Why I’m deleting Adobe from my PC

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Rather than buy a new laptop, I recently decided to recondition a four-year-old Acer to see whether it was up to the relatively light duties intended of it. This laptop had been my workhorse during a period when I was regularly flitting between my home office and business headquarters, and had almost no available space on its 140GB hard disk. The first job, then, was to do some weeding.

Microsoft Office was the first package to go, now that I use Google Docs almost exclusively. I found plenty of dross in the Downloads folder of course, but the real shock came when I looked through the list of Adobe programs installed on this machine and realised that I use almost none of them regularly any more.

When I bought this laptop, I reckon I spent around two thirds of my working day using Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Flex Builder – with the last of these accounting for the lion’s share. And yet, over the past year, Flash based development has dropped away almost entirely.

The rot began with Dreamweaver, which I’d been using since it was first launched in the mid 1990s. Since I began creating websites using PHP, and especially when WordPress became the basis of most of my web development, Dreamweaver became irrelevant and I’ve not used it for over five years now. (more…)

Will Apple’s Final Cut Pro X update placate the pros?

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Apple’s Final Cut Pro X was received with derision in some circles when it launched last year. Ostensibly it replaced the old version – Final Cut Pro 7 – but in fact it had been rewritten from the ground up. And there were gaping holes.

Erstwhile fans of the application moaned so hard I felt moved to write about the backlash, proponents of which complained about the lack of multicam features, as well as support for previous projects, XML and broadcast monitoring.

Now, Apple says, the free 10.0.3 update has filled in those gaps, fixed what was until now broken, and generally brought the new version up to the same level as before.

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Smartr Contacts for iPhone review

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

We have mixed feelings about the Outlook plugin Xobni here at PC Pro Towers. On the one hand, we love the way it scrapes through your inbox, extracting useful contact details and other data that was previously buried under a thousand messages.

On the other, we despise how it makes Outlook feel as if it’s running on a virtual machine hosted on a Commodore 64, forcing most of the team to reluctantly uninstall it.

However, I’ve taken rather a shine to the company’s new iPhone app, Smartr Contacts. I should explain that the last time I actually saved someone’s contact details into Outlook was circa 1997. I’m appalling at maintaining a contacts book, normally relying on finding the relevant details by searching through my enormously bloated inbox.

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Switching to Office 365’s Outlook Web App

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

As part of an IT roll-out in the office the entire PC Pro team was moved over to Office 365 last week. For the most part it meant no change at all. After a quick call to IT the morning after the transition to get some some account details adjusted (I’d had no email since 9pm the previous day), I was able to carry on working, using my standard desktop installation of Office 2010, including Outlook, just as normal.

That’s no surprise. After all, Office 365 principally represents a change in the way businesses purchase and manage licenses for Microsoft Office software. From a user perspective, the desktop software – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – stays the same.

However, we have received one major upgrade – from our old, clunky webmail service to the swanky new Outlook Web App – and it could be about to change the way I work.

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Ice Cream Sandwich on the Transformer Prime review: first look

Friday, January 13th, 2012

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is currently the pick of the bunch when it comes to Android tablets, but one of its few weaknesses was the lack of the latest version of the OS. Not any more. It’s received its update, so we thought we’d do an update of our own.

You can read about our first encounter with Android 4 – or Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) – in our Samsung Galaxy Nexus review. We were impressed with it, but had a couple of concerns, chiefly concerning the use of soft buttons and the potential waste of valuable screen real estate. That, fortunately, is a non-issue on tablets. We’re already used to it on Honeycomb tablets, and it takes up a negligible amount of room on a 10.1in tablet such as the Prime.

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Video: Autonomy’s augmented reality technology in action

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

CES Unveiled is the traditional curtain raiser for CES, allowing a limited number of companies access to journalists for three hours on the Sunday evening before the show starts proper. Autonomy, the company that reportedly cost HP a cool $11.7 billion back in August 2011, was one such company, and we caught a demo of its augmented reality technology.

The video is streamed directly to the app once it recognises the image, and then saved locally so that it can be viewed without eating up your data on subsequent occasions. For people like me, who can’t recognise faces almost a minute after I’ve been introduced to someone, the business card application looks particularly interesting.

New TweetDeck: more mainstream, less flexible

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

The TweetDeck desktop client has seen a major overhaul, with a move away from Adobe Air and a whole new approach to accounts and feeds. It’s all very snazzy, with a blue theme and some very welcome touches: I’ve long loved Tweetlist’s highlighted usernames and links, so they’re very welcome here, and tweet boxes that scale dynamically to the length of the tweet are long overdue. That’s the positives covered.

On to the not-so-positives. The tweet box now pops up and steals the focus until you close it. A small change, you might think, but I regularly half-write tweets while I keep reading those of others, then react as I go. Sometimes I leave a tweet for ten minutes to decide whether it should really be sent (it usually shouldn’t). This prevents that, and it’s totally unnecessary. You also can’t send a tweet using Enter, and if you think you can go to Settings and change that, you can’t – it’s been pared back to the idiot-proof basics.

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Will Windows 8 be a free upgrade?

Friday, December 9th, 2011

Nothing betrays desperation more than a company inflating statistics for its own end. Over the past couple of months, Microsoft has been inflating a stat about Windows 8 to the size of a hot air balloon.

Despite being probably a year away from launch, Microsoft claims that Windows 8 “represents the single biggest platform opportunity available to developers”. With tens of millions of iOS and Android devices already on the market, how on Earth does Microsoft justify the claim that Windows 8 is the biggest of them all? Because “half a billion PCs could be upgraded to Windows 8 on the day it ships.”

Replace the word “could” with “won’t” and you’ll be much closer to the truth.

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How iMessage works

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

One of the best new features in iOS 5 is iMessage. This nifty little service subverts the traditional SMS text messaging system, allowing you to send free* text/picture messages to other iOS 5 users via the data channel (*free, presuming you don’t exceed your data cap, that is).

iMessage is very subtly implemented into the existing Messages app. You won’t even notice it until you attempt to send a text message to a contact with an iPhone, and the message suddenly goes blue. Apple automatically detects when the recipient is using iOS 5 and diverts the message via the data channel rather than your network’s SMS channel.

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Photoshop-style Content-Aware Fill, for free, on your phone

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

We’ve covered Adobe Photoshop CS5’s stunning Content-Aware Fill feature on the blog before, as it’s an undoubted head-turner: the ability to draw around an unwanted object in your photo and, with a bit of tech trickery, watch it disappear, with the gap filled by the app’s best guess as to what should be there instead.

That’s the kind of feature you expect to find on paid-for software such as Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop Elements, but there’s an app that’ll do the same thing for free on Android and iOS devices – TouchRetouch. Here’s how it’s worked its magic on one of my holiday snaps, with a couple of inconveniently-placed tourists removed from in front of this Cretan ruin:

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