Tag: software

Easy image manipulation software: five of the best

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1. Adobe Photoshop Elements [PC / Mac]

Photoshop? Easy?

There’s no denying that the various flavours of Photoshop contain some very advanced features, but in fact it’s possible to do basic image and photo editing and manipulation plus a range of “fancy” things without a whole lot of training.

Photoshop Elements is a cut-down version of the full-blown package which means it doesn’t have as many features but it’s also cheaper. In fact, it often comes bundled with digital cameras.

Get to grips with the basics of Photoshop Elements and you may well find yourself wanting to delve deeper into its powerful tools.

Ease of use: 3/5
Features: 5/5
Price: Latest version around £60, may be bundled. PC / Mac

Andy Merrett Software, Top Fives

TweetDeck versus Seesmic: battle of the Twitter apps

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TweetDeck and Seesmic are desktop clients designed to make communicating on Twitter and managing your accounts easier.

Here they go, head to head: TweetDeck version 0.26 versus Seesmic version 0.4.

Look & Feel

Both TweetDeck and Seesmic are built using the Adobe AIR platform, and have a similar look and feel.

Seemsic appears to have more subtleties designed to make it easier to decipher tweets from multiple accounts at once, yet neither application is hugely customisable when it comes to the overall look.

If you only run a single Twitter account then seeing how applications handle multiple accounts won’t matter to you, but if you’re a “power user” handling two or more active accounts, you’ll find Seesmic offers more options for handling them.

Both applications let you view columns for each account’s tweets, replies, direct messages and so on, but Seesmic also allows you to view a single stream of messages from all your accounts at once, ordered by the time tweets arrive.

Whether this works for you depends on how you like to view accounts, but at least you have the option. TweetDeck (currently) doesn’t offer this.

Andy Merrett Internet, Software, Twitter, Web 2.0

Gmail comes out of beta

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I know, I know. Pick up your jaw. We’d all rather got used to the fact that Gmail and all the Google apps were in some sort of permanent beta over the last five years. Google has now decided that the time is right for their web software to be fully-fledged in its own right but not because it’s passed a bunch of tests.

It seems that all sorts of potential users – largely in the corporate world – might have been put off by the idea of using software that was only half ready or half safe or experimental or whatever the connotation might have been. So, by removing the label, Google hopes to be removing the stigma too.

They promise to continue developing their mail and office products all the same but those of a nervous disposition may now use the joy of the software in piece. If you haven’t, I heartily recommend you do.

GBlog

Daniel Sung Software

Nero lets comsumers BackItUp & Burn with simplest software yet

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Nero has taken an interesting step, today, a little away from media software specialist to more of a home IT solution package with the launch of BackItUp & Burn.

The idea is to provide an incredibly simple way for people to copy and save their data without having to think or know too much about what’s going on – or remembering to do it for that matter. Nero has minimized the footprint as much as possible and kept the interface design in a similar vein to well known Windows products like Outlook to promote whatever warm glow that may bring.

The software allows you to back up to HDD, CD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, FTP, memory card and online too as well as synchronising files and folders and scheduling activity along with all the norms you’d expect.

It’s available for a very reasonable £29.99 for the downloadable version and, provided you actually buy software, that’s pretty hard to argue with even if you only use the package for burning. Definitely worth a look.

Daniel Sung Software