Reviews and News » Software Review

Windows Mobile 6.5 Review: A Minor Update To An Old Platform

Noel Kuhlman — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:06:06 +0000

Did you hate Windows Mobile 6.1? Prepare to remain in the same position with version 6.5 of the platform, as it remains the same OS, albeit with a few shallow improvements. If you found 6.1 critical to business use and passable for everything else, then you’ll appreciate the few touch-ups that found their way on this new iteration.

So, what’s new with Microsoft’s attempt to scale back the demise of its dying mobile platform?

A new Today screen. Basically the screen that pops up anytime you want to go anywhere on the phone, the Today screen has received a much-needed facelift, closely resembling the same experience on the Zune HD.
A new Start screen. The placeholder for apps and shortcuts, the Start screen has been updated to reflect modern aesthetics. It’s gorgeous, making for a nice replacement to the tired menu system of old.
Improved Internet Explorer. Compared to the previous browser, this one is a full turnaround. The engine was revamped, the UI was improved and support for full HTML standards has been fine-tuned. It works, for the most part, although it still takes a backseat to browsers on other phones. During various tests, speed proved to be a tremendous change, although the rendering is still hit-or-miss for many complex pages.
Better finger-tapping support. Mmmm…not really. Sure, the updated Today and Start screen work perfectly well for tapping actions without the aid of a stylus. Here’s the problem: you still can’t use the rest of the phone with your finger (it’s impossible). Even the built-in keyboard remains a pain in the ass without a stylus, which is, honestly, unthinkable nowadays.
A thoughtful lock screen. I love 6.5′s lock screen, giving you multiple entry points back into the device.

That’s it. Everything from the core functions to the inner pages remain the same as Windows Mobile 6.1. Honestly, it’s like taking a shitty, old but running car and putting spoilers on it. With, maybe, new headlights. By the way, the Windows Marketplace comes with the OS by default, too.

Autograph Makes The Pogo Stylus Useful

Noel Kuhlman — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:48:57 +0000

Hahaha! Did you laugh at the unfortunate Pogo Stylus accessory for the iPhone too? Well, Ten One, the guys behind the ridiculous peripheral probably heard it. Instead of ditching the product, though, they actually made it useful. Wow.

If you don’t remember it, the Pogo is a small stick with conductive foam on the writing end. You were supposed to use that end to write on your iPhone screen. Since none of us did, they created a new use for it and this one’s pretty cool.

Basically, what you have to do is get a Mac software called Autograph. Once that is running, you can then use your Pogo Stylus to scribble stuff on your computer via the touchpad of any unibody MacBook. The stuff you write is accurately rendered on the screen, allowing you to scribble on the touchpad like it’s a piece of paper with the results showing directly on Autograph’s screen.

The main selling point is a newfound ability to sign documents on your PC, without having to print, scan or fax anything. It works in tons of OS X-based applications, include Word, Pages, Mail, iChat and many more, so you can adorn documents and pages you create with as many silly, little doodles as you want.

Pogo Stylus units, by the way, now cost only $7.50 on Amazon and they come with a free download of the software. Alternatively, you can buy just the software for $7 directly from the site.

OS X Snow Leopard Review: Amazing Changes Under The Surface

Noel Kuhlman — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:38:31 +0000

The OS X Snow Leopard doesn’t offer anything considerably substantial – at first glance. There are no new first-party software installed and no major interface changes.

In fact, it’s almost the same exact system as the Leopard, except with all the default applications running considerably faster. From opening files to running web apps on Safari to carrying out a system-wide backup, the whole thing just performs better, in very, very noticeable terms.

Don’t expect the same speed reflected on any non-Apple software you run, though. Photoshop? Almost zero difference. Firefox? Still the same thing. VLC? No change. Now, why the hell is that?

As it turns out, the new OS comes with a new middleware that takes full advantage of the machine’s hardware, with a multi-core processor called Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) and OpenCL API that utilize the power in the graphics card to great effect. All the rewritten first-party programs use these middle components to foster the speed differences, which easily clock in between 30% to 50% across all first-party applications.

