As I was saying yesterday, more and more producers update their products these days to ensure full Leopard compatibility and take full advantage of the features offered by it. Today, Adobe released Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac, a major update to their notorious photo editing application for beginners and intermediate users.


While other producers call "major updates" new versions that only come with some fixes and no new features, Adobe takes things seriously, since they added a pack of interesting new features to Photoshop Elements 6, such as the new Group Merge Tool, which allows you to select best facial expressions and body language from a couple of shots and combine them into a master image.

Additional features of this new Photoshop Elements release provide 3 editing modes, according to the user's skills - for example, the new Guided Edit mode shows beginners various image improvement steps, helping them to master program's features faster.

According to John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, "In this release, we've focused on going beyond the basics to make everyday and advanced tasks even easier to achieve. Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh allows people to organize and find photos quickly, unleash powerful editing tricks without any heavy lifting, and creatively share photos that give them all the bragging rights."

The product can be preordered on its Adobe.com official page, and will be shown at the MacWorld Expo in a few days, of course. The software will start being shipped early in the second quarter of the year for $90, and shipping is free for orders placed before the 24th of March.

After Leopard was released, a lot of Mac applications needed updates to ensure full compatibility, and various software producers still keep updating their products to achieve this goal. Cheetah3D just got its latest update that improves compatibility with the latest OS from Apple, so I thought it would be nice to tell you about this, so here we go...


If this name sounds new to you, then I should tell you that Cheetah3D is a computer graphics program that allows you to create, animate and render 3D models, written in Cocoa for the Mac OS X only. While it is aimed at beginners and amateurs, the results it can achieve don't look bad at all, as you can see in the picture above, but don't expect to find out that next Shrek movie is going to be rendered using this program...

The latest update to Cheetah3D brings the current version number up to 4.4, and this is a free update for all registered users of any 4.x release. Minimum system requirements are Mac OS X 10.4.x, a G3/G4/G5/Intel processor, 512 MB of system memory and at least 16 MB of video memory.

A single user version costs $129, but you can try it before you buy it as well. All you have to do is grab your free trial version from here and start to unleash some 3D magic on your Mac with Cheetah3D!

Without too much noise, NiXPS released version 2.0 of their XPS viewing & editing applications, called simply View and Edit. Since they are also available for the Mac platform, it's my pleasure to inform you that, if you need to use documents saved in Microsoft's XPS format on your Apple computer, these two options can be added to the list...

First of all, NiXPS View 2.0 for Mac is a pretty simple program, allowing you to view, print and search XPS documents. You can easily browse XPS files, using the table of contents or a thumbnail view to flip through the existing pages. Priced at $100, View 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and a free trial can be downloaded from here.

At last, the Edit 2.0 software, as NiXPS' flagship product, can take care of four main tasks - document manipulation, object editing, text editing, and variable data handling. Its features include data merge and extraction capabilities, conversion to PDF, as well as the ability to create personalized emails and other documents using existing XPS files. Unfortunately, its price matches its features, so you'll have to spend no less than $400 to take full advantage of them, but a free trial is also available here. System requirements are the same as for View 2.0, so if you need to edit XPS files too, you can jump over that one and grab Edit 2.0 first.

If you're using a Mac, the options for instant messaging are pretty limited, and Adium was always one of the best choices for using multiple protocols and a single application. With support for AIM, YM, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ and more, Adium got its latest version out about a day ago, bringing the current version number to 1.2.



Adium 1.0 was released back in September 2001, when the program was created by a college student called Adam Iser. That program got a few upgrades, up to version 1.6, but when the Adium team started rewriting the initial code, they renamed the program to "Adium X", and brought the version number down to 0.89.1...

Version 1.2, the one released this last weekend, comes with a long list of features and fixes, that can be found here. Leaving various updates and fixes aside, the best thing is the extended language support, with the next localizations being available: Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English (Australian), Finnish, French, French Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Adium's capabilities can be extended by the use of additional plugins, as it happens with every "serious" program, in my opinion. The last version requires OS X 10.4 or greater, and if you're using OS X 10.3.9, you'll have to stick with Adium 1.0.6, or the old Adium 0.89.1, if you don't want to upgrade your OS X 10.2 yet.

Finally, if you want to download Adium 1.2, you can do it by clicking here. Since I didn't mention it yet, I will also add that this program is completely free to download and use, being released under the GNU General Public License.

The BitTorrent file transfer protocol is no longer a tabu subject, because in the last year, more and more software producers or web services providers took the steps required to turn their products into something that you wouldn't mind to know that your family is using. Anyway, about two days ago, we just got a brand new application for downloading files using the BitTorrent protocol, and since it works as a charm on Macs too, I have to tell you more about it...


The Mac OS X version of the Transmission software has a Leopard-like look and features group labeling, filtering and sorting, statistics and the ability to sort torrents by total activity, as well as the must-have feature which allows you to assign bandwidth as you need.

The main goal of this program is to help you download files as soon as possible, with as little influence on your current activities as you can get. Peers that send corrupted data are automatically banned, the Peer Exchange feature is built in, and everything is done in the background, as I was just saying.

The Mac version of Transmission requires Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, and comes as a Universal Binary file which can be downloaded for free from here.