Software Spotlight
Your powers of creativity should be constrained only by the bounds of your imagination. New systems now at your disposal can help bring to life the contextual substance of your thoughts and give you the power to present them with an elegance and efficiency of a master artist. Tools for the creative professional available for Mac users open up a vast array of possibilities for the development, organization, distribution, display and storage of your ideas.
File Salvage
Let’s begin with those ideas you may have lost. FileSalvage software from Subrosa ($89.95) will retrieve the precious data that dropped into the black hole of your hard drive or just about any other storage device you can think of. As long as you haven’t overwritten them FileSalvage can resurrect more than 100 different file types. The software works on digital cameras, FLASH cards, USB keys even scratched CDs. Data that’s been corrupted or lost due to faulty hardware might once have been gone for good. But this handy piece of software can coax information out of the darkness and into the light.
Exposure
You don’t always want to see images as they appear. Exposure 2 from AlienSkin ($249) is a Photoshop plug-in that lets you emulate most any film variety imaginable. It’s a Polaroid. It’s Kodachrome. Or is it Tri-X®? Now it’s tinted in sepia. Color transforms to black and white. The software allows you to match gain perfectly, creating pictures with any degree of warmth and texture you desire. Color sharpness and variations you select automatically adjust with image size.
iListen
Voice recognition comes a long way for iListen users to upgrade to the latest product from MacSpeech, ($99 upgrade to the new program in this line called "Dictate" for iListen Users). You’ll get a Pro Xpress USB headset/microphone in the box to transform your spoken words into creative writing through speech-to-text transcription. Computer command and control are an added benefit that will allow you to navigate your way hands-free through applications, documents, even your web browser. The software has a vocabulary of 330,000 words and is compatible with the Mac’s scripting language. Dictate is the latest entry from Macspeech and takes iListen up a notch in terms of features.
FileMaker Pro 9
If you’re managing reams of data you’re going to want to get at it quickly. FileMaker Pro9 ($299.00) is the latest edition of the popular software package that makes organization easy. New conditional formatting offers visual if-then cues to keep information front-of-mind or off the radar. You can now access external SQL data via a LAN/WAN. Script organizing features makes one-touch processes a snap to edit or use in detailed layouts. And the enhanced layout object tool lets you customize tab controls or the FileMaker web viewer to your exact specifications.
