Link via the iTunes App Store
Adobe Ideas allows you to sketch out ideas, annotate photographs, extract color themes from photographs and more. Sketches created in Adobe Ideas can be emailed as a PDF for editing in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or viewing with any PDF viewer.
Adobe Ideas Feature List
The key features are:
• Simple vector-based drawing tools
• Zoom control without jaggies or big pixels
• Variable-size brushes using multitouch control
• Vector eraser
• Huge virtual canvas
• Automatic creation of harmonized color themes from your photos or images
• Ability to email ideas as PDF files for editing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or for viewing with any PDF viewer
• Gallery-style organizer to quickly scroll through your ideas and color themes
• Separate drawing and photo layers
• Easy creation of multiple versions of design concepts
• 50-level undo
How Adobe Ideas came to be (and where it’s headed)
Link via Adobe.com
Chart showing product compatibility with Microsoft® Windows® 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Please click on the chart for the complete product compatibility list.
Link via Parallels.com
Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK), a leader in 2D and 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, and Parallels, a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software, announced that they have signed an agreement to make Parallels Desktop for Mac Autodesk’s preferred Mac virtualization software.
Autodesk will now support use of AutoCAD software, AutoCAD LT software, Autodesk Inventor Professional software, Autodesk 3ds Max software, Autodesk 3ds Max Design software and the Autodesk Revit software platform for building information modeling (BIM) on Mac OS X via Parallels Desktop. Autodesk added official support for these products on the Mac via Boot Camp earlier this year.
Autodesk products are available at an education discount price from Creation Engine.
Parallels is available at an education discount price of $39.99.
Link via Autodesk
If you have an Apple Intel Mac, 3ds Max 2010 is now a officially supported application on Boot Camp:
Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010 and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010 is supported running on a Windows partition of an Apple computer using Boot Camp to manage a dual OS configuration.
The Mac hardware requirements are as follows:
| Operating System |
Apple OS X 10.5.2 Leopard or higher. |
| Processor |
Intel based Mac.
(64-bit Windows Vista requires an Intel Core 2 duo or Xeon processor). |
| RAM |
3GB minimum.
Recommend 4GB for 32-bit guest OS, 8GB or more for 64-bit guest OS. |
| Disk Space |
Minimum 20GB for the Apple OS partition, minimum 20GB for the guest OS partition. |
| Boot Camp Version |
2.0 or higher. |
3ds Max Design 2010 Student Edition Windows (13-month term) is available at an education discount price of $100.
3ds Max 2010 Superpack Student Version (13-month term) is available at an education discount price of $200
Macworld Expo: Apple Picks MathType for its new iWork ‘09 Suite
Equations can now be inserted and edited in all three iWork applications: Pages, Keynote, and Numbers
LONG BEACH, Calif. — January 13, 2009 — Design Science today announced that Apple has chosen MathType™ as the equation editor for its new iWork ‘09 suite of applications. Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, made this announcement in the keynote address at last week’s Macworld Expo conference in San Francisco and demonstrated editing a MathType equation in a Pages ‘09 document. MathType works with all three iWork applications: Pages (word processor), Keynote (presentation), and Numbers (spreadsheet).
“The Mac has always been big in education, science, and engineering.” said Paul Topping, Design Science’s President & CEO. “Until now, Mac users that need equations were limited to using Microsoft Office. Now they have a choice.” It is expected that many Mac users in these markets will make the move to iWork. If they have existing Microsoft Office documents containing MathType or Equation Editor equations, these can be imported into the new iWork applications and the equations will remain editable.
MathType has long been known as the professional version of the Equation Editor in Microsoft Office, used by millions of educators, scientists and engineers to create papers and presentations with textbook-quality equations. According to scientific and technical publishers, over 85% of submitted manuscripts containing mathematical notation are Microsoft Word documents with MathType or Equation Editor equations. Now that MathType works with Apple’s iWork, coverage of the most popular word processing and presentation applications on Mac and Windows is virtually complete.
MathType 6.5 is available at an academic discount price of $55.
