Digital Chisel is an entry-level multimedia tool designed especially for creating educational presentations. Like most authoring tools, this package lets you combine text, graphics, sounds, animation, and QuickTime movies into integrated,...

I used to chastise professional drawing stalwarts FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator for not being aggressive enough with their upgrades. No more. In the past two years, both programs have changed substantially. If FreeHand 5.0 is any indication, the...

Fractal Design Painter has long been at the leading edge of graphics applications, offering a dynamic range of extraordinary natural-media painting options that no other Macintosh program has seriously attempted to reproduce. With version 3, the...

Although it was one of the first Mac color painting programs, PixelPaint has languished in recent years. But after major renovations by its original developers, PixelPaint Pro 3 offers professional-level painting and image processing tools at an...

Understanding the relationship of objects to their surroundings is important to architects, interior designers, builders of theatrical sets, and even film directors blocking out movie scenes. If you need quick feedback on the spatial relationships...

No one can accuse Canvas of lying dormant. If the folks at Deneba see a feature that’s available in another program, they incorporate it into Canvas. As a result. Canvas looks great on any features-comparison list. Quite honestly, it offers...

Graphsoft is a Macintosh success story. At each revision, its products add useful features yet run faster than their predecessors. Microsoft’s Word 6 programming team could learn a thing or two from Graphsoft. Graphsoft’s Blueprint is...

In a chaotic world, Zaos Tools’ Terrazzo is an oasis of order and symmetry. A yin-yang complement to Xaos’s first Macintosh product, Paint Alchemy, Terazzo is a cool plug-in module that transparently places powerful mathematical...

If you don't need professional level 3-D tools, or you simply want to dabble in 3-D, take a look at LogoMotion, an easy-to-use 3-D package that’s eminently affordable. As its name suggests, LogoMotion is designed to facilitate the...

FreeHand has long been one of the most powerful draw programs on the Mac. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 offered more features than any draw programs in their time. But FreeHand 3.0’s emphasis on questionable interface enhancements allowed Adobe...

Since the dawn of desktop publishing, Macintosh users have been creating unique personal correspondence and notices. Some attempts are more, ahem, successful than others. With the release of Brøderbund’s Print Shop Deluxe, even the most...

Passport Producer, an impressive multimedia-integration package first introduced in 1992, has been replaced with Passport Producer Pro. The good news is that this upgrade includes a multitude of interactivity and pathanimation tools not in the...

Director 4.0 features increased performance, 48 channels in the score, 32,000 cast members, revised user interface, new lingo commands, and all-new tutorials and examples. Produce dynamic interactive presentations, entertainment and educational...

Fractal Design's new paint program is notable right off the bat for a number of reasons. First version 1.0 is available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms as well as for Power Macs. Second, you get 16-bit color and a remarkably powerful...

IntelliDraw is a shape based vector illustration tool that enables you to dynamically control shapes using numeric, rule based, or relationship based parameters. IntelliDraw gets its name from its “smart” tools that automate...

Flo' and MetaFlo' are authoring tools for the now abandoned Animaflex plugin. Remember creating funny faces by pressing images onto Silly Putty and tugging on it? That’s basically the premise of MetaFlo’, a graphics...

DeBabelizer Lite provides easy to use graphics translation, and can be used by anyone who creates and/or uses computer graphics.  It is derived from the award winning program DeBabelizer - The Graphics Processing Toolbox, a professional...

Pixar Typestry's approachable interface, animation support, and outstanding RenderMan rendering technology have made it a popular choice among graphic designers and QuickTime movie producers needing to create 3-D text effects. Typestry 2.0...

Plug-in architecture has been a real windfall for digital artists. Third-party plug-ins load into the main application (such as Adobe Photoshop and other image processors), providing filtering, file-format conversion, and other functions. Xaos...