Pixel precision is an essential part of the software experience that users have come to expect from OS X and iOS. It requires a kind of accuracy that is usually best left in the hands of experienced designers who know how to manipulate every detail of images and icons to get the best possible result. This goal is time-consuming and expensive to achieve, however, and only really makes sense when an interface has completely taken form.

By the same token, there are some instances in which pixel-level perfection is hard or impossible to achieve due to a number of constraints, like overall file size, the need to support arbitrary resolutions, or, perhaps, the requirement for complex animations. In these cases, the old developer fallback is to use of vector images, which, being based on the mathematical representation of an arbitrary set of curves, are rendered on the fly and scale arbitrarily without loss of resolution.

Even though both OS X and iOS have excellent built-in programming interfaces for vector rasterization, their support for popular vector file formats like SVG is limited, often requires the use of external libraries, and makes it hard (though by no means impossible) to manipulate the resulting images in fine detail.

PixelCut’s PaintCode (Mac App Store link) aims at solving these problems with its ability to transform a vector illustration into a series of code instructions. The code can then be embedded directly into an app written in either Objective-C or C# using Xamarin and give developers significant flexibility in its use.

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Everyone needs a great text editor—for those times when you need to clean up funky characters in a big text file downloaded from the Web, remove duplicates in a list, or make a particular change to a bunch of files at once. When such text-manipulation jobs land on your desk, you can make short work of them with Bare Bone Software’s TextWrangler. Even better, this powerful tool is free from either the Mac App Store or the Bare Bones website.

TextWrangler reads almost any file (including code files such as HTML and Markdown that contain plain text), but it saves only to plain-text files, and it doesn’t support styled-text formats such as RTF or Microsoft Word documents. TextWrangler shares this “pure” text-editor approach with its professional-grade sibling, the $50 BBEdit. Like BBEdit 10, TextWrangler 4.5 is now Retina-display ready.

Programmers have always loved TextWrangler (and BBEdit) for ease-of-use features such as syntax coloring for various programming languages. New to this version are switchable syntax-coloring schemes. Code folding lets you view or hide the functions you’re working with, and TextWrangler gives you easy access to files on FTP and SFTP servers—you don’t even need to leave the program.

If you don’t know a syntax from a saxophone, you’ll still like TextWrangler’s many text-manipulation features, including case conversion, line wrapping and numbering, simple conversion of straight quotes to curly quotes (and vice versa), the ability to change quote levels in copied emails, and the ability to work with multiple files simultaneously. You can even insert the contents of another file into the one you’re editing. TextWrangler automatically saves your files as you’re working—if you quit the program with unsaved (or even never-saved) documents, they’re automatically restored when you next open the program.

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Regardless of how you use computers, chances are that you have encountered the problem of comparing two files at some point or other. Doing so all by yourself is often like playing the hardest game of “Spot the Differences,” which is why software for this purpose has been available for many decades.

Originally designed to help developers keep tabs on the way their source code evolved, file-comparison algorithms eventually found their way into more mainstream apps such as Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages, where “track changes” have helped writers preserve their sanity for many years.

Black Pixel’s Kaleidoscope 2 takes the ability to compare two files kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, extending it beyond text to encompass images and the filesystem itself.

Installation

Kaleidoscope reveals its attention to detail from the very beginning. The app’s designers have—very wisely—decided to forego a lengthy setup process in favor of a quick startup that gets the user in control right away.

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I didn’t know when Panic would announce Coda 2 ( ), but I knew that a significant update to its all-in-one-window code editor had to be coming. Diet Coda, the iPad app that Panic announced alongside Coda 2, came as a complete surprise.

You could—and perhaps even should—stop reading this review and go grab Diet Coda from the App Store right now. If you do work on websites and want the ability to update them from your iPad, there’s no app better suited to that purpose than Diet Coda.

Diet Coda launches to a Sites screen that looks much like the one on its desktop counterpart. You can add one or more sites you manage; you provide a remote server address, server connection settings, and that’s pretty much it.

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I’ve done a lot of Web coding in my day. It used to be my fulltime job; now I code an in-house tool for Macworld, and I do some side Web development projects after hours. For years, my software of choice as a Web coder has remained Panic’s Coda.

Coda dates back to 2007, and it aimed to simplify the life of the average Web developer. And it succeeded. It combined, in a single tabbed window, your code editor, your FTP client, your web browser, and the Terminal. That’s a lot less Command-tabbing.

