Photoshop Elements 6 By Monte FergusonDigital photography has been, and continues to be, a liberating revolution. It is easily accessible to everyone. We’re taking more photographs than ever before. After you invest in a decent size memory card for your camera you can shoot as many photos as it can hold. Better yet, you offload the pictures to your computer and reuse the card.
Unfortunately not all of our shots turn out like a pro photographer. That’s when you turn to an image editor like Photoshop Elements. Photoshop Elements incorporates the core features of it’s big brother Photoshop at a very attractive price. It is a delicate balancing act between power and accessibility.
Audio Hijack Pro By Kris PhillipsRogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro is an application used to record audio from many different sources on your Macintosh computer. It records audio in a similar manner to recording audio from, say, the radio onto a tape deck recorder. Now, what makes this different from your normal run-of-the-mill recording program? For starters, Audio Hijack Pro lets you record from only one source at a time: such as only Firefox, your entire system audio, so that you get everything playing through your computer’s speakers, or a source plugged into an input on your computer, so that you can record all of those 8 track tapes that you’ve been telling yourself you were going to make into digital files 5 years ago. Also, as a nice addition, Audio Hijack Pro also features an impressive number of effects and enhancements that you can do to your sounds as you record them.
Pages (iWork '08) By Monte FergusonFrom the beginning Apple has shipped a word processing program. From MacWrite to the present these programs have showcased Apple technologies. It also showcased Apple’s philosophy towards design. Pages continues that legacy with aplomb.
Numbers (iWork '08) By Monte FergusonApple has slowly been building up the iWork suite as a credible alternative to Microsoft Office. What has been lacking, up til now, has been a spreadsheet program. That all changed when Apple took the wraps off of Numbers, it’s own spreadsheet program. As you might expect in an Apple app it’s pretty to look at. But don’t let it’s good looks fool you. This is a powerful program.
Keynote (iWork '08) By Monte FergusonIt has been five years since Apple introduced Keynote. Keynote is the presentation program of the suite. Its success has spawned a suite of productivity applications called iWork.
Looking Back
Keynote from the first has brought some great features to the table. It has tapped into core MacOS X technologies like Quartz graphics. Which enabled it to easily create soft drop shadows, freely rotate images, create image masks, add translucency, reflections on placed objects, and enabled advanced transition effects. Instead of using a ruler along the edges of the screen Keynote used automatic positioning guidelines. It also gave us a mini slide preview in the side bar, which supported drag and drop reordering of slides. A hierarchical grouping of slides allow you to hide sections of a ppresentation, to allow you to customize a presentation, by just clicking on a disclosure triangle.
Retrospect Desktop 6.1 By Monte FergusonThe last decade has given rise to an increasingly digital lifestyle. We have more, and more of our personal lives on our computers. Email, music, photos, and digital video take up increasingly larger portions of our spacious hard drives. Precious memories available in a heartbeat. Yet poll after poll shows that less than one in four of us take any measures to safeguard those precious and unique items. Apparently most folks assume bad things happen to someone else.
