.

High on the list of pointless visual tweaks include the new dock, which now has bevelled edges and extra alpha-reflective-web-2.0-transparency effects, as well as the menu bar, which is now semi-transparent for no particular reason. Apple die-hards will be sad to see the disappearance of the menu bar’s rounded corners, which set a rather nice frame for the desktop in previous versions of OSX. Windows now have a consistent visual effect, with the brushed metal of previous versions now pronounced dead.

The new dock allows you to create ’stacks’ of icons, and these are basically folders that expand when you click. Stacks, or piles, of documents are a desktop metaphor that Apple has been playing with for almost a decade, but this sees the idea’s first implementation. Stacks are useful for creating quick-access folders of your most important files and also for quick-launch groups of applications. However, it’s hard to be too enthusiastic about them – they are, after all, just folders with a neat animation.

The new Finder has received much attention for its iTunes-like interface – in fact, Apple advertises it as aping the popular music player’s interface. Down the left is now your list of ’sources’ – drives, networks and the like – and the main viewing pane now features a Cover Flow view, enabling you to view your folders like album art. In theory this is a great feature with some amazing visuals; in practice, it’s pointless for everything bar folders made up entirely of pictures.

Quick Look is the other major new interface adjustment, and it’s basically a document viewer that requires minimal opening time. Rather than double-clicking an image in Finder and having it open in Preview, the document viewing application, you can now open the picture in Quick Look, the document-viewing widget. Quick Look also allows you to have a gander at videos and multi-page PDFs from within CoverFlow view. A neat touch, but hardly revolutionary or, for that matter, time-saving.

So with the eye candy out of the way, it’s worth looking at Apple’s headline features for Leopard, and none has grabbed more headlines – for both good and bad reasons – than Time Machine.

The concept behind the idea is simple: attach a large backup hard drive to your computer and allow the software to create a system-wide backup. New backups are then incremental, with several increments being saved simultaneously to the drive – enabling you to pull up an interface to go back through different ‘versions from history’ of your machine. Whilst Time Machine comes with whizzy graphics and the promise of making backups a no-brainer, fundamentally it is just an incremental backup system with flashy vectors.

Which would be fine, were it not for its awkwardness. For starters, many users have reported that Time Machine has trashed their data trying to back it up, and others have reported system crashes upon use. Some external disks don’t work properly for no apparent reason, and support for wireless disk access over Airport was nixed at the last minute. In short, it’s great to have a full-feature easy to use backup system integrated into the OS, but Time Machine needs a patch before anyone should start using it.

Then comes Spaces, an interesting idea partly because it’s really quite a geeky one, and this is probably why Leopard ships with the feature turned off by default. Linux users have enjoyed multiple desktops for years, and Spaces is an implementation of this. The concept is that users can create multiple ‘virtual’ desktop areas for themselves, and then switch between each one at will – keeping work applications open on one space, internet open on another, music and media open on another etc. Apple has done a great job at enabling users to move between spaces and drag applications along for the ride. The concept is a bit of a weird one to get your head around for the first time, but it’s actually a very useful one if you don’t have room for four monitors on your desk and tend to multitask a heck of a lot.

Finally we’re up to Boot Camp, the run-Windows-on-Macs software that has been in beta since last year. Leopard finally sees the 1.0 release, and everything is pretty much the same as it was in the beta. In fact, there’s almost nothing to add. Right then.

So if all that has you scratching your head and thinking “Hmm, not exactly a compelling feature list” then you’d probably be justified. There are few big ideas in Leopard, and most of the ones that are there have been nicked from Linux and repackaged. But it’s not all doom and gloom, as there are some very nice ‘under the hood’ improvements to the OS that users should appreciate.

The first is the appearance of Core Animation. This is another one of the Quartz technologies, which include Core Video (Apple’s video processing libraries) and Core Graphics (the rendering engine of OSX). Animation allows for the easy creation by developers of gorgeous-looking interfaces, which Core hands off to the GPU to render. Apple was the first big player to rope the GPU into rendering desktop interfaces with its release of version 10.2 of the OS, and the gradual expansion of Quartz technologies has been a hallmark of its development. We like efficiency, and more GPU rendering means more CPU power for everything else.

Like Vista, Leopard places a new emphasis on security in this age of the internet, and makes a few welcome tweaks. The first is Sandboxing, which transparently virtualises certain applications to prevent any malware or viruses from hopping onto the OS. The new versions of applications such as Bonjour, QuickLook and Spotlight are now severely restricted in their access to your system and the permissions with which they run, meaning that malware can’t exploit their access privileges.

However, Security is definitely hit and miss for Apple as its new Firewall is arguably a step backwards. Unlike Vista (and even Windows XP SP2), the firewall is not active by default which, in this age of viruses and worms, it really should be. More worrying is that even when the Firewall is set to block all incoming connections, it doesn’t. Now you might say that modern NAT routers are protection enough – but with Apple’s laptops designed to roam out and about wirelessly, a firewall that the user controls is surely an essential OS component, and is certainly one Apple hasn’t nailed yet. Those on both sides of the pixel-per-inch debate will also enjoy Leopard’s support for resolution independence – even if such support isn’t exactly visible yet.

Apple has always worked at 72 DPI for its computer displays, but the new 17″ MacBook Pro runs at 100 DPI, to the annoyance of some and the love of others. Leopard allows developers to scale up applications and scale them down in size at the user’s will, meaning that as display pixel density increases over the next few years, users can maintain control of their eyesight.

Remember those 300 new features we mentioned? Well we’ve mentioned the big ones above, so you’d be right in thinking that the rest are mostly gumph. Here’s a few examples:

• Apple Mail now supports RSS reading, custom HTML stationary and to do lists.
• iChat now allows you to have a tabbed chat window and add ‘crazy’ effects to your video chat window.
• Parental controls mean someone can limit your computer time for you.
• You can now do calculations in the Spotlight dialogue.
• You can create a dashboard widget out of a webpage.

Actually, that last one isn’t half-bad, but as you can see, the bulk of Leopard’s new features really aren’t anything to pay attention to. There are some nice tweaks, as in iChat, but nothing that’s actually going to change the way you use your computer.

What’s annoying is that Apple has missed many opportunities here to actually improve rather than fiddle – Mail still doesn’t support a vertical viewing pane style, and why shoehorn RSS into it when Apple could create a gorgeous little RSS reader of its own? Why has Leopard broken many applications that worked just fine in Tiger and, more to the point, why hasn’t Apple added a ‘previous OS emulation’ mode like Windows has had for years? And why doesn’t the DVD Player support HD, for crying out loud? Drives have been on the market for more than a year now, and there’s still no way to play the latest movies from Blu-ray or HD-DVD on my Mac, despite having a display that supports 1080p.

Not to mention the fact that several of the 300 features listed as new actually aren’t new at all. ‘Front Row now built in to Mac OSX Leopard’, proclaims Apple. Really? I’m pretty sure that was in Tiger, too. Russian localisation is also listed as brand spanking new – that’s funny, since I’m pretty sure our comrades have been enjoying that in Tiger since earlier this year. I could go on, but looking at the list of language packs is sapping my will to live.

Verdict

All in all, it’s hard to view Leopard as much of an advance on Tiger. The interface improvements are a mixture of ‘great’ and ‘meh’, while the new features don’t really add much beyond tweaks to your daily workflow. The feature with the ability to really blow you away – Spaces – is switched off by default, and probably won’t be found by the majority of people.

So whilst Leopard will undoubtedly sell tonnes of copies (quite apart from the fact it will now ship with all new Macs), it’s hard not to feel that, given the system’s delay and hype, Apple has delivered too little too late – with too many bugs, to boot.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1882/Macintosh_Software/Mac_OSx_Leopard_v10_5.html

When it comes to recording data to discs, the folks at Nero AG have it down. Various incarnations of the Nero Burning ROM have been around since the earliest days of CD-Burners, and if you’ve purchased an optical burner any time within the past seven years or so, chances are you’re familiar with Nero software.

These days, the ol’ Burning ROM is just a small piece of a huge library of Nero software that has continued to evolve and grow. The most recent incarnation of the popular Nero software suite is Nero 8. Today we’ll be taking a look at some of the new and improved features offered by Nero 8 Ultra, and hope to give you a good idea of what this software can do for you, and if it’s worth your time and money.

Here’s what Nero themselves have to say about their product:

Nero 8 brings the digital world to your PC. Create and edit photo slideshows and high definition video, convert your favorite content to enjoy on portable devices or share them online with friends or communities, rip and burn CDs/DVDs with easy one-click functions, create a home entertainment center with integrated TV, DVD, music and video streaming, recording and playback options. Rest easy with advanced backup features to protect against loss from system crash or damaged disc. Nero 8 makes your digital life fun with easy-to-use functions and cutting-edge technology to help you manage your multimedia projects.

A rosy picture made more attractive by the lenient system requirements.

• Internet access or fax machine is required to activate certain technologies
• DVD-ROM-compatible drive required for installation
• Microsoft Windows 2000 (SP 4 or later); Windows XP SP1; Windows Server 2003 SP1; Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, Windows Vista Home/Business/Ultimate (except for Nero ImageDrive and Nero Search)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition/Windows Vista x64 Edition (all applications except InCD, InCD Reader, Nero Scout, Nero ImageDrive, and gadgets work in the x86 emulator that allows 32-bit Windows applications to run)
• Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
• 1 GHz Intel Pentium III; AMD Sempron 2200+ or equivalent
• 256 MB RAM (512 MB RAM for Windows Vista)
• 1.5 GB hard drive space for a typical installation of all components
• Graphics card: min. 32 MB video memory, min. resolution 800 x 600 pixels, hardware overlay support, and min. 16-bit color settings
• CD, DVD, Blu-ray, or HD DVD recordable or rewritable drive for burning and playback
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0c or higher
• Installation of the latest WHQL-certified device drivers is strongly recommended
• Internet connection is required to use online services
• Additional Requirements

Blue Laser Features
• Blue laser reading/writing device for Blu-ray Disc/HD DVD support
• Up to 25/50 GB hard drive space for Blu-ray Disc/HD DVD images

Mobile Features
• Nero Mobile is included as a 30-day trial version
• Mobile phone or PDA with Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC/Pocket PC Phone Edition, Smartphone/Second Edition (SE) and Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0
• Mobile hardware platforms (Intel XScale, ARM)
• Phone-to-PC connection over Microsoft ActiveSync, USB cable, or Bluetooth
• Not all mobile devices are compatible. Please see www.nero.com for details

Other Features
• SecurDisc-compatible CD/DVD drive
• LightScribe/Labelflash-compatible recorder and medium
• To use LightScribe, the latest LightScribe host software must be installed
• TV tuner or video recording card for analog or digital recording, time-shifting, and any TV functionality.
• For a list of supported capture cards
• UPnP-capable equipment is required for streaming with Nero MediaHome server
• To use the Nero Smart 3D video templates in Nero Vision, a video card with 3D acceleration support and 64 MB video memory is required

You may want to refer to our review of Nero 7 Ultra Edition from last year for a frame of reference. For a complete list of all programs included with Nero 8 Ultra, check the product page. Now, let’s see how Nero 8 measures up.

SmartStart Menu

One of the biggest things that Nero is highlighting with this latest release is a more intuitive and user-friendly user interface, beginning with the SmartStart window.

The SmartStart window received a pretty thorough cleaning compared to the somewhat busier look of Nero 7. The most notable new feature is the ability to add and remove program shortcuts to the menu on the right side of the window for easier access to commonly used applications.

On the left side of the window are four general shortcuts for creating data and music discs, ripping and copying discs within the SmartStart window itself.

As if drag-and-drop wasn’t simple enough, take a look at the copy disc option!

Press copy, watch a progress bar, insert blank disc, then watch another progress bar, and you’re done. The only problem with this feature is that copying a disc cannot always be cancelled, and can take several minutes.

The top of the SmartStart window lists functional program groups in the familiar way, but the menus are slightly different this time around, emphasizing general activities (rip, burn, edit) rather than data types (audio, video). You can see the functions of each tab below.

Another new addition is the inclusion of RSS feeds along the bottom of the SmartStart window. Default feeds for software updates, help, the Nero Community, etc. are shown initially and user-defined feeds can be specified in the options menu on the top left of the main SmartStart window.

Just below and to the left of the RSS feeds, there is a program launch menu similar to the Windows Start button that lists the applications included in Nero 8.

The more general function-based organization seems to have reduced the number icons on the screen, giving things a cleaner look and making it easier to find the right program.

One of the most substantive improvements found in Nero 8 is with the new version of Nero Vision, which promises to make movie creation and burning incredibly easy and flexible.

The main menu here allows users to burn video to basically any known format. Nero 8 adds support for editing and burning to HD-DVD (via additional plugin), Blu-ray and ACHD, meaning that Nero Vision 5 will allow users to burn pictures and movies to pretty much any media available. I do not have the necessary equipment to test HD-DVD and Blu-Ray burning, but there is a lot of functionality that has been added to the creation and editing process that users will appreciate regardless of the media they use.

This is the main menu that is used to create both videos and slide shows in Nero Vision 5. Media files are dragged into the top right pane where they are displayed. The top left pane is used for previewing, ‘cutting’ segments of video out of video files, taking snapshots within video files, and recording voice-overs to a .wav file directly from your microphone. Snapshots are saved as .png files and must be added to the project manually, while any audio that is recorded is automatically added to the list of media files in the top right pane.

