In my review of Adobe InDesign CS3, I lamented how Adobe still had a lot of work to do to fill in the shoes of the missing FrameMaker for Mac. They did it! Well, mostly. There still are some corners to sand and polish, but, for the most part, one can finally, really, truly do long format documents again on the Mac. Now, InDesign CS4 has Conditional Text and Cross References, not to mention Smart Guides, GREP nested styles within paragraph styles, and a whole lot more. If you use InDesign, this is one of the best upgrades in many years.

For those of us who remember it, there will never be a version of Word as good as version 5.1. It was a tight, full, and well-balanced program. Word 6 was not only viciously bloated, but you could go out to dinner while it booted up. Starting with Office X, Word has started to regain what it once had by providing new features while letting older features become more accessible. With Office 2008, the number of features continues to increase, but, on the whole, the program is much easier to negotiate. Significantly reduced are multiple locations of the same preferences, gone are confusing preferences, arrived is easier access to features that will appeal to offices. But not existent are features to customize Word to anyone's wishes.

I'm not the type of guy to look at my past and wish I could be back there. By and large, I'm happy where I am right now, despite the Minnesota Wild continuing to choke in the Stanley Cup Playoffs (something is most certainly rotten in the State of Hockey). However, I do sometimes lament the fact that today's technology wasn't available to me when I had the time, ambition and friends required to have myself some good adventures. Add to this list, now, the combination of a MacBook and MacJournal 5, because the two work perfectly for the young Mac user living the type of adventure worthy of documenting.

Font management programs have been around almost as long as the Mac has been around. In the early days, fonts were part of the system, and it was difficult to do anything with them. Then Apple introduced the Font/DA Mover, letting you finally having access to the fonts in your system and the ability to easily add new fonts. Nowadays, Apple provides Font Book, which makes it easy to add fonts into your system. But neither of these are font management programs. Over the years, there have been a number of font management programs, and FontAgent Pro has continued to be a solid, dependable program to control your fonts. Despite the fact that not all of my wishes from my review of FontAgent Pro version 3 were implemented in this release, this new version does continue Insider Software's tradition of great software.

Smasher is a strange, little, valuable program that helps repair and/or replace (by removal) font caches, folders, and troublesome fonts. The simple fact of computers is that there are a number of functions in your computer that demand your fonts are in tip-top shape, your font caches are in tip-top shape, and access to all of your fonts are tip top. So what do you do if things are not so tip top? You smash things up.

No, Apple hasn't made Pages freeware, or revived the late, lamented AppleWorks. I'm talking about Text Edit, the amazingly powerful and capable little word processor that comes bundled with every copy of Mac OS X. With the Leopard release of Text Edit, many users may find that it meets all of their practical word processing needs without the necessity of buying Pages, Microsoft Word, or another third-party word processor solution. Leopard's version of Text Edit can now even open MS Word files with basic formatting preserved, and save documents in Word's .doc file format. Sweet.

StoryMill (formerly Avenir from Return Self Software) is a perfect example of tailoring a program for a very select audience, offering a slew of features that are great for authors but would be completely useless to anyone else, and it's my program of choice for managing and completing the daunting task of writing novels. Although you can certainly use StoryMill for general word processing, a combination of this and MarinerWrite or Nisus Writer will still come in at least $100 less than Microsoft Word on its own. You could even throw iWork '08 into the mix to get page layout capabilities (not to mention spreadsheet and presentation software), and they would still be cheaper and easier to use than Word.

Those who actually owned their first Mac before owning their first iPod will certainly remember the original Nisus Writer. It was an entirely new kind of word processor in the pre-OS X days that developed a rather large and rabid cult following. If you're amongst this group and you're looking for the true to successor Nisus Writer (Classic), stop reading now; you're going to be sorely disappointed. Nisus Writer Pro is built from the same core as Nisus Writer Express, so it comes with that user interface (which was based on Okito Composer). However, Pro brings with it many features of Nisus Writer Classic, which should finally win back some of those users.

.... But not dumbed-down. Without the ponderousness (and high prices!) of InDesign or Quark, or even Apple's Pages, Swift Publisher provides you with the tools you need to create professional-looking short documents from scratch - flyers, newsletters, brochures, letterheads, certificates, fax cover pages, booklets, business cards, CD/DVD art, address or shipping labels - virtually any type of document combining text and graphics

Adobe has done a fantastic job in creating a program that, from out of nowhere, was strong competition to a program that had already been out for a long time (cough Quark cough). With this new, fifth version, Adobe provides a more fleshed out program, rather than introducing some major new features. That's not to say the new features are small, but those Mac users who've been waiting for FrameMaker capabilities (after Adobe killed the Mac version in April 2004) within InDesign will have to continue to wait. There are Text Variables (new with ID-CS3, explained below) that are powerful, but right now, very limited. The good news is that there have been some great refinements and wonderful UI improvements across InDesign's features and abilities.

Bridge grew out of Photoshop CS's File Browser and came onto its own in CS2. Now with the Adobe Suites 3, Bridge 2 provides greater depth to analyze and work with your photos as well as interact with the rest of the Suite. Since the release of Lightroom, there may be some question as to whether Bridge has any reason to be. However, Lightroom is a self-contained program for working with full photo shoots done by photographers. Bridge is for use with Photoshop and as a "bridge" between Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver, (and GoLive 9 when it is released).

Adobe recently announced the release of many updated products. After purchasing Macromedia and absorbing most of their product line, Adobe chose to take the hard approach—update everything all at once to a full new product line. In fact, from the previous two lines (Creative Suite and Creative Suite Pro), there are now six full suite lines. Over a period of time, Kirk Hiner and Gary Coyne will be presenting previews/reviews of the various Design and Web Suite programs. Due to our desire to not gloss over any product, we are taking the time to provide full previews based on the beta copies we've been provided. When we obtain the full retain versions, the previews will be updated accordingly and ratings will be assigned.