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Although it’s been a mere nine short months since the last time PathFinder was on the MacUpdate promo, it’s come back for another run. I highly recommend PathFinder; along with LaunchBar, it is one of the tools that I can’t make it through a work day without. Basically, if you haven’t experienced the PathFinder tabbed interface and drop stack, you haven’t lived. For today, May 8, 2008 only you can get PathFinder for $19.95, 43% off its normal price.

Even if you miss the deal, you’ll likely still be able to get PathFinder through MacUpdate for a discount a few days to weeks afterward. Here’s a direct link to the PathFinder page, so feel free to check it out.

Web Snapper is a fantastic little utility (most recent update released today). Web Snapper does exactly one thing: it takes screenshots of websites. However, it does this one thing extremely well, with multiple export options (including vector PDF), the ability to catch Flash and DHTML in the act (if you use the Safari plugin), and more. I’d never heard of it before, but as coincidence would have it I discovered it the day after I had to go through a bunch of websites for my employer and take screenshots. This entailed a lot of work stitching them together and so forth that would have been completely unnecessary with Web Snapper (which would also have provided better quality screenshots). D’oh!

Although the $15 price tag will probably dissuade casual customers, if you ever need to take a screenshot of a number of websites, Web Snapper is a godsend. I highly recommend it. It’s a particularly powerful tool in the arsenal of the website designer who needs to showcase sites in their portfolio.

The Tasty Apps website is a fun experience in worthless DHTML, too (worth a visit just for that, really). Dragging the price tags is my favorite. I only wish they had dedicated pages for their various apps; the all-in-one thing doesn’t work for me at all.

Although most people probably don’t need to be told, MarioKart Wii is out, and it’s loads of fun. The wheel takes a little getting used to (the first few races with it were brutally hard), but if you despise it you can always use the Wii remote + nunchuk or your old Gamecube controller.

I haven’t played all the races yet (two cups left to go!), but I highly recommend the game. Similar to the DS version (which rocked), MarioKart Wii offers 16 new races, and a full 16 races from selected past versions of the game (a mixture of DS all the way back to the SNES). Although the co-op goodness of Double Dash is no more, it’s still a great time with a friend, and also offers the ability to easily play online with up to 12 other people. Owning MarioKart is all but compulsory if you own a Nintendo system, so definitely give it a look. (And at the time of this writing, Wii Wheels on Amazon are only $10 as opposed to the normal $15, which is a bit more reasonable.)

Rented I Am Legend tonight from iTunes, and I was very pleasantly surprised. From what I’d heard when it opened in theaters, I was expecting a pretty terrible movie, but it was actually really good. Definitely an interesting twist on the typical zombie virus story.

Then again, I hear that about the only thing it shares with the book is the premise, so perhaps that’s why people were disappointed. The ending is, granted, a bit of deus ex machina and the “dark seeker” CGI was at times rather over-the-top, but what the hell. Last movie I rented was Beowulf; I can handle some CGI oddness and slightly wonked out storytelling.

If you like horror/zombie movies, I’d recommend I Am Legend. It is, at the very least, worth a rental.

For a movie made by a lot of people I respect, Beowulf is pretty spectacularly bad. I rented it via iTunes last night and watched it with my girlfriend, and about halfway through I turned to her and commented that I hoped whoever wrote the screenplay was never allowed to write again. Imagine my surprise when we reached the end and I discovered the screenplay was written (at least in part) by Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors. Party foul, Neil. Major party foul.

Even worse, they decided to do the entire movie in CGI. While I enjoy a CGI movie as much as the next guy, the director and producers apparently decided to pour all of their budget into kickass water, cloth, and hair. Apparently no one thought to remind them that little things like facial expressions are actually way more important than long flowing locks. As a result, the dialogue sequences are like watching wax dolls who are half-asleep. Add that to the terrible script, and you’ve got a recipe for hilarity, but not in a good way.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a movie you can mock the whole way through, or some mindless fantasy violence, then Beowulf might be for you. Just don’t expect the normally high caliber of the actors and writers to mean anything.

