Why I won’t subscribe to Creative Cloud

Friday, May 10th, 2013

This week, Adobe formally announced that it would cease development of Creative Suite and focus all its efforts on delivering its collection of apps via Creative Cloud.

The outpouring of rage has been considerable. Twitter has been ablaze, with the majority calling for human sacrifices in the Adobe boardroom. Others who are already using Creative Cloud have been wondering what the fuss is about, claiming it’s a great service.

I’m not using Creative Cloud yet, but I’ll eventually be forced to if I want to update Photoshop and the other apps I use as a professional photographer. So what’s the problem?

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Windows 8 sparking little more search interest than Vista

Monday, April 15th, 2013

There’s a lot of debate over the popularity of Windows 8. Microsoft claims Windows 8 is outselling Windows 7; British desktop PC makers have told us that up to 93% of new PC buyers still want Windows 7.

Google provides us with another means of divining the popularity of different products. The Google Trends website allows you to compare the search volumes of different terms, and it doesn’t make particularly pleasant reading for Microsoft when you start comparing recent versions of Windows.

We compared the search volumes for the past four editions of Windows, from 2004 until the present day, and this is the result (click graph to enlarge):

As you can see, Windows 8 is following a very similar trend line to Windows Vista, briefly bursting past the incumbent version of Windows at the time of launch, before settling down at a level that’s well below its predecessor. While the post-launch drop-off isn’t quite as severe for Windows 8 as it was for Vista, it’s still pretty grim viewing for Microsoft.

If there are crumbs of comfort for Microsoft, searches for OS X appear to be in long-term decline — although we suspect more people search for the particular version number than “OS X”:

Indeed, when you throw the search term “Mac” into the comparison, it paints an entirely different picture:

How to record a Skype call for free

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

Recording a Skype call is much easier than recording a regular telephone conversation, which requires a Dictaphone and specialist equipment. Better still, you can do it for free.

For this method, you’ll need to install the Skype Windows desktop client (the Windows 8 app won’t work), and a piece of free software called MP3 Skype Recorder.

If you install both these pieces of software at the same time, you may need to restart your PC before MP3 Skype Recorder recognises the Skype installation. When you first open MP3 Skype Recorder you’ll also have to click in a pop-up in the Skype client, giving the app permission to access Skype.

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Major retailers mis-selling Windows RT as Windows 8

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

There are only five Windows RT tablets or hybrids on store shelves and they’re not selling well, as one analyst has pointed out this week.

There’s many reasons devices such as the Asus VivoTab RT TF600T and Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 haven’t challenged the iPad’s dominance — high prices, poor availability, failure to invest in marketing, dislike of Windows RT, incredibly silly names — but I can add one further excuse to the list: confusion among retailers.

The Samsung Ativ Tab RT, for example, is listed over on Argos’ website. It won’t be tough for PC Pro readers to name what’s wrong with this picture:

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Flipboard 2.0: we’re all magazine editors now

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

I used to be a heavy user of Flipboard, an innovative iOS/Android app that turned your Twitter, Facebook and other news feeds into a stylish, flickable magazine-style format.

In recent months, I’ve edged away from Flipboard in favour of semi-rival Zite, largely because it was better at anticipating content from other sources that I might want to read, instead of merely sprucing up the presentation of my existing feeds.

However, a feature in the newly released Flipboard 2.0 has piqued my personal and professional interest in the app once more. Flipboard now allows users to become their own magazine editors (yes, I can feel that noose tightening around my neck), selecting content from different sources and presenting it in their own bespoke titles.

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Four alternatives to Google Reader

Thursday, March 14th, 2013

Google’s plans to shutter Google Reader will bite on 1 July, and anyone who hasn’t migrated their carefully-assembled collection of RSS feeds by then will have to start all over again.

The activist-minded can add their voices to a 30,000-strong petition, begging Google to keep Reader going, but the more pragmatic should accept defeat and start looking at ways to port their RSS feeds to different services.

Here are four go-to alternatives to Google Reader to consider:

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OneTab: the end of Chrome memory leaks?

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

OneTab might just be the Chrome extension that boosts the productivity of PC Pro. Sat next to me all day is Nicole Kobie, PC Pro news editor and rapacious harvester of browser tabs. Every time she sees a news story she might like to follow up on, she leaves it open in a browser tab, opens a new one and continues her hunt. By the end of the day her browser window looks something like this:

That’s the point where she starts thumping her desk in frustration and uttering profanities in that charming Canadian drawl of hers, because the 37 open tabs have brought her bedraggled PC to its knees. What’s more, she hasn’t got the first clue what’s hiding beneath all those tabs because all she can see is the favicon.

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The ridiculous splintering of Internet Explorer

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

Today, Microsoft has got around to releasing Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7, finally bringing the browser it released in October on Windows 8 to its most popular OS.

Just so as we’re clear which browsers work with which operating systems, I’ve produced this handy chart.

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Windows 8: a touch of madness

Monday, February 18th, 2013

For the last week or so I’ve been using Windows 8 and, for the most part it hasn’t been the least bit horrid.

Yes, it forced me to restart this morning just as I sat down to get some work done and, yes, the procedure to actually turn off the computer is like a putative storyline scribbled on a napkin by Franz Kafka but later rejected for being too complicated. And yes, the way PDFs, JPEGs and a few other file types insist on opening full-screen (how many PDFs are that important?) is jarring, but still, most of my work is done in a browser these days, making the operating system in the background irrelevant most of the time.

It is, as operating systems go, perfectly fine.

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How to add Media Center – and DVD playback – to Windows 8 Pro for free

Friday, January 25th, 2013

If you own Windows 8 Pro, you have precisely six days to claim your free Media Center upgrade – the main advantage of this is that it allows you to watch DVDs on your PC, because a DVD codec is part of the package.

Plus, if you have a TV tuner already installed or fancy buying one in the future, you can also watch and record live TV.

But – and it’s a big but – this free upgrade offer expires as of 31 January 2013.

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