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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/56665
FEA
TURE
IWARDS, CONTINUED WORDS BY BILL TROOP
Welcome to Part 2 of the 2011 iWards. If there's a theme to this year's awards, it's
. Times
are tough, and we all need a break.
We're waiting for Apple
We're waiting. For Apple. To make. USB 3. Available on all Macs. No awards until you guys do it,
until
Thunderbolt peripherals become numerous and cheap. Our best guess is that Apple will have caved by the time you read this in mid-February. If not, you won't have much longer to wait. Without USB 3 your practical connectivity options are too limited. Apple knows that.
Wacom has the greatest pointer interface ever
As everyone who uses a Wacom tablet knows, it's miles better than a mouse or touchpad: faster, more accurate, and more comfortable. Wacom's most ambitious product is the Cintiq line, which combines a high resolution monitor and a tablet so you can work directly with the pen on the screen. I first experienced this remarkable way of working on a Compaq Concerto laptop from the early 1990s that had a Wacom tablet built behind the LCD. It is an amazing, intimate computer experience to be able to work so accurately, directly on the screen. Nothing beats it. Fast forward nearly 20 years. This year we award Wacom's remarkable Cintiq 24HD. At 24" diagonally, this widescreen interactive pen display has Wacom's largest screen area yet, and the screen quality is
high
indeed, with remarkable color gamut and stability and fantastic viewing angles. It's already being widely used by animators, game developers, and industrial designers. It is also a beautiful object to behold, and the build quality is among the highest we have ever seen. This is a stunning product.
Photo Geoff Johnson, Model Kayo Sakata (Jungle)
grace, art, beauty, and spunk, she incarnates the knife-edge tension between 21st and 20th century Japan. With his unerring eye for the significant and the sellable, Mark proves that great publishing can still work. This is one of the cultural success stories of the 21st century.
Another of MBP's surprises is Cultural Connectives by Rana Abou Rjeily. This book introduces the Arabic alphabet to Westerners. It's about the last thing in the world I would ever pick up. But the minute I started reading, I was enchanted. The author has enormous love for her subject, and the ability to transmute her sentiments into interesting prose. The book is not just a primer for the Arabic alphabet, it's a template for how to write a great teaching manual.
Civilization's Future, OCR and ABBYY
Mark Batty Books
Mark Batty is some kind of genius. Year after year, Mark Batty Publishing produces a large list of fabulous yet affordable books devoted to the latest and greatest in the graphic arts. Everything from Tim Ahrens's Size-specific Adjustments to Type Designs, to Kicks Japan by Manani Okazaki and Geoff Johnson, which tells you what kind of sneaker you ought to be wearing — or designing. Our illustration shows one of the best images from Kicks, a truly modern geisha, modelled by the astonishingly talented Kayo Sakata. With
Once, a long time ago, OCR (optical character recognition) was ruled by Omnipage, a frustrating program that was difficult to use on any platform. It still is, despite a lot of criticism and some real improvements. Meanwhile, Russian company ABBYY has snuck up from behind to provide the best OCR program on either platform with its
flagship FineReader program. Like speech recognition, OCR is always getting better, and FineReader is today's state of the art. FineReader was recently chosen as best OCR software on the Mac by Macworld UK and on Windows by Ed Mendelson, the world's most trustworthy computer journalist, at PC Magazine. In addition, we think ABBYY merits a special award for its participation in the IMPACT project