June 13th, 2000

[5:00 PM] New DVD Site Produced Entirely On Macs by Staff A new site dedicated to DVDs called Digitally Obsessed has launched, and the site's creators e-mailed us to tell that they produced their new site on Mac hardware and software. In a shameless promotion of their Mac roots, the company details how Macs were used to build the site. According to Digitally Obsessed: Now playing on an Internet site near you is digitallyobsessed.com produced entirely on Macintosh computers. The site was designed and implemented by Catsprite Studios. Artist Debi Lee Mandel is the designer and Jesse Shanks is the programmer. The site features the latest news, reviews, articles, interviews of DVDs of all genres. Sections are devoted to Movie DVDs, Music DVDs and Children's DVDs. A section called the Digital Edge is devoted to the latest DVD technology news and articles explaining this complex technology. The entire site is database-driven using MySQL and PHP. "This shows that the Mac is an absolutely viable platform for creating sites of this type," said Shanks, "With a G4 and some software, they sky is the limit." Site graphics are concepted and designed in Adobe Illustrator 8 for layout and precision. The vectors are then imported into either Adobe Photoshop 5.5 or Metacreations Painter 6, depending on the "look & feel" to be created. The bitmap effects are finalized in Photoshop and exported for slicing/optimization in Adobe ImageReady. Site animations and banners ads are created in Painter or Photoshop; frames built in Photoshop layers and animated in ImageReady. Cover art is scanned at high resolution settings on an Epson Expression 1600 Pro Scanner and optimized in Photoshop. "There is simply no tool better than the Macintosh for high quality graphics design and production," said Mandel. You can find more information, including reviews, release dates, and all sorts of other information at the new site. The Mac Observer Spin: Congratulations and good luck to them with their new site! Digitally Obsessed - Catsprite Studios