Reviews in Brief

WebMerge 2.1

You don't need an expensive, complicated database system to generate a Web site populated with massive amounts of data -- especially if the site doesn't need to be linked to a live database. Fourth World Media's WebMerge 2.1 lets you quickly generate dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Web pages based on the contents of a FileMaker Pro database, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or just about any other application that can export delimited text files.

WebMerge merges your data into HTML templates that contain special tags wherever you want to insert data into your pages. WebMerge's language of tags gives you flexibility in transmuting data into HTML-ready format quickly. The program is also speedy; it generated hundreds of fairly complicated pages for us in less than 20 seconds.

Welcome improvements since version 1.6 (Reviews, November 2001) include support for conditional statements in templates, automatic creation of Next and Previous links, and support for multiple index pages. These and other improvements make WebMerge 2.1's templates much more capable of generating sophisticated Web pages that change based on the data poured into them. The result is an easy, low-cost way to create a database-derived Web site that doesn't require any complex Web database infrastructure. -- jason snell

Art Directors Toolkit 3

Art Directors Toolkit (ADT) 3 combines eight of the most practical production utilities for print or Web artists -- including a direct numerical converter, color tester, scaler, and font viewer -- with an intuitive interface. It spares graphic designers having to spend time searching for process color charts, rulers, and calculators. If not a must-have, ADT 3 is at least a should-have for every designer.

The application's toolbar displays eight specific tool sets. Among ADT's many handy functions is its ability to convert number values between common units of measurement, and ADT will even calculate file sizes instantaneously, based on your color space of choice. Further, it will allow you to translate RGB into hexadecimal, mix and view CMYK combinations, view all characters of a particular font, preview font sizes, obtain accurate scaling results by percentage or dimensions, and calculate column widths. Of particular use to graphic designers are the drag-and-drop color swatches from the Pantone Matching System and from HTML and Web-safe color spaces, which help when you're making color-consistent choices from screen to print to Web.

The results of these calculations are also shown in a small Global Results window that floats in front of any active applica-tion. And you can drag and drop any of your results -- whether they're numbers, colors, or characters -- into any other application. -- andrew shalat

DragThing 4.5

We've long promoted DragThing as a fantastic Finder enhancement that gives users a way to organize their desktops via floating “docks” full of icons that represent programs, documents, and even URLs. So we're happy to report that with version 4.5.2, DragThing is still our favorite shareware file launcher.

This new version is even more OS X savvy than its predecessors, with a slick trick for minimizing its own individual docks à la OS X's default Dock: when the Show Dock As Drawer preference is selected, only the tabs of your DragThing dock will appear along the edge of your screen. When you slide your cursor over them, the dock slides out to reveal the icons within. The tab you move over with your mouse is even automatically selected for you, making it easy to get to important items without using much screen space. In another time-saver, you can also now set hot keys to control individual docks. Other new features include the ability to navigate more than five levels deep when you control-click on folders in a dock, support for custom DragThing sounds, and OS X support for labels. For users who find their desktops littered with aliases, and for those whose Docks are full to bursting, DragThing can be a great space saver. -- jason snell

Six Degrees 1.5

In our November 2002 review of Six Degrees, we noted that Creo's innovative new program that finds relationships between e-mail messages, documents, and address-book entries was sorely lacking in the speed department. With the version 1.5 update, though, our misgivings have largely been put to rest.

In our tests on a 450MHz Power Mac G4 with 384MB of RAM, Entourage X no longer slowed to a crawl when Six Degrees was running in the back.