The most recent Software Reviews from Incisive Media

Review: Mozilla Firefox 3.5

Ian Williams — 2009-07-02T13:49:00.000Z

Ian Williams, V3.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 at 13:49:00

V3.co.uk gets hands on with Mozilla's latest web browser to see if it lives up to the hype

The browser wars continue to rage, and Mozilla's latest iteration of Firefox introduces a slew of new features and improvements to up the ante.

Probably the most noticeable addition in Firefox 3.5 is the inclusion of Private Mode, a feature already available in most of today's popular browsers - it's called Incognito in Google Chrome and InPrivate Browsing in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8. The feature allows users to surf the internet with a greater degree of anonymity as no local data from the session, including history, cache files, form data, passwords or searches, is kept on the machine.

Private Mode can be activated from the Tools menu. It closes all existing windows and begins the new Private session with a clean slate. Once the Private Mode is stopped the previous session and all its tabs are automatically restored. While this removes any confusion about what is running under Private Mode and what is not, it can be frustrating if you need any information from a previous window when entering Private Mode.

Users also now have a lot more control over data that has already been stored locally, as it is now possible to clear recent history from the past hour, two hours, four hours or day, as well as erasing all history as per normal. Similarly, from the history library users can also opt to 'forget about this site' and remove all reference to a particular site. It should be noted that sub-domains are not affected, so 'forgetting' about maps.google.com, for example, won't affect anything from mail.google.com.

Mozilla has also done a lot of work on tab management with Firefox 3.5, making it easier to sort tabs. This includes a new feature called 'Tab Tearing' whereby users can reorder tabs within a window, and move them between windows as well. 'Tearing off' a tab and dropping it on the desktop will cause it to be opened in its own window, while if the last remaining tab in a window is moved to another, the empty window will automatically close.

Firefox 3.5 includes location awareness, allowing different online services to find your location based on information about your internet connection. The system uses any information to hand to pinpoint your whereabouts, be it your IP address, nearby Wi-Fi signal information and 3G data if it is available. The results will vary depending on the connection. For instance, someone on a 3G data connection will get their location pinpointed quite accurately, while someone on a wired local area network connection connected to a larger company wide area network will get only a very rough estimate. In general, we found it got a location down to within a few blocks, which should be accurate enough for most location-based services.

Although this feature will be of limited use to desktop PC users, it could be very handy to laptop users and will be ported into mobile versions of Firefox such as Fen nec where it could prove a lot more useful.

One of Firefox's most useful features is the ability to easily recover recently closed tabs, helping to fix those moments when you accidentally close a tab you still need. This has now been extended to include recently closed windows and all their associated tabs, which is perfect for those moments when the wrong click of the mouse or a mistype could mean losing something important.

There are a slew of other smaller tweaks that have been included in Firefox 3.5, over 5,000 if you include minute changes such as altering the text in a dialogue box to make it clearer. For instance, the browser's Awesome bar, which provides suggestions as users type into the address bar based on history and bookmarks, can now also be refined with the inclusion of different command keys.

The session restore will also remember any form data that has been entered but not yet committed. If a user is in the middle of an email on their webmail service, for example, and needs to close the browser before they are done, the text they have entered will still be there when the session is restored.

Mozilla developers have also done a lot of work under the hood to boost Firefox's performance. These enhancements are a little harder to test, but include the TraceMonkey JavaScript and full HTML5 support among others. Dynamic content such as webmail, Flash applications or streaming video all feel a lot slicker and smoother, and the changes will go a long way to helping support new online services and technologies as they emerge.

Add-ons are one of the most popular features in Firefox as they allow users to customise the browser and to include a wide array of services and functions, but with over 6,000 available it can be difficult to find the ones you want. To help solve this problem Mozilla has introduced Collections, which allows people to create bundles of add-ons. This can help with the management of a collection, as well as assisting those who need to deploy the same configuration across multiple computers or who are looking for a group of compatible add-ons for personal use.