When Panic formally announced Coda 2, I was thrilled. Because as much as I liked the original Coda, I didn’t love it: It was missing a couple key features, and I longed for some of those features literally every time I used the app. Coda 2 adds the bulk of the features I’ve craved, and also adds impressive layers of visual and functional polish.

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When you already have one of—if not the—most robust and full-featured text editors available, what does a company do for an encore? Bare Bones Software chose, with BBEdit 10, to create a new version designed to make BBEdit easier to use and more accessible for existing users.

New users will find plenty to like, especially users who are outside of BBEdit’s core constituency of programmers. If you need strong text editing features for prose, not code, you’ll enjoy the user-interface improvements and the ability to get work done faster. If you’re a codehead, you get better ways to work with your code, like improved project management, easier HTML entry, and customizable syntax coloring. Everybody wins.

Workspace and editing improvements

BBEdit’s document drawer, which contained the many files you were working with, has been replaced by the Files sidebar, which gives you quick access to both open and recent documents. The sidebar can contain either a simple list of files, or you can drag and drop a folder with subfolders to it, allowing you to navigate your project similarly to a Finder list view. If you create a BBEdit Project file to organize your files, you’ll also get a Scratchpad window, useful for snippets of text and code you might want to use within different parts of the project, and a Unix worksheet that allows you to enter Unix commands.

The Open Files by Name window, new in 10.1, is modeless, and makes it quick to find and open files. You can use wildcard characters to find files, and it searches your BBEdit Projects, XCode project, or just the file system.

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Note: Today’s Mac Gem is the first Gem sold through Apple’s new Mac App Store. You can read more about the Mac App Store here on Macworld.com.

These days, between Twitter, Facebook, Internet forums, and Web forms, most people spend a good amount of time typing in text boxes and fields. In fact, if you use Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or another Web-based e-mail system, or if your work requires you to use Web-based tools, you may even do most of your text typing and editing outside of your favorite text editor—or at least frequently copying and pasting between your favorite editor and your browser.

Hog Bay Software’s QuickCursor (Mac App Store link) aims to make this back-and-forth easier—easy enough that you’ll start using your favorite text editor any time you have to type or edit text.

Launch QuickCursor, and it appears as a small icon in your menubar. Then, whenever you’re working with text—in a Web page, a Twitter client, a word processor, you name it—just choose your favorite text editor from the QuickCursor menu or, even better, press a keyboard shortcut. QuickCursor immediately switches you to your text editor, pasting any text you were working on. (As with many e-mail clients, if you’d selected a bit of text, only the selected text is pasted. If no text was selected, QuickCursor pastes everything.)

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Flash Builder 4, newly recruited into the Adobe Creative Suite for the release of CS5, is essentially a program for building interfaces that collect data (through forms) and present data (through views) from server databases.

Previously called Flex Builder, the program is a distant cousin of Flash Professional, but a close fit with the new Flash Catalyst CS5 ( ). Interestingly, the more I worked with Flash Builder, the more it seemed to me that its closest CS5 relative is actually Dreamweaver ( )—with which Flash Builder shares many interface and procedural similarities when it comes to binding server databases and collecting and presenting data.

Flash Builder doesn’t carry the CS5 label for a few reasons: It shipped in advance of CS5 and Adobe decided to continue the previous numbering system that it established when the program was called Flex Builder. Flash Builder 4 is the upgrade to Flex Builder 3.

The Flex framework is an open source platform that generates either MXML format or ActionScript 3.0 code. It is possible to build Flex applications with a free SDK, but I can’t imagine undertaking a Flex coding project without Flash Builder, which provides helpful tools like automatic testing, debugging hints, and all syntax hints for generating code.

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Bill Atkinson’s name will be familiar to many Apple fans. He’s the creative talent behind many Apple software gems like the Mac OS menu bar, Mac Paint, and more. Bill Atkinson is also a professional nature photographer. Bill Atkinson PhotoCard showcases his two talents by combining great software design and stunning imagery.

Bill Atkinson PhotoCard makes it fun and easy to create beautiful postcards to send to friends and family. The postcards can either be e-mailed for free or sent via snail mail for around $2 anywhere in the U.S. or $3 in the rest of the world. (Apps like Postino and HazelMail provide a similar service, though far less effectively.) You can buy credits for postage using a PayPal account or a credit card.

