Comparatively pricey, but IBM delivers a quality rack-server package.

Beautifully engineered and constructed, the Mac Pro is also the fastest PC we’ve ever seen by some margin.

In this line of work, there's really nothing quite like the all-too-occasional experience of opening a box from Apple, and unveiling the shiny wonders squirreled away inside. In fact, it's the only event that never fails to draw all and sundry AJB staff from throughout the office into the Labs to catch a glimpse of what the tech company with only 3 percent market share worldwide has managed to innovate this time.

What makes PDF (Portable Document Format) unique is that it can provide an exact electronic replica of any document from any application on all major platforms, including all text, graphics and fonts. It’s an amazingly flexible format with a myriad of uses ranging from electronic manuals and e-books, through secure document exchange and archiving, to multimedia presentation and high-end commercial print.

Adobe has been riding high on the success of the portable document format (PDF), and the Acrobat creation tools needed to generate them. Later in the year version 6.0 will be launched, but in the meantime we have a preview of Acrobat Professional 6.0 Beta.

Copernic Agent 6 Professional

Vector graphics

The Quark-killer has finally landed. For the last year, the hype about Adobe's replacement for the worthy but old-fashioned PageMaker (reviewed issue 22, p108) has been building to fever pitch.

Enact comes with the complete box and dice including application software, database, web-server and application server and the server can be run on a basic Windows XP Professional desktop. While the Java-based interface can be a bit buggy and slow at times, it is generally clearly set out and easy enough to use.