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.

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.

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.

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.

It hasn't even been two years since Macromedia-that-was unleashed Flash 8 (a huge step forward for the juggernaut [insert favorite use here] application), and now along comes Flash CS3 Professional. Sporting a new surname and a slew of new features, how does the now-Adobe product stack up, even as Microsoft's Silverlight (the technology formerly known as "Sparkle") begins its attempt to crash the party? Read on to find out.

Toast has been around for what seems like forever, dutifully providing us fun-lovin' and free-wheelin' Mac users with delicious disc burning goodness throughout all the tumult and upheaval the last decade-and-a-half (or so) has brought to the world of computing. And while that last statement was perhaps a tad dramatic, the point is that Toast is a very mature product which Roxio somehow manages to make more and more useful with every release, and Toast 8 Titanium is no exception.

The folks at Telestream have been busy of late—among other things, we've seen the release of version 2 of the Flip4Mac WMV components, the update of same to run natively on Intel Macs, Telestream's acquisition of Popwire, and finally, the re-branding of the former Compression Master as the Episode series of products. Today's review specifically concerns Episode Pro 4.2 (+ Flash 8), and as a service to those of you with the attention span of a gnat (like myself) who like to get to the bottom line quickly, here it is: Episode=excellent.

If you're a Web designer, the process of writing code can be highly personal and subjective. Some swear by integrated development environments like Dreamweaver, while others are more than happy to hand-code. Now, if you just so happen to have planted your flag in latter camp, and you just so happen to develop on a Mac, then you really should take a good, long look at MacRabbit's CSSEdit 2.

Back in junior high, I owned what I thought was the coolest gadget ever: a radio built into a pair of slim, Walkman-style headphones. The radio itself was the size of a postage stamp, and I postulated at the time that it wouldn't be too long before there were dime-sized "cassettes" that one could load into a playback device of a similar size. Lame visions of the future notwithstanding, I can finally declare my "dream" from 1986 to be a reality in the form of Apple's newest iPod Shuffle.

Macromedia (or, I guess it's Adobe now) Flash is great for browser-based stuff, but let's face facts: it's pretty lousy for offline use. Sure, you can save Flash movies as standalone projectors, but the glaring lack of customization or ability to interface with the host OS has created a mammoth opening for third parties to drive through. Enter Zinc, from UK-based MDM, which (to put it simply but crudely) puts Flash movies on an enormous steroid regimen. How well does it make Flash into a full-blown application development environment? Let's find out.