This section of our site will feature reviews written by members of NJMAUG and as such reflect their experiences with and opinion of the product they are reviewing. The only requirement we make on the reviewer is that they give us a fair and unbiased report. If you are a member of NJMAUG and would like to review a MAC program, Book, or Peripheral see a member of the Executive Board at a meeting.

Dreamweaver 8 Hands-On Training authored by Daniel Short & Garo Green

 A review By Paul Soltero

Let me start off this review with this statement, Dreamweaver has a very steep learning curve and will take quite a bit of practice to get comfortable with and may have you asking what have I gotten myself into before its all over. That’s why books like this are written.

Now onto the review, the scope of this book is quite broad it covers introductions of Dreamweaver 8, HTML & XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript etc. Then concludes with uploading your site to a web server, trouble shooting, Dreamweaver 8 resources and extensions. Each chapter leads you through several exercises that build on each other so that by the end of the chapter you will have covered all the different ways to Link or set up Tables etc, etc.  For the most part the authors do a very good job of explaining the how and why of what they are doing (You know there is a but coming here) … but when they covered CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) I felt that the explanations of why they used various selectors in the way they did could have been explained better, given the targeted users of this book includes beginners. Otherwise there is very little to complain about. There are plenty of graphics to show how the various tools work and how your project should be progressing. Handy notes like how to calculate table cell widths in the Tables chapter and warnings like why it’s a bad idea to covert tables to layers and vice a versa in the Layout chapter are some examples. The book also includes a CD with all the files you need to follow the lessons.

Dreamweaver is a very powerful program and, as I said before, has a steep learning curve. This book will make it easier to conquer that curve. Keep it close by you’ll be referring back to it often. On a 1 to 5 rating scale I give it a 4 ^1/2 with my only complaint being parts of the CSS chapter.

Photoshop Elements 4.0

A Review By Paul Soltero

Photoshop Elements shares much of it’s under the hood coding with it’s big brother, but presents it in a much less intimidating package. This program will work well for the novice as well as the advanced user as some of it’s features can be added to (styles and filters are examples). It has a list price of around $90 but can be found online for less, how much less depends on how good a shopper you are.

For most people this program will meet all their photo editing and correcting needs. Elements was designed to focus on digital photography in a RGB workspace. If you find that you need to do anything in the following list you need the full version of Photoshop

✤CMYK and LAB color modes  

✤More tools and features that work with high-bit (16-bit and 32-bit) images

✤Combine multiple exposures to create high dynamic range (HDR) images

✤Channels Palette

✤Recording custom Actions (for batch processing)

✤Adjustments: Color Balance, Match Color

✤Layer Masks, Layer Comps, and Quick Mask mode

✤Smart Objects, Smart Guides

✤Lens Blur Filter

✤Vanishing Point Tool

✤Pen tool and paths palette

✤Some adjustment layers (curves, color balance, selective color, channel mixer)

✤Editing History Log

✤Text on a path, advanced text formatting

✤Advanced Layer Style manipulation

✤Advanced Color Management

✤Advanced Web features and ImageReady (rollovers, slicing)

✤Customizable tool presets, keyboard shortcuts, and menus

✤In the features and tools that are shared, the Photoshop version usually offers more advanced options for fine tuning and control.

That’s a long list but you have to give up something when you pay less than $90 for a program as compared to a $700 one.

So lets talk about the program does have. First you have Bridge, it’s actually a separate program, consider it iPhoto on steroids. With Bridge you can manage, preview, and open JPEGs, Camera Raw, and multi-page PDF files. You can also batch renaming, search by keyword or metadata. The Elements version of Bridge is not as robust as the the one that comes with the full version of Photoshop. Next are a couple of features Photoshop doesn’t have, the Magic Selection Brush (Quickly select specific parts of your photo for easy color, lighting, and contrast adjustments), the Magic Extractor (Easily extract subjects from photos, with advanced edge defringing) Please note that both Magic tools work best in images with some contrast between the piece you want to extract or select. You have WYSIWYG fonts menu (no more lost time searching for the right font), Auto Red Eye Removal, and a Quick Fix Mode are some other features to take notice of.

