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Descenders are a waste of vertical space, requiring all lines to have extra space just to accommodate the few letters that require descenders.

That space is already necessary for legibility.

There's a reason why there are no descenders in upper-case letters

Yes. They hadn't been invented yet when those glyphs were invented. Again, they are a feature, not a bug.

and we really should travel back in time and take the people who invented both lowercase letters and "handwriting script" and shoot their great-grandparents - ask any pharmacist who's had to decipher a prescription

No. Just shoot the doctors who can't be arsed to write legibly. They're literally killing people.

Also, lead is toxic - and you miss my point

When you develop the ability to stay on topic, let me know.

...or blue, or purple, or orange, or brown, or yellow, or pink, or camouflage, or transparent...

Below is a link to an interview with Apple Aperture Product Manager Joe Schorr, which I read over a month ago, and it answers most of your questions (and most of the other Slashdot readers questions):

CreativePro.com

Did ACD buy Deneba or just Canvas, do you know? Is it really good for casual usage? Though I haven't really tried it yet I've got Canvas 7, as freeware/trialware. I wonder how it is for editing photographs. Actually I'd like to get something with the capabilities of Photoshop without the price tag.

ACD Systems acquired Deneba a little over two years ago, and released Canvas 9 some time afterward. Canvas was the only Deneba product I was ever familiar with; afaik, it was their only product. For some tasks, Canvas would be a decent substitute for Photoshop, but no one can match Photoshop feature for feature.

For raster graphics, there's actually another free alternative besides the The GIMP, although it seems like a lot of people forgot about it: in June of 2000, Corel released PHOTO-PAINT 9 for free on Linux. Yeah, that's a bit dated, but to this day it's one of the most powerful Linux graphics apps available.

They just "borrow" from the competitor.

I agree with the grandparent post that the linked article is more of a blog comment than a review. In sum, I think he probably got it as a "Microsoft rip-off of Photoshop" not to be taken seriously.

Instead, I suggest you look at the following list. They are more professional and in-depth reviews of Microsoft Expression (formerly Creature House Expression - the basis of Acrylic) by various magazines online:

• Graphics Unleashed
• All 'Bout Computers
• creativepro.com
• Designer-info
• Creative Mac
• Applelinks
• MacWorld
• About.com

Notice that Mac version has always been available except for this Beta Acrylic release. So I bet Expression was designed to appeal to artists among the Mac community to begin with.

Expression has made use of a unique technology called Skeletal Stroke (the review by creative.com has some explanation), which adds substance & complexity of raster graphics along vector paths. So I believe this vector drawing & painting package, while not as popular as Adobe Illustrator, has always been targetting a niche market with its own appeal.

In fact, it can produce some of the amazing effect found in Chinese water painting and other fine art drawing handily, even easier than you can do with Illustrator. The downside is a steeper learning curve to tap the full power of this unique & different app.

You can find more tutorials & resources on Expression at Wikipedia

I agree with the grandparent post that the linked article is more of a blog comment than a review. In sum, I think he probably got it as a "Microsoft rip-off of Photoshop" not to be taken seriously.

Instead, I suggest you look at the following list. They are more professional and in-depth reviews of Microsoft Expression (formerly Creature House Expression - the basis of Acrylic) by various magazines online:

• Graphics Unleashed
• All 'Bout Computers
• creativepro.com
• Designer-info
• Creative Mac
• Applelinks
• MacWorld
• About.com

Notice that Mac version has always been available except for this Beta Acrylic release. So I bet Expression was designed to appeal to artists among the Mac community to begin with.

Expression has made use of a unique technology called Skeletal Stroke (the review by creative.com has some explanation), which adds substance & complexity of raster graphics along vector paths. So I believe this vector drawing & painting package, while not as popular as Adobe Illustrator, has always been targetting a niche market with its own appeal.

In fact, it can produce some of the amazing effect found in Chinese water painting and other fine art drawing handily, even easier than you can do with Illustrator. The downside is a steeper learning curve to tap the full power of this unique & different app.

You can find more tutorials & resources on Expression at Wikipedia

Sad news indeed. :(

Heres some more information I found about the naming of macintosh apples.

