The H-Bomb Girl- May 27, 2008 Marianne and I both read Stephen Baxter's The H-Bomb Girl, the Clarke-nominated Young Adult novel set in Liverpool at the peak of the Cuban missile crisis. For Marianne, who is now 11, I think it was well pitched. It taught her a good bit of history and a good bit of science; she loved the story and thought the book as a whole was 'brilliant'. She spent the entire trip home from our wet bank holiday weekend regaling us with questions about time travel paradoxes, to which nearly all of our...http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/2008/05/the_hbomb_girl.html Comic Life Magiq first impressions- May 10, 2008 I got an email from the lovely people at Plasq offering me a cheap family pack of the new version of Comic Life. The new edition is Leopard only because it uses all the lovely Leopard core functionality. As a test for this review, I made this collage of some of the photos Steven took of the morrismen on Bank Holiday Monday. I really liked the extract feature, which isn't perfect but is good enough, and amazingly quick. I liked the flexibility around lettering, panel shape options, the great...http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/2008/05/comic_life_magiq.html Smultron and LilyPond- May 6, 2008 Regular readers will know that I'm a great fan of Barfly, a great .abc reader for the Mac. And, in fact, a great fan of abc, the simple music file format that's very popular with folk tune collectors. Barfly's now been upgraded to work fully with Leopard. It's splendid for dealing with long abc files with many tunes in; it plays them really well, and it generates sheet music instantly. However, nobody could claim that Barfly's printed output is beautiful. For that we turn to LilyPond, a...http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/2008/05/smultron_and_lilypond.html |