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SAN FRANCISCO—Tucked away in discreet corners beyond the Apple Mini and iPod shuffle demonstrations at the Macworld conference here are business applications for small and medium-sized organizations.
Among the more prominent new products introduced at the show is FileMaker Inc.s Recruiter 2.0 application, which is a ready-to-use FileMaker Pro 7 package that helps corporate and professional recruiters identify and track candidates or communicate with clients and hiring managers.
Recruiter 2.0 was heavily redesigned to work with the features in FileMaker Pro 7, which was introduced in spring 2004.
New features in Recruiter 2.0 include built-in security with predefined access privilege sets, the ability to import data from e-mail client address books and a quick view of outstanding actions on the home page, such as contact interactions, group interactions and searches.
Owners of Recruiter 1.x can upgrade to the new version for free. First-time buyers can acquire Recruiter 2.0 for $299 at FileMakers Web store.
Third-party application developers also demonstrated their software at FileMakers booth. For example, Base Builders LLC of Reno, Nev., introduced the full-feature version of its Praesto Jr.—a project scheduling application based on the FileMaker Pro 7 database.
The full edition is based on Praesto Jr. that Base Builders produced under contract to FileMaker. FileMaker worked with Base Builders to produce a starter project management application designed to work with creative professionals, such as advertising agencies, fashion designers, Web site designers, video producers, graphic artists and photographers.
Praesto Jr. is part of the Creative Pro Starter Kit, a free bundle of five ready-to-use database applications designed to help creative professionals with scheduling, billing, job tracking and creating digital libraries that store images, sounds and video clips.
Also at Macworld, App4Mac introduced xTime Project 3.0, a general-purpose project management package for Mac OS X. The new version includes a redesigned interface running on a new project management engine for improved performance.
The new interface makes it easier to view and manage conflicts between resources. It also makes it easier to manage multiple projects.
The new version also provides improved import-export support for Microsoft Project documents. App4Mac, based in Millbrae, Calif., has also improved the ability to export project documents to Web folders along with better HTML management.
Next Page: PowerCube eases 3-D designs.
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Softobe Inc., a producer of office automation software for graphic studios and publishing companies, is demonstrating at the show PowerCube, a three-dimensional real-time animation and presentation design package for Mac OS X.
The Softobe package is designed enable designers to create intricate 3-D animations with the simplicity of a 2-D presentation package by dragging and dropping images, movies, text and audio clips onto the PowerCube screen.
All of these elements can be embedded into preprogrammed 3-D geometric objects, such as cubes, rectangles, cylinders and spheres, which the designer can animate at will.
PowerCube includes a sprites console that allows designers to control the timing of all graphic objects by dragging and resizing each spring along its channel. Other controls enable designers to control audio timing and volume to conform to actions on the screen.
Furthermore, designers can organize sprite channels into hierarchical tables to enable them to create groups of objects that exhibit independent behaviors assigned to individual objects or groups of objects.
Meanwhile Recosoft Corp. is demonstrating PDF2Office, a utility that converts Adobe Systems Inc. PDF documents into files that can be fully edited in Microsoft Word, AppleWorks, RTF and HTML formats.
PDF2Office forms paragraphs; applies font styles; extracts images; preserves tables; and processes headers, footers, endnotes, footnotes and independent graphic elements as they appear in the PDF document, said Paul Chadha, vice president of engineering and product development with Recosoft, based in Osaka, Japan.
The package includes a batch conversion feature that allows users to convert entire folders of PDF files at once, Chadha said. The package also converts PDF pages into multiple formats, including JPEG, Photoshop, PNG or bit map, he said.
PDF2Office works closely with Microsoft Word X/2004, so users can directly open PDF documents in Microsoft Work, Chadha said.
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