Now that us lowly users have been unwillingly pushed down the slippery slope that is product activation, this particular article is equivalent to the proverbial closing of the barn doors after the horse has escaped. Actually, it's more like picking up the door and leaning it on the charred ruins of the barn after it burned down years ago, what with the horse having run out to flee the fire, but I digress. Since activation refuses to just go away entirely, I still (naively) think that there's a balance that can be struck between legitimate users and software publishers.

In many ways, Flash is like Photoshop. Neither has any real competition, and when new versions are released, there are the inevitable gasps of amazement from users and reviewers alike, shocked that neither program has decided to roll over and wallow in its own bloat for lack of contemporaries. Flash 8 Professional continues this trend, delivering what is the most significant update in five years (if not ever) and adding a whole new category of potential users to already crowded and varied list of user types.

Welcome to Working Mac, a new and (hopefully) ongoing series dedicated to helping you get the most out of your Mac experience. From tips and tricks to productivity boosters to system tweaks and more, it's all in play. In today's debut installment, we're going to walk though how to effectively replace the Mac OS Finder with Cocoatech's excellent Path Finder utility. Plus, as an added bonus, we'll go over a more current method of neutering the Dock, since so many of you have asked about it over the years. Let's do that first.

When we left off, we had just gotten our simple setup moved over to Layout. Today, we have just a couple of chores left to do before our scene is ready to light, and then we'll get to the much-delayed promise of setting up radiosity to help hide the fact that the scene is so gawdawful in the first place. Let's dive right back in, shall we?

After last episode's short detour, we're back on track. Now, all the talk about targeting way back in part 2 was the equivalent of taking the scenic route (long way around, lot more to see), but I hope that exercise gave you a sense of where instances of symbols "live" in relation to each other and how to start thinking about those relationships (an exercise which certainly wasn't a waste of time in terms of where we're going with this). Today, though, we'll explore a much easier way to target objects and (finally!) write our first official script.

It's been quite a while since the last installment of this series, in which I offered up some tips on faking radiosity to help add a bit of realism while cutting down on render times. But what happens if the opposite is true, and you have a project where setup time needs to be kept to a minimum and render time doesn't matter? In addition to being a beautiful, photorealistic way of rendering scenes in LightWave, radiosity can also serve as a virtual dab of Clearasil by covering up blemishes when budgets are tight.

Sixteen months. That's how long it's been since part 2 of this series, which, for the curious, happened to be a whirlwind tour of how to target symbols in Flash. While there was a good reason for this protracted absence (I was insanely busy and not writing anything for a year), it's still been WAY too long between installments. Today, all that gets rectified (I hope), provided you can get over the not-entirely-small fact that I'm going to renege on what I promised we were going to do last time. How's that for a page turner?

It's been eighteen long months since I did my first, and admittedly self-indulgent, list of "here's what I use because I'm so scary important" list of cool free/cheap Mac OS X apps. But since it seems a fair number of folks not only 1) read the original article but 2) sent in enough suggestions to spawn a sequel, I figured it was high time to compile another list for 2005. So here we go again: ten more excellent helpers that are deserving of a little good press.