Macintosh Books

This Cd uses a familiar children's T.V. show to teach shapes, alphabet, colors, phonics, as well as how to use the mouse. Two-Three years is not too early to use. Correct answers form words that are used to make "madlib" types stories in their own virtual book.

My review is simply information about this learning game. JoAnn Dodson of Plano, Texas ., who describes herself as a "Preschool Computer Lab Teacher", under "Blue's Clues ABC Time Activities by Humongous Entertainment", which I think is very much worth reading regarding her success or lack of it with different aged preschool children. On her reviews page she has provided feedback regarding several preschool computer learning games and has indicated her success or lack of such in using different computer learning games.

What I'm trying to do in this article is just to give you more information about the game itself. I found helpful explanations in the booklet which accompanied their game, and since I am not a good writer, I just want to let you know about this game, I will mostly quote from what they say about it.
"Blue and her friends greet you in Steve's Living Room."

Steve introduces you to a word book where you collect words to put into it. All together there are 6 different basic stories with different colored pages for each story. Each story has two blanks that you can fill in with the words that you have collected for that story by playing the other games. You can collect up to 10 words for each story and you can put any of these words on either or both blanks. Then Blue will draw a picture for the story you have written filling in these two blanks. As you can put any of these words anywhere in the story, you don't have to actually have to read the story to place them. Steve will read the story for you after Blue has drawn the picture. To earn a word for the word book you have to have successfully played a game right for each letter of the 3 to 4 letter words that you accumulate. Which gives your child the motivation to play the games a total of 216 times in order to fill the book! That's a lot of fun practice! Actually, most of the games you only have to play once to get a letter, but with the mailbox you have to put three letters in 3 letters to get one letter in your word book word. In the Snackroom you only play the game once, but you have to get 2 letters right to finish one game. In slippery soap you have to guess 2 pictures representing 2 words to complete a rhyme and complete a game. So it is actually more playtime fun than that before the book is complete.

From Steve's Living Room you can click on the picture of...

Felt Friends - Word Puzzles
"Objective: to make words and pictures from letters and shapes. Skills:Letter and shape recognition, phonics and word formation."
First the player can warm up their pattern recognition by putting the "felt" patterns into the two to three parts of the picture which have the outline to put them in. Then they can put the three to four "felt" letters into their outlines. Then the word, which has been spelled out letter by letter as each letter is put in place is spelled out then sounded out and then spoken as a word.
"As the game becomes more challenging, there will be more pieces available than you need."
For all of these games, the "difficulty levels automatically adjust to meet each child's skill level."

"Shovel and Pail - Alphabet Maze
"Objective: To help Blue find Shovel and Pail by following an alphabet or sentence trail.
Skills: Alphabet sequencing, pre-spelling and letter identification."
There is the alphabet at the bottom of the page in its sequence so that the player can follow along in knowing which letter to look for next in the alphabet sequencing games. When each letter is clicked on its name is given. After clicking on all of the alphabet letters in the path, Blue follows the path again giving the name of each letter one at a time. If the player goes the wrong way, when (s)he realizes the mistake (s)he can back up one letter at a time until the right path can be followed again. Even in these mistakes there is learning done as these letter's name is given each time it is clicked.
"As the game becomes more challenging, the maze will become more complicated and you will spell words and make sentences to find Shovel and Pail." I have to admit, though, that I played the game 75 times, and while it became more complicated, I never got to the point where it began to have me spell words and makes sentences. As all the other parts of this game (except the mailbox) did do what it stated it would do as it became more challenging, I am sure that it will eventually happen with this as well, I just can't devote any more time to finding out about when. This is good, of course, because it gives the child ALOT of practice reviewing the alphabet in the process of learning it.

Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper - Snacktime
"Objective: To help Blue find snacks that begin with the specific letters and sounds.
Skills: Phonics, vocabulary and auditory discrimination.
They have 4 or 5 snacks on the table. They show a letter of the alphabet, let you know the sound of that letter, and then ask you to find the snack that begins with the same sound. You then can move it onto a plate. As you pass the cursor over each food Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper will tell you the name of the food so that you can decide if the food begins with the correct sound. "Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper will repeat the name of the letter, the sound they're looking for and then say the name of the food you selected. If the food you selected begins with the sound they are looking for, they'll tell you. If the sound does not match , you may try again. When the correct food is chosen, its name appears on the screen. When you have correctly selected two snacks, Blue's friends will enjoy the snacks at the snack table."
"As the game becomes more challenging, Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper will ask for snacks that begin with letter blends, like 'gr' as in 'grapes' ." An extra bonus is that most of the snacks they have are very healthy! Who knows what healthy snack your child might get interested in eating!

Jungle Picture - Safari Snapshots
"Objective: To help Blue photograph jungle animals and fill the Animal Alphabet Album.
Skills: Initial letter identification and word recognition. ...
As you move through the jungle, click on the animal whose name starts wit the letter on the photo album" in the picture. "To see [and hear] the name of each animal move your cursor over the animal as it appears."
"As the game becomes more challenging, you will move faster through the jungle and you won't see or hear the names of animals as you move your cursor over them." By then you will know what they are with all of the previous times you will have met with the same pictures.

