Pakk99

Azohko, Marathon IS a classic game, and considered by many to be one of the best games of all time.

I'd like to amend my previous post...iWork's interface and integration with the rest of the OS is light years ahead of Office. Excel is still more powerful overall than Numbers, and Word is a more complete word processor than Pages. That said, Keynote makes PowerPoint '07 look archaic, even with Escher (Microsoft's latest less-than-stellar attempt at a quality rendering engine), and Pages is a significantly better page layout program than Word 07 (even with Word's new page layout features). Of course, I judge the entire suite as a professional creative director and freelance graphic designer, and not as an accountant or business manager. Now if iWork '08 would just play a little nicer with Office.

To Mikey P, I actually own a copy of iWork '08 (Mac) as well as Office '07 (PC), and frankly pal, iWork is light years ahead of the M$'s dinosaur. M$ has even gone so far as trying to copy iWork 06's interface and basic organization. Numbers is so much more efficient a program than Excel and allows our company to store our data, our way, in a significantly more intelligent arrangement than Excel. Further, Power Point has never even come close to matching Keynote for ease of use, integration with other applications, and quality of output...even in Office 07. And Pages already offers an attractive and equally useful alternative to Word. So much so, that we're dropping all of our copies of Office 07 on eBay later this week. Bye, bye M$. If iWork is the 80's, Office is the 70s.

Returning to the original discussion, I'm an independent film director, and I prefer the Shake/FCP/Cinema Tools route. Unlike MikeJ, I find the integration between these three applications to be absolutely unparalleled by anything in the Adobe bundle, at least in terms of real-world workflow. Granted, Shake isn't part of Final Cut Studio, but it costs half that of After Effects for 10x the power. My EDL is preserved flawlessly as we move from rough cut to color correction to effects editing to compositing to picture lock to inline cut. Toss in built-in integration with Xgrid, and you have one hell of an editing solution.

By the way, FCP and Premiere Pro are not DAWs, even though some people can't seem to get it through their heads that audio editing should be handled in, off all things, an audio editor. The tools in both of these programs are less than adequate for truly quality sound work. And Audition is at best a mediocre audio editor...not that Soundtrack is any better. If you are really concerned about audio production, spend a little money on a real DAW.

Oh, and XUL is a sloppy mess.

The old days? Sorry Charlie, but you need to step outside of the open source community for a few seconds. The fact of the matter is that the majority of consumers want products that let them do what they want to do, easily. As such, "synergetic" products are the growth edge of product development, and not just in the software community. Swiss Army Knife-type products, like Songbird, don't and won't attract most consumers. Period. Why download a bloated, slow, confusing product that makes me shop for my music, when I can download iTunes and buy almost any music I want at better quality than any other online music service out there? You can call it choice if you want, but most consumers have neither the time nor the interest to comparison shop for a song. Especially not when there's an easier (and significantly better) alternative out there.