AAUG Reviews

By Elizabeth Enslow, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

This book is part of the Apple training series. Peachpit publishes all of the Apple Pro Training series which is the official training curriculum for Apple Pro applications.

This book is a very beginner how-to book for iLife ‘05 and is the only Apple certified guide to iLife. The author has not published anything else for Peachpit, but has written 3 other titles, dealing with video editing, one of which is in its 4 edition. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is just starting with iLife, especially those new to Apple. It is a very basic book written in plain language and it takes you from not knowing how to do much more than open the program to being able to perform frequently used and much needed functions. You can even get new lessons online as the program is updated. For the most part, this book is just getting right down to business, but there are a few dry humor lines included. I am somewhat new to iLife and I felt like this book was a great help and I have already recommended it to a few friends. The “note” sections are very helpful if you have not played with many apple programs. There are a lot of clear graphics and each lesson is step by step, it doesn’t take long to get through the book. You can do the lessons at your own pace and take weeks or just a few hours. There is only one thing that I wasn’t thrilled with; the “note” sections contain most of the troubleshooting for the lessons and in some of the lessons it would ask you to perform a task and then wait until 3 tasks later to tell you how to access that particular command if it is not readily available. So, like I said, just a small error in order. Other than that minor glitch, I love it and completed it over the course of a week; I think it probably took about 8 hours total.

By Lynda McConnell, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

This book is another reference manual from “The Missing Manual” series published by Pogue Press. It covers Word, Entourage, Excel and PowerPoint for Macintosh users. Both author’s have published many books and/or articles for computer users. The writing is clear and easy to read with enough humorous quips to lighten the reading with a few chuckles. The layout of the book is user friendly. There are enough section headings to make browsing for information easy. There are frequent tips, cautions, notes and figures with good information. Just scanning these would give the reader enough information to start using the software. I find the graphics hard to read, because the print is so small, but there are always clear instructions to take you to the actual computer screen. I always appreciate a book that is written on non-glossy paper as this one is.

The organization of “Office 2004 for Macintosh” is similar to other manuals in “The Missing Manual” series. The Introduction describes what is new and different in Office 2004. It includes some basic information and vocabulary to help people who are new to computers and computer manuals.

The book is organized in sections for Word, Entourage, Excel and PowerPoint. The basic information about the each program is given first, with the information for more advanced computer users in the last chapters. The very last section of the book talks about other miscellaneous features of Office 2004.

One of the nice things about “The Missing Manuals” series is the Missing CD-Rom page at missingmanuals.com. At that website there are three additional appendices to the book. (more…)

By Bruce M. Herman, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

If you have an interest in natural phenomena at a global scale, EarthBrowser is for you. I originally discovered this program after Hurricane Katrina. I wanted something that would show storms and cloud patterns at any scale without having to rely on NOAA’s web sites. Two programs could do that: EarthBrowser by Lunar Software and 3D Weather Globe and Atlas by MacKiev. I chose EarthBrowser because in addition to the weather, I could see the locations of recent earthquakes, volcanos and webcams from cities around the world.

When you first open EarthBrowser, you see the earth spinning in front of you with the lights of all of the major cities. The continents’ topography is resolved to 250 m. The major bathymetric features such as mid-ocean ridges, transform faults, and submarine volcanoes are also shown. For more refined bathymetry, you can select the Blue Marble+bathymetry option. EarthBrowser opens with the cursor appearing to be a hand. With this setting, you can grab the globe and stop the rotation. You can then position the globe to view any area of interest. You can click the zoom (+/-) icon to zoom (in/out).

Selecting the earthquake icon displays earthquakes from the last 4 days. Earthquake magnitudes are displayed on the balls that locate the earthquakes. Zooming in reveals more earthquakes. Hover your cursor over an earthquake and a pop-up window gives the magnitude, depth, location, time and date. Click and you are linked to the USGS web site for that earthquake. Awesome! If I have any complaint about the program, it’s that the earthquakes database does not appear to be the World Wide Seismic Network. Comparing Alaska and Japan, you would think that Alaska is seismically far more active based on the number of earthquakes. That is not the case. (more…)

By Elaine V. Robinson, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

I LOVE graphics and truly believe one can never have enough! The SOHO Art Pack contains commercial grade images including 5,000 hi-res (300 dpi) photos, 10,000 hi-res photo objects and 25,000+ vector images in EPS format. The photo objects are even pre-masked for transparency. Wow, I’m drooling already! The graphics are searchable within the below mentioned applications from Cronos. Label& Envelopes, which I used for this review, lists a myriad of labels from audio tapes to name tags and everything in between to use your graphics. Eleven of the label companies (Avery included) display many sizes and compatible product numbers. L&E integrates with the Mac OS X Address Book for seamless mail merge integration. I’m very impressed with the ease of use of Labels & Envelopes but I’m supposed to talk about the Art Pack so I better get to it!