The horizontal bar at the center of the window is where additional effects are added during the course of the movie. On the second tab, the video track’s progress is shown in the center, up to two additional audio tracks can be played at any time, and there are also various video effects and scrolling text that can be applied. The picture below shows some of the options.

Once individual video files are edited, the first tab can be used to determine the transitional effects between the files, of which there are plenty to choose from.

Once the video file is edited, it must be exported before it can be burned. Clicking the export button brings up another menu.

Here, users can export to video and audio files, as well as to a camera, e-mail or website. Supported websites include YouTube, MySpace and MyNero. The output format can be configured many ways depending on format selected by the user. Custom resolutions and refresh rates can be set, audio encoding and compression can be changed, etc. A typical configuration menu for an MPEG-2 video gives a good idea of the kind of control the user has.

Supported video formats include: AVI, AVI (DV), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Nero Digital, Nero Digital AVC, and AVC. Once the video files are ready to be burned, users will find this familiar menu when they choose to create a video disc.

This menu incorporates the main menu from Nero Vision 5, and allows chapters to be set up. Continuing allows the main DVD menus to be set up using basic templates that can be customized with different colors, text, picture, video and audio backgrounds.

The additional editing features offered by Nero Vision 5 make it a home video maker’s dream, striking a great balance between ease of use and editing options. Compared to its predecessor, Nero Vision 5 has far more tweaking ability and templates/creative assets to choose from.

SoundTrax 3

SoundTrax is a comprehensive audio editing software suite capable of creating just about any combination of tracks, mixes, scratches, etc.

The main window is where audio files can be dragged/dropped into the mix, and the overall layout of the track can be set. Loops, scratches, beats, volume and pan curves can also be inserted and manipulated in this window fairly easily, and the tempo can be adjusted. Most video file types (non-copy protected) can be dropped here for editing as well.

The soundbox and scratchbox programs are easy to understand and offer a lot of options that can be easily added to any tracks. Recordings can be made in 8 to 32bit stereo or mono.

Wave Editor 4

For fine editing of individual audio tracks, Nero Wave Editor 4 offers a literal plethora of options that could take weeks to detail. The interface is comfortable enough for beginners to figure out, but there is plenty of depth for the more experienced.

Next, we will take a look at audio ripping, Photosnap and Nero Recode 2.

Not much has changed with audio ripping in this release. The menu is simple and includes all of the usual options with regards to read speed, file names and extensions, etc.

There are a few other noteworthy shortcomings of the audio ripping software in its current form, namely the complete lack of FLAC (although a 3rd party FLAC plug-in is floating about somewhere) and also support for being able to use your own version of LAME and your own options. Also, I find it puzzling that there is no ’secure mode’ option when ripping audio to ensure that disc scratches don’t ruin the rip – such functionality is readily available with freeware applications, and it’s a shame that such functionality is not included in this suite.

Aside from that, the ripper functions very well.

Photosnap

Also included in Nero 8 is a basic photo editor, Photosnap. Not much has changed here since Nero 7.

The interface is slightly different (simpler), but the functionality appears to be the same. General photo effects like sharpening, red-eye reduction, brightness/contrast, etc. as well as other options like aging, duo-tone, kaleidoscope, etc. It remains a very useful tool for simple photo edits if you don’t have access to a more advanced image manipulation tool.

Nero Recode 2

With all the different video players and formats flying around these days, the ability to convert file types is practically a necessity.

Thankfully, that’s where Nero Recode comes in, allowing users to convert video files (generally ripped from DVD) into various formats, including custom formats, for use on various players. The program with template settings for the PSP and iPod, and users can set their own resolutions, audio compression, and target size.

There may be some minor issues when it comes to using templates; for instance, selecting the PSP format only allows two resolutions to choose from, neither of which will use the entire screen.

The most notable update in Nero Recode 2 is multi-processor support. SSE4 hasn’t been incorporated yet, which is somewhat disappointing, but the speed bump from additional cores is definitely a step in the right direction.

Nero Home

Users with HTPCs or home networks will likely appreciate the file sharing and streaming functionality of Nero Home. While the software hasn’t changed much from Nero 7, the program remains a useful tool for many users.

Nero Home includes a server program that allows any device on your home network to access and play audio and video content stored on other network devices, and can also be installed on a single PC (usually attached to a TV input and run through a television monitor) in order to use content playback and recording features. This updated version of Nero Home offers the ability to stream and record live TV provided that there is a compatible TV tuner card installed. Not having a tuner card, I was unable to test this particular feature.

Setting up the network and sharing files was easy with the setup wizard, however I found that I was unable to play some uncompressed DVD video files with Nero Home that played normally with Nero Showtime. Once the files were compressed with Nero Recode to something smaller, the files played normally, but it’d be nice if Nero Home could play the same file types as Nero Showtime.

One of Nero’s best features is BackItUp, a program used to automatically create backups of your computer (including partitions) and files, encrypt/decrypt them, and restore them in case of emergency. While the core BackItUp functionality hasn’t changed with this release, there is a new feature called ImageTool, which allows users to create a boot disk (CD or DVD) that will enable the restoration of backed up files in case that the OS partition fails.

ImageTool is a utility that creates a bootable Linux CD that will allow users to restore backed up files without needing to boot from a hard drive. Creating the boot disc is incredibly easy, however, when I tried to boot from it, the system hung at the loading screen. This isn’t the first Linux boot CD that has failed to load on my PC, and I suspect that my SATA optical drive and ICH9R southbridge may be the cause of the problem.

Editor Note: Rob tried out the boot disc on similar hardware and it booted/functioned fine, so this might be an isolated case. If you have the opportunity to try ImageTool and it doesn’t boot, please let us know in our forums.

These types of compatibility issues are exactly the kind of thing that will anger customers in the event that ImageTool is truly needed; there needs to be more effort invested in ensuring that the boot disc will load in a wide variety of circumstances.

BackItUp is another Nero program that hasn’t changed much with this new release, but considering how useful and convenient it already was, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Users can use BackItUp to create any backup routines they please, from selecting only certain files/folders to entire partitions.

Backups can be automatically scanned for viruses prior to being backed up, verified for correctness after backup, compressed, and can also be encrypted for increased security. Users can create and save as many backup routines as they want, and can schedule them to occur automatically as long as the PC is powered on. The interface is very user friendly with wizards to help with any of the functions, and the large degree of flexibility makes BackItUp one of the best backup tools out there.

Conclusion

There’s a reason that the Nero software suite has been so successful up to this point. Nero’s software has always been reliable, easy to use and up to date with current technology. With a few very small exceptions, Nero 8 maintains the great track record that Nero has created, and delivers a very powerful and worthwhile package.

The amount of functionality Nero 8 brings to the table inside a single application suite is fantastic, and well worth the $100 price tag. Comparing the huge number of things that Nero 8 does right with the few issues that I experienced, a 9/10 rating is definitely in order.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/B4/Ahead.html

Nero 9 is an extremely competent suite for burning CDs and DVDs of all types, as well as for playing, importing, and manipulating video and audio, including HD.

But Nero 8 was competent, too, and while the improvements in Nero 9 are most welcome, they’re probably not enough to warrant upgrading from the previous version.

The most noticeable changes are the elimination of “Ultra” from the title, the replacement of the circular while-you-wait animation with Bezier waves, and the decision to make BackItUp a separate, optional install.

Regrettably, the multimedia-networking MediaHome 4 module is now sold separately, too.

Other Nero 9 changes are meatier. The Nero StartSmart application launch centre sports added entries for playing files (audio and video), as well as for the new AutoBackup background backup function. Both modules are integrated into the launch centre itself, which eliminates the need to start up separate applications.

AutoBackup (the reason BackItUp is now optional) can back up locally or to Nero’s new online service. Nero has also revamped its ShowTime DVD playback module so that the interface is less obtuse. Other tweaks are in the help, and more help is available online.

Overall, however, Nero 9 does not provide the sweeping redesign we’ve been hoping to see for this application; the interface, which could benefit from a face-lift, remains largely unchanged.

One convenient new feature is the ability to save audio tracks from videos to MP3. Also appealing are the use of Gracenote instead of CDDB for track, artist, and album information; a TV gadget for the Vista Sidebar; Ad Spotter, which helps you find and delete commercials in video recordings; and Pre-scan, for previewing and chaptering video straight from DV cameras.

Nero 9 is an extremely competent suite for burning CDs and DVDs of all types, as well as for playing, importing, and manipulating video and audio, including HD.

System requirements

DVD-ROM drive required for installation; Windows XP SP2 and SP3/Vista/Server 2003; Windows Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher; 1GHz Intel Pentium III or equivalent AMD and Intel processor (2GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD and Intel processor for Windows Vista), 256 MB RAM (512 MB RAM for Windows Vista); 1.5GB hard drive space for a typical installation of all components; CD, DVD, or Blu-ray Disc recordable or rewritable drive for burning; DirectX 9.0c revision 30 (August 2006) or higher; up to 9GB available hard drive space for DVD images and temporary DVD files; Graphics card with at least 32MB video memory and minimum resolution of 800×600 pixels and 16-bit colour settings. 24-bit or 32-bit true colour is recommended; installation of the latest WHQL certified device drivers is strongly recommended; online connection required for Nero online services. DSL-1000 or faster is recommended for video services; Microsoft .NET 3.0 runtime environment

Verdict

Nero 9 is definitely a better product than version 8, and for new users it’s a great tool. But considering the cost of the upgrade, we suggest saving your pennies for version 10. Versus the similarly priced Roxio Creator 2009, the story remains largely the same: Nero is less friendly, slightly more powerful in audio and encoding, and decidedly faster. Roxio still provides better templates. Both suites support Blu-ray BD-MV authoring with menus through additional plug-ins.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2789/CD-DVD_Tools/Nero_9_0.html

Adobe Version Cue CS2 is a revision of last year’s Creative Suite file-version manager. When used alongside Adobe Bridge, a new thumbnail-based visual file manager, Version Cue CS2 tracks file histories produced by Adobe and non-Adobe applications, provides Web-based visuals of PDF files, searches files via metadata and helps you share files with colleagues working on other computers.

Version Cue is overkill for most home users, although it is installed with Creative Suite 2.0 by default. But collaborative designers — especially those using Creative Suite exclusively — can use Version Cue to efficiently manage large projects.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P35/Utilities/Version_Cue_CS2_v2_0.html

New CS4 Features:

Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation (New)
Navigate to any area of an image with new, ultra-smooth zooming and panning. Maintain clarity as you zoom to individual pixels and easily edit at the highest magnification with the new Pixel Grid. And use the revolutionary new Rotate View tool to smoothly turn your canvas for distortion-free viewing at any angle.

Adjustments panel (New)
Simplify image adjustment by easily accessing every tool you need to nondestructively adjust and enhance the color and tone of your images; on-image controls and a wide variety of presets are also included in the new live and dynamic Adjustments panel.

Auto-blending of images (Enhanced)
Combine a range of images, each with a different exposure, color, and focal point — with options to preserve tones and colors — into a single color-corrected image.

Masks panel (New)
Quickly create and edit masks from the new Masks panel. This panel offers all the tools you need to create editable pixel- and vector-based masks, adjust mask density and feathering, easily select noncontiguous objects, and more.

Improved Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow (Enhanced)
Select multiple photos in Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® software (sold separately) and automatically open them in Adobe Photoshop CS4 to merge them into a panorama, a high dynamic range (HDR) photo, or a multilayered Photoshop document. And seamlessly roundtrip back to Lightroom.

Content-Aware Scaling (New)
Use the new and revolutionary Content-Aware Scaling feature to automatically recompose an image as you resize it, smartly preserving vital areas as the image adapts to the new dimensions. Get the perfect image in one step without time-intensive cropping and retouching.

Better raw image processing (Enhanced)
Enjoy superior conversion quality as you process raw images with the industry-leading Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 5 plug-in, which now offers localized corrections, post-crop vignetting, TIFF and JPEG processing, and support for more than 190 camera models.

Industry-leading color correction (Enhanced)
Enjoy dramatically enhanced color correction with reengineered Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools that now intelligently preserve color and tone details.

More powerful printing options (Enhanced)
Get outstanding prints with superior color management, tighter integration with leading printer models, and the ability to preview out-of-gamut image areas. Support for 16-bit printing on Mac OS offers increased color depth and clarity.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2817/Photo_Editing/Photoshop_CS4_Portable.html

LiveMotion, Adobe’s answer to Flash, was not impressive in its debut. While Adobe’s products have the advantage of better interface design, LiveMotion 1 lacked the power and capabilities to truly compete with Flash. While that still may be somewhat true, LiveMotion 2 has come quite a long way in adding serious features that will appeal to Web designers and animators.

Interface

The interface is generally very clean and easy to use, and looks especially good in its implementation for Mac OS X. But there are some glaring omissions. Want to draw or paint a freehand object? Too bad there is no tool for that! Drawing is limited to beziers with the vector pen and shape tools. If you want anything more than that, it must be created in an outside application.