Some other features are online printing of your masterpieces as prints, books, calendars etc. It can optimize your photos for emailing, make contact sheets, labels and the always fun slide shows.

Now you’re asking what do I like about Elements! So here is my list in no particular order.

✤    The price, thats a no brainer

✤    Works natively with Camera Raw files, if your camera has this ability it allows you to do the image processing not the camera.

✤   The Magic Extractor, the name says it all, you’ll be able to do some interesting things with this.

✤   Magic Selection Brush a time saver especially for a novice

✤    Auto Red Eye Removal & Skin Tone Correction

✤    Quick Fix Mode, very acceptable results with 1 click

✤    Shallow learning curve

What don’t I like? Here’s another list.

✤    Bridge can be painfully slow to start (particularly the 1st time) on older Macs (1GHZ or less)

✤    The Magic Tools are slow here too on older Macs

✤    Not a Universal Binary Program will only work under Rosetta on Intel based Macs.

I rate Photoshop Elements on a scale of 1-5, drum roll please.... a 4.5 it’s has many more hits than misses and its got more photo editing power than most people will need.

Here are some online resources

•  Planet Photoshop (www.planetphotoshop.com)

•  Photoshop Roadmap (www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-tutorials/Photoshop-Elements-tutorials/Most-popular/1) and

•  Photoshop Support (www.photoshopsupport.com/elements/tutorials.htm)

FYI- I worked with this program on a Dual 450 G4 Power Mac, a 12in G4 PowerBook and a 2GHZ G5 Power Mac to see how it would perform. Image editing is processor intensive, extra RAM helps but in this case there is no substitute for speed it’s just the nature of the beast.

FastTrack, AEC Software
Review by Connie Nicholson

I'm a project manager and a heavy-duty user of Microsoft Project. I describe working with that program as wrestling with an 800-pound gorilla. I would love to be able to find a program that is less annoying and one which would allow me to email project plans to my home Macintosh to work on. The Microsoft approach does not follow the way a project schedule should be set up as defined by the Project management Institute and I thought that FastTrack might be taking a different approach. In any case I was looking forward to having the chance to work with a different program that might allow me to find a better way of doing things. Unfortunately, FastTrack is not that program.

In order to see if FastTrack would give me all the information that MS Project does, I decided to import a project schedule created in MS Project into FastTrack and work with that to check out the differences between the final products. Despite what it says on the box, my advice is don't try this at home kids. I guess if I had both MS Project and FastTrack on my Mac this would have worked, but I wanted to see if I could email myself a project from work created on a Windows system and work with it at home without having to bring my laptop
home to do that. No can do! The import/export utility AEC offers, the Project 2000 Exchange Wizard, only works if you have both the MS application and FastTrack installed on the same computer. But the FastTrack CD offers only a Mac or a Windows installation. Therefore, it seems that there is no compatibility between operating systems to exchange files. So I couldn’t install FastTrack on my Mac and the exchange utility on my Windows machine at work. But the chapter on importing data gives alternatives: csv or tsv files. I tried both -
FastTrack would import neither. Or, it imports the data, but drops it all into the first task field. I made sure that the layout was the same as the tsv file, but that meant nothing to fast track. I tried Excel. Even bringing things in from the clipboard didn’t work. Nothing worked! So I went to the AEC website to try to find some info. I thought I had found my solution with their offer to turn my MS files into FastTrack files. I submitted my MS project file and they returned a FastTrack file to me. I don’t know if they returned a Windows file but I couldn't open that on my Mac either. So - for compatibility FastTrack receives a ZERO! I spent a lot of time trying to get the file in and was frustrated enough that I didn’t want to deal with the program anymore and a few months
passed before I went back to working with FastTrack

In order to a new schedule, I started entering tasks. The first non-intuitive thing is that when entering tasks the return key does not take you to the next line, but enters a carriage return in the same task. When I enter durations however, the return key does take you to the next task. This lack of consistency is disconcerting.

