Photoline Review: A Truly Great Photoshop Alternative
I’ve been looking for alternatives to Photoshop (and Illustrator, but I digress) ever since Adobe apps started refusing to launch if they couldn’t phone home (i.e. around 2001).
Since Adobe introduced product activation, I’ve been searching for something I can just license and install on any machine I use, the way I can with a lot of indie products (e.g. Silo, Cheetah, and Unity).
Well, my search is over, and if you’re like me, maybe yours is too.
Unity3D 1.6 – Incompletely Amazing
*Editor: This article was written right before Unity3D released a 2.0 version (watch for this review soon).
OTEE’s Unity3D promises to be what the Mac needs and many of us have wanted for years, a program that is to 3D what Macromedia Director was to 2D. It’s close enough that it will take your breath away, but it falls short of its promise in ways that may frustrate many potential users.
A Little History
Life Without Adobe?
When Adobe announced CS3, like many owners of Intel Macs I was very happy. This happiness didn’t last long — just trying to figure out which of Adobe’s CS3 bundles I (a) wanted and (b) was eligible to upgrade to was not easy. Like many pro web developers, I have Adobe Creative Suite (version 1, not 2) and Macromedia Studio 8 Professional. You’d think Adobe would toss a bone to folks who, in essence, paid twice for the prerequisites to CS3, but no. We can certainly upgrade to Adobe CS3 for Web Developers twice, but we don’t get any kind of break if we want to get the Master suite.
Bryce 6.1 Updated, Yet Dated
Hey you remember Bryce 3D don’t you? Cmon, think back – think waaay back. If you're a 3D artist like me, you have very fond memories of Bryce from the 1990s. It was a very easy program to get into and produced breathtaking results with almost no effort. But the history of Bryce since then has been a bit of a slow motion tragedy.
Nonetheless DAZ 3D’s Bruce 6.1 has been out n the wild for some time now, ad this time around it includes universal support for us Mac users.
Apple’s Four Product Matrix Revisited
If you cast your mind back to the early days of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple, you may remember when he introduced the four product matrix. It was breathtakingly simple and reasonable. Instead of selling a bunch of more-or-less randomly configured models in the pursuit of market niche “sweet spots” which led to the Performa debacle, Apple would sell four kinds of computer, based on a simple 2×2 matrix: professional vs. consumer, desktop vs. portable. It seems to me that this beautifully simple matrix has become badly unstuck, and needs rethinking.
It's Time for a Decent Mac Benchmark
It seems like the first thing you’ll see in any review or comparison of new Mac hardware these days is XBench results. XBench seems to have become the the de-facto standard for Mac benchmarking, simply because their isn’t an alternative suite of tools. I’m writing this short article on a Mac Pro 2.66 GHz with 3GB of RAM. XBench is free (well, donationware), it’s easy to use, and it’s quick to download. It’s also almost completely useless.
Now now, before you get upset listen to my argument.