One thing I don’t really understand about the interface is the Color Scheme palette. As far as I know, this feature is not shared with any other Adobe application, so I’m not sure why it’s there. I don’t find it especially useful or intuitive. Why LiveMotion has this, and not a Web-safe color palette, is beyond me.

Timeline

There is no doubt that the greatest strength of LiveMotion is its timeline, which is based upon the Adobe After Effects timeline.

There are no block frames to hassle with. The timeline is based on seconds, so it’s more intuitive to use than the Flash timeline. Animating an object is as simple as moving to the desired time and altering an object’s position, etc. This is much better than Flash’s frame/keyframe method. Want to shift an animation forward or back in time a bit? Just drag your keyframes on the timeline.

LiveMotion 2’s timeline is even closer to the one used in After Effects, which is probably the best timeline design out there. In addition to providing a clearer picture of how things occur over time, it’s very easy to see at a glance how the attributes of your objects are changing. You don’t have to dig into palettes nearly as much as you do in Flash. Some keyboard shortcuts are carried over from After Effects for quick timeline navigation, as are “hide,” “shy” and “lock” controls. Also, you can use the timeline to scrub through your animation to quickly preview how your animation works.

Future versions could benefit with the addition of more features from the After Effects timeline. For example, putting attribute and transform value controls directly on the timeline would be a great timesaver. It can be confusing sometimes to find the appropriate control in the palettes.

Integration

Livemotion 2 really plays on tight integration with other Adobe applications. You can now import nested Photoshop or Illustrator layer sets, then convert to objects or sequences. Impressively, if you update your source file, the changes will be reflected in your LiveMotion document.

While Flash MX boasts that it works well with Illustrator files, I still run into plenty of headaches and glitches. Half the time, if I want to use an Illustrator file in Flash, I find myself exporting an SWF file. Conversely, LiveMotion 2 did not handle Freehand files very well in my tests.

One of the greatest drawbacks of LiveMotion is its inability to import SWF files into a composition, even SWF’s created by LiveMotion. You can point to and bring up outside SWF files in the final playback of your composition via the “Load Movie” behavior, but you can’t edit them in LiveMotion. Flash allows you to import SWF files and even edit the objects. If you need to have access for editing SWF files, then LiveMotion 2 will not fulfill your needs.

Animation

What LiveMotion does seem to do somewhat better than Flash is deal with bitmap animation. Playback seems to be smoother and file sizes are just a bit smaller. LiveMotion’s control of transparency and other bitmap attributes are also easier to control than in Flash. But I’m not so sure about the bitmap effects that Adobe brags about. These quickly jack up the file size and slow down animation playback.

Another great feature is the ability to save animations as “styles” in the Styles palette, then apply the same motion to other objects. This is a godsend for those who have to do repetitive tasks during production, and sort of reminds me of the Swift 3D animation presets. Impressively, each animation style can encompass several changes to an object.

Support for Actionscript

Livemotion 2 does away with the poor scripting of version 1 in favor of Actionscript support, which is slightly different from that in Flash. Livemotion’s Actionscript is based on standard javascript syntax, and provides all of the capabilities of Actionscript that are supported by the Flash 5 player. Be aware, though, that Flash MX/6 enhancements to Actionscript are not supported.

The Script Editor is well laid out, and choosing an item from the left pane will bring up a short explanation of that item in the bottom pane. Unfortunately for code novices, this editor assumes that users have a good foundation in Actionscript. It would be nice to see Adobe implement a novice mode and code hinting, as Macromedia does in Flash. Thankfully, the included Scripting Guide book is easy to read and understand. Still, it’s better to have some live software assistance than to have to refer back to the book constantly.

Live Tabs

Another interesting new feature are the Live Tabs, which give the user the power to add to LiveMotion’s interface by building custom controls. These work with LiveMotion’s automation scripts, and can control anything from creating graphics, generating keyframes, or modifying Actionscript commands. This will be extremely useful for designers who need to customize the application to suit their workflow for complicated projects.

Video

Livemotion 2 also brings with it some output enhancements. You can now export as a streaming Quicktime movie, which is the best format for making use of the bitmap effects and distortions. Eight-bit alpha channel support means you can mix this footage with video and other LiveMotion movies in a video application like After Effects.

Adobe claims that this output is smooth and easily avoids bitmap artifacts normally associated with Quicktime output from SWF applications. I found this to be true in my tests, and was impressed by how much better the result was from a LiveMotion-generated MOV file than one created in Flash. Of course, LiveMotion 2 does not support an Import feature for video streams, so if you need to deliver video through the Flash plugin, then you will need Flash MX or Wildform Flix.

After Effects users will be interested to know that LiveMotion 2 can import After Effects 5.5 animations. This opens up amazing possibilities, and puts great features like “parenting” in your hands that would otherwise be very complex scripting tasks. While After Effects can export SWF files, it does not give you the amazing level of interactivity that Actionscipt affords. Using the two programs cooperatively is quite a powerful combination.

Audio

The audio controls in LiveMotion are decent, but they could be better. I was a bit confused about how to control panning and volume changes until I stumbled upon the appropriate sliders in the Properties palette. I’d like to see controls right on the timeline, and waveform previews might be nice too. LiveMotion could also benefit from some simple audio editing functions, like the ability to do simple clip editing, and separately alter channels for stereo audio files.

MP3 audio support also finds its way to version 2. Users can now import MP3s, as well as export streaming MP3 audio to both SWF and Quicktime output. I thought it was odd that version 1 omitted MP3 support, so this addition was a no-brainer.

Conclusion

I truly love using After Effects, and my hope is that Adobe continues to develop LiveMotion into something just as powerful. If you are looking for a Web animation tool that offers an easy learning curve and works well with Illustrator and Photoshop files, LiveMotion is definitely worth checking out. This is also true if you are an After Effects user looking to serve interactive animations over the Web. LiveMotion 2 is quite a big step in the right direction, but probably not enough to sway a majority of current Flash users. However, with such major improvements seen in version 2, perhaps version 3 is the one that will surpass Flash.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1128/Macintosh_Software/LiveMotion_2_0_MAC.html

Adobe InCopy CS 2 is Adobe’s editing application for editing workflows that combine with InDesign CS 2. InCopy and InDesign are increasingly often being used together as a publishing solution at magazine publishers, newspapers, ad firms, etc.

The advantage of having two separate applications like InCopy and InDesign is that you can split up the workflow of the layout department and the editing department. This has been the reason why Adobe has attracted quite a large number of specialised system integrators such as SoftCare and WoodWing. These vendors develop systems around the InDesign/InCopy tandem so that large environments can use the InDesign/InCopy publishing system.

All of these solutions are really plug-ins to both programs, but that is exactly what makes the Adobe solution so wonderfully efficient. Adobe offering an open technology to third-party developers in the sense that plug-ins are possible to connect InCopy to InDesign in a tight integration scheme, is one of the main reasons why Adobe has been steadily penetrating publishing markets where Quark’s QPS reigned before.
InCopy CS 2 novelties

However, that is not the only reason why InCopy CS 2 is almost a must-have, even for individual writers/editors. Imagine being able to write to copyfit, not just based on a pre-defined layout, but based on a number of words, columns, characters, or whatever else rules in the publishing industry.

InCopy CS 2 offers such flexibility. It’s one of the reasons why I personally have stopped using Microsoft Word or Apple Pages in favour of InCopy CS 2. Word is nice, and it is the standard for delivering copy to magazines, but InCopy CS 2 allows me to export my document to RTF, and that seems to be good enough for all of my editors. The fact that I can instantaneously see in the status bar whether I have written to copyfit is a wonderfully efficient addition to me, in my workflow as an individual freelance.

I don’t have to lose time by going to the Word count either in Word or in Pages. InCopy just shows me with a green bar when I’ve written the exact number of words that I was allowed to write in the first place. The bar turns red when I write to many words. It might sound like a detail, but this alone is worth the license fee.

But of course, there’s much more to InCopy CS 2 than there was to CS. For example, there’s the new ability to drag and drop text between applications. This is one of those features that I seldom use myself, but that I do find should have been included in InCopy earlier—it’s basic functionality.

Dynamic spelling is another novelty. You like it or you don’t. Whatever you may feel about it, it’s better implemented than the Auto-Correct feature of Word, where you often run into the experience that Word stubbornly insists to correct a mistake you haven’t made in the first place. InCopy luckily is less of a know-all. Dictionaries can be shared across workgroups and you can create and link to multiple dictionaries.

A feature many users will like is that you can turn off anti-aliased text. I like anti-aliased text, so I don’t use this feature, but many writers hate the fuzziness of the default anti-aliasing, and they can now turn it off.

Editorial notes are possible, with bookends right in the text, in a different colour so they-re easily identified. Exactly what editors tend to like the most. Footnotes are supported, no matter whether they come from a Word document or an RTF file, or self-created. Numbering and styling can be customized.

In fact, styles have been enhanced considerably in InCopy CS 2, with automatic conversion from Word, but also many more options when creating your own styles. For example, you can now assign a next style in InCopy, just as you could and can in InDesign.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P20/Web_Development/InCopy_CS2_v4_0.html

Adobe InCopy CS is Adobe’s editorial solution. It is designed to work together with InDesign CS, but can be used as word processor by itself as well. However, InCopy CS is aimed primarily at the user in the editorial workflow. InCopy CS produces pure XML files. The product is delivered by Adobe as well as Value Added Resellers these days, whereas previous versions could only be purchased from VARs.

Using InCopy CS as a Microsoft Word replacement can be done, but the resulting document is not compatible with anything, except with applications that read and parse XML files. It isn’t a good idea to buy the product just for that purpose. But when you want to interact with Indesign CS, InCopy CS is just the program you need. Although InDesign CS comes with its own built-in editor, there’s nothing like the power of InCopy when it comes to writing.

The real value of InCopy CS lies in its ability to have editors write to fit (copyfit), especially when a layout must be ‘filled up’ like in newspaper or magazine publishing. This works as follows: a designer sets up a layout and checks in the text frames that will hold the articles. The editor opens these articles in InCopy CS and writes until he sees a status bar turn green and display the words ‘Copy Fit’. That’s when he knows the frame is exactly filled up.

Of course, the integration with InDesign doesn’t happen on its own. In the past, VARs were usually also system integrators developing their own plug-in for the InCopy/InDesign tandem. These plug-ins created a bridge between InCopy and InDesign and allowed for the functionality needed to write to fit. With InCopy CS, Adobe has developed its own plug-in system that comes standard with InCopy: the Adobe Bridge. The Bridge is a plug-in that uses the Links palette as its control centre and which offers basic functionality to make the editorial workflow that you can get with the program tandem happen.

However, the Bridge is far from ideal. It doesn’t offer much in terms of overwriting protection, for example, meaning that simultaneous editing of open articles is possible. Furthermore, the Bridge regularly got confused when I tested its abilities to ‘find’ the right InDesign document to put its articles in. If you consider me testing the system by myself, all alone, you can imagine what it means for a workgroup. The Bridge is therefore limited in its capabilities—-it supports very small workgroups of no more than about 5 people in my experience. Such small workgroups can still solve problems if they are in the same geographical location. For people working in different locations, I would be very careful implementing the Bridge.

You can find a 200K image of InCopy’s interface with a few callouts in this separate window.

For those people plug-in systems like Smart Connection or SoftCare’s K4 seem like a lot more trustworthy. These plug-ins also liberate the true power of InCopy CS in tandem with InDesign CS: simultaneous editing/designing. The Bridge allows this as well, but as I said it cannot be trusted, and simultaneous editing remains somewhat theoretical. With K4, Smart Connection, or some of the other solutions, the power of simultaneous editing and designing becomes fully possible. This really makes the editorial workflow more efficient, as designers can keep fine-tuning and adding design elements to pages while editors can simultaneously write articles.

For editors, InCopy CS delivers the best of the old and the new. An editor migrating from an old-style editorial system can easily set up his copy of InCopy (no pun intended) so that his screen resembles the old system as closely as possible. This mimicking goes as far as the text cursor or i-beam’s form and colour. To editors just starting to work with an editorial system, InCopy offers all of the interface power of Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.

Is InCopy CS better than for example the Quark Publishing System and its editorial front-end? From a technical perspective, I would be inclined to say it isn’t. Quark uses a proprietary system, which traps an IT-manager into buying Quark’s system for the rest of his professional life. If he wants more power or a different working method, he will have to re-invest in a completely new and incompatible system like InCopy/InDesign—-although instruments for the latter exist that make migrating less daunting. On the other hand, from a user’s perspective, I really can’t tell. Although I have asked a test version on several occasions, Quark has always declined, sending me marketing material instead.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P19/Web_Development/InCopy_CS_v3_0.html

Adobe keeps Illustrator CS the top dog in the field of professional drawing tools.

Although Adobe is trying to convince all Photoshop enthusiasts to use Illustrator as their primary drawing tool, almost every graphics professional still uses Photoshop. That could change, thanks to Illustrator CS. Beyond Illustrator CS’s ability to work in a check-in, check-out production environment, its new type capabilities alone make it worth the upgrade for most existing Illustrator users. Illustrator CS’s 3D capabilities will lure many new users, too. Additional effects and fine-tuning of printing and PDF support will also please Web and print designers. Although its retail price is high, Illustrator CS is nonetheless a worthwhile upgrade.

