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Autodesk Mudbox 2009

Autodesk — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:14:27 -0500

Autodesk® Mudbox™ software is an advanced, high-resolution, brush-based 3D modeling software built on a unique sculpting paradigm. This production-proven digital modeler has been designed from the ground up to address the needs of professional modelers working in the film, game development, design, and visualization industries.

REQUIREMENTS: Apple® Mac OS® X 10.5.5 operating system or higher, Intel®-based Apple® Macintosh® computers, Qualified graphics card can be found on www.autodesk.com/mudbox-hardware, 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended), 650 MB free hard drive space (2 GB recommended), Ethernet adapter or wireless Internet card, Mouse or qualified Wacom® tablet, DVD-ROM drive

To download a demo copy of Autodesk® Mudbox 2009 (141MB), click here.

EA Developing Spore, Other Games For iPhone

Zack Stern — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:41:51 -0600

Apple displayed games at its iPhone SDK event, with EA, Sega, and Apple itself unveiling upcoming products. Sega will release a tilt-sensitive version of Super Monkey Ball, its marble-in-a-maze franchise. Apple showed Touch Fighter, an OpenGL space-pilot game where you lean the iPhone to steer and tap the screen to fire. And EA announced plans to bring a version of Spore to the iPhone. Release dates aren’t available for Super Monkey Ball or Touch Fighter, but EA is targeting a September release for iPhone Spore.

In addition to the creature simulation, EA has “other [iPhone] games in early stages of development,” according to EA spokesperson Trudy Muller. While Apple announced that all iPhone products would also work on the iPod touch, EA didn’t offer any comment about Spore’s specific phone-free compatibility.

Muller is pleased with the SDK release, which allows EA to create games for Apple’s mobile devices. She notes via email, “We’re really excited about what this means for people to be able to play EA games on their iPhone or iPod touch and are thrilled to extend our relationship as a developer of games for various Apple products.” She even names the devices, lest Mac gamers feel left out: Mac, iPod nano, iPod with video, iPod touch, and iPhone.

Spore creator Will Wright and executive producer Lucy Bradshaw were coy with us about iPhone plans at a recent Spore demonstration. (See the April issue, on newsstands now for more details.) We played a mobile phone version of the game then, but EA won’t comment on how closely that flip-phone game will match the iPhone release. Based on our brief impressions from the SDK press conference today, we think the two seem similar.

Instead of the massive five stages within the Mac game, Spore for mobile phones focuses on the first stage—the microscopic, cellular world. Players pilot primitive creatures in an overhead view, trying to eat nutrients to grow larger. Traditional phones use a joystick for steering, but tilts direct iPhone organisms.

Once the creature eats enough, players enter a customization screen to evolve. With the iPhone, upgrades are just a touch away; players position fins with a fingertip, allowing better steering and movement. Other changes add shells, jaws, and other offensive or defensive capabilities; other creatures live in this eat-or-be-eaten pool. Players can even customize colors for a unique, visual style.

EA wouldn’t confirm if the iPhone version of Spore will allow online competition, but the company has already explained the multiplayer mode on traditional phones. After beating the standard-phone version, players upload fully evolved, simple creatures, where they’ll fight other friends’ creations. Through automated battles, different creatures’ strengths and weaknesses determine the winner.

At the end of the demonstration today at Apple's town hall meeting, EA’s Travis Boatman ran a cut-scene of the creature climbing onto land. This transition marks the beginning of the second phase in the full, computer version, but he said it was just a test of the video capabilities of the SDK. We’ll keep you posted if the iPhone version of Spore evolves into something different than its mobile-phone cousins.

Development: Full Software List

The Software Vault — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:31:51 -0500

Here's a list of all the demos, trials, freeware, shareware, and donationware in the Development section of the Software Vault. Check back often to see what's new and what's been updated.

Just click on any software title for more information and a download link.

Editors' Picks:

BBEdit 8.6.2 demo - Here's the latest version of the undisputed champion of all text editors.

Billings 2.5 trial - Time and expense tracking has never been so easy.

Classz trial - A user-friendly drag-and-drop GUI shell around the "class-dump" command-line.

Clean Text 5.0 shareware - De-junkify text quickly and easily. Great for Web scrapings and email.

FinanceToGo 1.5 demo - Professional and intuitive finance management for homes, small businesses and accountants.
Flash Optimizer for Mac 2.0 trial - Powerful, feature-rich SWF-file compression utility.

Live Interior 3D 1.4 trial - Design your dream room for your home or office.

MacDraft Pro 5.6 demo - A powerful 2D design, drafting and technical illustration tool in one easy-to-use, package.

Sandvox 1.2.3 trial - The website creation tool for people who want to spend time developing their lives, not their websites.
SWF to FLA Converter trial - This handy tool does pretty much what its name suggests...

TextWrangler 2.2.1 and 2.1.3 freeware - BBEdit's little brother of a text editor is astonishingly powerful for its price - which is zero.
UI Browser 2.0.2 trial - If you use Apple's GUI AppleScripting or Assistive technologies, you gotta check this one out.

Updated: Live Interior 3D 1.4

BeLight Software — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:57:00 -0500

Live Interior 3D will let you create the interior you always dreamed of. 3D visualization will make you feel as in a redesigned home or office and encourage for various improvements. The program can also assist in understanding whether a new sofa or other furniture will fit the interior.

