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.

As I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash

Flash was a different matter. In the early 2000s, I moved from Adobe’s Director product to its lightweight cousin (at least, it was lightweight at the time) for e-learning development and created a series of authoring tools and online playback plugins based on it. There’s much to like about the platform, and our perception of what’s possible with rich internet applications was largely shaped, for better or worse, by the capabilities of the Flash player. So I have much expertise invested in my ActionScript knowledge and a big library of code.

And yet, as I contemplate the future of my online development, for the first time I can’t see a place for Flash. In the short term, this means extra work for me as I recreate these sophisticated applications using PHP and jQuery, but I can’t countenance investing time updating software created for a defunct platform.

The irony is that it isn’t Steve Jobs’ famous hatred of Flash that has caused this turnaround – the true villain of the piece is Adobe itself. By abandoning development of Flash for mobile, it eliminates Flash as an option for most websites. One in ten of the visitors to my sites uses a mobile device, a seven-fold increase over a year ago, so I’d be mad to develop in a form that excludes them. Had Adobe continued to improve the Flash platform for Android, I might have persevered – at least for sites that attract smartphone users rather than tablet owners. Perhaps I should thank Adobe, then, for making my decision easy. It’s now either HTML/CSS/JavaScript or app – and Flash makes for a very expensive app development platform.

In fact, the only Adobe product I use day-to-day now is Fireworks and that’s the only reason I’m keeping Web Premium on my main desktop. It’s also hard to see on what basis I would, in the medium term, be likely to upgrade even that one remaining product. Assuming that I’m not the only one re-evaluating in this way, this poses serious questions for Adobe’s future income. I think that’s sad because they’ve played an important role in shaping today’s web. Whilst it is making efforts, with Muse, Edge and updates to Dreamweaver, I can’t help feeling that the momentum is swinging away from Adobe. What I really want is a fully working browser-based versions of Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator that I can pay for on a per-use basis, and unless it has something quite remarkable up its sleeve, I can’t see myself upgrading to CS6.

The good news for me as a businessman is that I no longer need to budget for expensive licences. Adobe’s pricing policy has long been a bone of contention and, given the downward momentum placed on software costs by the advent of apps, Adobe’s looking increasingly isolated. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Web Premium costs £300 more to buy in the UK than the US (and yes, that’s comparing figures net of sales tax). Photoshop is the one remaining crown jewel – heaven help Adobe if a competitor comes along with a compatible application for a fraction of the cost.

Farewell Adobe. Delete.

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.

In a briefing, Apple spent a long time demonstrating the swish new multicam editing system, which looked suitably impressive, with support for up to 64 simultaneous angles, the ability to mix and match codecs and resolutions within multicam edits, and multiple synchronisation options. Editors can choose to synchronise clips based on analysis of the audio wave form, by marker or by keyword.

It also announced that, finally, there was a way of importing old projects from Studio 7 to Pro X – albeit via the $10 plugin 7toX for Final Cut Pro, from third-party developer Intelligent Assistance.

Apple was also keen to highlight burgeoning third-party support elsewhere – via effects plugins from the likes of GenArts, Red Giant and Sapphire Edge.

Also on the list of upgrades and improvements is a tweaked chroma key tool that allows editors more hands-on fine-tuning; updated XML support; the ability to import and handle multi-layered Photoshop PSD files; and Media Relink, a new tool for tracking down and re-integrating media into projects that may have been moved or modified.

Finally, Apple announced hardware support for external I/O devices such as colour-calibrated broadcast monitors (a feature still in beta while performance is being tuned). It demonstrated this by outputting its preview stream via a Thunderbolt-connected AJA Io XT to a Sony broadcast monitor.

There are still some areas that haven’t been addressed (there are issues with the import from and export to tape, for instance), yet for the most part this is an update that fixes many of the complaints when the software was originally launched. The fact that Apple has acted a mere seven months after launch is commendable; whether it will bring those disgruntled professionals back into the fold remains to be seen.

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.

Smartr Contacts uses all the data it’s scraped from previous Xobni installations in Outlook and Gmail, plus contacts harvested from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and presents all that data in one gigantic searchable contacts book.

Across all of my accounts it’s managed to find almost 1,600 contacts, 90% of which I’ll probably never voluntarily contact again, yet comprehensive enough to ensure it has captured the email and telephone details of most of the people I’ve had previous contact with.

Wisely, it doesn’t flood all of this data into the default iPhone contacts app, keeping it in its own separate app container. Nevertheless, you can still call, text or email contacts directly, simply by pressing on the relevant number/address in the app.

Contacts can be searched by name, company or title. Better still, each contact has a list of related contacts, so if you can’t get hold of someone at a particular company, chances are you’ll find one of their colleagues in your address book.

