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50 Fast Final Cut Express Techniques
Tim Meehan Manufacturer: Wiley ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0764540912 |
Book Description
Customer Reviews:
50Fast Final Cut Express Techniques.......2006-08-15
Easy to use.......2006-07-14
Uncommonly creative!.......2003-10-08
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Pangea Software's Ultimate Game Programming Guide for Mac OS X
Brian Greenstone Manufacturer: Pangea Software, Inc. ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0976150506 |
Book Description
Brian Greenstone, the developer who programmed Nanosaur, Bugdom, Cro-Mag Rally, Enigmo, Otto Matic, etc. reveals his Mac programming secrets in this indispensable book. The book covers all of the nuances dealing with various Mac OS technologies such as the HID Manager, OpenGL, OpenAL, Core Graphics, Rendezvous, Quicktime, and more. Readers will also learn how to write a plug-in for Maya, do stereo 3D rendering, networking, AltiVec optimizations, and even how to copy-protect their games. For developers interested in self-publishing their games, there is an entire chapter dedicated to marketing and sales strategies. Never before has so much critical Mac game programming information been available in a single book.The companion CD that comes with the book contains Xcode sample projects including a fully functional Maya file exporter, networking code, Vertex Array Range acceleration, threading, and a whole lot more! All sample projects are written in C, and the book is designed for intermediate to advanced programmers.
Customer Reviews:
Still a good gem of a book, and not out-of-date.......2007-06-20
Good introduction to mac game programming, but..........2007-06-18
A great book, but missing 31 pages!.......2007-05-01
Straight to the point.......2005-06-29
Great resource, but..........2004-11-12
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Mac Game Programming (Premier Press Game Development Series)
Mark Szymczyk Manufacturer: Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1931841187 |
Book Description
Are you an avid Mac fan, itching to try your hand at game development on your Mac? If you have a working knowledge of programming, this book is the guide you've been searching for. Covering the components that make up a game and teaching you to program these components for use on your Macintosh, you will work your way through the development of a complete game. Beginning with the basics for less experienced programmers, this book quickly moves into more advanced topics. With detailed information on everything from graphics and sound to physic and artificial intelligence, Mac Game Programming covers everything that you need to know as you create your first game on your Mac.Customer Reviews:
awful, awful, awful.......2003-11-17
A good start.......2003-09-29
Frustrating.......2003-07-14
This book is poorly organized, the author jumps around at seemingly random without any clearly defined goals in any of the chapters that I've read (im about half through) He has pages and pages dedicated to the theorys of how and why Apple chose to do this or that, but barely a snippet of how to actually accomplish anything. When the author does attempt to show you something, he makes grand assumptions about what you already know. Example : in chapter 4 he decides to show you "creating a window", but he only shows half of the process he just mentions offhandedly that you will need resedit or resourcer to actually create the window that he has just shown you how to draw. To the author : if the person reading your book does not know how to "create a window", then why do you assume that they know anything in the world at all about resedit? You didnt even include it on the CDROM, or at least you could have provided information about where to get it!
Thats just a single rant of mine about this book, but the half explanations and lack of follow-through here carries on for chapter after chapter. Frustrating.
I am not new to Mac programming, in fact I've written several proprietary programs for my business, have been working on a game as a hobby, and I am nearly lost reading this mess. I learned graphics on the Mac with the EXCELLENT book "Secrets of the Mac game programming gurus". Sadly that book is no longer published and unfortunately alot of the quickdraw stuff taught in that book is not supported in OSX carbon. But if you could find "Gurus" and another book on carbon programming, you'd be far better off than wasting your time with this mess.
Good Book.......2003-06-24
Very uneven, badly edited.......2003-02-03
The intended audience seems inconstant - a collision detection subroutine (will either corner of this edge of the square hit the object if we move it?) is repeated 4 times, one for each direction, with identical supporting text each time. Seems like this could be left as an exercise for the reader. But I should "create a window for my application in the resourcer." This is to describe in excruciating detail how to unlock the driver's door, then the passenger's door, and then the trunk; oh, and if you get a flat tire, just change it.
There are strange problems with the diagrams - they appear to have been delivered correctly, but they show up in the book with chunks missing or displaced. Correct versions are available on the publisher's and author's web-sites, but it shows a lack of concern for correctness on the part of the publisher and throws the accuracy of every diagram into question.