With this revision, Illustrator joins Photoshop, GoLive, and InDesign (but not Acrobat) in Adobe’s new naming scheme: Creative Suite. Despite the supposed new moniker, our splash screen still carries the version 11.0.0 appellation. Illustrator CS runs on Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or later or Macintosh OS X and, unlike Photoshop CS, does not require product activation.

The easy-to-use interface remains unchanged, which is good; it should be very familiar to both Illustrator and Photoshop users. The floating, tabbed palettes still dock to each other and to the sides of the window. With 25 possible palette windows and 7 subpalettes just for type options, it’s questionable whether Adobe can fit any more into this interface.

Also, we’re happy to say Illustrator CS adds a WYSIWYG font menu, so you can finally see the differences between, say, Humana Serif ITC and Humana Serif Md ITC.

The primary focus of Illustrator CS is work flow: Illustrator now links to the rest of the CS product family through Adobe Version Cue, which acts as a one-stop asset tracking system for multiple users. However, this feature is hidden in the File Handling & Clipboard section under Preferences in Illustrator and requires enabling before use in your system preferences.

Along with work flow, Illustrator CS offers 3D capabilities. You can now extrude and bevel, rotate, or revolve an item to generate a PostScript 3D object, which you can then manipulate in real time (with a live wire-frame preview). You can also set unlimited light sources with individual intensities, add a limited number of surface properties, and even create Flash animation. And you can map Illustrator or any rasterized artwork onto a 3D surface. The 3D items remain available for editing even after being placed within a complex document.

Illustrator CS shares (with Photoshop) a new type engine, so files can be opened by either application while at the same time preserving individual layers and the ability to edit text. Illustrator CS supports character and paragraph styles, OpenType, optical kerning, and optical margin alignment as well as multiple rows and columns in text areas. There’s also a Scribble effect for imitating a hand-drawn look, more customizable print previews, independent bleed settings, and new separation options.

We tested Illustrator CS on a 700MHz iBook and a dual-2GHz Power Mac G5. On the iBook, which lacks the G5’s processor speed and bandwidth, applying complex graphic styles to involved figures took up to a minute to process; on the G5, these took seconds. On the other hand, the integration of 3D and new type capabilities eliminates the need to switch to more specialized applications, thus speeding up your overall productivity.

Adobe offers free technical support for Illustrator CS, although you will have to pay for any call charges. However, there’s free online help available for Illustrator users. In addition to the Adobe Studio site, which delivers tips, tutorials and tools, Adobe’s user-to-user forums are monitored by competent support staff and offer a good track record. Adobe’s knowledge base has rarely disappointed us.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P17/Illustration/Illustrator_CS_CE.html

For MAC:

http://www.softster.net/P247/Illustration/Illustrator_CS_MacOsx.html

InCopy can be called a satellite program to InDesign. It integrates with the latter and adds some features to boost its power; but InCopy’s major purpose is as a tool for editing InDesign’s documents. Now, parts of documents can be assigned to different people. You can say, “so this could always be done.” But with InCopy it can be done in InCopy while keeping a link to the InDesign document. Furthermore, the basic design of the document cannot be changed in InCopy; the designer is still in charge. Only editorial changes can be made. Thus, the framework and design will remain the same. An editor works in InCopy while the designer sets up everything in InDesign and assigns sections to be edited to various people to be checked out and worked on in InCopy. The designer can set up placeholder frames or frames with content already in them. Thus, each partner does not only not have to have InDesign, but, when working on the copy, can do it in the less expensive software program, InCopy. Thus, two purposes are served: multiple people can edit parts of a document without changing the design (keeping the designer solely in charge) and the cost for the company is considerably less than if each member had to have a copy of InDesign.

This review or discussion will revolve around using InCopy as a team function. I have prepared a flyer in InDesign CS3 that will advertise a new newspaper that a friend and I are writing – mainly my friend.

Below is a screen capture of the layout of the flyer plus an assignment sheet in InDesign CS3. Here, notice how the Tulsa High Tech nameplate is highlighted in both the Assignment list as well as in the layout.

Below is the same screen in InCopy CS3. Here, notice how the colors on the Assignment list correspond to the colors in the layout.

How the assigning is done depends on a number of factors. It can depend on how the circles are checked on the New Assignment list. Notice that the assignee also has a color. These colors help identify who has made changes.

Below is a screen capture of the assignment options available in each program.

You are able to change assignment locations in InDesign CS3. If you ever are confused as to the location of an assignment, you can find it in both InDesign CS3 as well as in InCopy CS3. Notice how both menus show Reveal in Explorer.

If one person, for example, will do all the editing, all the parts can be collected under one heading in InDesign and then checked out one by one in InCopy. All of these will be packaged as a unit.

The next example is a little diffferent. Notice how each assignee has a different color. This makes tracking easy.

Now that some of the basics are out of the way, let’s see how this works.

One way to collaborate is to send an e-mail assignment as a package. You create a package for InCopyCS3 either manually through the command: Package for InCopy or automatically: Package for InCopy and Email. They will not necessarily be the same size. The package format is .incp. This is useful if the person who is editing is an individual and not a team member or does not have access to a server.

When you open the file in InCopy, you are ready to go. You check it out and start working on it. Then, it is not available to anyone else.When you are ready to save it, it can only be saved in one place. It automatically goes to a folder that is created in My Documents on a Windows’ machine. It would be useful if you could choose where you wanted to save it, especially so you could save it other than on the “C” drive. I experimented by changing the InCopy document and forwarding as a package under a different name: All Editable Content2.incp to a different directory. I did this with a few versions. When I accessed each package, each version was as I created it. Basically, I could save different content under different package names, but the name of the file would be the same: All Editable Content.inca. Then, I could decide which I wanted to send back to InDesign.

You can, also, upload your files to a server. If you have a website, you have a server. You can use Dreamweaver CS3 or an an FTP program to upload it. Below is an example from an FTP program.

I have only touched on assignments since the focus of this review is the workflow between InDesign CS3 and InCopy CS3. What I have discussed is the basic skeleton of the workflow to give you an idea of the basic pattern.

In InCopy you will see three panes to view your story. I brought in a different example from InDesign than the one shown previously. You can edit in any of the panes once you have checked out the story.

You can track changes. For example, one can set it up to track changes in this story. Notice, how I substituted the I for the We.

The basic trick is to keep track of what you are doing. The person sending the files from InDesign needs to be very well organized. I have another machine so I put InCopy CS3 on it, also. I even used the server and e-mail at a different e-mail address. Dee-Marie, another writer for Renderosity who has this program, and I also went back and forth both on my server and through e-mail.

While I could accomplish what the program stated, I have to admit I found this workflow confusing. The Help in both InCopy CS3 and InDesign CS3 dealing with working with setting up workflows and working with them was not adequate. A third party source is necessary. One that I found that was excellent was the InDesign CS3 Bible by Galen Gruman. While a bit confusing in the workflow aspect, with practice I can see where this program can save an organization time and money and streamline the production of a publication.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P1267/Development_Software/InCopy_CS3_.html

Late last month, Adobe announced their latest addition to the Acrobat family of products, Adobe Acrobat 3D, which now extends the visualization, publishing, and collaboration capabilities of the ubiquitous Adobe PDF format from 2D documents and drawings to 3D models as well. This can only be seen as a testament to the growing importance of 3D in design industries such as AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) and manufacturing (including automotive, aerospace, machinery, and so on). Adobe Acrobat 3D is primarily targeted towards design engineering, technical publishing and creative professionals in these industries, and harnesses the reach of the free Adobe Reader to allow extended project teams working in 3D to collaborate and communicate quickly, securely and cost-effectively. Let’s take a detailed look to see how it works.

Overview of Acrobat 3D

Adobe Acrobat 3D comes close to a year after the last Acrobat release, version 7.0 Professional. Recall from my review of that release that one of its most significant aspects, from an AEC perspective, was the ability to embed, view, and navigate 3D content in PDF files. This content, however, had to be a special format called U3D (Universal 3D), an open specification developed by the 3D Industry Forum that comprised of developers and corporate users of 3D graphics technology such as Intel, Adobe, Bentley Systems, Boeing, HP, and Right Hemisphere. From among AEC applications, only those from Bentley had the capability to export 3D models in the U3D format to PDF, and I showed an example of this in my review of Acrobat 7.0 Professional. Given this limitation, it was not surprising that 3D PDF didn’t take off in a big way in AEC and was restricted primarily to Bentley users only (for example, by NBBJ, as mentioned in the recent AECbytes article, BIM Symposium at the University of Minnesota).

This limitation has been eliminated in Adobe Acrobat 3D to a large extent. It now has more ways to convert 3D models to the PDF format, including direct conversion from certain CAD file formats without the need of the authoring application, as well as a new creation method referred to as 3D capture, which can be used to create a 3D PDF file from other design applications that may not be directly supported. (The list of applications that are directly supported at this point is admittedly much larger for the manufacturing industry than for AEC, and includes CATIA, Pro/ENGINEER, and SolidWorks, among others.) The set of navigation tools that was introduced in Acrobat 7.0 Professional for navigating 3D content has been expanded in Acrobat 3D to include multiple display modes, the ability to create dynamic cross sections, and the display of a “model tree” which allows the visibility of different parts of the model to be manipulated as required. The application also comes with an associated utility called Acrobat 3D Toolkit, which allows the 3D content in the PDF file to be enhanced by editing lighting, adding textures and materials, and creating animations.

When enabled by Acrobat 3D, extended team members, consultants, and clients can then use the latest version, 7.0.7, of the free Adobe Reader application to review and add comments directly onto the 3D content embedded within the Adobe PDF file, without the need to have the original authoring application or any other CAD viewer. This version is already available for download from the Adobe website. If someone has an earlier version of Adobe Reader and is sent an “enabled” PDF file by someone using Acrobat 3D, the Adobe Reader user will be prompted upon trying to launch the document to download the latest version of the product.

Acrobat 3D also allows 3D models of the supported file formats to be directly inserted into Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, so that when these files are published into the PDF format, they include the required interactive 3D content alongside traditional text-based and drawing-based content. While this capability is more useful for technical publishing and creative professionals creating brochures, catalogues, training content, operations manuals, and so on, it can also be used in AEC for creating presentation or construction drawings that include interactive 3D content for better explaining different aspects and details of a building. As with 2D content in PDF, the 3D content is compacted, so that the file size of a PDF file containing a 3D model would be substantially smaller than that of the original 3D authoring application.

Acrobat 3D joins the Acrobat family that includes Acrobat 7.0 Professional, Acrobat 7.0 Standard and Acrobat 7.0 Elements (see the difference between the Professional, Standard, and Elements versions in my review of Acrobat 6.0 Professional). While Acrobat 3D does not supersede Acrobat 7.0 Professional—which would still be the version of choice for those who don’t need the 3D capability—it does include all of the functionality of Acrobat 7.0 Professional described in my review, including the ability to publish multiple layouts in AutoCAD as a multi-page PDF, ability to export PDF comments and markups back into the original authoring AutoCAD file, automatic scale embedding in the PDF so that manual scale calibration is no longer needed for measuring, new Callout and Dimensioning markup tools, and several other enhancements related to PDF creation, interface, organizing, designing forms, and security.

Getting 3D Content Into Acrobat 3D

Acrobat 3D allows 3D content to be published as Adobe PDF in three different ways, two of which are similar. Files that are in directly supported formats—which include 3DS, DXF, MAX, DGN, IGES, 3DM, VRML, and OBJ—can simply be dragged and dropped into Acrobat 3D. Alternately, you can right-click on them and select the “Convert to Adobe PDF’ command from the context menu that appears. Most AEC users, therefore, with the exception of those working in MicroStation, would have to export their 3D models into one of these file formats to be able to import into Acrobat 3D using one of the above two methods. Figure 1 shows a sample Revit Building file brought into Acrobat 3D by exporting it first to MicroStation’s DGN format.

There is also a third, more direct way for AEC users to get 3D content into Acrobat 3D from those CAD and BIM applications that support the OpenGL rendering mode. This is through the built-in 3D Capture utility, based on an OpenGL model capture technology developed by a French company, OKYZ, that Adobe acquired in December 2004. It allows users to quickly capture a 3D file displayed on screen in OpenGL mode and convert it to Adobe PDF. The use of the 3D Capture utility to capture a SketchUp model is illustrated in Figure 2. It involves first launching SketchUp, then Acrobat 3D, and selecting the “From 3D Capture” option under “Create PDF.” A dialog box appears to notify that Acrobat 3D has recognized SketchUp. This needs to be done only once for any design application. When you now quit and relaunch SketchUp, you can simply use the Print Screen button to capture the SketchUp 3D model that is displayed on the screen. It is automatically sent to Acrobat 3D, and you also have the option of adjusting the capture settings before the model is displayed.

The 3D screen capture technology works with most applications commonly used in AEC, including AutoCAD, Autodesk Architectural Desktop (ADT), Autodesk Revit, form·Z, and so on. For some of these applications, some of the default settings need to be adjusted for the screen capture to work, either in Acrobat 3D or in the authoring application. For example, in AutoCAD or ADT, you have to access the System properties in the Options dialog, and under the Properties of the Current 3D Graphics Display, you have to enable Hardware Acceleration with wopengl8.hdi selected as the driver (see Figure 3-a). For Revit, on the other hand, no changes are required in its settings; however, the settings in Acrobat 3D for 3D capture from Revit have to be specified as shown in Figure 3-b. The 3D capture from Revit, for the same file shown in Figure 1, is illustrated in Figure 3-c, obtained after making the correct settings. A complete list of the required settings for 3D capture from various applications is given in this document on Adobe’s Support website. If it is important to have the model to scale in the PDF file, the scale information must be defined during creation from 3D capture, otherwise default measurements are used.

