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...

Grammatik 6 for Macintosh has benefited hugely from its programmers’ efforts. The interface has been dramatically improved. Gone are the Chicago and Monaco fonts it used for your original text and the program’s critique; it now clearly...

Interactive Home Medical Guide & Symptom Analysis (Obviously, this is more than a quarter of a centory old, so please DO NOT refer to this today if you or somebody you take care of is sick.) With the bewildering range of choices faced...

Norton Utilities for Macintosh (NUM) 3.1, the long-awaited upgrade to Symantec’s flagship data-protection and -recovery utility, is leaner, meaner, and faster than ever before. Yet, though built on the solid foundation of NUM 2.0.6 and...

What the world needs is an approachable, affordable QuickTime moviemaking application. If you don’t need — or can’t afford — a high-end program like Adobe Premiere ($695), you might well find what you’re looking for in...

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...

There is one certainty when it comes to computers: Things will go wrong, no matter how careful you are. Most of the time, simple software problems are to blame. But for more complex problems you have to call in the big guns. Micromat has released...

Sometimes being late to the party pays off, as it has for Now Compress. The program saves hard disk space by compressing files transparently or on demand and by creating archives. Now Compress includes the best features from the market leaders,...

Delrina, whose WinFaxPro made a splash in the Windows market, has now introduced the product to the Macintosh world. The Mac version of FaxPro shares many of the virtues of its Windows counterpart, such as a highly flexible address-book...

Lost, perhaps, in the furious pace of computer development is the fact that computers in most offices aren’t used very much in activities dependent on the results of theoretical computer science. From word processing to image manipulation,...

It's funny how to the pace of progress sharpens our senses and lifts our expectations just in time to be ready for the next advance. Back when Premiere 1.0 debuted, Macworld gave it the highest rating, as much an endorsement of QuickTime as an...

Midnight Software's DupLocator is a disk utility designed to find and delete unnecessary, space-wasting duplicate files on one or more volumes on a hard drive, floppy disk, or a network. The program can also perform file-modification commands...

Redux Deluxe tries to make the sometimes complex task of backing up your data simple and automatic. You begin by launching the application, choosing Backup, and identifying your source disk and the first backup (target) disk. Redux Deluxe...

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...

Electronic mail has become an indispensable tool for organizing, communicating, and collaborating with coworkers. CE Software’s recently updated QuickMail delivers an intuitive, easy-to-use interface as well as solid administrative options for...

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...

The name Practica Musica, Latin for “practical exercises in music,” probably conjures up visions of droning away with dull drills. Yes, Practica Musica (PM) is a music-teaching program, with emphasis on sight-reading and ear training,...

Ever get tired of using the same old Mac? Now Fun is a set of five desktop enhancements — all of which install as control panels — that let you customize everything from menu colors to Macintosh sounds, to liven things up. Many of the...

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...