- Photoshop CS3 looks really cool. The perspective grid looks amazing. By far that was the best conference I attended.
- Most of the conferences I wanted to go to were really full, which really sucks. Hope that means they’re good.
- I’m tempted to buy the disk for the conferences I missed from Macworld Encore. At $99, it maybe a better value than the conference itself.
Great Mac Freeware Programs
So as some of you know, I work as tech support for the College Writing Program at Berkeley. Our department is all Macintosh, so finding good software can sometimes be expense. Fortunately, there are a number of sites that list freeware Mac programs. One of the ones I like is FreeMacWare, a blog spotlighting free Mac Programs. They’re also having a contest where you write about five apps you’ve found on their site. I was able to find some good programs including:
- Firefox– It’s not as good as it is on the PC, but it has the best web compatiblity with web sites and the extensions can’t be beat.
- VLC– Quicktime can’t open every video file, so it’s up to VLC to do the job. And a heck of a job it does.
- Witch– Command + tab and Expose are great, but I think Witch is better. I like being able to cycle through all of my windows, even the minimized ones, which is what Witch allows me to do (among other things).
- Mactracker– I can look up the technical specs for any Mac model possible. Very useful.
- Nvu– Why pay so much for Dreamweaver when I can get WYSIWIG and CSS editing for free? And it’s pretty good code too.
I like a variety of other programs too, but these have been the most useful for me so far.