The Best & the Worst of 2002

A look at what's hot...and what's not

Bennett
29, 2002 at 2:30 PM

Cool Screensavers
2002 was the best year yet for awesome Mac screensavers -- unless you were a fan of the Zooming Icons screensaver in Mac OS X releases prior to its mysterious disappearance from Jaguar. Our favorite screensaver eye candy of the year: Jim Sachs' Marine Aquarium (US$21.95, for Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X, in standard and widescreen versions), from Serenescreen.com

Mac Software innovations seemed to be in short supply in 2002. Our pick for most innovative software title not appearing on a Windows PC near you: Studio Artist 2.0, from Synthetik Software Inc. It's for Mac OS X only.

Our pick for most encouraging development of the year: Chimera, a speedy variant of the open-source Mozilla browser, optimized for Mac and delivered without much of the clutter that threatens to turn the Mozilla code into bloatware like some of the best known browsers for the Mac already have. Apple's own Jaguar (and the generous "free for teachers" offer) is noteworthy in this category, too. We wonder how many people decided not to upgrade to 10.2, in the absence of upgrade pricing for the US$129 Jaguar software.

In the Mac audio world, we'd have to pick the beta release of Ableton Live 2.0 from www.ableton.com as the most exciting release of the year. Live 2.0 joins runners-up Reason 2.0, Sibelius 2.0 and a handful of other Mac OS X-native audio apps as finally beginning to show off the true potential of Mac OS X for audio applications.

According to Fortune's Best of 2002 list, "It was not a year for breakthroughs in personal technology, but there was plenty of improvement in familiar products, from PDAs and graphics cards to digital cameras and cellphones." Many of Apple's announcements were like that. About the only real breakthrough in the Mac world was the short-lived excitement over an external iDVD-compatible DVD writer from OWC. Too bad Apple forced the company to pull it off the market.

Graphics cards finally started to seem a little over the top in terms of image quality and performance, with NVIDIA and ATI battling it out for dominance, and gamers achieving hundreds of frames per second in Mac games such as Quake 3. ATI took the performance crown for 2002, with its Quartz Extreme-compatible Radeon 8500 and Radeon 9000 products for Mac. But NVIDIA promises to shake things up, with the forthcoming GeForce FX.

Kudos to the EU, for banning those so-called Smart Chip Ink Cartridges that are designed to prevent refilling and to the Electronic Freedom Foundation and all others who oppose unfair laws such as the DMCA.

Is there any question as to the identity of the the Mac personality of the year? It has to be Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned girl" star of Apple's most controversial "Switcher" ad.

For additional "Best of 2002" links, see PC Buyer's Guide.