Judging by number of books owned, C.J. Cherryh is my favorite science fiction author. Although I had an early love affair with Orson Scott Card, he’s not consistent. Cherryh’s novels are consistently excellent and no one can build an alien culture the way she can.

I’ve recently been reading some of Cherryh’s older books, and as a result picked up Alliance Space which contains the novels Merchanter’s Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna.

Merchanter’s Luck is reason enough to buy the book. It’s a classic Cherryh novel (tense action from a close third person perspective in space), and has a nice dash of romance which isn’t something I usually expect from Cherryh. I highly recommend it.

Forty Thousand in Gehenna is unlike any other book that I’ve read. It takes place over 200 years, and in some ways almost feels like an exercise in world building and backstory rather than a traditional novel. It’s fascinating, but is unlikely to appeal to everyone (I’m not sure if I’ll reread it any time in the near future, either). It’s a shame that Cherryh hasn’t published anything using the unique culture that she builds in Gehenna; the two-page epilogue cried out for a sequel.

In any case, Alliance Space is an interesting collection, and certainly worth a read if you enjoy Cherryh (if you’ve never experienced Cherryh before then the Foreigner series might be a better place to start).

Bookends is on sale for 50% off today April 3, 2008 only over at the MacUpdate Promo. Although I haven’t tried Sente in a while, when I was doing my senior thesis Bookends was the best reference software on the market for Macs (Sente had a nicer interface, but didn’t support the social sciences as well; probably more appealing if I were in medicine). If you do research, you really ought to give Bookends a look; it’s an invaluable tool, even if it’s a pretty ugly program at first glance (although maybe version 10 has a more Mac-like interface; I primarily used version 9).

MacUpdate usually runs some level of sale on the software for a few days or weeks after the initial promo, too, so even if you miss the one-day 50% off deal it would probably be worth checking out.

This is why Omni Group is great. Less than a month after they release a full-version paid upgrade for OmniGraffle, they unveil a beta for the previous version to fix some Leopard bugs.

Omni Group may be the classiest software company I know. Kudos to them.

The Sight by David Clement-Davies is a bit of a let-down. I had picked it up at the same time I bought Fire Bringer, and while the plot and idea behind The Sight are interesting (who doesn’t like prescient wolves?), the quality of writing hasn’t improved any since Fire Bringer. Clement-Davies has a really bad habit of using exposition to describe every stupid thing in the book. If a wolf mentions a mystical city, then Clement-Davies instantly goes off into a tangent about how actually the Romans built it back in blah de blah de blah, which pretty much kills the momentum of the story. I like it when authors research their topics, but not when they beat me over the head with their findings.

Add to that the fact that he constantly tells about emotion rather than showing it, and you’ve got a book that feels much longer than it should. I was hoping that these tendencies in Fire Bringer were part of the first book syndrome, but I’m beginning to think that Clement-Davies is simply a mediocre writer. To add insult to injury, every dang myth in the book is a rip-off of some human myth, religion, or story (Little Red Riding-Hood as one of the earliest wolf stories? Shoot me now), making the whole wolf culture feel forced.

If you like anthropomorphic animal stories, then I recommend reading The Sight rather than Fire Bringer (evil psychic wolves are a bit more believable than fascist Hitler deer), but overall Clement-Davies’ work has left me feeling more frustrated than anything else. His creative approach to animal stories has a lot of potential that isn’t quite realized thanks to the quality of the storytelling.

Feast of Love should really have been called “Sex and Sadness”. My girlfriend rented it from iTunes and told me it was like Love Actually but more realistic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Love Actually, but the cover of Feast of Love made it look like a romantic comedy and after a weekend otherwise filled with realistic, tactical shooter violence I was in the mood for a light comedy or romance so I grabbed my girlfriend’s computer and watched it.

Oops. Now I am sad and shall need to eat ice cream. Feast of Love is a bit of a downer, even if it overall has a happy message. If you like montage-style movies that are very true to real life, then you’ll probably enjoy it. It doesn’t really have anything earth-shattering to say about the human condition, but it is a surprisingly realistic portrayal of life for something with big-name actors in it. Overall feeling: meh. Not a bad movie, but not great. And like I said, now I’m sad. Watch it if you’re feeling bittersweet; I recommend renting over buying.