The snail mail cards are high quality prints on thick card stock with a gloss coating on both sides. The first one is even mailed for free. (A free lite version offers no free sample card and less content; otherwise, the functionality is the same as this $5 version.)

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For the company’s 15th anniversary, Bare Bones Software has produced BBEdit 9, a major release to its venerable text editor that will thrill long-time users and will likely garner new converts. At the same time that the program makes several leaps ahead, however, it could still use some further tweaks, especially for cutting-edge Web developers.

Find it, change it

BBEdit 9 boasts more than 120 new features and fixes compared to BBEdit 8.5. Many of those are, of course, relatively minor. But several will be of interest to anyone who uses the program, from newbies to the oldest pros.

Find-and-replace is one of the most-used features in any text editor, and here BBEdit 9 breaks dramatically from its previous versions. In those older versions, the search dialog box was modal, meaning you had to dismiss the search dialog before continuing your work. In the new BBEdit, the search windows for both Find and Multi-File Search are modeless, meaning you can move freely back and forth between an open document and the search window, without closing the latter.

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SPSS is a longtime player in the statistical/scientific software realm. Originally targeted at the social sciences, this statistical software package has evolved to support analysis and decision making in broader disciplines and business. I have some semi-vivid memories of my first encounter with SPSS in 1982—punch cards, JCL, /SYSIN = DD, and haggard grad students smoking up a gray cloud outside the room with the IBM 360, staring at a little black and white TV monitor in hopes that our job would finish next.

Over the years, SPSS has migrated from its birthplace on the mainframe to the desktop with an occasional bump in the road, most notably when it came to the Macintosh. As the Mac platform evolved to incorporate the PowerPC chip, Mac OS X, and, recently, Intel processors, SPSS has consistently lagged behind its Windows counterpart in features and support.

Educators, especially those who teach in multiplatform environments, will be happy with the consistency across the product line. However, this consistency comes at the cost of aesthetics—the application has a clear Java look and feel. Things aren’t as bad as they could be in this department, since Apple is responsible for the Java implementation in Mac OS X. Thus, users won’t be totally unfamiliar with the interface, but it does lack the polish of most Apple software.

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Creative writers often don’t need many of the features found in today’s word processors, but writing fiction or non-fiction can require organizational tools that word processors don’t offer. Ulysses 1.5 combines the simplicity of a text editor with powerful project management functions to be a writing tool for creative writers. Ulysses creates projects, which are bundles containing one or several documents. Each document can contain text and notes; the Ulysses window separates these two parts of the file, displaying the main text in the center and the notes at the right. You can open multiple documents and switch between them with a single click of their tabs; you can also re-order the tabs.

A project can contain as many documents as you’d like, and Ulysses lists them in the document browser at the left of its window. The browser has three sections. The top section shows all the documents in your project. Click on one of these, and the second section gives you a preview of the document; the bottom section shows any notes attached to that document. Double-click a document to open it in a tab in the central part of the window and start writing or editing.

Since Ulysses’ files are text only, they contain no formatting, but the program lets you use specific characters to set off three levels of headers or paragraphs. You can’t format text at all, but you can use codes to indicate different styles, such as bold or italic, which will be applied when you export your project. Ulysses has powerful export features that let you save your files as PDF, plain text, RTF, or Word documents, in one file or many, with a fair amount of control over the styles used in the exported documents. But the lack of formatting may be a deal-breaker for writers who want to use such formatting to indicate words, sentences, or sections they want to revise or change.

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BBEdit has long been the go-to text editor of choice for Mac-using geeks. But as it aged, BBEdit started to show its years, with new features piled on top of old features, which had been piled on top of still older features. In version 8.5.2, Bare Bones has given the old star a face-lift, restructuring and simplifying the interface to make BBEdit look like a hot new app. Along the way, they’ve added in some handy new features, giving this version a full set of enhancements.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

BBEdit’s previous Preferences window was an example of how a decade of interface additions could make adapting to changes confusing for anyone but a long-time user. The current Preferences window has been massively simplified: obsolete options have been removed and the entire window expanded, making the remaining items easy to find. Not easy enough? Open the search drawer, type in enough to give BBEdit a hint of what you’re looking for, and you’ll get a list of possible options. Click on one, and that pane opens.

The tool bar has also been reworked; rather than containing several pop-up menus, there’s now just one. Some options have been moved into the navigation and status bars, where they’re more easily viewed, found, and changed.