"The Macintosh project began at Apple as one code-named Annie, and spearheaded not by Steve Jobs (he actually lobbied against the Mac project at one point) but by Jeff Raskin, a former computer professor and Apple employee number 31. Raskin is generally credited with quickly changing the codename from Annie to Macintosh, an obvious tie to the Apple brand. Macintosh was spelled differently than the apple variety, however, in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid trademark disputes. Apple itself, lore has it, was named by Steve Jobs for either his love of the Beatles (and their Apple Records label), his interest in health foods, or because of his fond experiences working in the apple orchards of Oregon during a brief stint at college there. Or for none of those reasons. Except for the short-lived Pippin operating system, Apple the company thankfully avoided any other product references to varieties of apple, the fruit."

(taken from creativepro)

I forgot to mention that the last time this came up, a few people helpfully pointed out this UI feature actually appeared first in Mac IE 5.0. Point is that Firefox doesn't exactly have a track record of trailblazing innovation, either.

Apple themselves copied the idea from MS IE for Mac, which appeared long before OS X.

"If you pay an artist $200 for a couple of simple graphics, you'll save yourself tons of time, and your project will come out much, much better. So reduce the number of graphics you need, and get the best ones you can."

Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:

1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX

i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.

2. USE THE MORE "AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS, SUCH AS;

A. Ulead PaintShop Pro -- http://www.jasc.com/products/?
B. Macromedia Fireworks
C. Adobe Photoshop Elements
D. Cool Button Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
E. Cool FX Menu Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/

These programs are substantially cheaper $$$$ to buy then the "Biggies", and are designed to take some of the load off some of the design choices that can drive even highly skilled designers (Choices such as; opacity, blends, masks and moires)....

STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)

you can be a good citizen and ask, or you can homage them and alter them enough to make them "yours"

3. LEARN HOW TO FIND HELP FROM PROS: there are a # of websites designed to provide such help, for example http://creativepro.com/ is used by pretty much every designer i've worked with or known. everyone of the major software provider has both developer programs and tutorials and community BBs, forums, etc..

some companies such as Adobe and Macromedia really push these developer forums and you can frequently get better/faster/smarter solutions from these forums, than from the companies' Tech Support programs!!!

4. SELECT A "LOOK AND FEEL"; from a product/service/??? similar to what your product/service/??? and use that to extract GENERAL guidelines about how to present your design. Chances are these folk have paid good monety to learn lessons about to sell your similar product/service/??? -- go to school on them, BUT DON'T copy their design (Lawsuit City), extract their approach and see how you can apply it to your particular project...

Good Luck!

Is that kind of like a Chevy Mustang?
Not really because it exists.

You may be able to use font book. (that is if you have 10.3) For more information about managing fonts see the following article: http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20000.htm l

I invite you to re-read my previous posts.

Your claim that you can tell the difference between the two nearest colors in 8-bit accurace is a claim I do not believe. I could believe a random slashdot poster, or the people I personally showed the test to in person, who cannot see which is which.

The examples you showed were not examples of this kind of precision.

"You can buy LCD monitors with > 8 bit precision (like this one)."

You are right back to your original argument that no-one can see the difference. I notice you never responded to my explanation of banding, does that mean even you can see the problem there? And you still haven't explaned why you don't think precision should be increased given that there is virtually no cost.

I still don't agree, since I don't see any scenario in which anyone would *care* about the very, very SMALL loss of precision in the output device. Well, okay - YOU seem to care, but I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Personally I don't care particularly, I'm not going to notice, but it's virtually free. Why have "almost good enough" or "good enough for most people" or even "good enough for virtually everyone", when you can do better at almost no cost. To me, your stance is really quite similar to "640K should be enough for anyone". It's an unnecessary and artifical arbitrary limitation.

Your arguments about monitor variation are fine as far as they go, but they don't apply in every case. You can color calibrate monitors to be accurate across the screen and to a standard. People who care about color do these things now. LCD monitors also don't suffer from the same degree of variation as CRT montiors. See those links above.

