It's Magiq day. First announced and demoed at Macworld Expo in January, and eagerly awaited by doodlers everywhere: Plasq's new evolution in the Comic Life product line, Comic Life Magiq, is shipping now. Magiq is not an upgrade to Comic Life, which is still sold separately -- it's a whole new tool, including an embedded image editor and pro-level layout and masking components. A slew of new templates and a Core Animation-driven UI complete the package.

As you might surmise, CLM is a Leopard-only Universal Binary release (it actually calls for 10.5.2 as a minimum OS version). A full license is $45 and cross-grades from Comic Life (including the bundled version that shipped with some Macs) are $30; however, for a limited time you can get a license for $40 and a crossgrade for $20. A 30-day unlimited demo can be downloaded from plasq.com now.

We're looking forward to some hands-on Magiq time and posting some screenshots later today.

Freeverse, winner of many design awards (and publisher of Marathon on the 360-- I had no idea!) is throwing down with a software sale on their website. By using the code montyrules with any purchase before September 20th, you can pick up any of the software and games they're selling for a whopping 30% off.

Heroes V for $35! Euchre (my favorite card game ever) for $14! Wingnuts 2 for $21! And the apps aren't to be scoffed at either-- they've got the great Comic Life, Lineform, and Sound Studio 3 all on sale as well.

Woot for Freeverse, and woot for selling great games and apps for cheaper than usual. Now that you guys are flush with money, how about convincing Microsoft to let you put that Euchre game on my 360, too?

Thanks, Brian!

Click To Play

Skitch is the latest app from the boys of Plasq, makers of the hugely popular Comic Life. If you've never seen it in action, take a few to check out the simple yet powerful interface.

Notwithstanding the pre-beta Skitch product announcement, the Plasq crew have been busy as beavers (despite having never met in person before Macworld; talk about your distributed development teams) on their already-released products. Comic Life 1.3 is out for download now and includes:

• Visual preview of styles
  
• an "Email" button to send comics directly from Mail.app, Entourage, Eudora or AOL
  
• Publish your comic to iWeb
• Copy and paste Comic Life elements to other apps
• Speech and thought balloons now have "Multi-tail" capability :-)
  
• Multiple images per panel

and more. CL 1.3 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher; the upgrade is a free download for owners of the retail, Deluxe or bundled editions.

Thanks Matthew!

When it comes to software on the Mac platform it's a mixed bag. I don't mean like on Windows, where the bag is full of snakes, scorpions, rusty blades, and the occasional bit of peach. Software on the Mac has been in flux for a decade. When Apple bought NeXT, most of us figured Copland was dead in the water (and it was). Personally, I wish we'd seen OpenDoc come to fruition, but that comes from years of dealing with bloatware. OS X pushed the "Classic" Mac OS further and further into the shadows, until, with the advent of Intel Macs, it's pretty much dying off... Read the fine print on these Leopard features for developers, and you'll realize how dead "Classic" really is. Perhaps we should call it "Relic."

Now ask anyone (well, almost anyone) who's coded Cocoa apps and they'll tell you it's lovely. Shoot, Apple's so proud of the frameworks they provide for devs, they even touted a new one, Core Animation, as one of the 10 things coming in Leopard. But we're still living a dual-existence (triple or quadruple or more, if you get technical) in that you have Cocoa apps, and you have the non-Cocoa apps. Perhaps you know about Java, which is what Limewire uses. Or X11's ability to run apps like GIMP. Both of those have their quirks. Java apps can be all over the place, and X11 doesn't integrate the UI of OSX, among other issues. Carbon is a mix of old-skool API's (implemented in good ol' C if I recall), and permeates Mac apps like Office and Photoshop, where a teardown/rebuild would be too unwieldy. There's also the fact that key apps like Finder and QuickTime are Carbon enough to still have some legacy code from way back when, which might account for some of their quirks too... No holy wars about Cocoa vs. Carbon, OK? I'm with David Weiss on this one. So you have Cocoa, Carbon and everything else.

Getting granular for a moment, look at a tale of two browsers: Safari vs. Firefox. Safari is a Cocoa app, and it is tightly integrated with OS X tools. It maintains the ability to look up words in the Dictionary app with a right-click, and access the OS X Keychain. Firefox is not a (full) Cocoa app, and you can't niftily use a keyboard shortcut to look up a word, nor will it store passwords in Keychain. I've learned to use this "wall" to my advantage. Since the passwords are stored differently, I can automatically log in to systems (like gmail) using two accounts simultaneously. I use my business gmail on one browser, and personal on the other. Unfortunately, you're limited to 3, as all Firefox-based browsers will share their version of Keychain, and all Webkit-derived browsers use Keychain. I say three, because Opera stands alone (and doesn't always play nice with Gmail). There's the conundrum: to the average user, they don't care, but when little non-Cocoa quirks appear, they scratch their heads and wonder why the Mac doesn't just "do stuff" one standard way.

Keep reading for my take on shareware, freeware, and malware in OS X...

The good folks over at Nonstopmac (where they talk about Macs nonstop I would assume) have taken a close look at Comic Life, and they like what they see.

Give the app 9 out of 10 nonstopmacs, I would say you should check out Comic Life (and plus we have written about it about a million times).

If you need another reason to lay down the dough for a new Intel iMac then I have got one for ya. Cris Pearson, the CEO of plasq, just let me know that Comic Life is bundled with the new iMacs.

Comic Life is a favorite app around here, and this can only mean good things for iMac buyers and plasq.

Just before the weekend Comic Life, which is a great fun product that I blogged about previously, came out with an update to 1.0.1 with a few new templates (but, alas, no PSP template yet) and reduced the price: "Yes! 1.0.1 has new styles, new export options and more... now at only $24.95 USD with a new Education Price ($19.95 USD) and Household License Price ($39.95 USD). Existing customers: Thank you! - please contact us so we can organize your special offer." I contacted them, but still haven't discovered what my special offer is.  Hopefully, it's about $15, which is the difference in price from what I paid, and what the software now runs.