You have to install the entire DVD contents to your hard drive as you don’t get the option to install what you want. It’s all or nothing. I am not sure that I am comfortable with installing over 40,000 graphics on my hard drive as I would have preferred to insert the DVD and select the image as needed. The installation uses 3.9 GB of hard drive space which is quite a chunk. These days the hard drives are large enough to accommodate the install as I have an 80GB drive and plenty of room to spare. A G3 with a 4 GB hard drive could not handle such a big install instead needing the 6, 8 or 9GB configuration. I think that I would have preferred an index of alias graphics as the Hemera collections and just choose the graphics as needed. The clip art is installed into the Applications Support folder of either your home Library or main Library folder.

The clip art can be accessed in the SOHO applications by means of the searchable browser by category or keywords. You can scroll through all or any category but that takes a lot of time considering the sheer number of graphics. The browser is expandable so you can see as many images as your screen width allows. The image thumbnail size is also controllable as in iPhoto allowing more to be displayed. The image is then easily dragged directly to your design canvas. (more…)

By Gerrit H. Dalman, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

Apple is a special company and the Macintosh was a pivotal product that is still at the heart of its success today. Yet if you were to look inside the original Macintosh you would find something even more remarkable than technical innovation and creativity.

Past the intuitive graphical user interface, behind the first 3.5″ floppy drive in a personal computer, and over the novel logic board was something that most users never knew was there. Inside the case of every Macintosh was a collection of signatures. Just as an artist would sign a canvas, the team that put together the first “insanely great” computer signed their masterpiece.

The Macintosh was a special product because of the amazing team that took it from conception to retail. Revolution in the Valley is the story of their achievement. It is a sturdy and attractive hardbound book with a modern and approachable layout, relevant illustrations, and highlighted summary quotes from team members and the minds that inspired them. Under the dust cover it is adorned with stills taken from the infamous 1984 commercial announcing the Macintosh.

Though the book touches on parts of the larger Apple story - such as the exile and return of Steve Jobs, the development of the Lisa, and the great initial success of the Apple II - it maintains its focus on the Macintosh throughout. It follows the project from Jeff Raskin’s research project, to Steve Jobs’ adoption as the future of Apple, and through the first time the world said “‘hello’ to Macintosh.” (more…)

By Bruce Herman, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

Allume Systems, Inc. (previously Aladdin Systems Inc.) has released version 10.0 of Stuffit. Stuffit Deluxe, the product reviewed here, not only compresses and expands files, it also allows you to create self-extracting archives. The software has been updated to be compatible with MAc OS 10.4 (Tiger) and its Spotlight and Automater, as well as .Mac. Archives (their name for compressed files) can be encrypted with a 512 bit algorithm and password protected. Stuffit Deluxe 10.0 ships with a number of utilities that include backup software and plug-in’s for Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft’s Word. The product has its own search utility that allows you to search for information within archives. Finally, the product has a 100 page manual that fortunately includes an executive summary of sorts that allows you to begin working immediately.

In my day job, I’m a geophysicist who uses Sun workstations with Sun’s Solaris 8 OS. My evening job is as a photographer. So I wanted to see if I could move files from my Mac to my workstation, and I wanted to see how well the jpeg compression worked. I started with a relatively small jpeg 780 KB in size. The default compression of this file was 580 KB, an additional 26%. However, this file can only be opened on another Mac. An archive that would work with a windows PC file was 744 KB, a mere 5% additional compression. The UNIX version of the archive was 952 KB, a 22% increase! So the best results were obtained creating an archive that worked only with Macs. The good news is that both the windows and UNIX versions opened with no problems. Finally, and as you might expect, self-extracting files carry the overhead of the software, itself. This is insignificant when you’re archiving many files or a single large file.

A word about the plug-ins: in Photoshop and Word, you can archive a file from within the application, as well as add the archive to an email automatically. This is a time saving feature if you are sending compressed files as attachments. The process is compatible with Apple’s Mail and Microsoft Outlook and Express. No mention is made of Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail tool. (more…)

By Gerrit H. Dalman, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

It is often said that nothing is more important than family, but how much family can most Americans account for? Many never take the time to consider their roots farther back than grandparents. For those up to the challenge of tracing their family tree, a wide selection of genealogy software is available for organizing and sharing that family lineage.

MacFamilyTree (MFT) is one of few such apps for Mac OS X. It has a fairly robust feature set with a decent Mac-friendly interface and a great price tag. It performs all the functions you would expect from such a program, including input and management of person data, events, relationships, media, and research sources.

Multiple family trees can be open at once and each centers on a main window with an optional floater for navigation and a detachable drawer for browsing persons. The use of unique Mac interface components like drawers, tabs, and live search fields will make Mac users comfortable right away even though the layout and some editing conventions could benefit from a little refinement. This is particularly obvious when starting from scratch since the interface doesn’t offer rapid data entry or relationship assignment.