This 3D interior design application comes with more than 50 editable templates that will inspire you to improve the home you are living in. You can conveniently create multi room designs with different interiors for each room. The program allows you to move, add and edit furniture in both 2D and 3D views. Various 2D editing tools will let you draw walls, floor, ceiling, add text annotations, as well as display measurements on your 2D plan.

Utilizing the 3D environment is flexible thanks to advanced Rendering options. Position and adjust various light sources on the fly. Amazing effect of virtual walk through helps to understand what needs to be changed to achieve perfect interior. More than 1000 3D objects come with the program, including brand name furniture and building elements. Access to an online database of 3D objects is achieved by integration with Google 3D Warehouse™. Any 2D plan you created can be printed or exported to PDF, PNG and more. Make screenshots of interior 3D view in JPEG, TIFF and more.

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later

To download a trial copy of Live Interior 3D 1.4 (205.5MB), click here.

Updated: Sandvox 1.2.3

Karelia Software — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:28:39 -0500

Creating a website can be easy and elegant. Drag and drop content, watch your site take shape as you create it, and make it available to others with Sandvox's publishing assistant. Sandvox is that simple - and that powerful.

Is this your first website? Your fourteenth? Sandvox offers solutions that novices and experienced developers can use now. Whether you want to create a website to share personal news, business information, or some combination of the two, Sandvox is packed with features that help you share text, images, audio, and video with ease.

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4.4 or later

To download a trial copy of Sandvox 1.2.3 (30.9MB), click here.

New: FinanceToGo 1.5

Fastforward Software — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:49:05 -0500

FinanceToGo is an easy way for individuals and small businesses to manage their finances professionally with an intuitive interface and dozens of features for managing assets, accounts, debts, shares and more. Best of all, FinanceToGo also includes budgeting features, categories, Address Book integration and Quicken importing. FinanceToGo is the only double-entry bookkeeping solution on the Mac that is designed for home users, small businesses and accountants.

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later

To download a demo copy of FinanceToGo 1.5 (4.7MB), click here.

New: Billings 2.5

Marketcircle — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 13:02:01 -0500

Do your invoices reflect your professionalism? Billings combines powerful features with stylish designs so you can send elegant invoices right out of the box. Choose from any of the customizable templates, or create your own with the built-in WYSIWYG designer. Either way you'll send polished professional invoices in seconds, without expensive and time consuming graphics software.

Billings packs a ton of power into a lightweight and simple interface. Intuitive and convenient features mean you can focus on your business and say goodbye to tedious number crunching. Track your time and expenses easily, and when you're ready to bill, all the hard work is done for you - automatically numbering the invoice, calculating taxes, and even addressing and emailing to your client.

Never lose another penny with Billings' customizable suite of instant reports. With the click of a mouse, you'll know who hasn't paid, how much tax you've collected, what your expenses are, and much more.

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later, 50MB disk space, minimum 1024 x 768 screen resolution

To download a trial copy of Billings 2.5 (MB), click here.

New: MacDraft Pro 5.6

Macro Enter Corporation — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:38:37 -0500

MacDraft Professional provides powerful tools for drafting, 2D CAD, technical illustration, architectural drawing in one easy-to-use, CAD software package.

The Tool palette offers a full complement of drawing tools including lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, polygons, curves, parallel line and freehand tools. Parallel line and polygon tools make it easy to create exterior walls. Add interior walls with a mouse click using the parallel extrude tool. Some tools can be configured from the Tool Palette to provide several drawing options. For example, arcs can be drawn by their radius, any 3 points, or as an elliptical arc. There are also special tools to create lines tangent, perpendicular, and parallel to edges. Alternatively, lines can automatically be drawn from the center of an object, as well as from the middle or end points of a line or edge of an object.

MacDraft offers its users maximum control over their drawing setup, you can select from English or Metric units and work at your desired scale. Layers give you the ability to organize your drawings so that you have the power to hide or gray whole sections of your work, so for example you could have your floor plan on one layer and your electrical schematics on another, then you can choose to hide them or show them as required. Your layers can even have different scales in the same drawing.

Whether you need horizontal, vertical, diagonal, angular, perpendicular, radial or diameter dimensions, MacDraft's dimension palette is always on hand to provide them. With linked dimensioning to automatically update dimensions as you modify components. Dimension formats provide text position, tolerances, round off, witness lines, arrow position, and much more. You can also create linear dimensions in single, chained or baseline modes.

The Resize palette displays the size of an object, text, or picture. When you select an item, its unique measurement parameters are displayed. Using the keyboard, you can quickly and precisely edit any of the item's measurements to a new absolute value, or a new value relative to its current size; the item is resized instantly. The Resize palette can also be used to move objects or vertices to new absolute or relative positions.

MacDraft allows you to import images in the form of PICT, TIFF, GIF, JPEG and BMP. You can also export drawings as PDF, BMP, JPEG, PSD, PICT, PNG and TIFF, or any other Quicktime supported format for that matter.

Lastly, MacDraft Pro offers excellent compatibility with AutoCAD and other programs supporting the DWG/DXF file formats. During opening of these files the user can choose the layout that will be opened from a list of available layouts or open the entire Model. The scale and units can also be chosen or MacDraft can do it automatically if you are unsure.

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2 or later

To download a demo copy of MacDraft Pro 5.6 (30.1MB), click here.