While having a lot of fonts can be fun and/or provide a tremendous amount of potential graphic benefits, the more fonts you have open at any given time, the more chance the performance of your computer will be severely degraded. However, regardless of the quality of all of your fonts, it's hard to part with any of them. If you are like me, you could easily have upwards of over 3,000 fonts on your computer. This is where font management comes in. A font manager lets you control which fonts are actively running on your computer at any time and lets you stop and start fonts at any time. In other words, a good font manager lets you have your cake and eat it too. Speaking of which, FontAgent Pro (FAP) is an excellent font manager.

One of the most spectacular values in the freeware orbit

Think of Papyrus as the BMW/Mercedes-Benz/Audi of word processors - enhanced MS Word file support and now creates editable PDF documents

It's a good thing I waited to review this. Back with the release of v7, things weren't looking so good with QuarkXPress. The features were there, but it was slow...so very slow. It made my Intel Mac feel like the old 604e. I was not a happy reviewer. So, I waited. I waited because Quark assured me they'd be addressing the speed issue, and because I know there's not a print shop or design firm worth its weight in 28lb. stock that's going to buy the initial release of a software product upon which they depend to make deadlines. And to such firms, I can say you're safe. Feel free to get your upgrade to QuarkXPress v7.1.

Writing screenplays is the simplest job in the world, as anyone who's seen a Will Ferrell movie can attest. What's difficult about screenplays is the formatting, which is part of the reason why screenwriting software costs so much: they make sure your script adheres to the rigid standards of Hollywood formatting. Of course, you could save yourself a couple hundred bucks and just set up a Word template with the appropriate tab stops, so the makers of screenwriting software differentiate themselves with bells and whistles. Some try to make the flow of writing as smooth as possible. Others offer advice to help you get past writer's block. Still, they all cost a lot of money. But now the Open Source movement has come up with their own contender: Celtx, a piece of screenwriting software based off of the Mozilla application framework, available as a free download.

Many years ago, you purchased Acrobat so you could create your own PDF documents. For a number of versions now, Acrobat has been so much more than "just a PDF creator" that it's hard to pin down what it is and/or should be called. I think that Acrobat 8 could be called Office 8, but that would be ignoring all of the print features built into Acrobat. And if you called it Print 8, you'd be ignoring all of the legal features within Acrobat. If you called it Legal 8, you'd be ignoring the document reviewing features, etc. But despite all of what Acrobat 8 Professional is called, the obvious question is "does Acrobat 8 provides what you don't have in Acrobat 7?" Acrobat 8 has some very nifty and great features, and there is a lot that Acrobat 8 offers if you can get past the new user interface...which is dreadful.

DEVONthink Professional adds email archiving, OCR, scanner, and Web sharing support - a major update well worth having

And here we have a gift to the Macintosh writing community. I can't look at Montage as anything other than a gift, because it's certainly something I never thought we'd get: a script writing program designed by a company that gets the Mac aesthetic. Mariner Software knows that building powerful features into a program doesn't do much good if they're buried under a clumsy, archaic interface. They know that hiding usefulness under layers of options that really don't mean a whole lot can just be intimidating. Montage wants you to get to work, and that's a welcome respite, even if it may not let you get all of your work done.

I can't say that MacJournal isn't growing with each new release, because it certainly is. My complaint is that it's not necessarily growing in the directions I feel it should. This is because I don't use it for blogging purposes, however. Those who do are going to love the new version (provided they don't already love it, as it's been out for a while). If the rest of you are like me and prefer to use MacJournal specifically for organizing thoughts and ideas without the need to share them on the web...well, you may not need this particular upgrade, but you certainly need this program.

Need MS Word file compatibility, but prefer not to use Microsoft software if you can avoid it? Check out Papyrus

There are several pleasures with this release of ReadIris OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, starting with some nice improvements coupled with the fact that Iris Software released these updates on the Mac before the PC. That notwithstanding, there are a few glitches in an otherwise outstanding program.

If you've purchased the Adobe Suite, you also received a Total Training DVD with basic tricks and tips and how to use all the programs. If you wanted more information on GoLive and/or are new to GoLive (by way of CS2, or purchased GoLive separately), this is a great DVD training video for you.