Do a bit of research and it's clear that increased color precision isn't just considered a good idea by a lot of people, it's on the way. You can buy graphics cards today with 10 bit DACs, and I'm sure even better for broadcast systems. You can buy LCD monitors with > 8 bit precision (like this one). 8 bits may be good enough for you, but some people are clearly willing to pay for better.

I won't get into the CD debate. Obviously plenty of people feel 16 bit 44 kHz isn't good enough or there wouldn't be several competing higher quality formats around. But for most people the addition of video and more than two channels are far more compelling than increased music quality, which is why plan old DVD seems to be winning the next generation music format war.

, a G4 card in it, and a huge IDE system (with RAID or without) AND running Mac OS X Server. I think Apple missed the boat not supporting these Macs with OS X. They make great little OS X workhorses.

I don't think so, especially when it comes to the MacOS X Server. Remember that the 90-days "up and running" support is included in this package. PowerMacs of the 9xxx series are unable to run MacOS X without a third-party G3 upgrade card. So now Apple would have to test and support their system not on the Apple-branded hardware. They could probably do this - but this would be obviously a more expensive solution for them; especially now, when many third-party manufacturers of these cards simply no longer exist. And the whole gain would be at least questionable. These machines were running on a 33-50 MHz system bus. They have ridicolous limitations on the harddrive size (first partition must be smaller than 8 GB). Their extremely obsolete graphics cards cannot run Quartz Extreme (yes, I know, it's not that important on a server - but then again, if all you need is a headless server, why don't you just put Linux on it?). The G3 daughterboard cards generally had many compatibility and stability issues, making them a bad choice for a server and at best a stop-gap choice for workstations. I think that "running MacOS X Server on a G3-upgraded 9600" is just an even-more-geeky kind of "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these". Funny thing to think of to kill spare time, but nothing of practical value.

I don't think this is the first time this concept has appeared in the market [1,2].

Frankly, I'm holding out for something with more public, standard, interoperable interfaces, based on WebDAV.

Stories such as this remind me of the time John Warnock stood before the attendees of a Seybold conference years ago and actually cried because Apple was threatening Adobe's PostScript font tech with its own TrueType. (Well, okay, I can't find any articles that back up my recollection, but perhaps that's what the author of this one meant by "visible dismay.")

In those days, Adobe had a stranglehold on the fonts market. Sure, there were players such as Bitstream and Agfa, but nothing compared to Adobe and the huge fees it was collecting per font. Then came Apple (along with Microsoft) who announced a competing technology that would be included with its operating systems, rather than as an add-on such as Adobe Type Manager, and if not make PostScript irrelevant, at least take a huge bite out of Adobe's margins. History tells us a truce was achieved, but at the time, my sympathy for Adobe was in the minus. Gouging your customers inevitably is bad business.

Now we have this. I personally haven't used Premiere in ages, and I can't say I know how it has evolved in the meantime. But while I was using it, I always had the unnerving feeling I was using a pee cee port that was an afterthought. A stagnant afterthought. (Not quite as bad as MS Word 6.0, but you get the idea.) After using FCP (and FCP Express), the question I have is: Why would I ever want to go back to Premiere?

Again, I'm thinking it's just desserts for Adobe. While I'm certain their reasons for redeveloping Premiere are exclusively retaliatory (just my opinion), Premiere is a fading star in as much the same way that Quark Xpress is. Ironic, in a way, that it's Adobe that's eating Quark's lunch.

I know, I know, not freeware. Yet everyone seems to have a copy.

a creative pro article about correcting barrel distortion, and one at Fred Miranda.

I haven't seen anyone point out yet that Avid has responded to FCP by announcing a free version of their editing software for DVD, just as they already offer a free version of ProTools.

It should be fully functional (ie, not a "demo' version) although somewhat limited in terms of number of tracks. But no watermarks or anything. More info here.

As anyone who has used both Avid and FCP can attest, Avid's GUI is far superior. Or at least was, as I haven't used FCP since 2.0.

W

So now a super-expensive device can not only do what the old ones did, but also:

- Replicate the basic functionality of a 1992 Kodak PhotoCD player
- Play MP3s like a 3 year old $50 APEX DVD player

All at an additional cost. Hey, who knows, maybe they'll include a Commodore CD-i player for an extra $100 per year?