Mozilla has also implemented open codecs Ogg and Theora to help more deeply integrate video and other media into the browser without the need for proprietary codecs or plug-ins, which should help to generate an even more interactive web experience.

While many of the new additions to Firefox 3.5 are available in most of today's popular browsers, Mozilla is the first to implement an open-source media platform, which should open the floodgates for a much deeper embedding of rich content by web developers.

Whether Firefox 3.5 puts Mozilla ahead of its competitors is highly debatable, but what is certain is that the firm is listening to its users and delivering the types of features and functions they want, not just solving today's problems but trying to create an open platform for tomorrow's online world.

Review: Veritas NetBackup PureDisk v6.5.1

Frank Ohlhorst — 2009-06-30T17:25:00.000Z

Frank Ohlhorst, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 30 June 2009 at 17:25:00

A worthwhile contender for the enterprise backup market

Today's enterprises often have terabytes of data files scattered across multiple storage networks, servers and desktop PCs. Add to that the issues of compliance, security and auditing, and it becomes easy to see why so many backup technologies have started to fall short of enterprise needs.

Symantec is looking to bring order to the chaos of enterprise backups with Veritas NetBackup PureDisk Version 6.5.1, a product that melds several backup technologies under a single umbrella to ease the backup process.

The latest iteration of Symantec's enterprise backup and deduplication suite is aimed at enterprise networks, both large and small. The product's claim to fame comes from the integration of several backup technologies into a single product that eliminates the need for specialised hardware and tape-based storage.

NetBackup PureDisk employs advanced technologies such as deduplication, bandwidth optimisation, granular backup policy controls, compression and encryption to bring efficiency, speed and ease of management to the forefront of the enterprise backup market. Some of the advanced features are the result of Symantec's 2006 purchase of Revivio, a company known for its Continuous Data Protection technology. Symantec has successfully integrated Revivio's technology into NetBackup, and has upped the ante with deduplication, extensive client support and branch office connectivity, all managed with a single, comprehensive console.

Symantec has done its best to keep complexity to a minimum, but NetBackup PureDisk is still a very complex product that takes significant network management savvy to master. The product is far from plug-and-play easy but, considering the extensive feature set, the company has done a decent job in automating many of the tasks and building wizards to perform other complex chores.

Looking at the individual components of the product, it becomes easy to see why complexity enters the equation. NetBackup PureDisk is based on a software appliance, which runs on a modified version of Suse Linux. As a software appliance, administrators can scale the product pretty easily by throwing as much hardware as needed at it.

The software consists of three primary parts, starting with the software appliance which is aptly named a NetBackup Media Server. Part two comes in the form of the backup clients. Each system to be backed up needs to run a small piece of client software provided by Symantec. The company offers clients for various flavours of Windows Server, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Server, Suse Linux Enterprise Server, IBM-AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and Mac OS.

Symantec also provides clients for popular applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. Currently, there is no direct support for Windows Desktop operating systems, Oracle, IBM DB2 or MySQL. But savvy administrators should be able to create scripts or batch files that will allow these non-supported applications to be backed up.

The final piece is the PureDisk Storage Pool, which is simply the storage target for backups. A storage pool consists of many different types of disk storage, ranging from storage area networks (SANs), to network attached storage devices and direct attached drives.

The three elements can be deployed in several different ways or combinations, depending on the network infrastructure and the number of remote sites, if any.

For example, if deploying the product in a datacentre that supports multiple remote offices, an administrator will install backup clients on each of the systems at the remote sites, and then deploy a NetBackup Media Server at each remote site. The datacentre will also have a NetBackup Media Server, and the PureDisk Storage Pool is likely to be located at the datacentre as well. Of course, there can be various permutations of this setup.

