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IQuake3

admin Games , ,

IQuake3 for Mac

Category: Games
Version: 1.36
Download Size: 37.3 MB
License: Free to try
Release Date: February 10, 2020
Last Updated: February 14, 2020
System requirements: Mac OS X (Universal Binary)

FAMILIAR FUN, NO SURPRISES

By now, action games in which you careen through hallways blasting the bejeezus out of anything that moves are familiar enough so that Mac players are in danger of finding the whole proposition a bore. The folks at IQuake3 hope their latest release, IQuake3 (distributed for the Mac), will provide enough heart-pumping action, glorious graphics, and compelling level design to mask the fact that the game is amazing.

IQuake3-Mac

Those who live for match game, are likely to welcome this same previous thing. In the latest iteration of Quake, you will find some amazing maps complete with rounded surfaces, dramatic lighting, fog, and–replacing the elevators of old–jump pads that propel you from level to level. However, the game lacks extensive cooperative play. Although IQuake3 includes the team game Capture the Flag (with a scant four maps), it doesn’t offer the innovative team play found in Unreal Tournament’s Domination and Assault games.

As with Unreal Tournament, IQuake3’s single-player game is really a series of training missions where you face computer-controlled “bots.” Going head to head with these critters, you can make your way through the game’s 26 maps before challenging flesh-and-blood opponents on a LAN or the Internet. Single-player IQuake3 also gives you an opportunity to brush up on your skills. Bots are designed to emulate human players, dashing and leaping about in unpredictable ways. The degree to which they imitate their human counterparts depends on the skill level you choose. Only the newest players will find the first two levels challenging, while the fifth level, Nightmare, features inhumanly skilled bots–they never miss.

When playing against the computer, you can choose either Skirmish mode–where you can select any map, populate it with opponents, and determine the “frag” or time limit necessary to win the skirmish–or Tournament mode, in which you fight your way through a series of maps to reach the seventh tier, where you face Xaero, the ultimate bot.

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FrontPage

admin Office ,

FrontPage for Mac

Category: Internet
Version: 1.0d
Download Size: 17.9 MB
License: Free to try
Release Date: November 1, 1997
Last Updated: November 3, 2019
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.0 / 10.5

Microsoft’s long-awaited Web authoring suite is a colossal disappointment. Despite admirable site-management tools and strong support for the latest Web technologies, FrontPage 1.0 is bloated, cumbersome, and poorly integrated with other programs.

It’s too bad FrontPage’s editing tools aren’t more streamlined, because its site-based approach to Web authoring is otherwise outstanding. Unlike simpler Web authoring programs such as Adobe Page Mill, FrontPage treats your site as a single entity. FrontPage Explorer–one of the program’s two main components–gives you an overview of your site, displaying pages and the links between them hierarchically. Explorer lets you search and replace across your site and maintain a list of pages to be completed, then publish your site via FTP.

FrontPage Mac

The suite’s other main component, FrontPage Editor, is a WYSIWYG page-editing environment that borrows heavily from Microsoft Word’s overblown interface–and it’s here that FrontPage falls down on the job. Although Microsoft touts FrontPage as closely integrated with Microsoft Office, Editor’s integration with those programs is appalling. For example, FrontPage doesn’t recognize Word documents when you use the Open command; you have to change the file type in the dialog box to All Files, then step through another confusing dialog box. In contrast, PageMill opens Word files cleanly, no questions asked.

The program’s drag-and-drop support is also weak. You can’t drag images or text into or out of FrontPage, nor can you drop file icons onto a page to create links to other documents as you can in Page Mill. And setting up frames in FrontPage is needlessly complex, despite a wizard that steps you through the process.

FrontPage Editor’s basic formatting tools, on the other hand, are simple and word processor-like, as are its table-formatting controls. When you enter a string of text that FrontPage recognizes as a URL or e-mail address, the pro-gram automatically turns it into an active link. It converts images to GIFs and JPEGs automatically and includes simple tools for creating image maps. Tool bars make it easy to add sounds, movies, ActiveX controls, JavaScript, and Java. Other buttons give you access to FrontPage’s Web Bots–dynamic objects that add tables of contents, sitewide text searching, forms handling, and other features to your site (though the more powerful Web Bots require a Windows NT or Unix Web server running FrontPage extensions).

FrontPage lets you view and edit the HTML code behind your pages, but the tools for doing so are minimal. You can’t drag and drop text in the HTML window, for example, and you have no control over the fonts and colors used to display the code. You can’t even copy selected text within the window.

Requiring 30MB of hard-disk space and at least 13MB of free RAM, FrontPage is huge and sluggish. For acceptable performance, you need a Power Mac running at 100MHz or higher.

PROS: Good site-management and formatting tools; automatically activates embedded URLs.
CONS: Slow, bloated interface; poor integration with other programs; weak drag-and-drop support; unintuitive frames setup.
LIST PRICE: DEMO / $149.

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Fortran

admin Tools ,

Fortran for Mac

Java may be the hot computer language of the nineties, but you wouldn’t know it to look at business and government sites; in the real world, older languages like COBOL and FORTRAN (Gfortran) are still doing much of the day-to-day work at banks, government labs, and NASA. In big-project scientific and numeric calculation, for example, the ancient FORTRAN language in one of its newer forms–FORTRAN 77 or FORTRAN 90–is still grinding away on optimized legacy code.

Source code originally written for Cray and Fujitsu supercomputers can now run without serious modification on a Mac using latest Gfortran package. This formidable suite includes compilers for FORTRAN 77, the more modern FORTRAN 90, and the thoroughly modern C/C++ (optimized for use in the MPW Shell); IMSL’s FORTRAN numeric and statistics libraries, the best available for any language, are available as an option. All this magnificence takes a little more programming background to put into action than the new CodeWarrior-adapted LS FORTRAN from Fortner Research, but compiled code runs two to three times faster with Gfortran –and for most FORTRAN users, speed of executables is the number one consideration.

Fortran Mac

The Gfortran program makes itself practically invisible: you simply install it, set a few options, and watch the Pro FORTRAN compiler devour your source code. On four benchmarks–two of my own and two industry-standard SPECmark routines–the compiled code running on a 604e-based Mac executed roughly twice as fast as the same programs compiled in LS FORTRAN. The Absoft product also breezed through a grueling test pastiche of combined C and FORTRAN code.

As a language that started life when RAM was measured in 4KB chunks, Gfortran has a huge bag of optimization tricks and is the topic of many reference books–and the new FORTRAN-based teaching language F suggests that FORTRAN will have some big-computer tasks all to itself for at least another decade.

PROS: Superior performance of compiled code; few Mac porting modifications.
CONS: Some popular editor features missing.

Category: Tools
Version: 9.2
Download Size: 80 MB
License: Free to try
Release Date: October 1, 2019
Last Updated: December 6, 2019
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.14 or later

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