Since most people are not likely to be running very old computers, I doubt the speed gains are all that crucial. I mean, did you ever complain that “this spreadsheet is so slow” while using Leopard? Probably not. The refinements are invisible to the naked eye and, in fact, may even be overlooked by many users, who will likely exclaim, “So what the heck did I pay that money for again?”

With that middleware in place, though, OS X now holds the potential for amazing performance for future applications. That’s the key word, though – future. As impressive as what Apple has done here, you can probably forego getting Snow Leopard without missing a thing. At least for now.

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Corel Home Office: The Perfect Office Suite For Netbooks

Noel Kuhlman — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:05:59 +0000

Is there really a market for an alternative to Microsoft Office? Corel thinks so. To make sure you get the message, the UI of their Corel Home Office mirrors MS Office 2007. That should work.

What really makes Corel’s brand new productivity suite stand out, however, is its single-minded purpose of running on netbooks. The result is a light, modestly-sized system that should handle the majority of netbook users’ office needs.

Packing less features than MS Office, Corel Home Office is probably not for everyone. If you’re like most users, though, who use only the most basic capabilities of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Corel’s corresponding Write, Calculate and Show should provide everything you need, plus a little more.

Whether you use it Corel Home Office on a netbook, the software resizes proportionately, resizing buttons and screens to look good on the smaller 10-inch screen. I actually enjoyed working on this much more than other Office apps for this feature alone.

The Write application poses zero learning curve for regular Word users, making it an attractive alternative. Basic mailing and reference tools are bundled, although none as complete as found in its full-featured counterparts. There’s also macros, charts and illustration tools, but the goodies end there. One glaring flaw is when you paste rich content from the web – images, formatting and spacing are often stripped into a mess.

Calculate, on the other hand, offers strong for the most used features of spreadsheets – calculations, pivot tables, charts, illustrations and macros. Compatibility can be an issue, though, as it doesn’t import everything correctly from other spreadsheet applications (some colors, highlights and, in one instance, computations end up missing).

The presentation software Show is quite basic compared to competing tools. It does handle the usual set of capabilities you expect, like slides, layouts, shapes, pictures, charts, colors and animated transitions. Beyond that, however, don’t expect anything more.

If all you need is a light productivity suite, the Corel Home Office will do. Do note that some cheaper (and even free) tools will also do. If you use a small-screen netbook as a part of your regular work, though, it may prove to be a really good software to purchase.

Google Voice Versus 3Jam: Which Mobile Forwarding Service Is For You?

Noel Kuhlman — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:53:25 +0000

Google Voice promises to be a major threat in the telecoms space. As a service that uses your data connection to allow free calls and text messages in the US, it could prove a potential loss of revenue for carriers who depend on income from your phone calls and text messages to prop up their bottom line.

Not only is Google pushing the app out aggressively, it’s even gotten a new competitor at the end of last month, when 3jam rolled out its own GV-like app for mobile phones. While, on the surface, both beta-phase services do the same thing, performing call-forwarding, sending SMS, collecting voicemail and other phone-related actions, they do foster some large differences that make the case for choosing either of the two pretty clear-cut, at least, at this point in time.

Google Voice, for one, is 100% free; 3Jam, on the other hand, requires a $5/month subscription, along with premium SMS rate, if you want to send more than 40 text messages a month. While both apps are still in beta, the former works only in the US (and is currently invitation-only), while the latter is open to users in every country.

For that $5 a month, 3Jam’s main advantage is that you get to keep your cellphone number, while Google Voice requires you to get a new GV number that will forward to everything else. As for other advantages, it offers a considerably better interface, supports group texts and calling multiple phone lines per account.

While those features may sound dandy, Google Voice will likely coopt the same capabilities eventually, save for keeping your number, as their initial foray has already veered from that. It also allows for multiple customized voice mail greetings, offers call screening and recording, and can initiate cell calls directly from a computer – all things 3Jam doesn’t do.