Wow. Colour me sarcastic^H^H^H^H^H^H impressed. Sorry, wedging in this old tech just isn't going to cut the mustard.

That may be true, but they've also got to worry about the potential of lost sales. At the moment I'm using Dreamweaver 3 in Classic mode, which works fine but as more and more apps run native it becomes increasingly painful to have to do that. If GoLive is native before Dreamweaver, I may well consider switching.

It will be. It's supposed to be out at the end of the month. Adobe had some beta copies of GoLive out already. I tried one and it runs great. Plus GoLive 6.0 has some of the features of Ultradev already without having to pay extra!

Check out this review of GoLive 6 on OS X from CreativePro.com

The Creative Toolbox: A First Look at GoLive 6.0

I hate Dreamweaver

Under the truly amazing VPC 6, you can run Linux, Windows, &etc. I had submitted this story a few days ago, but it was rejected -- there's just too much Apple news lately. FWIW:

New for Mac OS X -- Virtual PC 6 from Connectix looks pretty incredible. As Wired says, "You can load DOS, Linux, OS 2, Windows 2000, 95, 98, ME, XP Home and Pro, and of course OS X and Mac OS 9. You can run any combination; RAM is the only limiting factor." Runs under MacOSX and MacOS9, though under MacOSX you can network different instances of VPC together, for filesharing or network programming. VPC 6 also allows you to "undo" -- revert to past sessions, including reboots (you can't do this in the real Windows). Apple and MacNet2 both review it warmly, and
CreativePro says: "I installed Red Hat Linux 7.1 and 7.2 without difficulty, though the drag and drop functionality does not work in Linux." If you're upset because MS Access or MS FrontPage weren't included with Microsoft Office for the Mac, you can run them under VPC. Prices go from $80 to $200. It's also available for windows.

This lawsuit could very well be related to Macromedia's recent purchase of NetObject's patents: Macromedia Buys NetObjects Patents, Website Pros Buys Assets . From the article:

More importantly than the sale of the software itself perhaps, Macromedia has got its claws into 11 highly valuable US patents that NetObjects was granted over the past couple of years. Among them is a patent on the concept of WYSIWYG HTML editors, which NetObjects was granted on the basis of its Fusion software.

NetObjects CEO Samir Arora told ComputerWire in June that he believed Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Microsoft's Frontpage use technology covered by the patent. "Anything that does WYSIWYG page layouts that auto-generate HTML is violating the patent," he said at the time. "We're going after anybody we believe is in violation."

Sites like CreativePro.com have had search engines like this for quite a while:

CreativePro.com Stock Photo Search -- (http://www.creativepro.com/eservices/imagegrabber for the link scared) ...

Not to mention cool things like the Font Search -- (http://www.creativepro.com/fontsearch/results for the link scared).

Sites like CreativePro.com have had search engines like this for quite a while:

CreativePro.com Stock Photo Search -- (http://www.creativepro.com/eservices/imagegrabber for the link scared) ...

Not to mention cool things like the Font Search -- (http://www.creativepro.com/fontsearch/results for the link scared).

Fonts are art works. Every letter gets tweaked and mooshed and adjusted. Letter pairs are sometimes handled specially (ligatures) like the fi combination in many fonts lets the dot in the "i" smear into the "f". Most of the "copycat" fonts shoot for the same looks but are quite different when directly compared.

Too good of a knockoff CAN get you sued. Adobe suit or this one Adobe again and more on that second one.

The copyright issue isn't fixed but it _is_ getting there. Shameful that we protect other things way too far and this so little.
--

Related links:

Deneba Canvas 7.0 (March) review at MacWorld

Deneba Canvas 7 (Feb 1) at The Internet Eye.com

Velocity Engine (Jan 17) MacCentral article on G4 Acceleration for Canvas 7

Another Review (12 Jan) at CreativePro.com

Yes, to AC above; Did it occur to you that the Windows release of Canvas 7 runs on x86 hardware?

As a follow-up, would velocity engine acceleration be easy to add to a Linux PPC version of Canvas or would it require a lot more coding?