If there's a glaring hole in Apple's current digital lifestyle approach, it's the absence of DVR functionality. Whatever the reason for this continued (and seemingly deliberate) oversight, the folks at Elgato certainly have risen to the occasion with their EyeTV line of products. With the recent unveiling of EyeTV 2, Elgato's first "unbundled" software release, the result is a product so thoughtful, beautifully polished and utterly Mac-like that one could easily think that the software was named "iTV" and come directly from Apple itself.

I'm sure there were others, but to my recollection, only iTunes 5 stayed at a full version number for less time than Telestream's Flip4Mac WMV 1. But here we are, less than a year later, and already Flip4Mac WMV 2 has been released. And even though the the product itself hasn't appreciably changed from version 1, there is still much to discuss.

Talk about a product that's made the rounds—Cleaner began life as Media Cleaner Pro at Terran Interactive, a company that was acquired by Media 100, who then sold Cleaner to Discreet, which was rebranded under the Autodesk moniker, and then...well, that's it. We're at the present day, and Autodesk Cleaner 6.5 is the latest version of the well-traveled, Mac-only compression program (Windows users have Cleaner XL, which is, like, 33.5 versions ahead). What it does, what's new, and if it's worth your time are all questions to ponder as we take a closer look.

Man alive, do I despise working out. I do it, and have managed to for years, but it's a never-ending struggle of gargantuan proportions to not get colossally bored while doing so. An iPod helps, but for me, music just wasn't getting the job done anymore. Talk radio was a nice diversion, but nirvana would be watching last night's episode of (whatever) while battling the elliptical machine. However, the video iPod, already notorious for scratches, is in need of some serious protection before I would even dare to bring it into the gym. Can anyone save the day?

Let me put this as succinctly as I can: if you use a Mac, you need to be using Path Finder 4. Period. That's about as direct as it gets. Granted, $34.95 may seem a bit steep just to replace a part of Mac OS X, but with the native Finder as (arguably) bad as it is and with Path Finder 4 as good as it is, the price is a pittance, especially in light of the sheer volume of features Path Finder 4 packs under the hood.

Over the years, Toast has changed hands more times than a Christmas fruitcake, yet still manages to remain (arguably, of course) the king of Mac-based disc authoring programs even amid a growing list of alternatives. Now owned by Sonic (yet still distributed under the Roxio moniker), Toast 7 Titanium packs a host of very useful new features and improvements that continue the proud Toast tradition, and despite the inexplicable continuation of what is perhaps the worst upgrade "deal" in the history of software, is still a good value.

I'm not a hardcore gamer by any stretch, and while I did manage to acquire a PS2 somewhere along the line, my pathetic library consists of titles scrounged out of the bargain bin. So I was surprised to find myself dropping fifty clams on the first Star Wars Battlefront game last year, and was equally stunned when I got bazillions of late night, procrastination-loving hours out of it. With a track record like that, I just had to run out and snag the sequel right away too. So how does Star Wars Battlefront II measure up to the original?

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.

I know what you're thinking: just what in Sam Hill tarnation are we doing reviewing a keyboard? After all, keyboards aren't hard to get a hold of. Hell, you can't even walk down the street these days without tripping over a keyboard, so what makes this one any different? Well, the long and short of the Matias Tactile Pro keyboard is that it isn't different, provided you're nostalgically stuck (as many of us are) several years in the past. And that's what makes it great.

If it weren't for (the outstanding) Flash MX 2004, Macromedia would have been all but dead to me right around the first of this year. Between the messes that were Director MX and Dreamweaver MX 2004, I had become quite down on what was formerly one of my favorite software companies. But times change quickly, and with the recent tandem of Macromedia's Dreamweaver update patch and the release of Director MX 2004, the former MacroMind is very, very quickly getting back into my good graces. But enough with everything else—we're here to talk Director MX 2004, and talk DMX04 we shall.

It's not often I find myself uttering the sage words of one George Costanza, but it didn't take long for Anark Studio to take its rightful place amongst the very short list of programs that have made me both unaware and not caring that it had produced a long strand of drool between my lower lip and the desk. Therefore, these five syllables best describe Anark Studio: Sweet. Fancy. Moses.

I'll freely admit that I'm doing this review for somewhat impure reasons. You see, I started my second flirtation with Adobe GoLive only because my usual visual page editor (you know, the one named after that cheeseball Gary Wright song) got the equivalent of some really bad plastic surgery that left it laughably buggy and ultimately unusable. So in my desperate time of need, I turned to the proverbial "other woman" I had only gazed at briefly before (and then, only for the QuickTime editor) in the hopes of finding aid and comfort. How did GoLive CS do? Read on to find out...