While Bare Bones has streamlined BBEdit, you can also make it leaner and meaner yourself. Go into the Menus pane of the Preferences and turn off any options that you don’t use. You live in C++ and don’t touch HTML? Turn off all HTML items, and you’ll never see them again. You’re a Web designer who has always been annoyed by the compiler choices? Turn them off. The end result is that BBEdit suddenly feels like a much lighter, svelter program, without actually losing any of its power.

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When Apple was touting Automator as part of the OS X 10.4 Tiger upgrade, some people wondered whether AppleScript would be needed anymore. Now that we’ve seen Automator, AppleScript may be needed more than ever. There are holes in the way Automator works for those applications that support it, and there are plenty of applications that don’t support Automator at all.

Script Debugger 4.0.4, Late Night Software’s AppleScript editor, is a ground-up rewrite of what was already an excellent product. Although Apple includes an AppleScript editor with OS X, Script Debugger is much more than just an editor.

For one thing, Script Debugger includes its own version of the AppleScript OSA (Open Scripting Architecture) component, which gives you the sort of debugging controls you would expect in a professional programming environment—including the ability to see your code run one command at a time.

In addition, each Script Debugger script window has its own drawer containing a result box, a stack list (so you can see which AppleScript routines are currently being called), a variable viewer (for showing the current state of variables being used), an expression area (where you can construct debugging code that gets evaluated at every step), and an execution clock (which lets you know how long your script is taking to run). If a variable or expression changes between steps, the new value shows up in red, making it easier to see the effects your code causes.

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Neometric Software’s PHP Studio 1.1 is designed to make PHP programmers’ lives a little easier by helping them write programs faster and test them more easily. It includes several tools that are designed to help programmers work with PHP code, access helpful reference material, and make sure that programs actually run before they are posted on a live Web server.

While it has some interesting and useful features, such as PHP syntax coloring and advanced search-and-replace, it lacks many helpful items like soft word wrap, brace balancing, and file comparison, which are available in free text editors like Bare Bones Software’s TextWrangler 2.0 (   ; May 2005 ). In addition, several performance problems—the inability to open some PHP files and glacially slow performance on large files, means this text editor isn’t for the full-time PHP programmer.

Text editing for programmers

PHP Studio 1.0 is a basic text editor that includes a few programmer-specific additions such as line numbering (which makes it easier to track down errors) and syntax coloring (which lets you quickly identify different language elements such as functions, comments, and keywords).

The Auto-Complete feature provides access to PHP functions that match what you’ve begun to type. This feature can save you a few keystrokes, but it doesn’t include common language constructs like include and foreach . In addition, automatically enabling Auto-Complete causes a function menu to pop up constantly, even in places where a function call wouldn’t make sense. I found this confusing and unnecessary. The company says it’s working on a fix.

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Have you ever arrived at a party too early? Apple found itself in this situation at the beginning of the year when it threw its weight behind HD (high-definition) video editing. iMovie HD (   , April 2005 ) and Final Cut Express HD brought HD editing to the masses, even if the masses weren’t aware that HD was an option.

With consumer-level HD cameras still costing between $2,000 and $5,000 (prices have dropped since January on new models), most video enthusiasts haven’t walked through the HD door—but they’re certainly eyeing the possibilities. And Apple is more than happy to welcome them to the party.

Unlike iMovie HD, the HD support in Final Cut Express HD is more likely to cater to event videographers and other professionals who want to take advantage of high-definition video for $299 instead of paying the full price for Final Cut Pro 5 ($999 for the application alone, or $1,299 for Final Cut Studio).

Editors shooting in DV format aren’t likely to be excited about Final Cut Express HD, so Apple has sweetened the package by including the music-creation program Soundtrack (   ) and title-creation program LiveType, both of which were formerly included with Final Cut Pro or sold separately.

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StickyBrain is a freeform information manager modeled loosely on a filing cabinet. In this filing cabinet, nothing is ever lost or forgotten. With its recently added features and enhancements, StickyBrain 3.4 could be the perfect place to store your notes, stickies, clippings, passwords, receipts, and reminders.