As you can see from what I have copied from their booklet, they give very good instructions.

Slippery Soap - Bathtime Rhymes
"Objective: To help Blue and Slippery create rhymes.
Skills: Recognizing rhymes and early vocabulary"
Four bubbles appear over Blue. Each bubble has a picture in it. Slippery gives the names of the objects in each one and the word is presented in writing. You click on the bubble that you want used in a rhyme. Slippery then presents it at the end of the first line of a rhyme and then has all but the last word of the second part of the rhyme presented as well. Four more bubbles appear over Blue's head and you choose the one that rhymes with your first choice of a word. Slippery then reads both words you have chosen. If they rhyme he reads the entire rhyme. If they don't then you can try again to choose the word which rhymes. The word bubbles with the picture can be pointed at to hear and see the word as many times as you want to in making your decisions. "After two more tries, Slippery will help you with the answer."

Mailbox - Mailtime
"objective: To help Mailbox identify and match the missing letters.
Skills: Letter identification and upper and lower case letter discrimination."
Mailbox has a letter for you. But before he can read the letter to you you need to help him fill in the letter. There are three pages to each letter. On each page a letter is missing from one of the words. The letter that is missing is indicated with a light grey letter in its place. At the bottom of the page there are five letters. It is your job to choose which letter is the letter which is missing (IE. which letter matches the letter in the light grey). When you have chosen the right letter, mailbox tells you the name of that letter and goes on the the next page. After all three pages have all their letters on them then Mailbox will read the letter.
"As the game becomes more challenging you will receive fewer visual hints." After playing this part of the game over 60 times, I have to admit that I had not yet come to the place where any visual clues started decreasing, which , or course is good, because then the child will have a lot of time to learn to recognize the words of these letters. There are a number of letters, but having played the game over 60 times, I can tell you that they do eventually start recycling as you can imagine. The letters that are missing are different every time, but the letters themselves eventually start recycling. Anyway, the child will be very familiar with these letters before the clues start becoming fewer.

This book was basically about how to do simple things like buttons and painting. Though near the end the book does delve into good things like fiel manipulation. I'm ordering Volume II because that looks more promising. Mainly a referance book!

Nothing compares to having fun with Hypercard and it was Danny Goodmans book that opened this world to me. It begins slowly and still takes you up to the top at the end. I cannot use pascal or C but I still felt like a programmer at the end, spending many hours every day making Hypercard scripts. All this thanks to Mr Goodman.

A must have reference guide for the beginner to the most advanced. This book covers it all!!Step by step instructions take you through each task on the imac in simple to understand terms.Each chapter begins and ends with summary sections to tell you what is upcoming and remind you of what you read about. Great Book!!!

I ordered this book expecting pictures, charts, and simple lists of the things I need to do to make things work on the run. Instead, I'm finding as much prose as in the "Dummies" series, but the style is so flat, static, and detached that it's less engaging and helpful than the "Dummies" book by David Pogue or "My Imac" by Gore et. al. A computer like the Imac deserves a style as zesty, colorful, inviting as its subject. This may be my newest book on the Imac, but it's my last choice of texts.

That is what this rather simple book is, a beginning. Having been out of the MAC world for years and, over the past week
back in it, I was expecting more. But I read (or skimmed) cover to cover and found that one week of hands on has brought me to a point beyond this effort.
With 10, 10.2 and 10.3 out already, this book is a bit behind. There are WONDERFUL (and I mean that) links, resources and 'further reads' listed and that is a great part of the text. But for anything beyond basic, I'd go elsewhere or wait for Hart to follow up. More performance issues, some step by step (for instance, updating Macs, bringing across email in a Windows network? How? Something I ran into in replacing older Macs)
Overall a great effort and does simplify. It's a beginning.

This book does exactly what it says it will do: it teaches you how to operate your Mac in a non-Mac world giving many, many practical solutions. It even gives impractical solutions when no practical solutions are available! Published in year 2000, it is a treasure of fresh web links that allow you to get current information on every topic covered. Instead of going into boring, techno-babble the book focuses on giving scenarios of what is trying to be accomplished, such as finding the best way to transfer files between Macs, PCs, and Unix platform machines. Then it provides solutions in general terms naming any hardware or software required to accomplish the task. Finally, it provides a resource list at the end of each topic which includes related commercial, shareware, and freeware publishers, hardware manufacturers, and their web sites. If you are the person in your cross-platform organization or school that other people rely on to provide them answers, this book is a valuable resource!

This book is great for all ages! I would recomend it for anyone looking for a fun innocent adventure novel writen by a devoted father and his son. I agree this book is a must buy!

