Expensive, perhaps, but print quality is superb and the subject covered in such depth and with such expertise that it’s sure to appeal to just about every LEGO fan.
Read MoreAuthor: Neale Monks
Neale Monks has used Macs since 1990, when he was won over by the simplicity of printing from a networked Mac compared to doing the same thing with networked PCs. Since that time he's written for several Macintosh magazines including Macworld and Macformat as well as MyMac.com, InformIT, Peachpit, TidBITs, and the now-defunct AppleLust web site.
Besides using Macs to make his living every day of the week, he likes to tinker about with vintage Macs, and a few years back wrote an e-book called 'Buying Used Macs' published through MyMac.com.
Neale has a degree in zoology and a PhD in palaeontology. He lives in the market town of Berkhamsted on the edge of the Chiltern Hills.
The Cult of Lego
Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
Hertzfield’s book is a touching, often painful, look at how groups of highly motivated people work together on a single project.
Read MoreExplorer Touch Mouse Limited Edition
Review
The burgundy red finish is very eye-catching, but beauty is more than skin deep here, with the little details being well thought through as well. A worthy alternative to its Apple equivalent, but priced substantially lower
Read MoreDreamweaver CS5.5: The Missing Manual
Review
Adobe largely expects Dreamweaver users to access the built-in help files or else search their online support files and forums. This is where Dreamweaver CS 5.5: The Missing Manual comes in.
Read MoreNo Starch Press ‘Manga Guide to…’ Series
Review
These books are good value and work well as study guides for advanced students and teachers.
Read MoreDreamweaver CS5.5Review
If you’re in the market for a professional web design program and don’t need hand-holding, then Dreamweaver is a sound investment.
Read MoreAcrobat Pro X
Review
Acrobat Pro is a massive application in more ways than one: it’s big, it’s expensive, and it does a whole bunch of things casual users might never realise need doing. It isn’t an application for everyone. But for those who use PDFs routinely will find the $199 upgrade well worth the money. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s surprisingly good and easy to use.
Read MoreHere’s who’ll use the iPad
To no-one’s great surprise, Apple unveiled the iPad yesterday. But one thing Steve Jobs didn’t elaborate on was precisely who will be buying iPads.
Read MoreGaming combo review: Arctic Cooling P531 surround-sound gaming headset and Arctic Cooling M571 gaming mouse
For the price both the Arctic Cooling P531 headset and the Arctic Cooling M571 gaming mouse are good-value products. The lack of Macintosh instructions is a niggle but not a flaw: neither product is sold as a Mac peripheral as such, they just happen to work great when plugged into a Mac.
Read MoreReview – How Wikipedia Works
How Wikipedia Works is a guide to the inner workings of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopaedia… as a primer, How Wikipedia Works is hard to fault.
Read MoreReview – PowerBook Fan Book
The ‘PowerBook Fan Book’ is beautifully put together and illustrated with colour throughout—a great snapshot of Apple history circa 2005.
Read MoreData Rescue 3.0 – Review
Unless overwritten with new data, files don’t vanish simply because they’re deleted, and just because a hard drive has been corrupted somehow, it doesn’t mean the data on that disk can’t be recovered. Data Rescue 3 is an application from Prosoft Engineering that performs both these functions via a relatively intuitive, if quirky, interface.
RailModeller – Review
On a whim, I decided to spend some of the long winter evenings building a small model railroad for the N-scale engines I’d had kicking about in the attic for a while. While looking around the various model railroading websites I came across a program called RailModeller, a Macintosh application that helps the user design model railroads and slot car racetracks.
Drive Genius 2.1 – Review
Hard drive utilities are used to maintain, repair and configure hard drives. Since OS X already comes with a basic hard drive utility called Disk Utility, you might wonder what’s the point of buying a third-party program like Drive Genius. Read Neale Monks review and find out why Drive Genius 2 is worth the asking price!
Take Control of Buying a Mac – Review
Engst will be well known to Mac users as one of the authors of the popular TidBits mailing list. But he’s also an author of electronic books sold under the ‘Take Control’ banner. One of his most recent efforts is a book on buying a new Macintosh. As someone who’d written a similar book a few years back on buying a used Mac, this was a topic that immediately caught my attention.
Data Backup 3 vs. Time Machine 1
The value of good backup software cannot be overstated. In its latest iteration, the Mac OS comes with a built-in backup program called Time Machine that creates incremental backups on external drives. It is designed to operate in the background with little interaction from the user, and should the need arise to recover lost or damaged files, the Time Machine interface is intuitive and simple to navigate.
First Book Shoot-out
Missing Manual vs. My New Mac
Recommending a good book for newcomers to the Mac platform is always tricky. You want to recommend something that doesn’t just cover all the basics but also has some depth as well. A book that only covers the simplest aspects of the Mac interface like how to copy files or connect to the Internet will quickly become obsolete as the user’s skills increase. So the best sort of beginner’s book is one that doesn’t just cover the interface and the operating system but also explains how to use the supplied programs to complete a variety of different projects.
Klix
Review
Klix is a utility that recovers photos from digital cameras and memory cards. Klix can’t recover digital image files that have been partially or completely overwritten, but that caveat aside, Klix provides a quick and easy way to bring lost files back.
The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects
Book Review
GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program to give it its proper name, is a graphics-editing program broadly similar to Adobe Photoshop in terms of functionality. The GIMP is an open source program that can be freely downloaded and installed on most computers, including maps. But on the downside it doesn’t come with a manual, so figuring out how to use GIMP can be tricky. Read the full review here.
Maquarium
Review
Maquarium is an integrated set of tools that allows aquarists to log water chemistry and quality tests, schedule maintenance events, download and record information, and perform a variety of useful calculations. Of course, almost all of the features that Maquarium totes could be done with other applications, and arguably in some cases better and with more flexibility, but what Maquarium does provide is a neat interface and true ease of use.
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