The StickyBrain Viewer window is a cross between Mail and Safari. Like Mail, StickyBrain organizes information into folders and subfolders that are displayed in a drawer. Like Safari, StickyBrain lets you view information in individual floating windows or in tabs. You control the appearance: you can select different icons for folders; set a background color, texture, or image for a note; add a calendar; add a checkbox in any of eight styles; or select from three window styles, including a Sticky-like window style with adjustable transparency.

When you search, StickyBrain displays a list of matching entries and highlights matching search terms, so you’ll always find what you’re looking for. Attach an alarm to a note and you’ll never forget anything important (you can even add a note with an alarm to a contact from your Address Book).

Getting information in and out of StickyBrain is a snap. Import text or RTF (Rich Text Format) files, other StickyBrain files, or Stickies. A new Image Browser lets you drag and drop clip art from Chronos’ SOHO series programs (Business Cards, Labels & Envelopes, and Art Pack) and images from your iPhoto library. You can export one or more notes as individual files or a combined plain text or RTF file, and StickyBrain can synchronize with your .Mac account, Palm OS device, or iPod.

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Writers, coders, and geeks may salivate over good text editors, but others might wonder why one would need anything more than TextEdit, which comes with Mac OS X. Let’s put it this way: If TextEdit were a dinner knife, Bare Bones Software’s TextWrangler 2.0 would be a set of chef’s knives, complete with a Benihana chef to do your bidding. TextWrangler 2.0 slices, dices, and reformats text to suit your needs, regardless of document size or quantity.

Interface and Power

TextWrangler 2.0’s text-handling operations are swift and precise. The Text menu holds an array of time-saving commands: Change Case, Sort Lines, Add/Remove Line Numbers, Process Duplicate Lines, and a host of others. Like Bare Bones’ flagship program BBEdit, TextWrangler uses the powerful Regular Expression syntax to find and replace text. Replace actions can now run on multiple files or folders via the new Sources Drawer. This version of TextWrangler also runs BBEdit’s Text Factory tasks, which collapse a series of operations into a single click.

Similar to BBEdit 8, TextWrangler now opens multiple documents in the same window. Instead of using browser-style tabs, however, documents are listed by name in the Documents Drawer. The new Navigation Bar lets you switch between documents via the Previous and Next buttons or the pop-up menu.

TextWrangler now highlights the line containing the insertion point, a handy addition when working with long documents. OS X’s built-in spelling-check service is now available, but it only checks and underlines misspellings when you invoke it manually.

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Since its 1993 debut, Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit has been the text editor of choice for Mac-based coders, system administrators, and Web developers. Alas, successive upgrades have tended to address one group or another. But all BBEdit users will be happy this time around: Version 8.0.3 is a solid upgrade in all areas.

More-Efficient Workflow

The new version of BBEdit features many convenient improvements. BBEdit can now open multiple documents in the same window. These documents are listed by name in the new Documents Drawer, or in the new Navigation Bar’s pop-up menu; both the drawer and the menu can be hidden or shown. You can drag documents into a window’s drawer, or between the drawers of different windows.

The Sources Drawer is a new addition to the familiar Find & Replace window. This drawer lists open documents as well as those in any of BBEdit’s Disk Browser windows, defined Web site folders, and any other folders you specify. A single find-and-replace operation can now reach any combination of files and folders.

In previous versions you had to script BBEdit in order to run text operations in batches; the Text Factory now performs that function for you. A factory is comprised of multiple text operations that are performed in sequential order; each operation is presented as a pop-up menu in the Text Factory window. These operations can be any of those listed in the Text menu, a custom Replace All function, a Unix script, or an AppleScript. You can re-order operations by dragging-and-dropping them in the list, but this capability is not obvious in the interface. Saved Text Factories can also be executed by BBEdit’s little brother, TextWrangler 2.0.

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On-the-go laptop users frequently find themselves looking for wireless networks to connect to for a quick e-mail check or surfing session. In the December 2004 issue, I reviewed Marware’s $30 WiFi Spy (   ), my favorite way to check for wireless networks.

My one major criticism was that it didn’t differentiate between open and closed networks—you still had to open your laptop and try to connect. Now that Canary Wireless has released its $50 Digital Hotspotter (   ), my laptop bag has a new Wi-Fi finder. Like the WiFi Spy, the Hotspotter can detect the presence and strength of wireless networks (but, in my tests, with a slightly better range). However, rather than using multiple LED lights to indicate the strength of nearby networks, the Hotspotter includes an LCD that displays textual information about each network, including its SSID (displayed as “cloaked” for private networks); wireless channel number; signal strength; and, perhaps most important, security (that is, whether it requires a password). Road warriors will welcome this final bit of information with open arms, as it lets you keep your PowerBook or iBook in your bag until you’ve found an open network.

