Aperture surprises: Apple slips in new release when fans were losing hope
Posted by Kathleen Maher on February 16th 2010 | Discuss (0)
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Software Review
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apple
review
faces
adobe
lightroom
geotaggin
images
photography
aperture
photographer
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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Software Review
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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
physics
wwii
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
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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…
Seeing is believing - Putting photo editing products through their paces
Posted by Kathleen Maher on August 6th 2009 | Permalink
Categories:
Software Review
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apple
avi
microsoft
mov
roxio
wmv
quicktime
google
Roxio Photoshow is easy and fun. There’s something nice about having just a few options and getting something done quickly. Luckily, the templates, styles, and music, are pleasant and not too childish or silly as is so often the case in similar programs.Remember this: nothing is easy on a computer unless you stay within your boundaries. You like the Mac, stay there, you like Windows, stay there. Things might work out okay if you stay in your own backyard but then again they might not. What was a simple test of free online software can turn into a maddening exercise in…
A word about Game Booster
Posted by Jon Peddie on May 14th 2009 | Permalink
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Software Review
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games
software
boosters
Game Booster is a free program that can be downloaded from various sites (e.g. http://majorgeeks.com/Game_Booster_d6148.html). It’s advertised as being designed to help optimize your PC for smoother, more responsive game. It works by temporarily shutting down background processes, cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance so you can keep all the features of Vista or XP out of the way as well as all those little applets to make opening a program faster. And you can turn them back on when you are ready to get back to work. We thought we’d try it. It’s got a convenient UI for turning things…
So you wannabe a race car driver?
Posted by Ted Pollak on January 8th 2007 | Permalink
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Software Review
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Formula One Grand Prix (F1) is the king of racing. It’s not necessarily the most competitive, but indeed it is the king. F1 hosts the fastest “turning” cars known to man. Unlike their open-wheeled Indy brethren, they are not mandated to use the exact same engine (currently Honda), and unlike the perplexingly popular NASCAR vehicles, they can turn sharply at speed … both ways, and do it in the rain.