Link via Macworld
Among the 20 Eddy Award winners for 2009 are:
Eddy Winner: VMware Fusion 2
If you want to run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems on your Intel-powered Mac, there’s no better choice than VMware Fusion 2.
VMware Fusion 2 is available at an academic discount price of $39.
Eddy Winner: Photoshop Lightroom 2
The first version of Lightroom was a solid update when it came out in 2007, but this Eddy Award-winning update is even better.
Photoshop Lightroom 2 is available at an academic discount price of $95.
Link via PC Magazine
If you use Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, you probably like it and dislike it at the same time. You probably like that it’s the most powerful office suite on the Mac platform, with Apple’s iWork suite still playing catch-up. You probably like that it’s almost fully compatible with documents created in Office for Windows. But you probably don’t like that it’s the least Mac-like of any major Mac software, with plenty of quirks inherited from the Windows version, and some quirks of its very own. To help you find your way around the byways of the Mac version, here are some little-known tips, many of them based on techniques and methods that are well documented only in the Windows version.
Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition is available from Creation Engine for $145.
Academic Volume Licensing is also available for Office 2008 for Mac.
Link via MacWorld
All of the changes in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Extended CS4 add up to a friendlier, more accessible interface (and with Photoshop that’s an accomplishment), with increasingly helpful tools that are much easier to find and use than before. The changes may take some getting used to, but in the end, you’ll come to appreciate the more streamlined and uncluttered experience. If you’re a photographer, the enhancements in Camera Raw alone may well be worth the upgrade and for everyone else, the additions along with the improvements to existing tools makes for a much more enjoyable Photoshop experience.
Photoshop CS4 Extended is available at an academic discount price of $299.
Link via WebMonkey
VMWare has announced Fusion 2, the latest release of its flagship Mac virtualization app. Like competitor Parallels, Fusion allows Mac users to run Windows applications alongside their normal Mac OS X apps.
Fusion 2 packs in a host a new features and current Fusion users will happy to hear that the upgrade is free. Among the standout new features are an improved “Unity” mode, multi-display support for virtual machines, improved 3-D graphics and easier-to-use “shared” folders for moving documents between your Mac and the guest OS.
The multiple monitor support also means that any Windows-only apps that require more than one display will work without a hitch.
Gamers, Fusion 2 has quite a few features that will make your Windows games a bit faster and more impressive on a Mac. The new version offers full support for 3D video acceleration in games (and other apps) that use DirectX 9.0. There’s also support for 1080p HD video playback and more.
You’ll also find a new virus-fighting feature, AutoProtect, which makes automated snapshots of your Windows install. Should a virus strike (remember, just because you’re running Windows on a Mac doesn’t mean Windows is immune to viruses) you can easily roll things back to a pre-virus snapshot.
But Fusion 2 isn’t just about Windows on your Mac, it allows you to run just about any OS including, Linux distros which now work with Unity 2, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and some 60 other operating systems.
Fusion 2 is a free upgrade for all owners of VMWare Fusion 1. You can grab the latest version from the VMWare downloads page.
VMware Fusion is available at an academic discount price of $37.
Link via AppleInsider
Following an earlier open beta, Adobe on Tuesday released version 2.0 of its Photoshop Lightroom post production photography software, which stands as the company’s first application to run 64-bit-native on Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard operating system.
The San Jose-based software developer is particularly proud of the accomplishment given that Lightroom’s main competitor, Apple’s Aperture, has yet to see native 64-bit support.
Adobe has committed to delivering 64-bit versions of Photoshop and its other Creative Suite applications, but said earlier this year that those updates will take considerably longer due to Apple’s decision to scrap plans for a 64-bit version of its Carbon developer tool set.
For Lightroom 2.0, 64-bit support will allow the application to address large amounts of memory in excess of 4 gigabytes, which will speed up overall performance for photographers dealing with large scale images that must be swapped into and out of memory during processing-intensive operations.
The software also aims to streamline and accelerate photographers’ workflows through an enhanced Library module featuring the ability to visually organize images across multiple hard drives. A Library Filter Bar and Suggested Keywords feature work towards simplifying the search and retrieval process.
Photoshop Lightroom 2 is available at an academic discount price of $98.