Top stories

Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

Adobe’s Biggest Product Announcement Ever: Creative Suite 4 Products Coming in October

Adobe announced its “biggest ever” product release on Tuesday. The Creative Suite 4 product family, a new series of media applications scheduled to ship in October, features tightly integrated workflow solutions designed to advance the creative process across print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production.

The entire product line includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editions, Creative Suite 4 Web editions, Creative Suite 4 Production Premium and the Creative Suite 4 Master Collection.

Photoshop, the most widely used Adobe product, will take advantage of new graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware in the CS4 edition ($699) to deliver a smoother pan and zoom experience, allowing users to easily edit images at even the highest magnifications. For an additional $300, Photoshop CS4 Extended give users the ability to manipulate 3D imagery, such as painting directly on 3D models and surfaces, merging 2-D files onto 3D images, and animating 3D objects.

InDesign, Adobe’s page layout program, also comes in for some interesting upgrades, including a feature that highlights potential production problems in real-time from within the layout and directs users to the problem area to resolve the issue. Other new features make it easier to create and manage long documents such as manuals and textbooks, including a Conditional Text feature that lets users quickly produce multiple versions of a document for different uses such as multi-lingual documents or Teacher/Student materials.

Below we reproduce Adobe’s comparison chart to help give you an idea of the range of options available in the new applications and their bundles, but be sure to visit the Adobe website for detailed information and several arresting demos of the kinds of work supported by these products.

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer, musician, web designer attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

Email the author | Read more posts by Lonnie Lazar.

2 comments

    Didn’t I just pay several hundred dollars for CS3 a year ago?

    Lonnie Lazar, Adobe peddler extraordinaire!

    But seriously…couldn’t you of made this less like a cram-down-your-throat-paid-for-by-adobe advertisement and more of a “hey guys, adobe’s stuff is coming out soon, here’s what’s cool : _______”.

    Nothing says Mac more than staring at packages with too many combinations and sorting out chekboxes and seeing if you need the ultimate or basic or…..wait…this sounds like I’m buying Vista…

    (By the way, I found

    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/compare-editions/default.aspx

    to be really funny when I scrolled down and found that apparently home premium promises more having of fun than home. Maybe they should try scare tactics instead and say that home basic causes impotence. That might boost sales.)

    I digress. More Mac entries. Less ads.

    Cheers,
    Thomas

Buy Inside Steve's Brain Buy from Amazon.com Buy from Barnes & Noble