Macworld articles from March 2004

Macworld archives from March 2004

Musically inclined.(From the Editor's Desk)(Editorial)
March 1, 2004... MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MUSIC IS, LIKE MOST PEOPLE'S, somewhat complicated. I vigorously resisted years of piano lessons and became an adult with only rudimentary piano skills and the ability to read sheet music. As for my abortive yearlong...

Rooting for the underdog.(Feedback)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Our December 2003 cover story focused on one of the hottest debates in computer history: Macs versus PCs. We expected to receive many angry letters about our testing--instead, we received a flood of appreciation for our Mac Beat item on...

Thanks, Cubed.(Feedback)(Sevices of CubeOwner.com being appreciated)
March 1, 2004... FRANK DOBBELAERE * As a Cube owner, I was pleasantly surprised to find a Cube article among all the buzz about G5s and other new hardware ("Building the Perfect Cube," Mac Beat, December 2003). But not mentioning the world's best Cube...

Problems with Panther.(Feedback)
March 1, 2004... TODD JOHNSON # Overall, I enjoyed your story about Panther ("Panther by the Numbers," December 2003). But the "Network in the Finder" item has some major bugs. You say in your article to "just choose Network from the Go menu to see a...

Stand by your Mac.(Feedback)(Comparing your Power MAc G5 with Personal computers )
March 1, 2004... ELLE FAGAN # Thanks so much for your article on Power Mac G5s versus PCs ("The Race Is On," December 2003). I liked and agreed with your approach: comparing apples and oranges. I love technology and did my own site design and HTML. I'm...

PowerBooks hinge on design.(Feedback)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... RICHARD BRUCE # I was dismayed to hear about the excessive hardware flaws of the new 15-inch PowerBook G4s (Reviews, December 2003), but I'm not surprised. A 12-inch iBook I bought had to be replaced twice at the time of purchase, and then...

Think different, dang it.(Feedback)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... ANTHONY W. MAGEE # I've been reading your publication for four years now and have heard some of the worst criticism about Apple come from its longtime users. I just want to say something a smart man named Sam Walton said a while back:...

X11 lessons.(Feedback)
March 1, 2004... AMITAI SCHLAIR # In December 2003's Geek Factor ("X11 Marks the Spot"), Jim Akin recommends the FinkCommander GUI for OS X users looking to dabble with OS X applications. Those who seek or cultivate a more profound appreciation for OS X's...

Corrections.(Correction Notice)
March 1, 2004... In "The Two-Mac E-mail Shuffle" (Mobile Mac, February 2004), we said that copying the contents of OS X's Address Book to a secondary Mac required copying the file Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist. In fact, the...

Apple wasn't the only company that made news at Macworld Expo: beyond the digital hub.(Mac Beat)(Macromedia Inc.)
March 1, 2004... Apple usually dominates the product news at Macworld Expo, and this January's San Francisco conference was no exception (see "Center of Attention," page 52, for more on Apple's new products). But there was more to this year's Expo than smaller...

PageMaker makes way for InDesign.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... For the last few years, Adobe (www.adobe.com) has kept PageMaker, its venerable page-layout application, in the game for OS 9 users while devoting most of its development attention to the OS X-only InDesign. But Adobe believes that InDesign is...

Panther gets some backup.(Mac Beat)
March 1, 2004... Updated operating systems need updated software. And some of those updates are trickier than others, as Dantz Development (www.dantz.com) learned when it came time to add Panther compatibility to its Retrospect backup software. OS X 10.3...

Hardware beat.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Coolscan V ED, Super Coolscan 5000 ED, and Super Coolscan 9000 ED, from Nikon (www.nikonusa.com): High-speed desktop film scanners feature 4,000-dpi resolution (V ED, $600; 5000 ED, $1,100; 9000 ED, $2,000). Harman Kardon Soundsticks II,...

Xserve gets faster chip; Xserve RAID boosts capacity: serving up the G5.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... The PowerPC 970 processor added to Apple's Power Mac desktops last year amid much fanfare has made its way into another piece of Apple hardware. The Xserve, Apple's server product line, now runs on either one or two 2GHz G5 chips. ...

Productivity beat.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Dave 5.0, from Thursby Software (www.thursby.com): Networking software adds support for Windows Server 2003's enhanced default network security ($119; upgrade, $70). DeltaGraph 5.5, from Red Rock Software (www.redrocksw.com): Data-analysis...

Multimedia beat.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... AlchemyTV DVR, from Miglia Technology (www.miglia.com): PCI card that lets users watch and record TV shows on their Macs is now G5-compatible ($159). Combustion 3, from Discreet (www.discreet.com): Visual-effects and 3-D-compositing...

DigitalFilm Tree puts editing app to work: Final Cut's Pros.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Hollywood is just beginning to offer Final Cut Pro, and other Apple hardware and software products, a leading role in postproduction work on projects large and small. But DigitalFilm Tree, a postproduction and services firm based in West...