It’s not perfect: Smartr Contacts often lists two or three phone numbers/email addresses for the same person, and is clearly unable to tell when someone has moved jobs or changed their mobile number. There doesn’t appear to be any way to even delete outdated entries manually.   The social networking profiles on the home screen are also erratic, sometimes appearing, sometimes not.

Nevertheless, for a disorganised lummox like me, this app does a decent job.

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.

Now, when I log into the Dennis Publishing webmail address, I’m faced with an interface that actually looks like a proper email client, not the abomination of an interface that adorned the webmail before.

The layout is modern and fresh, but most importantly the web interface is quick – blindingly so – with keyword searches completed in a blink of an eye, faster even than my desktop Outlook client can manage.

Now I realise this may have as much to do with the way our Exchange servers were set up (and possibly because my desktop PC is running on steam) as the native speed of the Web App, but it’s been a revelation, and has persuaded me to carry out an experiment.

I’m going to try and use the Outlook Web App – and only the Outlook Web App – to see if it’s a workable alternative in a busy office environment.

The first few days

So far, I’ve been using it exclusively since Friday and I’m glad to report I have few complaints. I no longer have to wait an age as Outlook slowly rouses itself out of its morning stupor. Once Chrome is launched, the Web App takes less than three seconds to appear, so I can get to work straight away.

And I’ve come across very little that I can’t do in this version of Outlook. I can see all my folders, set up meetings and see others’ free time while doing so. I can set up tasks and assign them to members of my team. I can filter search results by category and attachment.

I’m also a real fan of the way the Outlook Web App displays conversations as an expandable list in both the message list and reading pane. This can be switched off, and doing so reveals another plus: the Outlook Web App’s settings and features feel much more accessible and easier to find than on the complex and intimidating desktop app.

Flies in the ointment

There are some annoyances, though, and the main one is a lack of pop-up notifications, although since I have the interface displayed permanently on my second monitor, that’s not the issue it could be.

Another is that I can’t display all I want on the screen. I normally have a to-do list displayed in a narrow pane on the right hand side; the Outlook Web App is restricted to email or calendar or contacts or tasks, not a combination of two or more. I’m not a huge fan of the way some keyboard shortcuts I’m used to work – CTRL-R – while others do not – CTRL-N.

However, these for me are minor irritations, and I say that because I haven’t yet been tempted back to the desktop client. Time may change my opinion, of course – what seem now like quirks may turn into full-blown pet hates – but for now I’m happy with this brave new world.

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.

Initially things don’t look that different, but a few minutes of browsing around really brings home the main advantage of the new OS: the Prime was already pretty responsive, but Android 4 takes that to the next level. It feels even more immediate than before, sweeping from desktop to desktop with the sort of smoothness typically associated with Apple products. Launching and scrolling menus feels buttery smooth, and there’s barely a judder or hesitation to be found.

In more practical terms, this translates to faster and more predictable behaviour in complicated websites. During our day-long test working with tablets, we found sites such as WordPress were barely usable on a tablet, whether iOS- or Android-based. With this ICS update, in most cases there’s zero typing lag and no irritating keyboard buffer run-on. One exception to this rule we found was Zoho Writer, which still feels sluggish in use.

Results in various benchmarks back up this impression. In our own in-house HTML test, which times the loading of 28 web pages, the Prime took an impressive 8.9 seconds, only a little behind the iPad 2’s 7.7 seconds. By comparison, with Android 3.2 on board, the Prime took 17.6 seconds.

Moving on to SunSpider, and oddly the position is reversed. On Android 3.2, the Prime  scored a scorching 1,796ms; with Android 4 on board it slipped to 2,340ms. Just for the hell of it, we also headed of to the BrowserMark website to see how the Prime would fare: it scored 116,360. Alas, we didn’t get the opportunity to test in BrowserMark under Android 3.2, but the general consensus in other reviews is that it scores around 100,000. Another victory for Android 4.

We also retested battery life, but this is one area that appears to be unchanged. With our standard looping video test and the tablet in battery saver mode, the Prime lasted for 9hrs 49mins – that’s roughly the same as the 10hrs 8mins time we achieved under Android 3.2.

Screenshots

Android 4 doesn’t just boost performance. It also brings with it an overhauled user interface and a load of new settings and features. The lock screen has the new Android 4 font, but also a change in functionality: the lock icon can be dragged to the right to unlock the tablet, or to the left to unlock and launch the camera. Small beer, but every little helps.

Once you’re into the UI proper, more small changes become apparent. In the top-right corner, the + symbol has now disappeared. This used to launch the customisation screen – where shortcuts, apps, widgets and wallpapers could be dragged onto any of the five Honeycomb desktops. That screen has gone, with widgets moving to the app drawer (see below) and the wallpaper menu accessed via a long press on the desktop.

