Filed under: Design, Fun, Macintosh
Comic Life Magiq: heroic comic-building app from Plasq
by Jay Hathaway May 12th 2008
Comic Life Magiq is the latest and greatest version of the familiar Comic Life app you've probably seen bundled with some Macs. It takes the Comic Life concept of building comic strips using your own images, and gives you a fully-loaded toolbox that makes the job easy and a lot of fun.
To build a nice-looking page, all you have to do is grab one of the many pre-loaded layouts and drag it to your new page. The panels drop into place, and you can begin dragging in images, which fit your panels by default. Then you can add some text, using a wide range of speech balloons. Voila! Easy comics!
Comic Life Magiq is definitely not hard to use, but it also doesn't force you to color inside the lines. You can do everything by hand, if you're so inclined. Plenty of advanced options (grouping panels and adding reflections, for example) are included, but we found no need to use them to pack the recommended daily allowance of POW! ZAP! and BLAMMO! into our test comic. If you liked the idea of Comic Life, but found its lack of image editing and customization a bit boring, Magiq won't fail to impress.
To build a nice-looking page, all you have to do is grab one of the many pre-loaded layouts and drag it to your new page. The panels drop into place, and you can begin dragging in images, which fit your panels by default. Then you can add some text, using a wide range of speech balloons. Voila! Easy comics!
Comic Life Magiq is definitely not hard to use, but it also doesn't force you to color inside the lines. You can do everything by hand, if you're so inclined. Plenty of advanced options (grouping panels and adding reflections, for example) are included, but we found no need to use them to pack the recommended daily allowance of POW! ZAP! and BLAMMO! into our test comic. If you liked the idea of Comic Life, but found its lack of image editing and customization a bit boring, Magiq won't fail to impress.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