Admittedly -- and literally -- the work of a ten-year-old, this book still charms you, and takes barely half-an-hour to read. It's not spectacular, but its scope and vision (spanning a voyage from Antarctica to to Martinique and beyond) do captivate. I'd say it's a must-buy, especially as a first-edition.

In FileMaker Pro Advanced For Windows & Macintosh, Cynthia Baron and Daniel Peck successfully collaborate to present a visual, task-based approach to learning FileMaker, as they use pictures to guide the reader through the software, clearly illustrating what to do and how to do it. The layout is ideal for use as a reference book and offers concise, "user friendly" steps and explanations. FileMaker Pro Advanced For Windows & Macintosh is an ideal, very highly recommended how-to guide for intermediate and advanced level FileMaker Pro users.

It's well written and easy to follow but the "advanced" claim is misleading. There are some useful tips, pointers and ideas but if you want to learn some advanced techniques you are better to get out on the web and start searching. The CDML section is particularly lightweight.

This book contains so many good advices for
the person, who already knows the basics of
Painter.
Techniques which are shown in this book can
give a many fresh ideas for every digital
artists.
I would say: "digital artists primary handbook"

If there is something lacking in computer graphics programs and tutorials it is without a doubt the intuitiveness, the "grasping it" factor; interfaces that strike terror in ones heart, and tutorials that go for a 1,000 pages. Here is an example of how to present a tutorial. Just show an example of art, comment briefly on what, why, and how, and show the dials and sliders set to the positions needed to achieve said effect. This makes the learning of the software more fun. Someone said a "picture is worth a thousand words"

Someday these pioneering CD interactive "games" from the 1990s will be rediscovered. This is one of the best from that period when CD-based games broke new ground in terms of gameplay, storytelling and subject matter.

Like "Myst," is a somewhat eerie and mysterious setting in which you are guided along more as an observer than a "player." But that can be refreshing as you can sit back and enjoy the atmosphere.

Also, check out "L-Zone" if you can find it. The period from about 1993-95 saw a lot of releases that were similarly enchanting and there was a lot of experimentation going on.

This is a point and click type of game, but the plot--or perhaps I should say the pointing and clicking--is extremely linear, there aren't any puzzles to solve, in many cases you can't leave a screen until you've clicked everything that you need to click. You visit a number of locations, but there is always only one route to follow to reach the next plot point. You run into a number of characters, click on them, read the text that they say, click again on them until they stop having something to say; if at this point, you click on them again, they will go through the same speech. The interactivity is very simple, especially compared to Myst which was released the same year (1993). But the graphics are good, almost equal to Myst, especially the mechanical apparatuses. The storyline, although simplistic and arbitrary, gets interesting halfway through, if only because you have no idea where it's headed. By the end you are just clicking a few times, watching the story unfold through a cut scence, clicking a few times, watching a cut scene. But if you like anime films, especially ones that glory in the technological sublime, then you will like the ending of Gadget (although you won't comprehend it). The game was made in Japan, and was "directed" (rather than programmed), which suggests that the makers saw it as more of a movie experience. The soundtrack is good, especially when it accompanies the hurling train. Amazingly, the price tag on my CD case is $79.99, the price it was being sold at in 1993. Perhaps this is why the game has appeared to become forgotten....

Sure, I'd heard the hype. But how could any instructional manual be that fan-frickin-tastic? Worry not, citizens... Schrand bellies up to the bar and dishes out the no-nonsense approach to visual graphics that has become his hallmark.

His delicate verbage soothes any anxiety that the first-time user might feel, while still managing to perpetuate the lively vim we old-school users sometimes take for granted.

Blessing to you, Rick... keep up the cracking good work!

Eyecatching cover, detailed information, tips & tricks, all what you want to know about Golive 5.0.

It gives you the ideas, how to create graphics using photoshop, illustrator, etc and arrange them in Golive. It tells you from design to production techniques. How to create a homepage using grids, where to use tables, smart tools, cascading style sheets, streaming media like quicktime, flash, livemotion, dhtml and webDav technology.

It also explains how golive works with adobe, macromedia, 3d, audio and video applications and how to bring them in golive. You can create a website from scratch to live on net.

CD includes tutorial files for projects and lots more.

It's amazing that this CD is still for sale! It's not only a wonderful source of information on the Beatles, very detailed and useful, this is the FIRST full-length feature film that includes hypermedia. Numero Uno. This is one of the great pioneering CD-ROMS, a true "first edition", the Gutenberg Bible of multimedia. In other words, duh, like this will be worth extremely valuable in fifty years.

This CD-ROM for the Mac came out in the days before DVD and so pales in comparison with a DVD movie. The entire movie is here, with commentary, out-takes, still pictures and more. The biggest drawback is the smallness of the window the movie is shown in--it can't be enlarged, so you're stuck watching a Pocket TV-sized screen. Overall, this CD-ROM is a good bit of nostalgia, but I'm sure a DVD version would be much much better and do the Beatles more justice.