You may also have noticed a small black square filled with app icons in the bottom-right corner. That’s a folder. As with the phone version of Android 4, folders are created by dragging one app icon onto another on the desktop, then giving it a name.

Here’s the new app launcher screen, complete with widget preview. As with Honeycomb, you swipe left and right to navigate, and there’s a new fade-in animation: as the current page of apps exits stage  left, rather than scrolling in from the right the new page of apps fades in from behind. Frivolous, but neat.

Another small change is the ability to tidy up the recent apps list. Pop up the list in the normal manner and you’ll see that the individual thumbnails can be removed with a quick swipe of the finger.  Note, that  process also removes the app from Anroid’s cached processes list, effectively killing the app completely. You can see the effects by visiting the App section of the settings screen, where you can now switch between a view of running apps and cached processes.

Speaking of which, this is the new settings screen, which looks similar to Honeycomb’s but sees a reorganisation of sorts. The list to the left is now broken up into sub-headed sections: Wireless & networks, Device, Personal and System. It’s a little easier to find your way around as a result, although it took us a while to get used to it.

There is also a handful of new options and tools hidden away in the various settings screens. Above is the new data usage screen, which gives an overview of how much data you’re consuming overall, plus a breakdown of data usage on an app by app basis. There’s the option to encrypt your tablet – apps and all – to improve security, as well as the ability to remove the lock screen if you so wish.

In terms of the core apps there are more tweaks, but nothing hugely dramatic. The Gallery app now looks a little neater, with thumbnails tidily tesselated together instead of surrounded by acres of wasted black space.  A long press on any photo or album allows photos to be shared as before, but with slightly changed options – a one-click shortcut to the  last service used is handily displayed next to the sharing dropdown.

While we’re on the subject of photos, the camera app has seen a dramatic overhaul. Much more of the screen is now given over to the viewfinder; the shutter button is surrounded by a zoom control, and there’s an extra option in the bottom-right corner for shooting panoramic photos.

Elsewhere, the changes are a little more sedate. Aside from a slight redesign, the Gmail app looks largely the same as before, and the same holds true for the email app used for POP3, IMAP and Exchange accounts. There’s still no sign of search (sigh), although you can at least browse your Outlook folders.

The Calendar, meanwhile adds a new Agenda view, listing upcoming meetings in a vertically scrolling list to the left and details in a larger pane on the right.

As far as the browser is concerned, it’s more minor tweaks. As you can see from this screenshot, there’s a new section – Accessibility – in the settings menu, which allows you to fiddle with text scaling, the amount the page zooms when the screen is double-tapped, and the minimum font size. Elsewhere, there’s a new ‘Fast Scroller’ setting, which brings up a scroll bar when the edge of a page is tapped. In a bonus for 3G tablet owners, there’s the option to switch off Google’s search result preloading, potentially saving a bob or two on data.

Finally, the keyboard sees a slight usability improvement. The look is a little cleaner, fitting in with the whole Ice Cream Sandwich ethos, but more importantly, each key is now a few pixels taller, making it a touch easier to type onscreen. The new keyboard is on the left in the above screenshot; the old Honeycomb one is on the right.

Verdict

Overall, Ice Cream Sandwich is an excellent update that turns a great tablet into an even better one. I’m sure there are more new features to find, but hopefully this gives a flavour of what to expect when the OS update starts to roll in aboard shiny new quad-core tablets over the coming months.

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.

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.

Tweets are now labelled with the number of days ago they were sent, rather than the actual time. That might not sound much, but I can think of many occasions when seeing a tweet was sent at 12pm or 12am made a big difference to the way I interpreted it. Every tweet now gives pride of place to the username of the sender, rather than the tweet itself. And unsurprisingly, the range of URL shorteners and photo services is cut right down, with Twitter’s own now the default.

It’s that oversimplification that constantly jars. When I first installed it and synced it up with my TweetDeck account, I was presented with a Home column of tweets, a Me column of mentions, and a Messages column for those all-important DMs.

But something wasn’t right. There were DMs I hadn’t sent or received. There were people in my Home feed I didn’t follow.

Now, I don’t just tweet from one account; I have three. I’m sure many people do the same, be it personal and work accounts, websites they run, or just a desire for different accounts for different needs.

New TweetDeck had taken it upon itself to make assumptions about my three accounts. The Home feed was taken solely from the team’s @pcpro account, which it had randomly assigned as my default despite there being seemingly no option to set an account as default. I’ve tried deleting all three accounts and adding them in a different order, but it always becomes the default. This also means every time I type a tweet, it assumes I’m sending it from that account, which I rarely do; if you see @pcpro tweet about its hangover on Saturday morning, blame TweetDeck, not me.

