all reviews
A complete list of all the reviews published on IT Enquirer since January 1, 2008.
DrawIt is a vector and bitmap program that relies heavily on Mac OS X’s built-in effects and graphic capabilities. For a moment, I thought DrawIt would be a perfect replacement for Adobe Illustrator, but after having reviewed the product, I don’t think you should throw away your copy of Illustrator just yet. Having said that, DrawIt has a couple of nice touches.
It must be awfully difficult to create an illustration program in a world dominated by Adobe. Illustrator CS3 especially offers so many features that blur the line between vector and bitmap program. Think about Live Paint or the capability to embed Photoshop images into Illustrator.
The GigaVu Extreme is a hybrid device that allows you to view photos downloaded into the device straight from a CompactFlash or SD memory card, play videos (MPEG-2 or MPEG-4), or listen to music (MP3). Photos which have been enhanced in-camera with voice annotations, can be viewed and listened to as well.
X-Rite and Pantone jointly announced and released a new colour management / colour measurement system with some innovative features. Two versions were released: ColorMunki Design and ColorMunki Photo. Pantone sent me one of the first ColorMunki Design systems available. I’ll receive a ColorMunki Photo later on. The differences between the two systems are entirely attributable to the software. While the Design version focusses strongly on spot colour management, the Photo version focusses more on skin colours, black and white profiling and a completely new exchange model for photos.
Groboto is a 3D system with a twist. Groboto can mean “Grow a Bot”, or it could mean “grow your 3D object using robots”. I guess it’s the latter, as Groboto is a system that enables you to create complex 3D art by letting the software do all the hard work. Imagine yourself being like a god and controlling 3D drawing “bots”, then you’ll get a feel of what Groboto is. One thing is sure: it’s not your every day 3D creation tool, and as such it’s more of an art tool than something you can use for commercial work --although you never know…
Publishing Connections Incorporated is better known in the industry by its acronym: PCI. PCI is a privately held company which has been active in publishing for fourteen years. It’s a small company with offices in Washington, Denver, Montreal, Slovakia and China. PCI puts most of its energy in Scriba, a XML conversion and workflow system that treats cross-media publishing as a workflow diagram.
PCI gave me a demo of the system, which I think must be the easiest way to get content from a print document into a Content Management System (CMS). Scriba can be used as an intermediate agent between InDesign and any XML-capable CMS, but if you’re using Softcare’s K4, you can just use K4 and let the Scriba XML Server engine do its work completely transparently in the background. As from April 3, Scriba and Quark also announced a closer working relationship, further extending this system’s appeal in the cross-media publishing market.
Who remembers Aperture 1? Aperure 1 probably was one of the applications that raised high hopes with photographers and editors of small publishing companies alike. Unfortunately, many users found the approach inefficient and ineffective. Apple didn’t take long to adapt the program so it would meet photographers’ needs better, but Aperture 1.x remained second (or even third) choice.
For a long time, nothing happened with Aperture, and the world thought the giant that Apple is, had fallen asleep. But then Leopard was released and not so terribly long after, Aperture 2. And now we have Aperture 2.1 only weeks after version 2.0.1 was released. And the photographers’ world is cheering, and for a reason. Aperture 2.x is fast, its RAW 2 engine --Leopard’s really-- is excellent, giving near-perfect results when converting. Aperture 2.1 has an open architecture; developers can --and are-- creating plug-ins for Aperture 2.1.
Capture One 4 is Phase One’s amateur photo management application. Capture One 4 doesn’t offer media management or cataloguing. It uses the file system to manage your images on disk. However, it’s strong at correcting and retouching Camera RAW photos. Capture One 4 supports most semi-professional and professional cameras that can output RAW images. I tested the RAW quality earlier, with good results.
Softpress is releasing its newest version of Freeway Pro, version 5. As always, Freeway Pro is aimed at everybody who wants to design a web site --everybody, regardless of the level of knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Freeway 5 Pro is also a good environment to experiment if you’re a designer --even a web designer-- who wants to concentrate on design and less on technology.
Freeway 5 Pro has support for accessibility analysis, full CSS layouts, Scriptaculous Javascript Actions, full form editing, background effects and images, and more. It allows for easy set up of Blogger pages, and its CSS capabilities are robust. Freeway 5 Pro is not Dreamweaver; it doesn’t aim at that market. It’s better then Dreamweaver in creating powerful sites without any knowledge at all of the underlying technologies, but if you can’t get it exactly right, you’ll have to resort to hand-coding outside Freeway.
SilkyPix Developer Studio 3.x is a Camera RAW conversion application that compares favourably to the more “professional” sounding RAW applications such as Capture One, Adobe Camera RAW 4.x and even Aperture 2. SilkyPix Developer Studio is a Japanese effort that contains a number of innovations leading to more accurate conversions and better (read: less noise) detail in low-light photographs.
Illustrator often being used for creating brochures and other printable media, the question crops up: when do you need to see how your design will do on its output medium? Early on in the design process, or as the final check --when the file has been converted into PDF already? The latter is the easiest on the designer; he or she doesn’t have to know anything about prepress details such as Total Area Coverage (TAC), also known as Total Ink Coverage.
Astute Graphics developed Phantasm CS, an Illustrator plug-in. Originally intended as a system that was capable of maintaining an almost one-on-one similarity between Illustrator and Photoshop when it comes to colour manipulation, Phantasm CS Designer and Phantasm CS Studio --the newly released versions of this plug-in-- now also deliver prepress capabilities to designers.
EnFocus has a specific application to edit PDFs. It’s called Neo, and it has full editing capabilities for PDFs. SmileOnMyMac has PDF Pen Pro which also has editing capabilities, but they are far more limited than what Neo is capable of. The issue with editing PDFs is that you’re editing a file format destined to be a definitive, print-ready format. My problem with that has always been: why is it necessary, and why not do with the limited tools Acrobat Professional delivers?
Adobe After Effects CS3 has lots of new and improved features such as shape layers, Photoshop layer styles and video layers, and Flash integration, but two of the most eye-catching novelties must be Brainstorm and Puppet Tools. Brainstorm is a properties experimentation tool, while Puppet tools is a set of tools that enables you to deform images with smooth motion.
Instead of summing up all the new features of After Effects CS3, I have decided to concentrate on Puppet Tools and Brainstorm, because these two make After Effects CS3 something really special in my opinion. Puppet Tools is a set of three tools that you can easily make available by clicking the Puppet Pin tool in the Toolbar.
Page 3 of 6 pages « First < 1 2 3 4 5 > Last »
