Briefs

Revival time: You can’t have avoided the Photoshop 4 reviews and cheap journalistic jokes about how it should have been called version 3.5. We’re working on a wish list and will reveal it to you and Adobe ASAP, especially as Adobe is thought to be starting to recode its major apps in anticipation of the new BeOS which Apple has probably now bought.

Five-piece suite: Macromedia has just brought out a revision of its FreeHand Graphic Studio now in version 7 and at less than 200 for the upgrade. This suite comprises Free Hand 7, Extreme 3D 2, xRes 3, Fontographer 4.1 and Shockwave which work within the environments of Macromedia Open Architecture, Information Exchange, Scripting and the User Interface. If you need explanations of what these apps do you’re probably very new to the trade and will have to pay the full 400 or thereabouts for it.

Megamouth: ViewSonic claims that its new 21in monitor, the Mega Monitor, has the world’s highest resolution – viz.1800×1440 at a max 115KHz (and a fairly normal 25dpi), with anti-glare, Invar shadow mask and high contrast screen. And the display can be modified with 20 different adjustments from pincushion to moiré. List price is 1600 and your local discounter should have it now at a more interesting figure.

Safety for evermore: Ai Solutions has a software solution for the dreaded Construction (Design and Management) regulations including all the forms and bumf and reporting which this frightening bit of legislation demands. Essential for most interior designers and, maybe, exhibition designers, as architects and the like are now held criminally responsible for any damage their designs cause – unto eternity, it seems. And yes, criminally. The main result so far seems to be the setting up of a new safety inspection profession. Ai’s CDM Toolkit is demonstrated on a CD-ROM from the company at 01525 85 00 80.

Director kill kill kill? For a while there was a buzz about the potential of mTropolis – a whizzy new authoring app, death of Director, very encouraging noises and all that – but weird stuff about the actual price, about which they seem to still be coy. Now after grumbles of the sort you expect with version 1.0, here is version 1.1 which is Network-aware. Can’t say much about it because the CD demo (totally useless for an evaluation anyway) promised to leave stray files all over the hard disk. Still, ask the mTrop would-be lords of Authorware Universe about it all on 0181-288 9994.

More direction: The other Net-aware Director-killer is Scitex’s Clickworks which will cost around 1100 in Europe and you can probably get more info about it from www.scitex.com/ pitango and distributor Principal. All we can tell you is that Scitex seems to think it’s fantastic.

Intelligent apps: Invention Machine Corporation claims that Invention Machine Lab is “software that invents”. Does it work? Dunno. Next Step Associates is flogging it here but shyly doesn’t tell us where they can be contacted. US price is $1500 – check to see if that number also refers to pounds sterling at Arrow PR on 01344 486 000.