With last week’s release of the Power Mac G4 and the Apple Cinema Display, Apple generated serious techno-lust in the Macintosh community. This week we look at the specs and the few annoying aspects of the Power Mac G4. Matt Neuburg also weighs in with a Tools We Use column on Menuette, which replaces menu names with icons, and we cover releases of GraphicConverter 3.7, MacTuner 2.1, SoundJam 1.1, Adobe InDesign, and LetterRip Pro 3.0.6.
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GraphicConverter 3.7 Adds Features and Fixes -- Mac users looking for a Swiss Army Knife of graphics programs can download GraphicConverter 3.7, an update to Lemke Software's tool for viewing nearly 120 graphic file formats
MacTuner Update Simplifies Worldwide Listening -- Trexar Technologies has released MacTuner 2.1, adding performance and interface improvements to its utility for connecting to radio and television stations over the Internet
SoundJam 1.1 Adds G4 Support -- Casady & Greene has released SoundJam 1.1, a free update to their $40 MP3 player and encoder. The primary improvement to SoundJam 1.1 is support for the new Power Mac G4's Velocity Engine (previously known as AltiVec)
Adobe Ships InDesign -- Adobe is shipping InDesign, its next-generation design software that replaces the aging PageMaker as the company's flagship page layout program
Fog City Releases LetterRip Pro 3.0.6 -- Fog City Software has released LetterRip Pro 3.0.6, a free update to the company's simple yet powerful mailing list management software (see "Going Pro with LetterRip Pro" in TidBITS-473)
Applications these days seem to sport more and more menus, and the menubar is becoming increasingly crowded thanks to the new wider Application menu title, the keyboard menu icon, and the clock, not to mention third-party icons such as OneClick, OSA Menu, StuffIt's Magic Menu, Conflict Catcher, and Timbuktu Pro
Apple's announcement of the Power Mac G4 at last week's Seybold San Francisco 99 took many by surprise - after all, the blue and white Power Mac G3 had been out for only nine months and rumors put more faith in the possibility of an enhanced iMac