In practice, the solution works by performing backup processing, including deduplication and compression, at the local site, which significantly speeds up the backup process while reducing the overall size of the backup that has to be transmitted back to the datacentre. Other variations of this setup may include configuring additional Netbackup media servers for load balancing and failover, and additional storage pools for data mirroring or failover.

We tested NetBackup PureDisk by setting it up as an 'all-in-one' configuration. That meant a single 'node' solution, where all NetBackup services are installed on a single machine, as opposed to installing the metabase server, metabase engine, storage pool authority and content router on different systems. Our single node was installed on an HP server class system, running a pair of Xeon CPUs and 8GB of RAM. An 'all-in-one' or 'single node' installation is the simplest and most basic way to set up the product, and is appropriate for smaller enterprises or branch offices.

Setup consisted of installing the NetBackup PureDisk operating system, PDOS, which is based on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 1 (SLES10 SP1). Hardware compatibility is determined by the requirements of SLES10 SP1. Simply put, if the hardware can run SLES10 SP1, then it will be fine for PDOS.

After installing PDOS, administrators will need to install NetBackup PureDisk, which comes on Linux standard TAR files. Although the included instructions are straightforward, experience with Linux is a definite plus when it comes to the initial setup and configuration. An installation requires at least two disks, a boot disk and a storage disk. The storage disk can be direct attached storage as in an internal drive, a disk array as in iSCSI and fibre channel, or a SAN.

Administrators will want to properly size their hardware, making sure that enough processing power and storage is available. Symantec offers detailed instructions on capacity planning in the documentation. Luckily, setting up the nodes is the most complex part of the product. The remaining chores are relatively straightforward and consist of deploying agents or backup clients, configuring storage options, running wizards and setting up various system parameters.

Installation of the client software was very simple, just a matter of running an installation program on the target machines. Administrators could also install the clients remotely using any deployment and management technologies that they may already have in-house.

While it is not rocket science, a good understanding of storage, networking and security is needed to successfully deploy the software. Once deployed, NetBackup PureDisk is managed via a concise browser-based tool that offers context-sensitive help. The management console can be a little intimidating, simply because of the number of menus, pull-downs and options.

For the most part, the management console offers a logical procession through the various choices. That said, it could be better organised and vastly improved with a tab-based interface that focuses on common functions. But potential purchasers should not be put off by those minor complaints, as Symantec intends to overhaul the interface in a future version of the product.

After testing a few backup scenarios it became easy to see where NetBackup PureDisk offers the most value. One of the more interesting aspects is how the product handles backing up virtual machines, which we tested with a couple of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual PCs.

Virtual machines are becoming very popular in datacentres and offer their own unique challenges. The technology used by Symantec's solution addresses many of those virtual machine challenges. For example, deduplication can reduce the size of the backup by a factor of 10 or more, by identifying which software elements of a virtual machine are the same as other virtual machines. Most virtual machines are created by duplicating a standard virtual machine, so many files across the virtual machines are the same. Removing those duplicate files from the backup saves significant space and time.

The deduplication process runs on the NetBackup media server, and the process was very fast in our tests and barely taxed the CPUs. We were able to run dedupe on 300GB of backup files data in under 15 minutes, using local Sata drives on the NetBackup media server we had built. Simply put, our test bed could handle significantly more data, and most, if any, performance issues will be dictated by the speed of the network backbone and the throughput of the storage disk.

The major strengths of NetBackup PureDisk come from its flexibility. It can be scaled relatively easily and deployed in a way that best suits the target environment. Scaling up usually means just adding more media servers, and incorporating failover has the same basic requirements.

That flexibility extends to the types of storage that can be used, as well as the hardware selected. Additional advantages of NetBackup PureDisk come from its disk-based nature of backup processing, which eliminates the complexity of tape media while significantly speeding up backups.

Of course, administrators can move backup files to tape for long-term storage or archival purposes if needed. The viability of disk-based backups is further enhanced by the product's deduplication abilities and data compression prowess, which can reduce storage needs by as much as a factor of 10.

