When you think of graphics and publishing suites, your first thought may well be of Adobe. After all, its range of suites is certainly comprehensive and includes a wide range of applications. But, strangely enough, not one for monitoring the weather or divining the future through cosmic symbology. For this you'll need to turn to Stone Works, a bundle of applications for designing and publishing to print and web, billing for your services, making movies, creating photo albums, watermarking documents, converting fonts, performing image processing, choosing fonts, managing your preferences, working with PDF files, and achieving world peace. Okay, we made the last one up.

But this is not to take Stone, a long-time OS X developer, lightly. It simply chooses to go its own way, providing a pile of OS X apps at modest prices and tossing in free lifetime upgrades for good measure. The suite includes such applications as Create, a design, page layout and web publishing program; Videator, for realtime performance video creation; PStill for processing, distilling, combining and separating PDF files; FontSight, which provides visual font menus; TimeEqualsMoney for tacking times and expenses, and lots of other stuff. Many of these have benefited from new Leopard capabilities, with an example being the contents of a Create file can now be displayed in Finder, thanks to its built-in QuickLook.

Stone Works is currently priced at $399 on the Stone Design site. A trial version is also available for download.