The same is true for a lot of the code snippets. (And the book cannot stand on its own without the included CD.) There are a lot of syntactical typos, the indentation is frequently just wrong - something I'm inclined to also blame on the editors. It feels like they were more interested in getting the book out the door than getting it out the door correctly. The code provided is frequently inelegant - there are memory leaks, multiple calls to functions whose parameters and return values won't have changed. And yes, maybe they're side-effecting functions and this is what you have to do when you're using InputSprocket - but tell me that, don't make me wonder.
There's a lot of information here - much of it good and helpful. But it's sparse and hard-won. I'm perfectly happy to sit and puzzle over something I just don't get, as long as I'm sure it's just me not getting it. It's frustrating when there are so many inaccuracies ('cause sure, everyone makes a typo or two) that I can no longer trust that process.
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Making Movies, Photos, Music & DVDs on Your Mac: Using Apple's Digital Hub
Jesse Feiler Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0072225548 |
Book Description
Get full coverage of Apple's hot new suite of fun, creative tools for making movies, photos, dvds and custom music in one volume! Now you can see how easy it is to make your own customized digital creations using iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, and iTunes with help from this detailed, results-oriented guide.Customer Reviews:
Bad choice.......2003-11-28
mymac.com book review:.......2002-10-24
Making Movies, Photos, Music and DVDs on Your Mac
By Jesse Feiler
Publisher: McGraw Hill/ Osborne
SBN: 0072225548
...
Imagine for a moment that you have a spiffy new iMac and further suppose that you want to use it to make all kinds of multimedia. Heck if you have a newish Mac you know it comes pre loaded with iTunes for music, iPhoto for pictures, iMovie for making your own movies and iDVD for cramming that newly made movie on a DVD disc. Thatýs a lot of programs to take in all at once and if you have a new Mac you know that the manuals are nonexistent. So are you left running out to buy a book for each program? Maybe not, perhaps Jesse Feilerýs book "Making Movies, Photos, Music and DVDs on Your Mac" can answer your specific needs for a fraction of the price of four individual tomes and with a good deal more depth than an all-encompassing Mac reference.
The first problem with the "Making Movies, Photos, Music and DVDs on Your Mac" is the title. It might trick you. Jesse Feilerýs book is not about making music or photos on your Mac, itýs about organizing and manipulating said multimedia. I suppose that objection is a minor quibble, after all it is the stuff between the covers that counts. "Making Movies, Photos, Music and DVDs on Your Mac", from now on referred to as MMPMD, starts out fairly basic. On page five Jesse Feiler covers the importance of "thinking digital" noting that today's computers are digital. Computers (the kind Jesse is thinking of) have been digital since 1937 but other media has been heading steadily towards the land of 1 and 0ýs for the last few years. The progression of media to the digital realm is what makes the Mac a digital hub and what makes MMPMD worth reading as long as you ignore anything that doesnýt pertain directly to computers or digital equipment.
Just what am I talking about? An example resides on page 21 where Jesse Feiler is chatting about visual perception. Sure this topic may seem a bit extraneous to some (and I would agree) but if youýre going to jam this kind of information in you should at least get it right. After noting that you need your brain to see (who knew?) we are treated to the following:
"Light, like all other electromagnetic radiation, consists of waves. All electromagnetic waves behave in the same way. This is why sound, light, infrared, X-rays, and gamma rays all exhibit similar behavior"
This is not some quibble about wave/photon duality or some other obscure quantum mechanical complaint my beef is a bit more basic: Just when did sound become an electromagnetic wave? Itýs been a couple of years since my class in classical mechanics but way back in ý97 science was pretty sure that sound waves were mechanical.
Once we get the first chapter out of the way we can begin to actually eye the book for the intended purpose of using our Mac to the fullest in the increasingly digital world. So how do the remaining 24 chapters hold up? Generally pretty well, the prose is easily understandable and the book is full of useful iMovie tips I havenýt seen elsewhere. The iPhoto information is quite thorough and useful and the iTunes chapters are more than passable. The last few chapters are "case studies" which are fairly useful to help the reader realize just what the "hub" can do.
While mostly solid (say 85%) MMPMD also has more than itýs fair share of "why the hell is this here?" spots where you are left wondering what the point was of the last few pages. A prime example of this can be found in the chapter on Applescript. The reader is treated to a couple pages full of Applescript terms and lines of Applescript code but not enough info to write a useful Applescript. The point of the chapter seems to involve a wish to get the reader to learn Applescript elsewhere and noting that there are quite a few useful downloadable scripts. My question remains: why did I wade through all that Applescript stuff just to find out I need to get a different book to actually write an Applescript?