Editing may require too many clicks and keystrokes, but is just the beginning of MFTs functions. Selecting the “View” tab provides access to several different visualizations of family data. These include attractive heritage charts, genograms, timelines, and even annotated world maps. Unfortunately customization and export options are limited, but the graphics do print nicely and can be saved at screen resolution for any purpose. (more…)

By Clint Seyer, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

The new .mac (pronounced dot mac) suite of on line services is quite amazing with mail, synchronization, mega storage for saving critical files and photos, calendars, web pages, and much more to enhance on line utilization and storage. There are also a great deal of extra benefits from Apple for OS X users and the applications we enjoy such as the learning center and downloads for members only.

About a year ago I signed on for the .mac offered by Apple (for Mac and pc users). It was to be the answer to all my creative prayers, no more expensive christmas letters, large email storage for large files and a place for online photo/movie publishing. I have a great respect for the Apple crew for making their inventions user-friendly, however I was quite frustrated with getting a clear basic understanding of some of the services especially with publishing photo albums online. The two I did get online were by accident and lots of trial and error that I had trouble duplicating later. Unfortunately the “help” articles were not very in-depth and did not get me the steps I needed. They were too simplistic and when something didn’t go as planned I was lost. I finally quite trying to publish on line at least until I got hold of “Inside .Mac” . This has become my favorite reference guide in optimizing my .mac enjoyment.

Inside .Mac is well written, simple, in depth (to whatever depth you want to go) and very well organized by subject matter. The .mac internet /storage suite is immensely versatile and this book goes through every element efficiently. It starts with “Setting up you .mac account” and how to use your idisk and customize your email account. It covers essential security such as backing up your files and using Virex (anti-virus program provided with your .mac account) to my favorite entertainment, building a home page and creating online slide shows. this book even covers creating a blog or sending icards. The great thing about author Chris Toporek’s style is that it doesn’t get all super techno so one doesn’t need a quantum physics degree to sort the material out. Chris goes step by step with clear subheadings so you can easily find your way to the exact information your looking for and skip what doesn’t grab you. His explanations are in plain English and has effective screenshots so you can see what you should be looking at. The book has wonderful depth so that you can immerse yourself into remarkable customizing or delve into the inner workings of the .mac offerings. (more…)

By Robert Arrington, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

After Dark Screen Saver is the classis best-selling screensaver collection that has been around since 1989 and in fact was the very first screen saver ever created. These fun retro savers are now available for Mac OSX.

Best known for the “flying toasters,” After Dark + Fish adds a whole army of additional screensavers to its toasty repertoire. Fans of the original who long for the 80’s version - like a 70s junkie misses Atari - will have great fun experiencing what was, back then, a groundbreaking success in the world of computer animation. But Mac users spoiled with 21st century graphics might want to check out the demo first before shelling out the cash for this puppy. This is, for the most part, a nostalgic throwback to another era.

One of the first things I noticed about the initial downloading of the program is that there is no American website address for the program. Rather, it is a long and complicated website name linked to a server in Japan and so after manually typing in all of the sub folders I finally arrived at the page and downloaded the software which is a .dmg file.
Inside the .dmg file are several folders and several text documents explaining how to download the file, but these text documents are also heavily peppered with what looks like programming code and the help text is sandwiched between this unintelligible language.

The instructions, once found, are simple. Drag the contents of the .dmg file to the Screen Saver file on your hard drive. Then open System Preferences and go to Desktop and Screen Saver. There are 12 new screen savers now loaded and ready to run. These include perennial favorites such as Circles, Fireworks, Kaleidoscope, Mandelbrot, Mowing Man, New Line Art, New Message, New Starry Night, New Warp, Shower, and the hilarious Space Toaster, which features flying toasters blasting off from the earth and circling the moon defending our planet from the onslaught of threatening asteroids. (more…)

By Christopher Narvaez, AAUG Member
Reviewed 12/05

Have you ever had your iPod and look at it to only find that your battery power is on its last minutes? No charger around and your far from home and need music? Welcome to my world, but the only difference is that there is hope. Belkin’s Tune power gives you the extra hours of music you need w/out the hassle of needing a charger or cords running across your dashboard or center console.

Well, My name is Christopher Narvaez and I recently had the opportunity to review Belkins Tune power charger and I like it very much. I was surprised that this little bulky adapter could withstand so much use along with weather temperatures only Polar Bears find cozy. This little device has changed my life (SORT OF.) I got hold of this and tested it on my road trip to Eureka Diner in Eureka, Alaska. This 3 hour trip each direction, along with stops for gas and pictures, proved to be very enjoyable because I had my music on all the time.

The battery pack comes with 3 plastic cases that fit for any ipod mini, up to the 4th generation ipod photo. These cases are bulky especially when your going to use this in your car. I don’t like leaving my iPod in my glove box because I like to switch my music from different play lists. The battery comes uncharged so you should give it a full charge before use. When I went to put the battery pack in the sleeve so I can slide my 3rd generation iPod in I noticed the top of the plastic sleeve that contains the iPod, it had a defect. The top opening for the earphones and sliding the hold button was very small so my itrip could not fit. (more…)