Year: 2001

Summary.Net has posted Summary Pro 2.0.2, their industrial strength Web log analysis application for Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X. This update offers a host of bug fixes and a few minor new features. A free trial version is also available.

Electric Rain, Inc. has announced the release of Swift 3D Version 2.0, a new version of its Mac and PC software that allows users to design and render 3D scenes to the Macromedia Flash (SWF) file format, as well as Adobe Illustrator, EPS, and SVG. Improvements have been made in both modeling and rendering, including new extrusion and lathe editors, PostScript font support, targeted cameras and lights, shadow rendering, specular highlights, and up to 50 times faster rendering.

Adobe has posted SVG Viewer 3.0RC1, the latest version of the Web browser plug-in for viewing Adobe’s Scalable Vector Graphics format. The plug-in is available for both Mac OS 8.6/9 and Mac OS X 10.1. Among the features of version 3.0 are more elements, CSS properties, DOM support, and performance improvements.

VersionTracker notes that Canon has posted PowerShot 3.8.0, an update to its Photoshop-compatible plug-in for its EOS D30, PowerShot Pro 90 IS, G1, S20, S100, Pro70, A50, A5, and A5 Zoom digital cameras. The new version also apparently adds support for the G2 camera; other changes are unknown.

An Apple Solutions article features Dr. Michael Love of Cornell University who has ported PyMOL, an open-source research tool for protein crystallography, to Mac OS X. Love, a long-time fan of the Mac, was able to set up a Power Mac G4 cluster solution that “runs fast or faster than on anything else,” complete with the ease and elegance of a Mac. Love is also leading the way at developing and porting other scientific applications to Mac OS X.