The first of the new breed of IBM rack servers, delivering superb design and a wealth of new features.

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.

The world's most popular professional 3D animation package, 3ds max by discreet, just got an upgrade. Rather than being a major overhaul, this seems an effort to bridge gaps between 3ds max and some of the industry's leading 3d applications in several areas. However, 3ds max6 is not just upward expansion reaching higher in 3D visual effects, it is also broadening to encompass a wider scope of different industry disciplines.

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

This is the kind of workstation that budding 3D artists have wet dreams over. It packs two Hyper-Threaded 3.06GHz Xeon processors – currently the best workstation processors on offer from Intel – a gigabyte of RAM and a 10,000rpm SCSI hard drive. In short, you'll be hard pressed to find a faster workstation without forking out the $15,000 or so for a blazing Silicon Graphics machine.

One way to get your Website's logos and page titles to literally stand out is by making them 3D. Xara3D is designed to make the whole process a cinch.

If your Website is hosted by an effective ISP you should have access to reams of information about who looked at your Web pages, when they viewed them, how long they were navigating your site for and much more.

MACROMEDIA E-LEARNING STUDIO

Almost five years have past now since the first release of 3ds max, then called the full 3D Studio MAX. One of the first packages of its kind to introduce affordability and performance to an industry dominated by huge price tags. And even after its competitors have been forced to compromise their price to compete, max has kept up its innovative features and held its ground.

Vector graphics

Workstation

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.