I really thought my life would turn out differently. Back in college in the early 90s, I was part of a 2-man cover group that played the local bar scene (with actual guitars, I might add). Today, I press plastic buttons on a facsimile Gibson SG, pretending I'm shredding to one slammin' rock song after another. I don't need to be told that this is pathetic, but damned if I'm not having a blast anyway. This is the reality of the Guitar Hero series, which has offered up addictive fun even while making you look like an enormous tool.

The 2007 college football season is winding down, and while the last of the autumn leaves falls lazily from the trees in Charlottesville, VA, there's no slowdown for Erik Elvgren, senior producer and animator at the University of Virginia's Athletics Video Services Department (AVS). The last home UVA football game is only days away, and while Elvgren's animated CavMan adventures make their final 2007 showing at Scott Stadium, basketball season is already heating up, and CavMan is expected to pull duty for the Cavalier basketball team as well.

There are many, many reasons to love Intel Macs, but the one I'm going to focus on today is Boot Camp. Being able to run a full copy of Windows natively on the exact same hardware as Mac OS X not only represents a 2-for-1 bang for your buck when it comes to buying a production rig, but also gives average Joes such as yours truly the opportunity to compare apples to apples (so to speak) when running cross-platform software. And with After Effects CS3 finally out in the wild (and in Intel Mac-native form, no less), it's time to see how well the Mac and Windows versions of AE do on identical hardware.

Believe it or not, there are still folks out there using Director for multimedia authoring, even as Adobe pushes the Flash platform ever forward and preps AIR as the technology of choice for desktop-based applications. And while it's been more than a year of silence since the "Director is not dead" proclamation was issued by Adobe's former Director Product Manager, in the interest of keeping the fires lit, here's a tidbit for how to make Director projectors (with the help of the essential Buddy API Xtra) recognize whether they're running on an Intel or a PowerPC-based Mac.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year or so, chances are that you've at least heard that you can run non-Apple operating systems on Intel Macs using a number of methods. The one we're going to concern ourselves today is virtualization, focusing on a product that, to the outside observer, seemed to come out of nowhere in the last year: Parallels Desktop for Mac. Version 3 has just been loosed upon the Mac universe, so let's see what's doing in the latest rev of the virtualization solution for Intel Macs.

Regardless of what you may specifically think of the CS3 iteration of the venerable Dreamweaver visual Web editor, even the most hardened skeptics would probably be forced to (grudgingly) agree that the integration of Adobe's Spry framework for Ajax into Dreamweaver CS3 is, to put it very technically, pretty freaking cool.

It's the moment that a whole bunch of Web designers and producers (especially those with Intel Macs) have been waiting many a moon for: Adobe's CS3 Design and Web suites are finally shipping. Today, we're going to be checking out the Web Premium bundle, which features former Macromedia products finally brought together with traditional Adobe stalwarts in an all-star lineup of Web production bliss. That's the idea, anyway—out in the field, the Web Premium suite is a blend of fantastic features and worthwhile upgrades mixed with a sizable amount of disappointment.

Like the weekly serials of old, we left off last time with a cliffhanger. What treats were there to be found in the rest of the CS3 Production Premium bundle? Which goodies in After Effects, Encore, Photoshop Extended, and even OnLocation and Ultra would appeal to motion graphics and interactive folk? Well, you didn't have to wait too long to find out, so let's get this sucka done.

I was somewhat skeptical about what the forthcoming Adobe CS3 Production Premium bundle would offer outside of Flash and After Effects; after all, I have precisely zero skills when it comes to the "front end" of production (shooting, capture, editing, etc.). My interests lie squarely down the line (motion graphics, interactivity, Web distribution), so my initial thought was that the entire bundle might be of limited total value to someone like me. However, after seeing and using a pre-release version of the suite for myself, it turns out that there are a lot of hidden gems in surprising places.

Even though I'm only a casual Dreamweaver user these days, I get excited every time a new version of the legendary visual editor is released, hoping against hope that this is the one that gets me to abandon my now stubbornly-ingrained habit of hand-coding HTML and CSS and back into really (ab)using the product that I loved so dearly in the late 90s. It's now Dreamweaver CS3's turn at bat, so let's find out how it does in its first plate appearance as an Adobe product.