Brand: MacNews

A new patch is available for the Mac OS X version of id Software’s popular game, Quake III Arena. Quake III Arena 1.29f Beta contains a whole host of changes including new pro maps; new network code; a new auto-update system; new rail, rocket, plasma and lightning effects; and new cheating counter measures. A Mac OS Classic version is not yet available. [25.2MB]

Extensis has released an update to Preflight Pro. Version 2.2 has updated Illustrator support to accurately inspect version 8 and 9 .ai and EPS files and modified PDF support to essentially match Preflight Online. Preflight is designed to save prepress professionals time, money and materials by inspecting documents and correcting problems to ensure they are error-free prior to printing.

Formerly a MetaCreations product, Eovia today released Carrara Studio 1.1. Carrara Studio is a 3D solution for modeling, animation, rendering, and special effects. Carrara Studio enables full real time scene manipulation and high-quality 3D rendering.

MacGIMP, which has managed to get GIMP running under Mac OS X with X Windows, has started working on running the application as a native (Cocoa) Mac OS X application. GIMP is a powerful, free graphics editor that’s very popular among Linux users. Additionally, MacGIMP will begin shipping CDs with a simple installer for running GIMP under OS X later this month. The pre-order price is US$19.95, $5 off the retail price.

Toshiba today announced the PDR-M81 digital camera, which boasts a 4.2 megapixel CCD (2400×1600 resolution) with a 2.8x optical zoom and 2.2x digital zoom. The camera will be demonstrated at PC Expo next week and is slated to ship in July for under US$1,000 and will include an 8MB SmartMedia card. Sony last week announced its new 4 megapixel camera, the CyberShot DSC-S85, which will ship in August.