There is yet another method to bring a 3D file of a specified format that is not directly supported into Acrobat 3D. A good example of this is DWG. While both AutoCAD and ADT files can be brought in through 3D Capture, or by saving as DXF which is directly supported, it can sometimes help to go through an additional step which involves the use of the Acrobat 3D Toolkit, a separate but associated application that is installed along with Acrobat 3D. This application allows advanced editing of a 3D model embedded in Acrobat 3D, and we will look at this capability in more detail in the next section. Let’s look at 3D PDF creation, for which the Acrobat 3D Toolkit provides another avenue. It can directly import certain file formats such as DWG that are not supported by Acrobat 3D. (For a full list of the formats supported by both applications, see this Adobe support document.) Once you open up that file in the Toolkit, you can then save it as a U3D file, which is directly supported by Acrobat 3D and which can also be directly inserted into Microsoft Office documents to created PDFs combining 2D and 3D content. The advantage of importing through the 3D toolkit and then inserting into Acrobat 3D as opposed to doing a screen capture is that more information about the objects gets preserved using the former method. Thus, while a screen capture only captures geometrical information, importing a file into the 3D toolkit preserves some additional information such as layers and object names. It also preserves dimensional information, as well as material and texture information more accurately than a 3D capture. This is illustrated in Figure 4, which shows the same SketchUp file shown in Figure 2, imported into the Acrobat 3D Toolkit by exporting it first from SketchUp as a 3DS file.

It must be noted, however, that non-graphical and non-material attributes of objects, such as the U-value of a wall or the fire rating of a door—information that will usually be captured in a BIM model—is currently not captured in the 3D PDF format, regardless of which of the above methods is used for bringing the file into Acrobat 3D.

Working with 3D Content

Once you have got the required 3D content into Acrobat 3D using any of the methods described above, it can be visualized and manipulated in different ways. To start with, let’s look at the enhancements that have been made in the 3D toolbar. Recall that the tools in Acrobat 7.0 Professional for working with 3D content included zoom, pan, rotate, adjusting lighting, switching to different predefined views, changing the background color, and hiding, showing, and isolating selecting elements. Some significant new capabilities have been added to this toolbar in Acrobat 3D. A Model Tree option allows you to see how the model is broken down into its various parts, and gives you the option of turning the visibility of each part off or on, as shown in Figure 5. You can create and save different views that you can return to, right below the model tree information. Some basic information about the model is also listed. Another toolbar option gives you the choice of several different display modes including Solid, Transparent, Shaded Illustration, and so on. And finally, another significant new capability is the ability to see a cross section of the model and dynamically adjust the alignment, offset, and tilt of the cutting plane, as shown in Figure 5. You can also save the cross sectional views for quick visualization later, as well as generate cross sectional views with the camera aligned with the cutting plane, allowing plans and sections of the building to be saved for quick reference.

For project collaboration between an extended team using Adobe PDF, the commenting, markup, and review tools in Acrobat 3D are the same as in Acrobat 7.0 Professional, with the added ability to add view-specific comments to the 3D content, as shown in Figure 6. All comments added in a particular view get saved with a view, and can be reviewed by others accessing that document. Also, when enabled by Acrobat 3D, users of the free Adobe Reader can also add their comments directly on 3D objects and 2D content within the Adobe PDF files. Extended team members can define multiple cross-sections of a 3D model illustrating plans and sections to facilitate the review process. Unlike 2D comments and markups on a PDF file generated from AutoCAD which can be round-tripped back to AutoCAD, comments and markups on a 3D model cannot, however, be exported back to the original 3D authoring application.

If you right-click on a 3D model in Acrobat 3D, you can select the option for editing it in the Acrobat 3D toolkit. This will launch the same application shown in Figure 4, where you can make changes to the model—such as textures, shading and materials—and add animation, views and lights, without returning to the original CAD file. You can also output high-quality 2D graphics from the 3D model for use in documentation. An Optimize Geometry option is also available to simplify 3D models that are complex and weighty by removing duplicate faces, duplicate materials, internal parts, and so on.

And finally, those who are adept with programming can use Javascript to add to or limit the functionality available in a PDF. Javascript can be added to the file during the creation process or after the PDF has already been created. Examples of Javascript enhancements to 3D content in Acrobat 3D include adding a grid to the PDF file, limiting rotating to a specified axis only, and so on.

Analysis and Conclusions

The ability to capture and embed 3D design information in a PDF file and subsequently share it for collaboration and review—for free—is certain to be welcomed by AEC professionals as 3D takes off in the industry. In my last review of Acrobat 7.0 Professional, where 3D had just been introduced, I commented that Acrobat needed to continue to broaden its focus from 2D to 3D, and that it would be interesting to see how much further the PDF format could go. I hadn’t expected such a giant technological leap in just a year! The ability to capture 3D model information from an open application right from the screen and convert it to PDF on the fly is a very powerful one, and constitutes a critical breakthrough for Acrobat and PDF. It will continue to maintain PDF’s current stature as one of the most ubiquitous and compelling options for electronic publishing in the AEC industry.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that since the 3D content in a PDF file does not retain its non-geometric properties, it does lose a part of its “intelligence.” Thus, it cannot supplant the use of specialized design review and design checking applications such as NavisWorks and Solibri Model Checker, which are being increasingly used to detect conflicts between the different disciplinary models of a building. And, of course, Autodesk continues to forge ahead with its own electronic publishing format, DWF, which can capture attribute information in both 2D and 3D and is now being used as the basis for developing applications such as quantity take-off and asset management, both by Autodesk as well as third-party developers. It seems as though Adobe PDF is moving ahead with developing unique 3D capabilities of its own, and as it does so, it is differentiating itself more strongly in scope and purpose from other electronic publishing solutions. It will likely remain the most popular way to electronically capture and share documents comprising both 2D and 3D information—culled from practically any kind of software application under the sun.

There is, however, still some scope for improvement in Acrobat 3D, at least from an AEC perspective. Since most of the commonly used file formats are not directly supported, users will have to spend some time understanding how 3D capture works and configuring their settings for each of the individual design applications they are working with. The navigation capabilities for the 3D content need to be improved to make it easier to rotate views about the Z axis so that the building continues to stand “straight up” when rotated. Currently, this can be done only using Javascript by those who know scripting. Also, at a street price of $995, Acrobat 3D is more than twice the price of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional and it remains to be seen how many users will make the switch. It certainly doesn’t need to replace all the seats of Acrobat 7.0 Professional being used in an organization; firms can get by with upgrading only for a few users commissioned with the task of creating the 3D PDF files for review. Acrobat 3D is going to gain much more initial traction in the manufacturing industry, which has already embraced 3D fully, and which will find it tremendously useful to capture machine parts, assemblies, and so on in PDF format (see Figure 7). Larger projects like buildings are not as amenable to being usefully captured and presented in 3D PDF format compared to smaller parts such as machinery.

But the AEC industry is an important market for Adobe’s Acrobat product line-up, experiencing a 70% growth over the last year. Hopefully, future versions of Acrobat 3D will provide more direct support for commonly used CAD and BIM applications in AEC, and possibly capture more non-graphical object attribute data to make for a richer 3D PDF file, which in turn might spawn a whole new generation of PDF-based applications for different aspects of design, construction, and operation. The possibilities are indeed limitless.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P699/Development_Software/Acrobat_3D_V7_0.html

Adobe’s first serious attempt to address growing competition from the likes of Avid, Pinnacle and Sony came last year with Premiere Pro. To long-time DV enthusiasts, this was the seventh incarnation of Premiere, but Adobe considered the overhaul so significant that it not only renamed the program Pro, but also reset the version number to 1.0. Premiere Pro brought on-board many of the more professional features associated with competitors such as Pinnacle Edition (possibly the program’s biggest threat, due to Pinnacle’s highly aggressive marketing), and Apple’s Final Cut Pro (the light version of which, Final Cut Express, has surely dealt Premiere a killer blow on the Mac platform). Interestingly, most of these pro features were concerned with the program’s interface and workflow, rather than cutting tools or effects.
Despite being more businesslike in its approach than Premiere 6.5, Pro 1.0 left us disappointed. Most frustrating was the discovery that the program required a very powerful host PC to deliver anything approaching fluid performance. In our initial tests, V1 had bluntly refused to run on a PC with an AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor (due to its lack of SSE instruction sets), and staggered and lurched on a PC with a 2GHz Pentium 4 CPU. We were eventually able to review it comfortably on a 3GHz P4 laptop, but even then, from time to time, we felt that Premiere Pro was grumbling.
Indeed, while Adobe lists an 800MHz processor and 256MByte of RAM as minimum requirements, it also makes a point of recommending a 3GHz P4 processor and 1GByte of RAM – these recommendations should be taken seriously. This all seems rather perverse when Adobe is currently trying to hold on to an existing user base in a market where DV and FireWire are open standards, and most editors aren’t tied to the software that came with their capture boards. With that in mind, we’d have expected Adobe to make the transition to Premiere Pro rather less painful – and certainly not force the purchase of a brand new PC to support it.
Another grumble came from the fact that editing methods had been brought more in line with competitors from Avid and Pinnacle, forcing existing Premiere users to spend time re-learning the interface if they upgraded – again likely to reduce the chances of keeping customers loyal. With Premiere 1.5, none of our major gripes about V1 seem to have been addressed. System requirements are still formidable, and none of the old working methods (notably A/B roll editing) has been restored.
This isn’t a full point update, so we can’t expect any mind-blowing additions to the toolkit, but Adobe has followed the current market trend of adding High Definition support – import, edit and export of HD content at resolutions of 480p, 720p and 1080i using supported third-party hardware, plus capture of 24P progressive scan content from Panasonic camcorders such as the AG-VX100E DV. These formats are yet to break real ground in the UK, and we were unable to test V1.5 in this environment.
Bézier path curves for motion effects and keyframes are new, too, and there’s closer integration with Photoshop and After Effects. The program offers CMX3600 EDL-import capability (earlier versions were limited to export only) along with in/out support for AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) – the multimedia file format that simplifies the exchange of digital media (with metadata) across platforms and between systems and programs.

Conclusion

Premiere Pro 1.5’s system requirements are hefty, and this paired with the learning curve when moving from V6.5 to Pro won’t do much to encourage users of V6.5 or earlier to upgrade. Project management tools are useful, and Bézier curves in the motion editor are nice, but High Definition support isn’t likely to have a huge impact on the UK market for some time yet. Overall, Pro 1.5 is a relatively minor upgrade, so some V1 users will choose to wait for V2 before upgrading. But, Pro 1.5 does its job well, and our intensive usage across three big projects resulted in no tantrums and no crashes. So, possibly, the real appeal of Premiere Pro 1.5 to existing Pro users might be increased stability and a relatively bug-free environment.
There’s no denying that Premiere Pro is a very able editor, though we don’t find it as tactile and friendly as Edition, or regard its advanced audio tools as anything like as accessible or intuitive as Vegas’s. On the whole, V1.5 moves Premiere Pro in the right direction, but without undoing some of the backward steps taken by the original version.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P34/Digital_Video/Premiere_Pro_v1_5.html

This is an important software category. You can drop off your flash memory card as if it were film at some photo finishing shops to get prints. But most digicamers are on their own after they press the shutter.

In the beginning that meant laboriously transferring images from the card to your computer to print from an image editor after setting the image size and resolution and perhaps cropping and fixing red-eye.

What you did with the images after they got to your hard disk was your problem.

That was fine for the pioneering types but now that the rest of us are along for the ride, all-in-one applications that manage the collection organizing, retrieval and sharing of our images matter. A lot.

Apple figured that out early with the introduction of iPhoto. Companies like Kodak and Lifescape with online photofinishing divisions didn’t waste time provided front ends for their output services. And finally Adobe itself jumped into the ring with Album.

VERSION 1.0

We thought the original Album acquitted itself very well, taking six rounds in a virtual 10-round bout with Kodak’s EasyShare (http://www.imaging-resource.com/SOFT/ESY/ESY.HTM) and Lifescape’s Picasa.

The rounds they lost, though, were big ones. Album isn’t cross-platform and we found the interface cluttered.

Since then Kodak has released an OS X version of EasyShare and Picasa has had a minor update. But Adobe has taken off the gloves. We went a few rounds with the shipping version recently to see what Jim was talking about.

NEW & IMPROVED

OK, it’s still not cross-platform. Adobe is still isn’t ruling out a Macintosh version, but we have the feeling they’re just humoring our cross-platform preference.

But it isn’t compatible with Windows 98 anymore, either. And that disturbs us. There’s something sacred about Windows 98, just as there is about Macintosh OS 9 (when we called it System 9).

But we’ll chalk it up to a change is how business is done. Registration, security, updates, etc. all profit from the newer operating systems.

