Cyblink Power2go 7 Review
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 2nd 2010 | Discuss (0)
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How often has this happened to you? You’ve got a bunch of photos on your computer and you want to see them—but you can’t—they’re in ISO format—sucks to be you. Well bunky, your days of frustration and wait are over—let me hear you say hallelujah. With Power2Go’s new ISO image browser, you don’t have to burn a disc to see what is in the image, or to get the contents. Just drag and drop from the image to your hard drive. Much faster … and much easier.
“Singularity”—first impressions - game review
Posted by Jon Peddie on July 8th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Software Review
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review
games
fps
We got a copy of Activisions’s “Singularity” (developed by Raven) and started playing with it. It’s a FPS set on a island where the Russians built a research facility in the 1950s to test a newly discovered element E99. Things didn’t turn out quite the way the scientist had hoped and the Russians (Soviet Union at the time) shut down the research center and abandoned the island. Rediscovered by a satellite scan in 2010 a U.S. special ops force is sent in to investigate, find the E99 and well, I’m not sure what they are supposed to do with it yet.…
Corel Photo & Video Bundle
Posted by Kathleen Maher on March 19th 2010 | Permalink
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True to its heritage, Corel has released a powerful set of tools for photo and video professionals in its Photo and Video Pro bundle. Corel disrupted the drawing and illustration market by adding a broad range of tools in Corel Draw including raster to vector tools and most recently dimensioning and other tools for professional users (we’ll talk about CorelDraw in an upcoming review). In the case of the new bundles the company has been releasing for its video and photo products, you can argue that Corel is late to the party but the Photo & Video Pro Bundle is a…
Aperture surprises: Apple slips in new release when fans were losing hope
Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 16th 2010 | Permalink
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Software Review
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apple
review
faces
adobe
images
lightroom
photography
geotaggin
photographer
aperture
Aperture 3 is here and Apple has made it a lot more flexible and friendly. In fact, Apple has reversed the waterfall and pulled the popular Faces and Places feature in iPhoto up to Aperture. Features like photo books, which have existed in both products, have become easier to use in Aperture but there are also more options. Aperture, if you don’t remember, is a photo management tool introduced for professional photographers. It was brought forth sometime before Adobe introduced Lightroom and it caused a sensation. It handled some of the most common tasks performed by professional photographers—and in so doing…
Software Review: Making Muvees
Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 15th 2009 | Permalink
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Of all the tools out there that promise to make video making easy and fun, Muvee has been one of the best and one of the easiest. The way Muvee works is to let you select video clips and still pictures, add a soundtrack, and pick a style. The templates add some graphics elements, such as a scrapbook, stars, cubes, and also a style for cuts and transitions. Then you just push a button and see what you get. The developers at Muvee have been pretty quiet and that’s because they’ve been working away re-architecting the software to take advantage of…
Corel Digital Studio 2010
Posted by Kathleen Maher on October 28th 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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video
media
photoshop
corel
studio
ilife
editing
elements
We believe that there are about 16 million people working with digital media all over the world—and around 35% of them are in the United States. The vast majority of those people are not professionals, they are people who are taking pictures, editing them, and creating videos and picture books, because they like it. Some of them are good at it, many of them wind up spending a lot more time on what they’re trying to do than they ever intended. Corel has taken a look at the market and brought a new suite for working with video, pictures and creating…
Darkest of Days: What if you could travel in time?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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nvidia
gpu
cpu
games
wwii
physics
realistic
physx
You can, and enjoy physics and cinematic visions whilst doing it: the first serious implementation of GPU-based physics. During wars and natural catastrophes people go missing, MIA in the case of wars, simply missing persons in disasters. They could be alive, they could be dead, the ambiguity of their status is the basis for the time travel in the multi-era, Darkest of Days FSP from 8Monkey Labs. In order to avoid conflicts with the time-continuum and prevent you from killing your own grandmother, you have to be in never-never land, or so the game’s story premise goes. I buy it, it…
CyberLink MediaShow—they love GPUs
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 22nd 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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apple
facebook
media
flickr
microsoft
faces
photo
cyberlink
recognition
CyberLink has been at the forefront of GPU exploitation for photos, and their latest effort is MediaShow. YAPP—yet another photo program, but this time it’s got more. If you’re like me, you have several photo programs, some you wanted, some that were forced on you. I currently have: Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Photo Gallery, Picasa 3, Roxio 2010 PhotoSuite 12, and now CyberLink MediaShow; there may be others lurking on my system I’m not aware of. They all have their own indexing system and files, and then there’s the ever loving Vista indexer making life easier for us all.
Wolfenstein - Great game little use of GPU
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 4th 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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gpu
3d
games
fps
activision
Activision has recently released a remake of the classic FPS Wolfenstein, and all I can say is thank you Activision. However, the GPU folks may not be quite as thankful. When I heard it was coming out I expected it to be in stereovision and have killer physics, after all this is 2009. The physics are good, damn good, but not accelerated by the GPU, and alas there’s no stereo. No doubt Nvidia will do a driver tweak and correct that but a natively developed game in stereo is just so much better.
Augmented Reality hits the mainstream - A darling of technorati Marvel is bringing it home
Posted by Jon Peddie on August 6th 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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3d
marvell
boeing
avatar
startrek
augmented reality
mattel
Immersive Technologies’ AR demo.If you’ve ever seen a yellow scrimmage line appear in the field of a football game, you’ve experienced AR (Augmented Reality), which is a term credited to Thomas Caudell in 1990 when he was with Boeing. Lots of companies and universities have experimented with it, and there are games being played on mobile phones in Japan right now (you point your camera phone at a place and on your screen is superimposed a graphics image of a treasure or a monster). At San Diego Comic-Con 2009 last week, Mattel showed a new line of action figures based on…