Being in beta, both services still come with plenty of problems. Visual Voicemail, for instance, which is an automatic speech-to-text transcoding of messages is terrible and largely unusable on both platforms. There are bugs galore on both systems, which means it might be best to wait till next year to actually choose one. I know I will.

8Bitone For iPhone Brings A Full-Featured 8-Bit Synthesizer To The Platform

Noel Kuhlman — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:23:00 +0000

If you’re looking for a music-based iPhone app that’s more than just a novelty or a toy, you should definitely take a look at 8Bitone, an audio sequencer application for the platform. More than a casual tool, it’s a fully-functional instrument that capably mimics a real 8-bit synthesizer from yesteryears.

The iPhone has been especially noteworthy for the variety of apps available from its download storefront and this particular tool showcases the great variety and depth that can be accomplished with such a small machine. With 8Bitone, it manages to fit in an entire 80s-style synthesizer, allowing you to roll out compositions fit for Nintendo gaming systems from those times.

Instead of a dumbed-down toy app, 8Bitone realistically mimics a real portable synthesizer, bundling in a piano roll screen, a sequencer and a full synthesizer. It’s got controls for plenty of aspects of the sound, including oscillator, envelope and arpeggio. While it only does four tracks, this is as close as you can get to a real-deal 80s-style electronic music box in a freaking cell phone.

Being a realistic musical instrument, the app is primarily targeted to real musicians, who know how to work with synthesizers. Casual iPhone users will likely encounter a steep learning curve, which is why Yudo offers plenty of tutorials for it.

Composing an entire song on 8Bitone should take a couple of hours, just like in a real box. You’re allowed to save and load your creations, but you can’t export it in an MP3 format directly from the iPhone. Instead, you’ll likely have to connect your handset to a PC and record it from there.

Developed by Japanese company Yudo, the 8Bitone is one seriously good app and worth every penny of the premium $8.99 price.

Citrix GoTo Assist: Remote IT Support At An Unbelievable Price

Noel Kuhlman — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:25:56 +0000

Few services offer as robust an implementation of remote IT support as Citrix Online’s GoTo Assist Express. Priced at only $69 a month (or $660 per year) for unlimited users, it’s also considerably inexpensive.

As soon as you register and pay at the GoTo Assist website, you can immediately set up a management client by downloading the self-installing software. Each time you start a new session, a link will be generated by the GoTo Assist system. Send this link to your users, have them launch it and you’ll be ready to provide assistance – no extra appliance and no additional set-up.

The management client can run up to eight sessions simultaneously, allowing the technician to provide assistance to multiple users concurrently. All sessions are secure, with numerous levels of permissions from the each client PC necessary to perform the remote operations. From the remote computer, the technician can run a diagnostic feature to collect various hardware and software information from remote systems, allowing you to monitor client systems regularly. Other features of the software include chat, file sharing, report generation and unattended support (as long as the user gives you permission).

You can look as hard as you want, but it’s virtually impossible to find a technical support solution as capable for the same low monthly price as Citrix GoTo Assist. It may not be the best option around, but it’s simply unbeatable for its price.

Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 Review: Average Video Editor, Unique Multicam Editing

Noel Kuhlman — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:44:47 +0000

While Movie Edit Pro 15 isn’t the best video editor around, it brings one feature to the table that nothing else in the market can match – two-camera multicam editing. There are two versions of the software, Basic and Plus. We highly recommend going for the latter, which, despite its higher, features a number of advanced functionality (including the multicam editing) and bundled apps.

Interface

The new UI is considerably more usable than any previous iterations, rivaling the most sleek and intuitive video editing interfaces around. It follow the three-window style, which consist of the storyboard, preview and content. A number of new, subtle controls (e.g. jog wheel, shutter) makes it a very good canvas on which to perform your clip manipulations on.

Editing

It offers numerous editing techniques for cutting up your movies, all of them very easily managed through the interface. There’s one in particular, the Object Trimmer, that felt a bit odd and badly-designed, though the rest works as niftily as other similar applications.