On the new _and_ improved front, the user interface has been simplified with a browser-like skin, tagging is more flexibility, the calendar has been revised, proxy collections have been introduced, image editing has been enhanced, there are new options for phones/Palms/Tivos, a Quick Guide and more.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

To run version 2.0, you need a Pentium III or 4 class processor or equivalent, Windows 2000/ME/XP, 128-MB RAM (but 256 are recommended), Explorer 5.01 or later updated with the relevant service packs, a color monitor capable of displaying thousands of colors at a resolution of 800×600 pixels and a CD-ROM drive.

INSTALLATION

Grumble, grumble. We’re pretty religious about maintenance updates but apparently we missed one for Album 1.0. When we tried to update to 2.0, the new version (which removes the old version) couldn’t make any sense of our catalog files.

But by the time we found out about that, version 1.0 had already been wiped off our disk by the installer. So we couldn’t simply go back to 1.0, install the maintenance update and then reinstall.

The installer should check before removing the earlier version. After all, the code to check is in the application. It’s just run at the wrong time.

The solution was to have 2.0 rebuild our collection from scratch, scanning our drive for images. Not a great solution. Any work we’d done in the application (like tagging) was lost and our offline CDs wouldn’t be included.

So, if you’re upgrading, check for an update to 1.0 before installing 2.0.

THE INTERFACE

Album does a lot of things. It transfers your photos to your hard disk, organizes them so you can find them, touches them up a bit, assembles them into productions you can share and archives them, too. You can enhance the image editing substantially with Elements (or Photoshop for that matter) or any free Windows image editor (Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com) and Vicman’s Photo Editor (http://www.vicman.net) are two).

The doorway into this world is the new Quick Guide. It presents six icons for Album’s major functions: Get Photos, Organize, Find, Fix, Create and Share. There’s also a button to access an Overview and another to get Help. Finally, a check box disables the doorway, so you just enter the application when you launch it.

But the existence of the Quick Guide suggests a problem. And that problem is an interface that tries to do everything at once.

Album 2.0 is prettier than 1.0 but still jumbled. At first glance, it struck us like a Web browser with a tool bar of familiar icons and a large pane to show thumbnails. But that’s where the similarity ends.

The Title Bar of the window itself announces that this is Album with the usual icons to minimize, restore and close. Under that is a small Menu Bar with File, Edit, View, Find, Creations, Online Services and Help commands.

Under that (oops, here we go) is a Shortcuts Bar populated with buttons (some with text) for common commands. The default set includes Back and Forward navigational buttons, a Home icon to select all photos, Get Photos, Fix, Create, Print and Share. Then there are three tabs on the right of the shortcuts bar to display items in the Photo Well, display the Organizer’s tags and collections panes and display the Calendar View. Finally, the Shortcuts Bar includes an Adobe logo button to take you to its Web site.

The Menu Bar is easy to overlook (although that’s where you backup, adjust dates and set preferences). And the Shortcuts Bar really should be the Menu Bar with the Quick Guide icons.

Under the Shortcuts Bar is the Timeline, a terrific way to navigate your image collection. It’s a bar graph of the number of images shot in any particular month. You can drag a marker along the Timeline to display the images for the month it rests on. Or you can set end points for a wider range (narrowing down the display in the Photo Well). In short, it’s a convenient way to quickly navigate your collection.

But the marker and end points ought to be one tool. This confusion of options really drove us nuts. We’d rather have one selection tool that can be stretched to cover a range than one tool to pinpoint and another to select a range. It reminded us of Word (and that ain’t good).

Sorry, not done with the interface yet.

Under the Timeline is the Find Bar, using a lot of screen space. Drag tags or an image on it for a quick search. Drag the Family tag to it, for example, to see all your family pictures. Drag an image and Album shows other images it thinks look like it. But why is it a full bar?

Then we come to the Photo Well. This is really your work area, your light table, your sorting bin. Each thumbnail includes the date and time of the image and icons for its tags (with medium-sized thumbnails). An icon also indicates if the image is offline.

Album catalogs your image collection, creating a database entry for each image. So it can know about images that are on a CD offsite somewhere.

So why wouldn’t you display the Photo Well all the time? Two reasons. The Calendar View and Organize function.

Calendar View replaces your light table with either a year, month or day calendar. In the monthly calendar, a thumbnail of the first picture taken each day fills the square for that day. Next to the monthly calendar is a date display with the starting image and the option to add a Daily Note below it. Controls let you see a slide show of images with their notes for that date.

We thought we’d miss the refrigerator style calendar of 1.0, but we didn’t really. The monthly pretty much gives us that, just in a different layout.

The other competition for the Photo Well is the Tags pane. More about that later.

Under all that is the Options Bar. Depending on your view, you can change sort order or thumbnail size here.

And finally, below the Options Bar is the Windows Status Bar.

At first glance, it’s confusing. And that’s a shame, because Album does a lot of things very well. You should look forward to seeing its shining face as you launch it.

GETTING PHOTOS

The tools are there to do things, of course.

The first thing you’ll want to do is get your photos. You can get them from your digicam or mobile phone just by plugging it in — a big help for occasional photographers. Images are copied onto the hard disk and a record is entered into the Album catalog.

And that includes in-camera movies (which will actually play in the Photo Well).

Remember, you can also just catalog images already stored on CDs, without copying them to the hard disk.

ORGANIZE

Thumbnails of your images are displayed in the Photo Well organized by date. Dates are picked up from the Exif header, which includes the moment the image was captured. If your image doesn’t have an Exif header, Album uses the file creation date.

Dates are where organization starts, but there’s a lot more to it. Album includes some keywords (like People, Places, Events) but it allows you free reign to create your own categories and subcategories of keywords. An easily editable icon built from the first tagged image helps remind you what the category is all about.

Fortunately, though, it automatically generates keywords from the original folder name using the new Instant Tag. So if you’re archiving four years of CDs and you’ve named the folders in some meaningful way, you’ve got keywords you can use without keywording anything yourself. Nice.

But adding keywords is just as important, really. And Album 2.0 makes it much easier, fully implementing drag-and-drop keywording. Select a bunch of images, drag a tag (or three) to keyword them. Or drag an image to a tag. Either way, it’s keyworded.

FIND

The point of tagging images with keywords is to make it easy to find them in a few years (or days). You don’t want to have to look for your vacation photos from Alaska or try to remember what year you went to Niagara Falls. You want Album to look and remember. Keywords do that.

All you have to do is click on the tag and the Photo Well will display image thumbnails with that tag. Or choose a single picture, drag it to the top of the Photo Well and Album will find other photos that look like it.

Album has some other clever ways of finding things for you, too. You can actually find photos by how you’ve used them. When you imported them, who you got them from, who you emailed them to, when you printed them, when you exported them, when you ordered online prints or shared them online, when you used them in Creations or Web Galleries or 3D Galleries.

REORGANIZE

One day you’ll get a bright idea. It’s unfortunate, but it happens to all of us. You may, for example, want to do a CD of images celebrating your in-law’s anniversary. You’ll want to include all sorts of images, antiques and modern ones. No one category can quite cover it all.

Album 2.0 introduces the concept of a Collection to help you. We’ve been calling your stash of images a collection. Album extends that concept by letting you make subcollections without moving anything.

Behind the Tags pane is the Collections pane. Create one called Anniversary and, as you scroll through your complete collection of images, drag the ones you want to use to the Anniversary Collection. When you’re done, click on the Anniversary Collection and that’s what the Photo Well will display.

Collections are ideal for rounding up the posse before you make a new Creation, like a CD or photo book.

FIX

Wish we could skip over this and just point you to an image editor, but Album has made these essential tools hard to gloss over. There are three main fixes.

Single Click Fix can correct lighting or color and sharpen blurred images. Slider controls let you fine-tune the results.

Red Eye Removal and Cropping take no more effort than making a selection (one eye at a time) and clicking the tool.

Filters for Photo Conversion can morph your image into a sepia tone or a black and white image.

You’ll want more, but you can do a lot with just these.

CREATE

Jim told us pros really like their keyword tagging system. But the occasional user will appreciate Album because it’s comprehensive. You don’t have to have an image editor to fix red eye, for example. And it can also print greeting cards.

So the strong suite of Album is what you can make with it. Creations.

You’ll want, for example, to print an image now and then. Or create a slide show. Or make a greeting card featuring your photography. You can do all that without leaving Album.

But you can also make calendars, Web pages, 3D galleries and printed photo books (like those iPhoto guys get). And pretty nice ones. The new templates are not all done by designers with crayons.

Templates: Greeting Card

The requirements for these kind of projects can be complex, particularly when you are asking a third party to make the print or print the book. So Adobe provides Creation Templates and Creation Wizards to guide you.

And they are cleanly laid out, easy to follow and even check for errors. We made a Video CD in just five minutes, rearranging our images and using a nice template. We could easily have added music (captions would have taken a bit more work). The one image Album warned us would be severely cropped, actually turned out just as we’d hoped. And, yes, it was easy.

SHARE

Sharing has been bumped up a notch, too. Emailing is easier than ever and you can send not just individual images but slide shows exported to PDF. Wizards will take care of that for you, too, sizing your email to match your connection speed.

You can share images in your catalog by synching your Palm OS handheld with your computer and sending pictures to it. You can also send pictures to your mobile phone or TiVo Series 2 DVR.

And, of course, you can burn DVDs and Video CDs for playback on a television without leaving Album. Jim told us Roxio preempts the Album burning software, though, so beware if you’ve installed a Roxio product. They’re discussing the problem (which we’ve hit too; we never got our Roxio products to run on a Vaio that had CD/DVD burning software already installed).

And, finally, Adobe Atmosphere 3D Galleries are a virtual world your Web visitors can stroll through to see your images.

PROTECT

If you’ve ever studied the specs for hard drives, you may remember old MTBF. Mean time between failures. Nothing spins forever.

So we gave Adobe big points for providing an archiving and backup solution in version 1.0. And we want to applaud them again. Back up to either CD or DVD with one click. Make two. Then get one backup to a second location. You won’t have to reach for your photo albums when the smoke alarm goes off. You can actually grab some clean underwear.

CONCLUSION

Our grumbling about the interface is something personal. When you’ve worked in Album a while, you get used to it. It isn’t a pleasure to use, but it functions. The real pleasure is behind the interface. You’ll enjoy it again and again.

Apple and Adobe seem to be working the hardest at this software category. Their second versions are both grand efforts. Mac owners have iPhoto but Windows users need to install their own solution. Don’t rely on Windows alone to manage your image collection. Not when there’s something as affordable — and comprehensive — as Album.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P25/Photo_Editing/Photoshop_Album_v2_0.html

Adobe InDesign CS PageMaker Edition software combines the full version of InDesign CS with the Adobe PageMaker Plug-in Pack to provide an exclusive upgrade path from PageMaker. Popular PageMaker tools ease the transition to InDesign. Professionally designed templates introduce you to the advanced layout capabilities of InDesign. And extensive training materials help you master InDesign quickly. To successfully install Adobe InDesign CS PageMaker Edition, you will need to provide a valid Adobe PageMaker serial number during the installation process. ADOBE OPEN OPTIONS CLP 4.5 The CLP provides flexible volume software licensing as part of Adobe Open Options 4.5. CLP members set the discount level for all of their Adobe desktop software orders during the life of the CLP membership based on the value of an initial order – but with no further order commitment beyond that initial order. The CLP offers the discount level to all new and upgrade software orders and Upgrade Plan orders. Additional orders may qualify you for an improved discount level. If your organization is already enrolled in CLP 4.0, you do not need to reenroll. In addition to volume pricing, the CLP helps organizations cut costs by simplifying software ordering and administration in several ways. First, it provides them with a single licensing program membership that can be effective worldwide, so that they always gets the same discount level regardless of their location or order quantity. Second, Adobe provides all CLP members with an easy-to-use, web-based licensing site that simplifies licensing administration and record keeping. The site provides your organization with a login and password for access to comprehensive Adobe software licensing information so you can see your global software licensing status and easily track licensing records.

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P22/Web_Development/InDesign_CS_v3_0_Pagemaker_Edition.html

Flash Media Server products combine in themselves the functions of streaming and flexible development environment, which allows creating and putting interactive multimedia applications for a wide range of users. Adobe Flash Media Server 3 products consist of Flash Media Streaming Server 3 and Flash Media Interactive Server 3 packages. The first product, Flash Media Streaming Server 3, is used for dispersion organization through the net of video in a streaming mode. What for the server Flash Media Interactive Server 3 solution, it is built on the basis of Flash Media Streaming Server 3 and combines the facilities of three versions: Flash Media Server 2 – Professional, Edge and Origin Editions. The Flash Media Interactive Server 3 package helps to expand video services with multimedia functionality.

Among general features of the Flash Media Server 3 products developers single out H.264 and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) standards support. Besides, the packages make it possible to double the number of broadcast streams counting on one server practically. Adobe Company also mentions enhanced means of protection and high stability.