Who knew QuickTime could do all this? It's not a rhetorical question, because Apple hasn't exactly been real busy spreading the word about all the cool stuff lurking in QuickTime that LiveStage Professional gives you unfettered access to. Perhaps if this product was made by Apple itself and branded "QuickTime Studio Pro," QuickTime might be widely known by now as much, much more than a video format. Alas, we have to rely on Totally Hip for assistance in tapping into the large helping of interactive goodness that's been a largely hidden part of QuickTime for many moons now.

Now that Flash MX 2004 has been out for a while, it's time to revisit the juggernaut web animation / multimedia authoring / rich internet application development / whatever-else-Macromedia's-marketing-department-wants-it-to-be-this-week package to see how it's holding up after a bit of the ol' scrutiny. And, as is quickly becoming the norm with a mature product such as Flash, it's not an automatic slam-dunk to come up with a single recommendation as to whether it may be right for you.

While Tribeworks' iShell 3 is a pretty gawrsh-durned excellent multimedia authoring program, chances are that you're not going to be able to head on down to your local Mega-Giganto Book Emporium And International House of Double-Caffeinated-Half-Caff-Lattes and find any supplemental iShell training books. At the same time, said establishment probably has devoted more square footage than most of us live in just to books on Director alone. However, author Jan Costenbader of Electric Tours has stepped up to provide two iShell resources that could very well be all the extra iShell reference most of us may ever need. Which is a good thing, since iShell 3 In Depth and iShell 3 Illustrated pretty much make up the entire market.

Having tried the standalone version of Swift3D 1.0 back in the late summer of 2000, several problems immediately cropped up that led to me proclaiming the product not at all useful for my needs. As I was not writing product reviews at the time, that proclamation was pretty much heard only by myself. But now that I've gotten my hands on the LightWave plug-in version of Swift3D, now in its second iteration, I have the opportunity to explain just how nicely the Swift3D concept has evolved to an audience that probably, by now, could very well number in the double digits.

Boy, who'da thunk that it would have taken Equilibrium four-plus years to wake up from it's Windows-first (and seemingly, Windows-only) honeymoon and finally release a new version of DeBabelizer for the Mac? Hard to believe, but since DeBabelizer 3 was released in 1998, Mac users have received nary a whiff of where the once Mac-exclusive image processing powerhouse ran off to. Well, DeBabelizer is back for the Mac and better than ever. It's been given a Carbon injection to run natively on Mac OS X, had the "Pro" moniker added to its name, and brought up to version parity with its Windows counterpart, even if Equilibrium had to take the rather Netscapian measure of completely skipping a version number in order to do so.

When the time comes to get down to brass tacks and write a review I usually stick with a good ol' tried and true formula: I'll settle in with a product, give the tires a good kick, try to get some real-world work done with it, and then write about the hijinks and hilarity that usually ensues. With this product, Discreet's unbelievably outstanding combustion 2, I'm going to do something a little different. First, if you read the last sentence, you'll probably notice that I more or less gave away the rating. Well, besides that, I think a product like combustion represents part of the bigger Mac picture, so I'll be focusing not only on the specifics of what combustion actually does, but also why combustion is so important to the Mac platform, as well as why you should try to scrape up the wad of cash needed to purchase combustion as soon as humanly possible.

OK, so you're an editor, and your NLE of choice works just fine. Fine, that is, until you have to do anything that involves compositing or effects. So now you have to track down an artist to do something relatively simple, or try to go it yourself by either muddling through whatever your host program happens to offer, or learning an external effects suite on your own. Then what if you need to fix something later? Changes and re-renders can be a logistical nightmare, especially under a tight deadline. Sensing that the preceding scenario might be a common problem for editors, Boris FX (formerly Artel Software) offers up the latest version of its namesake program, Boris FX 6. But before we dive in and get into more detail, I'll go ahead and spoil the ending: I expected better.

Do you remember when Commotion, then from Puffin Designs, first hit the Mac scene a few years back? A lot of us hadn't seen anything like it, at least any desktop application like it. Provided you had enough cash to get yourself a copy and plenty of RAM to load your footage into (and RAM was some major cash back then), you could have a serious, quasi-real-time, high-end compositing package right there on your Mac. Times are a tad different now. RAM sure is a heck of a lot cheaper, and so is Commotion Pro, now owned by Pinnacle Systems and currently standing at version 4.1. And if I didn't know any better, I could swear that Pinnacle Systems is quietly trying to muscle in on After Effects' traditional motion graphics turf, in addition to retaining the signature high-end painting and rotoscoping features Commotion has had all along.