On sitcom set, Macs run the show: choice edits.(Mac Beat)(Final Cut Pro)(Brief Article)(Product/Service Evaluation)
March 1, 2004... For the first two seasons of the TV series Scrubs, the show's editors used Mac hardware but turned to Avid for editing software. Before the start of the third season last fall, the editors decided to give Apple's Final Cut Pro a try. "We became...

Storage beat.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... ComboDock, from WiebeTech (www.wiebetech.com): Docking device, featuring dual daisychainable FireWire 800 ports and a USB 2.0 port, lets users dock IDE drives to a FireWire 800-USB 2.0 bridge ($150; with AC adapter and FireWire cable, $170)....

Game beat.(Mac Beat)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Aki Mahjong Solitaire, from Ambrosia Software (www.ambrosiasw.com): Puzzle program runs on OS X 10.1 and later ($20). Eylau and Friedland, from By Design (www.macwargames.com): Two Napoleonic-era war games add OS X compatibility ($25 each)....

Catching up with Mac icon creator Susan Kare: behind the smile.(Mac Beat)
March 1, 2004... Maybe it's not that surprising that the Mac has spent the past 20 years developing a passionate following even among people without much interest in computers. After all, the icons and fonts that first attracted many of these technophobes to...

Natural selection.(Interview)(Brief Article)(Interview)
March 1, 2004... You Software founder Craig Barnes is following the same approach he took at Now Software and Extensis: offer a mix of homegrown products and software from independent developers. Barnes recently spoke with Macworld about how giving small...

iBook G4s: familiar design, updated technology.(Reviews)
March 1, 2004... At a glance, the new iBook G4 notebooks look almost identical to their predecessors, but beneath their unchanged ice-white covers, they've undergone a major upgrade. If you're in the market for a mobile Mac at a bargain price, you no longer...

Wireless input devices: cord-free mice and keyboards promise to set you free.(Reviews)(Product/Service Evaluation)
March 1, 2004... Input devices are not glamorous. But few pieces of equipment see more use--or have more potential to affect your computing experience--than the lowly keyboard and mouse. And who says input devices have to be mundane? A wireless mouse and...

Avid Xpress Pro: support for 24P film projects improves solid editing system.(Reviews)(Product/Service Evaluation)
March 1, 2004... Perennial rivals Avid Xpress Pro and Final Cut Pro took decidedly different upgrade paths this year. With version 4, Apple reinvented Final Cut Pro as a massive five-program bundle containing extra titling and music-scoring tools. Meanwhile,...

iView MediaPro 2.0: asset manager is a professional designer's new best friend.(Reviews)
March 1, 2004... iView MediaPro has long been an excellent application for organizing your digital images, sounds, and movies. For a reasonable price, it lets you create Web galleries in a snap and catalog disk contents with ease. But the media-cataloging...

Mariner Write 3.5 and Mariner Calc 5.2: strong applications undermined by inconsistent compatibility with Microsoft Office.(Reviews)
March 1, 2004... The word processor Mariner Write 3.5 and the spreadsheet program Mariner Calc 5.2 are designed to fill a niche somewhere between their counterparts in AppleWorks and the full-featured standards, Microsoft Word and Excel. Mariner Write is a...

Carrara Studio 3: moderately priced 3-D software has high-end features.(Reviews)
March 1, 2004... Although Eovia's Carrara Studio 3 boasts an impressive list of new features, such as HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) support and new controls for subdivision surfaces modeling, it's the program's $399 price tag that will sway many people. But...

Readiris Pro 9: OCR application offers improved accuracy, has some quirks.(Reviews)
March 1, 2004... Accurate optical character recognition (OCR) is difficult to achieve. An OCR program must not only decipher text printed in different fonts, sizes, and alphabets, and convert it to editable text, but also distinguish between text, graphics, and...

Studiometry 1.1: project manager for freelance designers simplifies some tasks.(Reviews)
March 1, 2004... One of the most frustrating and tedious aspects of working as a freelance designer is keeping track of project incidentals. Billable hours, invoices, design notes, project files, and the like often end up scattered to all corners of your hard...

Dymo LabelWriter 330 Turbo: label printer shines with excellent Mac support.(Reviews)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... You may be wondering whether or why you might need a dedicated label printer. Can't an ordinary printer do the job? Sure it can, if you want to print out partial sheets of labels and spend money replacing your ink cartridges. If you don't...

HomeGuardian 2: Web-cam software works well but only in small areas.(Reviews)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... HomeGuardian 2 simply and effectively uses your Web cam and your Mac's built-in microphone to monitor activity in your home or office. When motion or sound levels exceed a user-defined threshold, HomeGuardian e-mails photos, videos, and audio...

Sonnet Aria extreme Wireless CardBus Card.(Reviews)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... VERY GOOD; Sonnet Technologies, 949/587-3500, www.sonnettech.com; $80 Apple's decision to not provide an Airport Extreme option for CardBus PowerBooks, including G4 Titanium and G3 models, left owners of those laptops with no immediate...