System requirements:

- 3.2GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor (dual Intel Xeon® or faster recommended)
- RAM: 2GB minimum, 4GB recommended
- 1GB Ethernet card

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P2334/Development_Software/Flash_Media_Server_v3_0.html

Macromedia created the first version of Contribute in 2003. At that time, the company’s slogan was “Add life to the Web,” and Contribute did so by giving non-technical content editors a way to easily publish to the Web without first learning their <p>’s and <q>’s. This in turn freed trained Web developers to explore the possibilities offered by the ever-evolving Web. The idea was that developers would build their pages in Dreamweaver using templates to indicate specific areas of each page editable by others, while locking down navigation, styles, and other formatting so they’d be safe from unintended changes. Macromedia targeted IT departments as Contribute’s main beneficiaries and customers, soliciting them to purchase and install Contribute for business users and/or designers.

Contribute differs from other programs in this general space, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver extension SiteAssist from WebAssist. FrontPage is for Windows users making their first Web pages, and SiteAssist is a rapid development tool for Web designers who understand the basics but want more sophistication. (See my SiteAssist review for details.)

Blog, Blog, Blog

Contribute 3.0 boasted an impressive list of new features and enhancements: WebDAV support, CSS compliance, built-in image editing tools, and administration features. I had hoped version 4.0, the first release since Adobe and Macromedia merged, would offer a similar range. Instead, it appears that Adobe wants Contribute to become a Swiss Army knife for bloggers.

As a blog editor, Contribute does offer several nifty features: easy connection to the server, a one-stop-shop editor for all of your various blogs, easy categorization, Title and Tags fields, and buttons for Trackback and Allow Comments.

Setup is easy, thanks to a wizard that walks you through the three-step process of entering your credentials for your chosen blog server. (Contribute works with WordPress, Typepad, and Blogger, and supports the MetaWeblog servers from Movable Type and Drupal, among others.)

Once that’s done, the connection window has links to each connected blogs for one-click access. When you’re in, you can edit existing entries by selecting one or add a new entry in Contribute’s WYSIWYG window.

Editing and formatting with Contribute is equally straightforward. With Office-style editing toolbars and icons, creating attractive entries is a pleasant and uncomplicated experience.

Contribute’s drag-and-drop capabilities make quick work of uploading images to your blog. If you enter an image of unnecessarily high resolution, Contribute automatically resizes the image to its preferred specs. Editing images is a double-click away. You can control image size, cropping, alignment, border, padding, and Alt text.

You can also add Flash, QuickTime, and Windows Media Player movies (.mov, .mpg/.mpeg, .avi and .wmv), but there’s no easy way to drag and drop music files into your pages.

Windows Wins

Contribute’s interface was modeled after Microsoft Office, and with each generation, Contribute’s integration with–and look and feel of–Office deepens. This makes working with Contribute very easy for anyone who uses Word, Excel, or the myriad products that take interface cues from them.

If you use Windows, Contribute offers three excellent shortcuts to publishing Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook documents directly from those applications. Contribute adds Publish to Web and Post to Blog buttons to Office applications; click these buttons and Contribute opens dialog boxes that let you manage document settings and quickly publish the formatted contents.

Firefox users can install a two-button toolbar with similar integration: Edit in Contribute gives simple access to editing pages that you’re authorized to change, and Post to Blog copies and pastes selected text from Firefox into your connected blog, creating a new page with proper attribution and quote level. My installation of the Firefox toolbar worked fine under Windows, but despite repeated attempts on multiple computers, the Mac installer choked each time I tried to enable the Mac version of Firefox with this toolbar. There is no Safari support for these features.

Contribute for Windows has always been a better product than its Mac counterpart, yet the two are identically priced. It’s maddening that Adobe didn’t address this disparity. And at a time when every Macintosh in stores for the last four months has had “Intel Inside,” Contribute 4.0 is not a Universal Binary application, meaning its code is optimized for older PowerPC-based computers. The feature gap between the Mac and Windows versions seems to be growing, not shrinking.

Speed and Need

Contribute 4.0 performs acceptably on both platforms, though neither feels particularly snappy when it came to loading pages and saving changes. This is primarily because for those tasks, Contribute sends and receives in the foreground, which forces you to wait until those operations complete before moving on. Dreamweaver 8, upon which several of Contribute’s features are based, allows uploading and downloading in the background.

The mission of Contribute has always been to enable non-technical users an easy and safe way to post content to their company site without help from their resident Web guru. With this recent update, Adobe has brought blog editing into the features list. While it may be hip to refer to Contribute as a blogging tool, the features that make it worthy of consideration in any organization–WebDAV support, strong administrative controls, CSS integration, and the wealth of WYSIWYG editing capabilities–have seen very little improvement since version 3.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P615/Business_Management/Contribute_v4.html

Adobe acquired Syntrillium Software in May 2003 and morphed its flagship Cool Edit Pro product into Adobe Audition. Version 1.5, which has an estimated street price of AU$559, results in a dynamic yet accessible audio-editing powerhouse, now better integrated into the Adobe video-editing product suite. Although experienced audio editors will get the best use out of this program, several useful features are simple enough for beginners.

Audition installs cleanly as a standalone product or as part of the Adobe Video Collection suite. Along with the installation CD, you get a second disc with “loopology” content. This includes more than 5,000 high-quality royalty-free music loops, organised in 21 major categories from Classical and Blues to Techno and World, and also “moods” from Ambient to Lounge to Weddings. We appreciate the separate disc, since installing all these loops with the app takes up roughly 700MB of space.

Audition’s interface, which has arbitrarily resizable and dockable windows, is a bit idiosyncratic, especially for users who are accustomed to other Adobe tools. However, compared to the previous iteration, version 1.5 is more accessible to novice users. You can mix up to 128 stereo tracks in Multitrack view and apply more than 50 audio tools and DSP effects. You can even import video clips and display thumbnails to help synchronise music and voice-overs.

Beat detection, tempo and pitch shifting, and vocal/instrumental channel extraction (for a cappella and karaoke) are just a sampling of the powerful audio-manipulation tools you’ll find within Audition. You can also restore and sweeten individual tracks with filters and effects such as high-quality click/pop eliminators, noise and hiss reduction, time stretching, sample rate conversion, and even pitch correction (for fixing off-key notes). We’re particularly impressed with the app’s Spectral view, which isolates individual instruments and transients and permits full editing in the frequency space. All audio is processed internally in high-fidelity 32-bit and sample rates up to 10MHz.

All of Audition’s effects provide a plethora of options that can be previewed in real time, or you can choose from presets for common uses. Additional packaged effects and filters provide quick enhancements, or you can save your own settings as Favorites. In addition, you can record custom scripts and convert groups of files with batch processing. Audition is also compatible with VST and DirectX plug-ins, as well as ReWire for seamless integration with other audio packages.

Audition runs smoothly through the entire process of audio recording, mixing, editing, and applying effects. In Multitrack view, it renders effects as they are applied (in a handful of seconds), then provides real-time playback. In Waveform view, you adjust effect options and preview them in real time, then Audition applies them to the audio samples (again, in a few seconds). In a complex multitrack production, you can lock tracks to remove them from the processing overhead. Adobe recommends using a Windows XP system running a 2GHz processor with 512MB of RAM; however, the application will run on 400MHz systems with 64MB of RAM.

More than 20 popular audio file formats and variations are supported for import, including WAV, AIFF, MP3, and WMA. A number of video formats, including WMV, MPEG, AVI, and native DV are supported as well. You can even use the Multichannel Encoder feature to transform any multitrack mix into a 5.1 surround-sound track. The new built-in CD-burning application is a bonus.

On issues related to installation and product defects, Adobe offers complimentary, but not toll-free, phone support for registered copies of current products. Paid support is available for other issues, on a per-call basis or through service plans. The Adobe Web site also provides extensive tutorials, forums, and troubleshooting information.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P8/Digital_Audio/Audition_v1_5.html

It may not be fair, but Adobe GoLive CS2 rolled onto the market under a cloud. Just a few weeks after Adobe announced the entire Creative Suite 2 (which includes new versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Version Cue, and the new Adobe Bridge), Adobe revealed it was buying Macromedia, the house of Dreamweaver, GoLive’s main competition. It’s unclear what Adobe will do with its two step-siblings — bolt them together to form a GoDream or a DreamLiver? Sell one off? Or (gulp) kill one? But nothing will happen soon. And since Web pages don’t design themselves, let’s look at the tool we have in hand right now.

Family Member

One of GoLive’s greatest strengths is its association with the rest of the Creative Suite. If you regularly rely on Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign to accomplish your work, your decision to use GoLive CS2 may already be made. Happily, Adobe didn’t take bundle buyers for granted, even if that’s the way many designers are being exposed to GoLive. Using the new Bridge application, you can navigate to your assets via a visual preview instead of guessing at file names or thumbnail icons; I appreciate this when I’m trying to find an image buried in the midst of several nearly identical test versions that each have slight variations.

How many times have you worked with a color in GoLive, switched to Photoshop to use that color as the background for an image, and promptly forgot which specific shade of blue you selected in GoLive? Now, if you first save your custom swatch collection, you can load it in the other applications, though that involves manually exporting and loading the collection each time. In the real world, I don’t open and close Pantone books whenever I switch tasks, so I’d like to see some sort of Smart Swatch that updates automatically in all applications in a future version of the Creative Suite.

One definite CS2 improvement, however, is the capability to view multiple swatch collections within a palette, each with their own tab. Switching between the Mac OS and Web Named Colors swatches is now a matter of clicking a tab instead of heading to the palette’s popout menu.

That CSS Religion

Today’s Web isn’t the same one started by your parents — well, your younger self, at least. While the Web’s content is still structured in HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) provide a more elegant, flexible method of building Web pages. Say goodbye to table-based layout hacks.

GoLive CS2 embraces this new Web order by adding CSS Block Objects. The new CSS palette has seven layout schemes, including Three Columns: Scaling Center and Two Liquid Columns (“liquid” being the term for columns whose widths adjust based on the size of the Web browser window). You can change the schemes’ settings in the Inspector, such as specifying a new fixed width for a column or giving it a human-readable name. However, I discovered a small bug: if you include spaces in the name, the layout will vanish when you switch between the Source editor and Layout editor. This makes sense in the code (because a browser will read the name as two words, not one identifier), but it shouldn’t be so easy to make this mistake in the Inspector’s field. Like GoLive’s other tools, you drag an object to your layout and then populate its sections.

CSS Block Objects take some of the work out of building a design and wrapping it in an easily editable template. After building your CSS layout, save the class styles that GoLive created into the site’s external style sheet (which GoLive also now creates by default): Drag them from the page’s CSS Editor window to the external sheet’s CSS Editor window. Then, save your page as a template. Any pages you build from that template follow the CSS in the external style sheet, so editing the styles there (for example, applying a solid border instead of a dotted one) applies to all of the pages.

Adobe also did something wonderful in GoLive CS2: They came up with a worthwhile use for the Layout Grid! An admirable idea when it was introduced, the Layout Grid was meant to give designers a way to create Web pages graphically in the same way they built pages in desktop publishing programs: by placing elements where you want them to appear, not limited by the conventions of HTML. Unfortunately, the Layout Grid was a complex hack that built overly complex HTML tables to “position” elements. To the developers’ credit, Layout Grid improved greatly over time, producing cleaner HTML code.

Web coding has finally caught up to what the original GoLive developers pioneered, only now the Layout Grid’s underlying structure is CSS — which, coincidentally, excels at placing objects in specific places. The CS2 Layout Grid is even more useful as a quick previsualization tool, or the first steps toward developing a CSS-based structure.

Helpful Refinements

Adobe continues to break away from the desktop computer screen with GoLive CS2, enhancing support for what it believes is the next frontier of the Web — cellular phones and handheld devices. The Live Preview window in GoLive CS2 includes an SSR (small screen rendering) button to give you an idea of how your page will appear on a phone’s screen. If you’re creating solely for mobile devices, you can create XHTML-MP (Mobile Profile) workspaces that are set up for authoring WAP-compatible pages.

A few other small improvements will help the overworked designer avoid some drudgery. You can now crop images within GoLive, avoiding a trip to Photoshop to fine-tune the picture. If you’re using a Smart Object, the original remains intact; similarly, if you later edit the original, GoLive retains the cropped area. You can always click the Use Original Image button to discard the cropping you’ve applied.

If you’re in the process of upgrading an older site to more recent Web standards, the capability to batch-convert HTML pages to XHTML provides a good start while saving you from touching every file manually. And when it’s time to upload the files to the server, companies more concerned about security can opt to use the SFTP (secure FTP) protocol.

GoLive CS2 also steps into the blogging realm with support for custom tags for SixApart’s Movable Type and TypePad blogging services. I don’t have Movable Type installed on a server, so I couldn’t give it a whirl, but bringing the sidebar portion of my TypePad site made it easier to edit than accessing the code directly — I was much less liable to accidentally delete a command that TypePad relies on.

Stability

Previous versions of GoLive weren’t known for their stability. Unfortunately, GoLive CS2 doesn’t solve this problem. On several occasions, the program crashed at random times: When I was command-dragging from a selection to the site window to create a URL, for example, and removing right justification from a paragraph. My old habit of reflexively hitting Command-S often to save the file I’m working on serves me well.

Colleagues who are more adept at server interactions than I have run into some issues when synchronizing pages, and I’ve been able to confirm generally pokey behavior in the SFTP implementation (caused, I learned, by a new FTP engine that supports the SFTP protocol being used in GoLive CS2). The good news is that Adobe is aware of these issues and is actively pursuing fixes for them.

