Better Audio From Your Mac

From JoeSoft comes Hear, a sound enhancement program for the Mac. The developer claims that Hear greatly improves audio quality in movies and music throughout all Mac OS X applications. Hear offers a wide array of settings that allow a user to customize audio. With Hear, music is richer, movie sounds are more powerful, dialog is clearer and games will blow you out of your chair! The software is available for $49.95 through www.JoeSoft.com.

Adobe Introduces Its Media Player

Adobe Systems is offering free download of Adobe Media Player 1.0 software through www.adobe.com/go/mp. An Adobe AIR application, this customizable, cross-platform media player provides new ways for viewers to discover and interact with their favorite content, while offering revenue and brand-building opportunities for content publishers. Additionally, Adobe has introduced Adobe TV, a network in Adobe Media Player with a series of shows that provides expert instruction and original series programming about Adobe products to the worldwide creative community.

Adobe Media Player can provide high-quality playback of streamed, downloaded or locally-stored video in the Adobe Flash format. Consumers can download video outside the browser, which can be viewed in 1080p, 720p or 480i video display resolutions with the most advanced audio quality. Users can also subscribe to television shows and other online video content and then automatically receive new episodes of the shows as they become available. To help viewers discover new content, a broad, searchable catalog of shows from leading media companies and networks is available and it is expected that it will continually expand.

Putting the ‘Fan’ Back in Fantasy

If you’re into celebrity scandal, then take a look at Celebrifantasy (www.celebrifantasy.com. This site is a community-based fan location that aggregates celebrity gossip and news content from dozens of news sites and blogs, and also offers live chat and celebrity fantasy teams.

Daily polls pose “probing questions” such as whether users would rather see Britney in concert or at a mommy-and-me class, with results inevitably sparking debate within the live chat, a function unique to Celebrifantasy. The website also tests readers’ knowledge by providing an arena to predict what celebrities will do next. Users can test hunches to draft celebrities and compete for high scores and bragging rights, similar to fantasy football leagues.

Grab That Special Moment

You know how it is. You’re waiting for your son to score the first goal of his football career and your digital camera is so slow to respond, that you miss the moment. To solve that problem, Casio has come up with a camera that aims to allow amateur photographers to shoot with the speed and foresight of professionals.

Casio’s Exilim Pro EX-F1 Digital Camera, is a high-speed digital camera featuring a revolutionary improvement in burst shooting speed. This camera incorporates a high-speed CMOS sensor and a high-speed LSI processor. After building in 6.0 million effective pixels and a 12X optical zoom, Casio has also achieved an ultra-high speed 60 frames per second (fps) burst rate for still images, together with 1,200 fps high speed movie recording that captures movement faster than the eye can see, for ultra-slow motion replay. Moreover, the new model can record movies at full High-Definition.

Users can record images not just at the instant they press the shutter button, but before! It’s possible to continuously record at up to 60 images per second — saving a maximum of 60 images in the camera’s own buffer memory, even before the shutter button is depressed. So if a user presses the shutter a little late, it is still possible to catch a vital moment in time, because the camera would have already recorded it.