VectorWorks 10.5 9X.(Reviews)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... VERY GOOD 1/2; Nemetschek, 888/646-4223, www.nemetschek.net; $895; upgrade from version 10, free When we last reviewed VectorWorks (VERY GOOD 1/2; February 2003), we felt that the program was an excellent value with well-integrated 2-D and...

Keyboard virtual Instruments: Lounge Lizard EP-2 and B4 offer great sound but have a few visual quirks.(Reviews)(Product/Service Evaluation)
March 1, 2004... In the second half of 2003, the four major digital music sequencers for the Mac reached relatively satisfactory levels of stability and usefulness in Mac OS X. Soon thereafter, plug-in makers began to ship plug-ins and virtual instruments (VIs)...

Gods and generals.(The Game Room)
March 1, 2004... MACSOFT HAS A KNACK FOR DELIVERING SOME OF THE best strategy games on the Mac. Age of Mythology, its newest addition to the genre, is no exception. Developed by the same people who brought us the Age of Empires series, Age of Mythology shares...

Personal assistants.(Mac Gems)(Product/Service Evaluation)
March 1, 2004... PERFORMED REGULARLY, CERTAIN MAC OS X MAINTEnance tasks--Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions function and three Unix cleanup scripts scheduled to run daily, weekly, and monthly, respectively--can help your Mac run more smoothly....

Office 2004: first look.
March 1, 2004... Although Microsoft's Office 2004 won't be on store shelves until the middle of this year, we got a sneak peek at its new features. And these additions--from a command center for related correspondence, calendars, and files, to an audio recorder...

Hands on: ahead of the curve.(Secrets)(Adobe Photoshop tricks for image enhancement)
March 1, 2004... MOST PHOTOS IN PROFESSIONAL BROCHURES AND MAGA-zines have been enhanced or corrected until they're as flawless and polished as Hollywood celebrities. And Adobe Photoshop ($649; www.adobe.com) is usually the surgical instrument of choice....

Working Mac: Word productivity.(Secrets)(Microsoft Word X)
March 1, 2004... I LOVE GETTING MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY FROM MY MAC, so I love features that let me do a lot with a minimum of effort--features like the Find And Replace dialog box in Microsoft Word X. Many programs have a similar find-and-change tool, but Word's...

Digital Hub: record streaming audio.(Secrets)(Desktop utilities)(Product/Service Evaluation)
March 1, 2004... THANKS TO THE INTERNET, YOUR RADIO CHOICES ARE NO longer limited to the local airwaves. Maybe you want to keep up with the news in your hometown--now 2,000 miles away. Or maybe you just can't bear to miss a single minute of your favorite...

Create: creative suite layers.(use of Adobe Illustrator CS and InDesign CS)
March 1, 2004... WHAT IF THEY MADE A FEATURE NO ONE COULD USE? When Adobe released Acrobat 6 Standard ($299; www.adobe.com) last May, the program could display layers in PDF files for the first time. But there were no Mac programs that could produce layered PDF...

Mobile Mac: hop on a hotspot.(Secrets)
March 1, 2004... YOU'VE GOT WIRELESS NETWORKING IN YOUR HOME, AND you're enjoying surfing from the couch with your AirPort-enabled Mac, but you're starting to look a little wan and feel a little lonely. It's time to search for coffee shops and other public...

Geek Factor: develop Safari's power.(Secrets)
March 1, 2004... THE SIMPLEST AND MOST POWERFUL TOOLS YOU CAN ADD to your browser are things you may not even have heard about. Bookmarklets, also called favelets, are small bits of JavaScript you run in your browser just by clicking on a bookmark. You can use...

Help desk: Mac OS X Hints.(Secrets)(OS X 10.3 DVD Player and Activity Monitor)
March 1, 2004... DISCOVER PANTHER TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR DVD PLAYER experience, working with Activity Monitor, and mastering the new Open and Save dialog boxes. Plus, use Terminal to find out how much space folders use. Use a Second Monitor for DVD...

Help desk: Mac 911.(Secrets)(Operating systems )
March 1, 2004... MAC OS X 10.3 (PANTHER) IS A MIGHTY FINE FELINE, BUT it isn't sleek enough to make this column obsolete. If you're confounded by Panther's ability to create a bootable disc, confused about installing missing language resources, seeking a...

Hot stuff.
March 1, 2004... AT JANUARY 2004'S MACWORLD EXPO, as at all Macworld Expos, we roamed the show floor to seek out the most exciting recently introduced Mac products. Many of the award winners were beta versions or prototypes, so they're not yet available to the...

2004 Art Directors Invitational Master class.(ADIM)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... ADIM, as this conference is called, boasts amazingly imaginative presentations that will inspire even the most jaded designer, art director, or photographer. Each year there's a wacky theme for the conference--this time, it's James Bond. ...