On the other hand, if you have access to a secure network but you’ve got a case of encryption paranoia, the Hotspotter will tell you whether that network is using WEP or WPA encryption. Even better, the Hotspotter can differentiate between multiple networks: after you press the scan button, the Hotspotter provides detailed information on the strongest network it finds in your vicinity. Pressing the button again displays information on the next-strongest network, and so on.

The Hotspotter does, however, have a few minor flaws. The most obvious is its size: the Hotspotter requires two AA batteries and is a bulky 2.5 by 2.2 by 1.0 inches—more suitable for a laptop bag than for a key chain. I also wish the LCD had a backlight for easier viewing in dimly lit meeting rooms. Finally, the company says that the default settings on a small number of access points prevent the Hotspotter from detecting them even when units such as the WiFi Spy can find them.

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Looking for a word processor that has power where you need it but doesn’t come with a lot of noisy bells and whistles you never use? Two recently released OS X word processors, Nisus Writer Express 2.1.1 and RedleX’s Mellel 1.8.2, offer competitive feature sets at very competitive prices. One may be just right for you.

Sleek, Flexible, and a Bit Geeky

With the release of version 2, Nisus Writer Express comes of age. It now has solid support for style sheets and tables, footnotes and endnotes, columns, in-line images, section formatting, and hyphenation—the features that distinguish word processors from text editors. There’s a lot here for power users. You can assign keyboard shortcuts to almost any command. The program offers nameable, editable clipboards, a three-level find-and-replace function including regular expressions (grep) and search criteria you can save, and noncontiguous selection. You can automate processes in AppleScript, via scripting in Perl (a language designed for manipulating text), and by using the basic but efficient Nisus Macro. But there’s nothing intimidating about Nisus Writer Express; in fact, it’s so easy to use, and its user interface is so uncluttered, that beginners will take to it like baby ducks to water.

Writing by Numbers

Many users won’t mind, but Mellel 1.8 lacks macro and AppleScript support, and its find command is limited to searching only for literal text strings. Its idiosyncratic user interface makes sense once you get to know the application, but you may find that figuring out critical features such as styles and autonumbering is impossible without reading the guide.

Nonetheless, where Mellel delivers, it really delivers. The program’s distinctive excellence is its extraordinarily powerful and flexible autonumbering system. You can autonumber document parts (or objects such as tables and pictures) on several levels; each level can have its own format, including literal text strings, numbers, and variables. You can also view numbered levels reflecting document structure as an outline in a separate pane. In addition, Mellel 1.8 offers unequaled footnote and endnote options, a bibliographic database, and table-of-contents generation—features scholars will welcome. And with Mellel’s support for user-definable document variables, it’s clear that the program is up to the task of creating complex structured documents without a hint of feature bloat.

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Thomas Edison gazes stoically from the front of Interactive Solutions’ MovieWorks Deluxe 6.0.2 software box. Although the great inventor wasn’t known for writing code, he would probably have approved of this multimedia-authoring package. MovieWorks is a powerful, versatile tool for creating Web movies, slide shows, and interactive presentations. Factor in its attractive price, and MovieWorks is worthy of a hearty “Eureka!” from creative beginners who want to release their inner Edison.

Supporting Cast

The MovieWorks Deluxe package can import most graphic, audio, animation, and video file formats. It encompasses six separate applications; four of these—Paint, Sound, Video, and Animator—help you prepare media for use in Author, the master application. The sixth application, Player, lets you view MovieWorks’ interactive projects; it’s freely distributed for the Mac and Windows.

The most full-featured of the helper applications, Paint gives you a variety of tools for creating graphics. Its large toolbox can be daunting, but the helpful Tool Tips palette identifies each tool as you pass your cursor over it and gives you usage suggestions. Strangely, painting is Paint’s weakest function; brushstrokes made with its Brush tool aren’t antialiased, resulting in blocky edges, and there’s no easy way to make small adjustments in brush size. Paint would also benefit from tools for enhancing imported photos, such as sharpening and gamma control.