Looking Ahead

In light of the Adobe-Macromedia deal, the future of GoLive remains hazy. Because of this and the program’s weaknesses, I can’t recommend that you buy it now for the first time, nor switch from Dreamweaver. But if you’re already highly invested in the rest of Adobe’s professional suite, there’s no doubt that GoLive CS2 is the Web design application of today. It no longer feels like a distant cousin brought to the family reunion, as in the early days, but rather a full-fledged member of the family.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P16/Illustration/GoLive_CS2_V8_0.html

Introduction:

I’ve been working with several beta-versions of After Effects 6.5 for a while now, and the last couple of months I’ve been doing all my production work with 6.5 in various stages of completion. With the official release coming up very soon, I’d like to share a little bit of my personal experiences with it.

Where to start — The short version is that in my opinion 6.5 is a great dot-release. It’s probably the most exciting dot-release that After Effects has ever seen. There are a couple of very powerful new features and additions, and a huge amount of small improvements in the user interface and tool functionalities.

Performance and stability:

After Effects 6.5 has proven more stable even during the beta stages than 6.0. The mysterious ‘Abnormal Condition’ errors that have been plaguing mostly Mac users seem to be a thing from the past now. It’s been real stable for me for the last months on the Windows platform.

There have been speed optimizations for both G5 and Intel processors. Especially Paint seems to have benefit from the improvements, but depending on the type of project you’ll see a subtle speed increase.

But now the big news:

GridIron X-Factor (Professional Version only):

In February 2004 GridIron Software officially announced that its grid computing technology would be included in the next version of After Effects Professional. GridIron Software has developed X-Factor, a plugin that allows After Effects Professional version 6.5 to use GridIronss XLR8 framework to distribute compositions to available computers over the network.

In short, Grid Preview distributes the Previewing task over any number of ‘peers’ (render nodes) that are available on the network. When using Grid Preview, two additional computers let you Preview twice as fast, three computers let you Preview three times as fast, and so on. And the most exciting part of it — It works!

I have only been able to test on a small grid, but other users have reported similar successes in terms of the speed up being almost linear in relationship to the amount of render nodes.

Installation:
I found it very easy to set up the system on my small network. Each ‘peer’ needs to have After Effects Professional 6.5 installed, either the full version, or just the render engine (which can be freely installed on as many machines as you need). On top of that, the peers and the workstation need X-Factor installation, which will automatically add XLR8 and the necessary JAVA components for your particular OS. Some testers have reported some issues with the installation, but for me it was very easy to set up. And I’m no networking wonder and definitely no command-line junkie.

Ease of Use:
With X-Factor comes an extra Palette, that houses different functions, like selecting which peers you want to use for a Grid Preview, a PreStage function that distributes all the necessary source material over the network to speed up rendering. If you buy an additional Plus or Unlimited license, you get the Audit function that checks whether all necessary fonts and plug-ins are available on all peers.

Network Demands:
Since accelerated previews using X-Factor rely heavily on network traffic, for sending the necessary source material to the peers and receiving the rendered frames back, a gigabit network is no luxury. I tested on a 100 Mbit network which definitely did the job, but with larger clusters of machines the network bandwidth easily becomes a bottleneck. Also the proprietary XLR8 software makes smart use of network switches for efficient distribution of files to all the peers. It’s highly recommended to use switches over hubs.

The Downside:
Currently, X-Factor only accelerates Previews. There’s no connection to the Render Que. While it would be nice to see this change in the future – and I know GridIron is looking into it – it’s not necessarily that big of an issue. First of all, rendering can often be done overnight, while previewing is something we always need to sit and wait around for. But there’s also some sort of a work-around that can be used in certain cases. After Effects 6.5 now has Disk Cache, which (if enabled) moves the rendered frames to disk if RAM is full. The maximum volume of the Disk Cache can be specified in the preferences. For short projects this means you could run a Grid Preview, a couple of GigaBytes of rendered frames will return to the workstation that will store these in Disk Cache. Then when you add the composition to the Render Que, it’ll render very quickly since all of the frames have already been stored in Disk Cache. This won’t work if you change settings in the Render Que or need interlaced output, since After Effects still doesn’t do interlaced Previews.

Apart from that, Grid Preview works by sending out specific ranges to be rendered to each peer. Some plugins (Particle Playground for instance) are dependant on information from all the previous frames to calculate the current frame. X-Factor typically sends out tasks of 10 consecutive frames to each peer, which in those cases won’t work well, causing a performance drop.

But all in all I find Grid Preview a very exciting new feature that is most useful for complex projects that are CPU heavy and slow to render.

After Effects 6.5 Pro comes with two extra X-Factor licenses, that will allow you to use two extra CPUs apart from the workstation. A dual processor machine counts as two CPUs in GridIron’s licensing scheme, but additional nodes can be bought for $99 each, or a site license for $1995.

Product integration:

One thing that has always been a strong point for Adobe is product integration. Especially with the competition in the NLE and compositing market stiffening, this is an area where Adobe has clearly done lots of work. One of the most exciting new addition is the ability to copy and paste clips from Premiere Pro 1.5 into After Effects 6.5, while preserving edits, position keyframes, opacity settings etc.

Something else that I’ve been asking for since the launch of Premiere Pro is the ability to import a specific sequence into After Effects, instead of having to import the entire project. You can also choose to leave out audio files — since most people use After Effects for compositing and sweetening the images, and then import back into their NLE without touching the sound in After Effects.

Integration with Encore 1.5 has also been patched up dramatically. You can now import Encore menus directly into After Effects 6.5 for treatment, and After Effects 6.5 also features tools like ‘Create Encore Button’, making it very easy to create fancy motion menus in After Effects 6.5 and integrate them into your Encore 1.5 project.

And of course the integration with Photoshop CS has been worked on, too. The biggest new improvement is the ability to edit text (point text, path text or paragraph text) in After Effects 6.5 when you import a Photoshop CS document. Also, since Photoshop CS now allows layered documents in 16-bit, you can also import 16-bit Photoshop documents with their layers intact.

The biggest omission here is that we still can’t edit paths in imported Illustrator documents. Which is somewhat embarrassing to Adobe since Discreet Combustion* can do this.

Improved Painting and Clone tools:

The Paint and Clone tools have also been worked on, most notably it’s now possible to overlay the clone source frame while painting with the Clone tool. This means you can actually see what you are doing. It takes a little getting used to, but I’ve found this to be very valuable. Apart from that you can save your most-used clone settings in presets, which is a small but nice productivity enhancement if you’re doing lots of wire-removal. These days I find I do all my Paint and clone work in After Effects. The main competition in this field used to be Commotion, which hasn’t seen any updates or support in ages. Commotion feels a bit faster when Painting and Previewing on high-resolution sequences, but it’s also completely pixel-based and destructive, while After Effects used a much more sophisticated vector based process, which for instance allows you to nudge individual paint strokes, or erase only the paint strokes with an eraser, without affecting the underlaying footage. Each paint stroke can be individually transformed, rotated or have its brush size changed later on, in the Timeline Window.

The improved Clone Tool Palette		The clone source overlay can improve the overview and accuracy of working with the clone tool.

Animation Presets:

In previous versions of After Effects, we could already save effects combinations as favourites, to build a collection of homegrown recipes so to speak. New in After Effects 6.5 is the ability to save anything that you can keyframe, from scale, mask, an effect of even an expression, in an Animation Preset — which can be a real timesaver for certain projects.

Text animation presets:
But if you do a lot of quick text animation, you’re going to love this: Adobe has included hundreds of text animation presets, that can be applied to your own project, and can easily be adjusted and tweaked to make them work for your specific piece. You can also create and save your own animation work as presets that can be reapplied in other places. All the included presets are documented in a gallery of animated gif’s in the on-line help files – for a quick overview. But since images say more than a thousand words, here’s just a small selection of the included presets:

New Effects

CycoreFX:
Apart from the improvements of the core application, After Effects 6.5 comes with a wealth of very valuable new Effects. The most exciting news is probably the inclusion Cycore FX.

A little history: Cycore is a Swedish software developer (in Uppsala) that produced a couple of very popular plug-in sets for After Effects. As a matter of fact their Final Effects set was one of the first 3rd party plugin sets ever released for After Effects, just after Knoll Lens Flare.

Cycore went on to develop Next Effects, and Studio Effects, but in the mean time the sets had been bought by Metacreations who instead decided to release all three under the name of Final Effects Complete. Metacreations later on sold it to ICE (the manufacturer of accelerator boards for After Effects) which in turn was acquired by Media 100.

Even though this set contained a couple of the most popular plugins for After Effects to have ever been produced, Media 100 didn’t really support the package well, and added a very flaky licensing scheme which put off many users.

But, apparently the original deal with Metacreations gave the original developers all rights to use the code for anything they wanted, including After Effects plug-ins, after a certain time. Which is how it’s possible to see Cycore FX bundled with After Effects 6.5, including updated and improved versions of all the original filters from Final Effects Complete. They don’t support 16-bit yet, and they aren’t backwards compatible with the original Final Effects plug-ins, but this set of around 60 effects contains some real gems!

Grain Surgery (Professional Edition only):

Another old personal friend of mine is Grain Surgery, developed by Visual Infinity. This advanced noise and grain removal and matching tool is now included with After Effects 6.5 Professional. I’ve been using Grain Surgery in almost every production the last years. It’s great for removing excessive film grain, or video noise with minimal loss of image quality and detail. The set contains three plug-ins, Remove Grain, Match Grain and Add Grain. All three are based on the same technology of sampling grain samples from existing images, creating an algorithm from that and either adding or subtracting this from images. It works similar to audio noise removal tools like ProTools DINR, where a sample of clean noise is used to remove the noise from the rest of the signal.

It’s also a very effective solution for matching grain on footage from different sources, or matching computer generated material to film or video material.

Color Finesse 1.5:

And as if all this wasn’t enough, After Effects 6.5 also comes with Color Finesse from Synthetic Aperture, which is widely considered to be the best color correction tool available for After Effects. Color Finesse features a comprehensive range of tools for primary and secondary color correction and a built-in waveform monitor and vector scope.

My only complaint with Color Finesse has always been that it only runs within its own window and user interface. This is probably necessary because it processes in 32-bit floating point color space, which results in a lot higher accuracy even compared to After Effects 16-bit color space. Maybe in a next version of After Effects we’ll see floating point color space supported, and tools like Color Finesse could also be accessed from the Effect Control Window.

The only thing you have to keep in mind is that although all these plug-ins are full versions in the sense that they have all the functionality – they will only run in After Effects as a host, so they won’t run in Combustion*, Final Cut Pro or other applications that support the After Effects plug-in API.

Then there are a couple of new effects like a series of auto color effects for automatic color adjustments, and a very nice Box Blur. And let’s not forget the goodies that came with 6.0 that are once again included: Keylight from The Foundry, 3D Assistants Lite from Digital Anarchy and Zaxwerks Invigorator Classic — with a combined value of hundreds of dollars.

Wrapping it up…

This article is becoming quite lengthy and there’s so much that I haven’t even touched upon. Like the possibility of adjusting the brightness of the user interface – as you may have noticed from the screenshots in this article. You can now have a bit more control over what your workspace looks like. It’s a small thing but has proven to be very popular as a way to get a bit more of a high-end look to it. Actually for critical color correction it’s nice to be able to dim the workspace.

Firewire Preview:
After Effects 6.5 now finally does Firewire Preview on Windows, too — which has been a long awaited feature. Anyone with an OHCI compliant firewire output and a firewire to analog converter can now view their compositions on a video monitor. Although this won’t give you the output quality of an uncompressed video output as seen on Blackmagic or AJA hardware, if you work with DV material and don’t want to be guessing what your material will look like on a TV set, this is a very cost-effective solution, especially since many people are using their DV camera as a converter.

General UI Improvements:
There’s also lots of small interface improvements, like a preview for the Auto-trace tool.
In After Effects 6.0 you had to guess the settings, apply, undo, change the settings etc. But Adobe has obviously listened and improved many of these small annoyances in the interface. You can now also automatically cycle mask colors, so After Effects automatically assigns a new color to each created mask. A nice time-saver if you do a lot of complicated masking with multiple masks.

Hidden Power:
With After Effects 6.0 Professional came very powerful scripting possibilities to script the user interface, add buttons and menu items etc. Although expressions have been a ‘hot’ item ever since they were the UI scripting possibilities doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention from the field.

The UI scripting power has increased a lot with this update (Professional Edition only). Part of the functionality can be compared to Photoshop Actions, where a user can automate specific combinations of procedures and tasks. Except in After Effects you need to script all these actions instead of hitting the record button and doing you thing. Fortunately After Effects 6.5 Professional comes with a couple of cool example scripts to take a look at and dissect, before creating your own.

Included are scripts to look up and replace texts in multiple compositions across multiple projects, or even create a gravity situation that will create position keyframes for selected layers based on a couple of parameters that you can adjust in the custom Palette.

There’s also a render and e-mail script that will launch a render, and send an email to a specified e-mail address when the render is done. The scripts can access and change most of the parameters and features within After Effects, like layer properties and blend modes, but a script could also create comps, create layers etc.

Source

Buy this software here:

http://www.softster.net/P6/Digital_Video/After_Effects_v6_5_Pro.html