The Me feed and Messages column, on the other hand, automatically roll all three accounts into one, with no proper indication of which tweet came from which account. I don’t want to read my editor’s correspondence with our lovely readers mixed in with my own private messages; it’s confusing, a little bit scary and raises the potential for embarrassing blunders. I have three separate accounts for a reason; the decision to bundle them together should be mine, not TweetDeck’s.

Most of this can be fixed by simply deleting all of the default columns and creating new Timelines and Messages columns for each individual account, but to a long-term user like me it seems a perverse way of doing things. Don’t get me started on the way every link and photo now sends you to the browser, or clicking a tweet opens it over that column in the style of the Twitter web interface.

It’s not terrible, and I’m sure I’ll get used to some of its quirks. But for me the new client takes away much of what made TweetDeck so useful – namely the flexibility and control – and replaces it with much of what makes the Twitter web client so annoying. I don’t like the Twitter web interface, that’s why I use TweetDeck. Or at least it was until now. The former buying the latter means that distinction is only going to get narrower from here on in.

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.

It’s ridiculously disingenuous of Microsoft to even suggest that Windows 8 — no matter how good it is — will be such an overnight success. Microsoft is basing the half a billion figure on the total sales of Windows 7 after two years! Considering that Windows 7 won’t support the Windows Store – it can’t, because it requires a completely new application stack that cannot be added retrospectively – it’s not even credible to lump the sales of Windows 7 and 8 together to arrive at that figure.

I’m cautiously optimistic about Windows 8, and don’t share IDC’s attention-seeking view that it will be an “irrelevance” for traditional PC owners. But the only way Microsoft could credibly claim the Windows Store has a potential audience of half a billion users is if it makes Windows 8 a free upgrade from Windows 7.

Microsoft couldn’t do that. Microsoft wouldn’t do that. Would it?

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.

As PC Pro’s Paul Ockenden has argued repeatedly in his Real World Computing column, SMS messages are only a few bytes of data anyway, and it’s amazing that the mobile networks have got away with charging separately for them for so long. However, if you’re on a monthly contract, chances are you’ll have several hundred – or even thousands – of inclusive SMS messages anyway, so the cost benefit of iMessage is likely to be slim.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of iMessage is that it allows you to send text messages even when you’ve got no mobile reception. In my house, for example, there are rooms where I can’t get a reliable phone signal, but the iPhone is constantly connected to the Wi-Fi network, so I can send and receive messages (admittedly, only to/from other iPhone users) without having to dangle near an upstairs window. Alternatively, if you’re abroad, you can hook up to the free hotel lobby Wi-Fi and exchange text messages without paying extortionate roaming text tariffs.

Back to SMS

What happens, you may wonder, if the inverse is true: you’ve got mobile reception but no data, such as when you’re abroad and out of Wi-Fi range, and have turned data roaming off to avoid horrendous roaming charges. Do messages sent from iPhone contacts not get through, because there’s no data channel available?

The answer is no. If you send a message to a fellow iMessage user who has their data switched off, the phone attempts to send it via the data channel at first, but if it can’t get through after five minutes or so, the message turns green and is sent via the traditional SMS channel instead.

This could mean that you’re charged for sending an SMS message that you thought you were sending for “free” via iMessage – there’s no prompt to ask whether you want to send via SMS, it just does it automatically – but the amounts involved here are so tiny that we don’t think it’s a serious problem.

The other small advantage of sending texts via iMessage is you get an instant messaging-style speech bubble on the screen when the other person is typing a message to you, so you know when you’re about to get an incoming message.

iPad messaging

iMessage also works on the iPad, allowing you to send text messages even from devices without a 3G SIM. Synchronisation is a little patchy in our experience with a Wi-Fi only iPad using the same iTunes account as an iPhone 4S.

Messages sent from the iPad are synchronised to the phone, but not the other way round, unless you’re replying to the same thread. So you can start a conversation on the iPad and pick up where you left off on the phone, but not necessarily the other way round.

Full iMessage synchronisation between iPad and iPhone is apparently possible between 3G versions of the tablet, but we haven’t been able to test that.

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:

Here’s the after picture, with those tourists in front of the ruin removed:

If you look closely then you’ll see it’s not perfect – the area of modification is just about evident. Still, it’s extremely impressive for a free app. There’s a paid version available, too, for a mere 62p. Upgrading allows you to output at the same image resolution as the original photo – both of the pics in this post are at 648 x 388 – alongside a Clone Stamp tool for advanced retouching.

Here’s another before and after shot, this time from last week’s LITS. It’s members of the PC Pro team recording our live podcast, and I don’t like the look of that lectern to the right of the stage.

See? Gone:

Once again, it’s not perfect – there’s some pixellation where the app has struggled with the glow of the lamp that was behind the lectern. But even so, for a free app – that’s pretty impressive, right?