Bottom Line: When MMPMD is going well itýs full of tricks and solid tips. When MMPMD is going bad it can be quite a time waster. My advice to those who buy this book: Make frequent use of the index to avoid the tangential information scattered throughout MMPMD.
MacMice Rating: 2 out of 5
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Chris Seibold
A STAR IS BORN!.......2002-09-26
Great book!.......2002-09-10
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Photoshop 4 for Macs for Dummies
Deke McClelland , and Julie Adair King Manufacturer: For Dummies ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 0764500392 |
Amazon.com
If you're brand new to image editing and you've got a copy of Photoshop that you're trying desperately to understand, you should check out this book. It introduces you to the basic concepts of editing and acquiring images; understanding and navigating the Photoshop interface; and learning about resolution, sizing, and printing issues. Various file formats, including JPEG and GIF, the standards for Web images, are also discussed. Photoshop 4 for Macs for Dummies teaches you how to use Photoshop's paint, drawing, and selection tools, and the last section features an introduction to layers, color options, and text effects. Several four-color pages show Photoshop images and tell a bit about the editing techniques the artists used. It's hard to write an introductory book for such complex software, but these writers have done it. They're funny too, which helps if you're particularly daunted by the prospect of learning Photoshop. If you're using a Windows operating system, check out Photoshop 4 for Windows for Dummies.Book Description
Now that the graphics-intensive World Wide Web has taken the world by storm, Adobe Photoshop (long the premier image-editing application of the print world) has never been more popular -- or more necessary. Now, Adobe Photoshop is out in a new version, with enhanced layering and text-editing controls, and so is the book that hundreds of thousands of Photoshop users have turned to again and again for easy-to-understand, practical advice. In Photoshop 4 for Macs For Dummies, 2nd Edition, best-selling author and premier Photoshop guru Deke McClelland reveals his own techniques for quick and creative image editing (including "cleaning up" rough and distorted images, creating new images, enhancing and distorting old images, and creative ways of using images after they1ve been created), along with specific tips that Photoshop veterans can use to take advantage of the software's new features. In this book, Photoshop pros can discover tricks they can try out right away, while Photoshop novices can find ready-to-use instructions so that they can become productive quickly.Customer Reviews:
A high school book ( un libro para jóvenes de secundaria).......1998-03-29
A great resource.......1997-10-23
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Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus
Jamie McCornack , and Ingemar Ragnemalm Manufacturer: Hayden Books ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1568301839 |
Customer Reviews:
If you want to code Games on the Mac, you need this book........1999-05-01
The writing is excellent (you can read this book like a novel, rather than just use it as a reference), and the topics covered are just what a beginning or slightly seasoned programmer are looking for - from sprite blitting routines that blow away what the toolbox has to offer, to multi-channel audio tips, to networking and AI development, and a great chapter on porting from Windows.
I cannot stress highly enough how much help this book is to a MacOS game programmer.
Excellent book for learning game programming on the Mac........1999-01-01
I have taken two classes on C++ programming (for UNIX) and I had virtually no experience programming for the Mac. This book covers absolutely anything you want to know about making games; from an excellent chapter on networking (written by Stuart Chesire, creator of Bolo) to an even more impressive chapter on PowerPC optimization. It covers basic sprite animation, advanced sprite animation, and it also has a great chapter on audio... this is the MUST GET Mac game programming book.
Above all this, it is an absolute joy to read. It contains interviews with other big names in the mac industry - for instance, Jason Jones of Bungie - and gets their tips and tricks for making killer games.
This is one of those books that you will consult every day in the development of a mac game.
Excellent Mac programming reference.......1997-02-01
One of its strengths is that it's written by experts in their field. The chapter on porting games from other platforms, for example, was written by people who have ported many popular games to the Macintosh platform. Thirteen authors are listed in the book, each covering topics they know well.
Modern topics, such as QuickDraw 3D and optimizing code for PowerPC are covered. Enjoyable reading and an excellent reference. CD-ROM included.