The Sound application can record audio from your computer’s built-in microphone or audio-input port, and it can import tracks from CDs. You can apply effects such as Echo and Flange, shift pitch, and adjust overall volume. There’s also a waveform editor that lets you zoom in to make minute edits to the audio waveform; unfortunately, you can’t resize the small application window horizontally, so you can’t see much of the waveform at any one time.

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HyperCard? That's dead, isn't it? Oh, sure, it was great back in the 1980s. So versatile it defies ready definition, HyperCard lets ordinary people create their own software without having to conform to the strict rules of a formal programming language. But the last time Apple updated it (1998), Macs were made out of vacuum tubes and corncobs. AppleScript Studio and RealBasic, while they're nowhere near as easy to learn and use, have stepped into HyperCard's role: the nonthreatening way to write software. But nonprogrammers everywhere can now rejoice: Revolution 2.1, a HyperCard-compatible development environment, has come along with enough power to wake the dead.

On the surface, Revolution works much like the HyperCard we knew and loved. Your program is a set of blank cards. Just draw buttons, text fields, and other interface doodads; then assign simple actions to some of those elements with Revolution's Transcript language. You'll wind up with a card "stack" that's a working, running piece of software.

Revolution can even import your old HyperCard and SuperCard stacks, and the program goes far beyond those applications. When you think of a HyperCard stack, you certainly don't think of a traditional-looking OS X application featuring menus, multiple windows, drawers, and sheets. You certainly don't imagine a stack that accesses SQL databases; speaks XML, HTML, and RTF fluently; supports HTTP, FTP, and TCP sockets; and takes full advantage of the system shell.

All that sounds more like AppleScript Studio and RealBasic territory, but it's well within the purview of Revolution Express, the basic edition of the program. Take one step up to Revolution Studio, and you get the king of write-once, run-everywhere. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can make the same stack run on OS X, OS 9 and earlier, Windows, Linux, and several flavors of Unix. Even RealBasic, which supports Windows, can't create solutions for every desktop in a large and diverse office. And with a final leap to Revolution Enterprise, you get all of the above, direct support for Oracle databases, and enhanced developer support from the program's publisher, Runtime Revolution.

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Ensuring that a Web site is accessible to people with physical disabilities is a longtime concern for Web designers and programmers. The rise of more-complex Web pages, a proliferation of Web browsers, and the federal government's Section 508 accessibility guidelines make designing and testing Web sites for maximum accessibility a great deal of work.

UsableNet eased this burden with Lift Onsite (   ; February 2002 ), and the company's latest product, Lift for Macromedia Dreamweaver -- Nielsen Norman Group Edition (Lift NN/g), promises to make ensuring accessibility even easier. The program helps you implement the accessibility standards of the Nielsen Norman Group, founded by design pundits Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen. Their guidelines form the basis of the tests you can use to determine whether your Web site is accessible. The real benefit of the NN/g guidelines is that they incorporate criteria from two sets of accessibility recommendations -- the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Section 508 requirements -- as well as the results of the Nielsen Norman Group's research, in one simple set of rules.

The Key to the Castle

Installing Lift NN/g is a snap, provided you use Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.01 or later, or Dreamweaver MX. If you don't, you're out of luck; while other UsableNet products offer accessibility testing, Lift NN/g is the only one that comes with the Nielsen Norman Group's guidelines.

Lift NN/g adds its eponymous menu to Dreamweaver, so you can access all of Lift NN/g's functions from the menu as you create or test a Web site. Using Lift NN/g is easy; you open a page in Dreamweaver, select the Evaluate option from the Lift NN/g menu, and choose the set of guidelines by which you'd like to evaluate the site. You can select the Nielsen Norman Group's guidelines or another option such as the Section 508 guidelines or WCAG. Users can also customize their guidelines if they want to set up their own accessibility criteria.

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We're going to state right off the bat that RealBasic 5.0 is a significant and worthy upgrade to an already fine product. As a programming environment that lets ordinary civilians write useful Mac software with a minimum of experience, sweat equity, and grain alcohol, RealBasic no longer stands alone -- but it's still the best choice for entry-level programmers.

People who've never written a line of code before will find that RealBasic 5.0 is a nonthreatening environment in which to acquire fundamental programming skills. Experienced programmers who are comfortable with modern BASIC will discover that they can build Cocoa or Classic applications just as professional-looking and powerful as many applications developed in more-traditional, hard-core development environments such as Metrowerks; CodeWarrior and Apple's Project Builder.