The color and background correction options are extensive and very effective, even when used in the hands of moderately average skill level users. Image stabilization, however, can be very intimidating and will probably take the average user a number of tries to get a feel for.

Controls for still-images (panning, zooming, etc) are well-made, allowing users to animate most images with ease. It affords a good deal of flexibility, along with being very precise. Audio editing is similarly on par with other products in the market.

Multicam And Others

The main reason to get the Plus is undoubtedly the multicam editing tool, which synchronizes videos of the same event from two cameras, allowing the user to shift from shot to shot during editing. It’s a very useful tool – one that can make your finished movies truly stand out, without requiring much more work than usual. Other features include a title-creation tool (2D only), decent rendering speeds (about 25% slower than Premiere Elements) and DVD authoring.

Overall, Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 is a decent editor for the $90 asking price (Plus Version), especially with the unique multicam editing function. The rest of its feature set is on par with the average title you can find in the market, but it really pales in comparison with the best one around, Adobe Premiere Elements 7.

Firefox 3.5 Review: The Need For Speed

Noel Kuhlman — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:43:43 +0000

I had high hopes for the release of Firefox 3.5. Easily the most extensible browser with an innumerable number of add-ons available, it’s the one browser I always want to be using but often don’t simply because it’s not fast enough.

For this latest iteration, the browser’s TraceMonkey JavaScript engine does make some inroads in speed. Compared with the competition, however, it’s still considerably slower than both Chrome and Safari, which I have been running side by side on my Windows XP machine. Against Chrome, Firefox performed as much as two times slower, with an average speed difference of about 80%.

Interface is pretty much the same and should be familiar to longtime users. I’ve really been waiting for Firefox to lose the entire main menu row in place of a dropdown icon (same as with both Chrome and Safari) but, alas, we’re not that fortunate yet.

There are a bunch of new features for this iteration, of course. There’s a new “privacy mode” that’s designed to let you surf incognito, a cool geo-location feature that allows websites to detect your geographical position and full support for all the nifty features of HTML 5.0.

As of this writing, the number of plugins that have been updated to support Firefox 3.5 is steadily growing. A number of notable ones (such as Google Gears), however, are still on the way, so you may want to hold off on upgrading until full support for all the add-ons you use are available.

Overall, Firefox 3.5 is an update to support HTML 5.0, more than anything else. Those who were hoping to see better speed and an improved interface will have to wait longer for their wishes to be fulfilled. It’s still not going to be my primary browser (because of the speed) but it remains an often-used secondary one (until Chrome gets stronger developer support).

BeBot For iPhone: A Serious Music Synthesizer App On A Mobile Platform

Noel Kuhlman — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:26:59 +0000

Mobile phone apps that allow you to create music generally range from the ridiculous to the mundane. On first glance, Normalware’s BeBot, with a singing and dancing robot right on the interface, looks to be another one of the lot. Spend a few minutes with it, though, and you’ll find that it’s a more serious tool than you ever imagined.

In truth, BeBot is a full-featured four-voice musical synthesizer that can create an incredible array of sounds I never thought I’d hear out of the current generation of cell phone devices. Using your fingers on the multi-touch interface, you can fashion amazing tunes that might as well have been coming from an actual keyboard synthesizer.

Apart from capably playing four notes at the same time, it offers analog-sounding filters, plenty of effects (e.g. looping, overdrive), user-programmable scales, autotune and programmable presets. It basically creates a complex musical instrument hiding underneath an Apple-branded phone – a truly amazing feat.

Musicians and tinkerers alike can literally create an infinite number of voicing on the BeBot, allowing it to be used both for passing the time and serious music purposes. Barring the inability to save your recordings (yep, though I expect to come as an update soon) as well as share saved presets with other handsets, it’s quite possibly the single most complete music-creation app available on a mobile platform, bar none.

Seriously, it’s apps like BeBot that make it worthwhile to get an iPhone.

Reviews and News » Software Review

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