FastTrack lacks the flexibility to enter durations in different units. In MS Project I can change the unit by just typing 1h for hour or even 1w for 1 week. But in FastTrack, where I have set up a 7.5-hour day, what is the decimal equivalent of 1 hour?

When I went to enter resources, I can't type in on the schedule form, but have to open the information form where I kept getting error messages about the hour not being in the correct format when I haven't even entered any date or time info until finally the whole thing came to a grinding halt. Finally the spinning ball stopped and I closed out and tried to enter successors. Again the information form is needed and the tab is called bars. (Why is it called bars when I am not defining bars but dependencies) but no amount of typing in a
predecessor or successor task number or selecting the successor task from the drop down worked. There seems to be some kind of bug here, or else I can’t enter dependencies without entering dates, but normally the dates should set themselves based on the dependencies.

So I opened up one of the example files and discovered that the only way the dates for higher-level tasks roll up is when the lower level tasks are rolled up.

That's when I gave up. Too frustrating. Not very intuitive. I'd had enough!

I am not real interested in adding pictures to project schedules. What I want is to be able to enter the schedule without too much trouble and have it calculate the days for me based on the start date, the durations and the dependencies. I might also like to generate task lists or schedules for the various resources assigned. I would like to be able to calculate slack and maybe run and early start and late finish. I want to see what my critical path is. I want to be able to enter information into the field where I see it. I don’t want to
have to open up a form to have to enter dependencies and durations.

Sorry. For me this program doesn’t make it as a usable alternative to the 800-pound gorilla.

designing web graphics.4
Lynda Weinman

A review by Paul Soltero

This is the 4th edition of designing web graphics by Lynda Weinman who besides being an author is also a well-known speaker, consultant and teacher. The title of this book is a little misleading; the book addresses, in concise overviews, everything from how to get started in the business of web site design to determining your Hosting needs. Along the way she does cover web graphics, but this is no How-To-Book. Maybe the book should be subtitled The Business of Web Design A to Z or What Your Mother Forgot To Tell You About Web Design.

This is a heavy book, it weighs in at 489 pages (excluding the index) or if makes you feel better 30 chapters. Either way this is not a quick read there is a lot of information here. The book is meant to help all experience levels from “the novice”(who should read this from cover to cover) “to the pro” who will use this as part of a reference library. Every chapter starts with an introduction of one to four paragraphs and finishes with a summary that gives you a bulleted list of what’s been covered. This should prove to be helpful to the more experienced designer because either the intro or the summary can be used to see if the information they are looking for is in that chapter without wasting time or effort.

With the Web being what it is, in a constant state of flux, no one book can be absolutely current or possibly cover everything in depth. Ms. Weinman deals with this dilemma by offering tips, favorite techniques, detailed overviews and most of all by not trying to make this a how-to book. Web links are provided throughout each chapter to various web sites that can provide in-depth/current information on the topic.

I’ve been involved in web design for a while and found this book helpful, it confirmed many things I learned through trial and error (like project planning and, setting goals) it also offered good advice and suggestions as well as what to expect in the near future of web design.

Now the part you’ve been waiting for. Would I recommend this book to someone interested in or already involved in web design? Yes, this book will make a great addition to your reference library, whether you’re just starting one or it’s latest of many you will get more than your moneys worth out of this book.

designing web graphics.4 is published by Newriders and lists for $55 but can be had for less with the NJMAUG discount.

The Pocket Reference starts with the differences between OS 9 and OS X, “Switchers” help and finishes with how to customize the OS to your liking. Along the way there are screenshots, and very useful tips, a UNIX overview, yes UNIX, it’s at the core OS X. Can we say Terminal Window. There are concise descriptions of the various aspects of the system (these are important because there are several things that you used to have in OS9, like Control Panels and Extensions that are nowhere to be found In X). There is also a section that goes over the Developers Tool.

So what do I think about the book? This little book should be on the desktop of all MAC users. It sits in front of my monitor. At 102 pages this is no OS X bible but it does pack more than enough information to help the OS 9 user migrate to X (sooner or later you’re going to have take that step), the “Win-doze” user make the switch from the dark side, and the experienced X user with quick answers. The book retails for $12.95 and is worth the price.