Macworld Expo ramblings

I started the day off at a press conference for Xaos Tools' Flashbox. Flashbox won't be out for the Mac for a month or so, but the demo was very impressive. It's a bit like Photoshop but with an interface so simple that mere mortals can easily use it and even have fun with it. Whether you are morphing, masking, creating 3D text with drop shadows or more, you can do them all with simple (usually one step) actions.

Hey, ATI's upgraded Xclaim VR card is out and has been for a couple of months (somehow I had thought it was being released here at the Expo). It uses ATI's 3D RAGE PRO technology, making it up to twice as fast the original Xclaim VR.

Speaking of fast, Newer Technology was showing its new G3 upgrade cards for 6100/7100/8100 Macs. They won't ship until February, but they look amazing. For around $500-$600, you can take your old 6100 and have a Mac that (according to MacBench 4.0 scores) is 880% faster!!

Qualcomm will be shipping the final version of Eudora Pro 4.0 within 3 weeks. Qualcomm also announced the release of Now Utilities 6.7.1. It "includes over 20 improvements but is not OS 8 compatible." [However, two readers say they installed it on Mac OS 8 and that it works for them; at least SuperBoomerang worked.] In any case, Qualcomm said that a new Mac OS 8 compatible version of Now Utilities, with new versions of Now SuperBoomerang, Now Menus, and Now WYSIWYG Menus, would be out by the end of March.

If you can't wait that long (and maybe even if you can), check out Power On Software's Action Utilities. It is a competitor for SuperBoomerang, but does more. It completely redesigns your Open dialog box (including making it resizable) with its own menubar of features.