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Adobe InDesign for the Mac (Mac/Graphics)
Carla Rose Manufacturer: Premier Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0761530290 Release Date: 2000-12-21 |
Book Description
If PageMaker was the desktop publishing program for the 80s and 90s, InDesign is most definitely the desktop publishing program for the next millennium. It's not a PageMaker upgrade, however. InDesign has been written from the ground up in C++ and combines the best features of PageMaker, Quark, and VenturaPublisher. InDesign is fast, intuitive, and versatile. And so is this book! Adobe InDesign for the Mac is the only one of its kind that really integrates real-life design issues and problems. The Prima book is a user-friendly, practical guide to learning the basics of InDesign. It melds the theory of design principles with explanations of how the product works. This book tackles real-life problems of layout professionals and helps you keep up with changes in the field of design.
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Cool Mac Animation
Sean Wagstaff Manufacturer: Hayden Books ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 1568300689 |
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Mac De Design: Makku Do Dezain (Mac de Design)
Manufacturer: Books Nippan ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 4900781134 |
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Mac OS X and the Digital Lifestyle (Mac/Graphics)
Brad Miser Manufacturer: Muska & Lipman/Premier-Trade ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 1931841748 |
Book Description
As a dedicated Mac user, you have experienced the power that applications like iMovie, iDVD, and iTunes can give you over your digital media. Ever wonder what you could do if you combined these tools with QuickTime, iPhoto, and iTools? The result is a complete digital lifestyle that allows you to master your digital domain. Mac OS X and the Digital Lifestyle gives you the skills you need to combine each of these powerful applications to create a digital media studio. Begin by touring the individual applications as you master the fine points of each tool. Then the real fun begins as you partner the tools to complete projects such as creating soundtrack CDs and adding video and sound from a movie or television show to your iMovie projects. Put the finishing touches on your projects by learning how to publish your digital media in a variety of formats including videotape, CD, or DVD.Customer Reviews:
David Weeks MyMac.com Book Review.......2002-10-24
Several years' back, Steve Jobs announced the "digital lifestyle." I'm not sure if using a Mac and a digital camera or camcorder qualifies you to live the "digital lifestyle," but if it does, then Brad Miser is going to tell you how to live it. In fact, his book tells you how to live the digital lifestyle "a la vida loca."
There are plenty of good books focusing on iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, and iDVD (the so-called "iApps.") Nevertheless, this is the first book to focus on the integration between the iApps. Miser does not tell you just how to use iMovie, iTunes, and iPhoto; he tells you how to use them all together to create a seamless digital production. This focus on integration, and using the strong points of each application is what sets Mac OS X and the Digital Lifestyle apart from books that simply tell you how to use one iApp.
Before reading Mac OS X and the Digital Lifestyle, I felt reasonably conversant with the fundamental of iMovie, iTunes, and iPhoto. (I have never paid attention to iDVD as neither of my Macs have a SuperDrive.) I could fool around with the various programs, and get some moderately interesting results. But I always felt I was never taking best advantage of the programs as a suite of applications.
Three pages into Mac OS X and the Digital Lifestyle, I knew this book was something special.
Using QuickTime Pro as a focal point, Miser lays out the graphics underpinnings of the iApps. The ability to import and export scads of file formats makes QuickTime Pro and especially iMovie extra-flexible. You learn that you can get almost any external file into your production, and how to best import it.
iTunes gets attention next, then iPhoto and iMovie. Each chapter, while not as comprehensive as specialized books on each iApp, gives plenty of detail. I especially appreciated tips relating each program to its siblings; how best to format an export from iTunes to get it into iMovie, for example.
After each member of the iApp suite has had its' turn, Miser gets to what is the best part of the book. He presents logical strategies for creating digital productions. These are not cookie-cutter "step 1, step 2" checklists that some beginner-level books use. Miser talks fundamentals, and uses general principles to help you learn how to use the iApps together to best effect. While each one has strengths and weaknesses, Miser shows you how to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
If you think I like this book, then think again.
I LOVED this book. It is well written, with easy-on-the-eyes formatting (less common than you may think), and it weighs less than 5 pounds. But the best part of reading Mac OS X and the Digital Lifestyle was the constant feeling I had of "so THAT is the best way to do that effect," or "jeez, I was wasting a lot of time doing it my way."
Rather than list all the chapter titles, I'll simply say you will learn all you need to know to use your digital camera, camcorder, CD/DVD burner with your Mac if buy and read Mac OS X and the Digital Lifestyle.
This is a must-buy for anyone who wants to get more out of their digital hardware and the iApps that ship with their Macintosh.
MacMice Rating: 5 out of 5
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David Weeks
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