The Basics of RealBasic

One of the most attractive things about building software in RealBasic is that you don't start off by designing your application's data structure and code framework. Instead, you pick up the mouse and design the user interface. Imagine having a copy of Adobe Photoshop -- only instead of brushes, pens, and shape tools, the tool palettes are full of standard user-interface elements such as windows, menus, and buttons.

Once you've created something that looks right, you go in and attach bits of working code to each of those user-interface elements. Wiring up your interface with code isn't trivial, but RealBasic nicely compartmentalizes the process so you can work on your application in piecemeal fashion, which can be very easy and very fulfilling. You don't have to finish the whole app to see worthwhile results, so if all you feel like doing one day is making a single button work, you can spend an hour writing code and attaching it to the button -- and that button will actually do something useful. There's another advantage of the get-results-as-you-go approach: before you've finished your application, you can take it for a test drive and experience it from the user;s point of view. If your user interface stinks after one day of development, you can fix it the next day, instead of burning several days on work you'll have to undo once you realize your mistake.

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Before the Internet, it didn't really matter which proprietary database system you used, as long as you could export a tab-delimited file. Times have changed as databases have become increasingly interconnected, and 4D's 4th Dimension has changed, too. Since its humble beginnings on the Mac in 1987, it has combined the ability to create a graphical user interface, rich data-structuring tools, and its own programming language. The latest version, 4th Dimension (4D) 2003, is totally OS X native, adds a number of solid Web capabilities, and improves on the program's already impressive range of developer features. However, it also retains the idiosyncratic take on rapid application development that we described in our review of the last version, 4D 6.8.1 (   ; December 2002).

The Web Dimension

Developer tools are all well and good, but the most-interesting new capabilities in 4D 2003 come in the form of its integrated support for Web services, including XML, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and WSDL (Web Service Description Language). Acronyms aside, these features essentially allow you to publish to or use information from the Web within your solution. There's a wide range of possible ways to use Web services -- you can enable your database to track your FedEx packages, check Amazon.com prices, or record weather status. And a quick online search for Web service or a visit to www.w3 .org/2002/ws/ reveals a ton of available Web services. By connecting your 4D database to a Web service, you turn the database into a client that interacts with a server on the Internet.

This is where 4D 2003 hits its stride. Its Web Services wizard unlocks the door to some powerful tools, via a series of dialog boxes that guide you through accessing a Web service or setting up your own. One downside is 4D's (quite appropriate) focus on developers and programming tools, which means that the byzantine layers of options and dialog boxes will easily lose some novices. An upside is that real power lies under 4D's hood, but you'll need to become quite familiar with the application before you'll be able to go beyond the common paths to configuring Web services.

"D" Is for Developer

Developers already familiar with 4D will be right at home with 4D 2003, which is a solid step forward with welcome new features in a variety of areas. The new Methods Editor takes its cues from modern Web-authoring tools, with type-ahead functionality, the ability to remove developer comments even if you choose not to compile your solution, multiple undos (thank goodness!), live syntax checking, and my favorite: split windows for looking at different parts of code at once.

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Almost a year after Macromedia relaunched and rebranded many of its main products as the MX line, its multimedia-authoring application, Director, has joined the fold. But with most of the MX flock already so well integrated, will Director MX be the black sheep of the family?

Well, probably not. Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, and Flash do offer a stunning set of tools for the design and deployment of Web content and applications. And they constitute a unified suite, given the high degree of integration among them. But Director MX does something else: it gives designers tools for creating multimedia content that can be deployed across a wide range of media: CDs, DVDs, kiosks, downloadable applications, and the Web. Think of it as an all-in-one multimedia tool. If you're building content that may include text, hypertext, audio, high-resolution still images, digital video, animation, 3-D modeling, and Flash content, this is the application to use.

New Features and New Looks

Director MX is an upgrade from Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio, which was one of Director's most important upgrades: through the introduction of Shockwave 3D, Director 8.5 added new interactive capabilities for the design and deployment of streaming 3-D content on the Web. The Director MX upgrade is not as groundbreaking, but it does contain some important new features and enhancements.

First and most significant is that Director finally works with OS X for both authoring and playback. Users should note that Director MX will not run in older versions of Mac OS for authoring, but it can still create applications that will run in OS 8 or later. Before switching to MX, developers should make sure any third-party Xtras they use to add functionality to their Director applications are also OS X compatible.

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