James Dempsey

When I reviewed Acorn 1.0.2 ( Macworld rated 3.5 out of 5 mice ) back in October of 2007, I was pleasantly surprised at its capabilities, but wanted a bit more from some of its features, such as better text tools and improved performance. While not designed as a professional-grade image editor, Acorn nonetheless offers an array of editing tools for photography hobbyists and bloggers. And, it's easy on the pocketbook.

Flying Meat has now released Acorn 2.1, and I am pleased at how fast this version runs on my 13-inch MacBook Pro 2.53GHz with 4GB of RAM. Opening, saving, and editing images in the 30MB range was mostly fluid, due in part to the program's new 64-bit support.

You've heard the saying, "you can't judge a book by its cover," right? Well, I was hoping that maxim was true when I received the Adesso CyberTablet 6400, the company's new graphics tablet. The affordable price of $70 led me to believe I would be missing out on a few higher-end features, but that's to be expected. I began to worry though when I glanced at the box and a few disturbing things caught my eye.

For starters, the box lists a dozen or so features on the front and back. Unfortunately, over half of the features listed are duplicates (USB connection is listed as a feature three times). Between the Web site and the box, I couldn't tell the size of the active drawing area because they list three different sizes. More disturbing though is the claim that the mouse comes with a scroll-wheel, which it clearly does not.

As designers, we pretty much accept Adobe's Big Four apps as our tools of choice in creating brochures, flyers, ads, and Web sites. But Adobe has offered another tool for quite some time that should take its rightful spot next to Photoshop ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), InDesign ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), Illustrator ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), and Flash ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) in our design toolbox. It's called Kuler (pronounced "cooler" according to Adobe), and its name is certainly appropriate.

Kuler is a Web-based application that allows users to browse, create, and share color themes through the Kuler Web site, the Kuler desktop application (direct download link; requires Adobe AIR), or a Kuler widget for Mac OS X's Dashboard (available for download from the Links page on the Kuler site). Of course, Kuler is also available inside your favorite Adobe CS4 desktop applications including: Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, and Fireworks. Kuler is available online for free, and you don't have to be a CS4 user to take advantage of it.

Whenever Apple releases a new operating system, the first thing creatives consider before updating is whether or not the new OS will play nicely with their existing investments in hardware and software. For most designers and artists, that means Adobe Creative Suite, font managers, and Web browsers, not to mention their existing Macs.

While previous versions of Mac OS X offered numerous new features that enticed users to update based on expanded capabilities, Snow Leopard offers little in the way of sexy doo-dads. So your only considerations for upgrading are speed and compatibility. Fortunately, the news is positive.

With all the social-networking services out there, you can easily find yourself spending more time switching between Web sites than you do actually using them. Rather than jumping back and forth, save yourself some effort by using a desktop program that brings your social network to you. There are many good programs for managing specific networks, including Iconfactory's $15 Twitterrific for Mac ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), for Twitter feeds, and Infinite Sushi's free 1001, for Flickr feeds, but my favorite is Cosmic Machine's $15 EventBox. This program, which is still a beta release, not only lets me follow what's going on with several of my favorite social networks at once, but also allows me to view RSS feeds, thus eliminating the need for yet another application on my Mac.

EventBox puts everything in a single window, with your networks listed in a source column to the left of the content-viewing area. To view any particular network, you simply click on its icon. To get a quick overview, you can use smart folders to show all unread activity, favorites, or recent activity at once.

If you're a photographer, the photo-sharing site Flickr offers a great way to get your work seen and to elicit feedback. But it's unlikely that others will find your stuff without a little help from you.

Apply tags liberally To make your photo easy to a stumble upon, tag it with plenty of appropriate keywords. For example, if you're posting an image of a boy and girl riding bikes, tag the image with not only with the obvious (boy, girl, bike), but also the colors of the clothes they're wearing, where you took the photo, and descriptor words of the scenery around them.

If users of the popular photo-sharing service Flickr have one complaint, it's that the image uploader on the Flickr Web site is horribly inconvenient to use. Flickery offers a desktop-app alternative with a great Mac-like interface and a good balance between features for novice and pro users.

Once you've entered your Flickr account info, the left-hand side of Flickery's iPhoto-like interface shows a list of the various areas of your Flickr account. Clicking on an item in the list--Photos, Favorites, Photosets, Flickr Groups, etc.--displays that item's photos in the preview area on the right. You can also view Saved Searches and the photo streams of your Flickr Friends and Contacts.

If you use Adobe Photoshop for design work, you've no doubt used a custom brush at one time or another. Experienced designers probably have a handful of custom brushes installed. Then there's people like me--Photoshop Brush freaks, who have hundreds upon hundreds of brushes at the ready, just waiting for the perfect excuse to use them.

The problem is, once you download and install a custom brush set, it's easy to forget what they look like later on. This is especially the case when the brush author names the incredibly handy grunge paper brushes he designed something really clever, like "cool brushes by Bob."

Enlarging photos appears to be a simple and mundane task for the average user. But as a pro, you understand the ramifications of firing up Photoshop and just using the Image Size dialog box, or worse yet, just stretching an image in your page layout application.

Blow Up 2, from Alien Skin Software, is a Photoshop plugin that produces high-quality image enlargements by using an algorithm which temporarily converts pixels in your photo to vectors. The results are a sharper, more detailed enlargement.

One of the things I love about Adobe InDesign is that there's usually more than one way to accomplish virtually any task. Take placing images in your document. InDesign offers a plethora of options to improve productivity in this area, thanks to keyboard shortcuts.

Placing a Single Image

One of the things I love about Adobe InDesign is that there's usually more than one way to accomplish virtually any task. Take placing images in your document. InDesign offers a plethora of options to improve productivity in this area, thanks to keyboard shortcuts.

Placing a Single Image

Adobe Photoshop has offered a feature called Actions for quite some time, though it rarely gets the attention it deserves. Actions allows you to automate many of Photoshop's advanced features in a simple manner that increases your productivity and allows for exact application of filters, scaling, file-saving, and much more.

Sure, there are plenty of shareware and freeware apps out there that can help you batch crop, size and rename files, but none of them give you access to Photoshop's powerful feature set, including the multitude of third-party filters available.