While there are several other vendors in the backup and deduplication space, Symantec seems to be unique by offering a solution that incorporates several technologies that ultimately reduce the hardware, software and expenses associated with enterprise data backups.

Berlitz Mandarin and Japanese Premier

Tom Royal — 2009-06-30T17:22:00.000Z

Tom Royal, Computeractive, Tuesday 30 June 2009 at 17:22:00

Learn a new language - or two

Learning a language can be rewarding, but it also tends to be expensive.

Even if you don’t fork out for a tutor, the textbooks and software on offer are often costly, so we were surprised to see this Berlitz package, which claims to teach two languages, selling for less than £20 online.

There are several language versions available – we opted for the Japanese and Mandarin Chinese version.

The main program in the box, Berlitz Learning System, was disappointing. Its ‘immersion environments’ offered plenty of photos, audio and text, but the interface was confusing and despite knowing some Japanese already we were baffled as to where to start in the Survival Phrases for Japanese environment.

After some confused clicking we found that each includes some handy conversation practice lessons, but the Theater screen that appears first is so lacking in guidance that we can imagine many users giving up before they even work out how to use the software properly.

Fortunately, the rest of the contents was far more useful. Best of all is the Before You Know It flashcard program that allows learners to practice simple words and phrases using on-screen flashcards and spoken examples. It’s simple, effective and easy to use – everything, in fact, that the main program is not.

And there’s more, too. One of the discs includes flashcard software for Palm and Windows Mobile handheld computers so you can take the same flashcards and practice them on the move – smartphone versions would have been handier for some, but this is a nice extra nonetheless.

There’s also a short audio course that can be copied to a portable music player. This concentrates on teaching useful short phrases, and although some of the teaching methods are a little daft – picturing the state of Ohio at sunrise to remember the Japanese for ‘good morning’, ohayo gozaimasu – we did learn a few new phrases.

All in all, this package is a really mixed bag. We don’t like the main program at all, and it seems daft to pay for two languages at once, but at less than £20 it’s worth buying for the flashcard tool alone.

Anno: Create a New World Nintendo DS game

Tom Royal — 2009-06-27T10:00:00.000Z

Tom Royal, Computeractive, Saturday 27 June 2009 at 10:00:00

Create a colonial empire in this pocket strategy game

The Nintendo DS's touch screen is ideal for strategy games and, in particular, 'God games' in which the player uses a bird's-eye view to build a miniature civilisation.

The latest title in the Anno series allows you to rule over a fledgling empire in the 15th century.

The plot sees you, the son of an ageing king presiding over a kingdom in trouble, sent out to find new lands to supply hungry subjects back at home. After landing on a small island you must build houses for your small band of pioneers, and clear fields for them to work. They pay you taxes, allowing you to build new facilities: a chapel, for example, or a dairy farm.

Creating more municipal buildings will attract more wealthy citizens who, in turn, are able to pay more taxes. Over time your cluster of shacks with hardy owners that require only food can grow into a city of stone houses whose patrician inhabitants need food, milk, linen clothses, herbs, spices and much more, but who pay you a fortune in return.

One island alone can't provide all the raw materials for such a city, so you'll have to spread out, colonising other islands that are suitable for growing particular goods. To find enough islands you need to acquire maps, which can be gained by meeting certain requirements such as colonising a number of islands or building a city with so many hundred inhabitants.

Fail to provide any one type of goods and your citizens will stop paying taxes – fatal when you have a few plantations to support and you're trying to save up for a cathedral. Similarly, an island left undefended can be stormed and occupied by pirates. The game's combat system, which involves moving troops around between forts and ships, isn't as polished as the rest of the game, but it works.

The game includes a story mode, which serves to introduce the key concepts of the game at a decent pace, or you can go it alone and start building a colonial empire. It's not an action-packed rollercoaster of a game, and the combat sections are a little clumsy, but the rest is strangely absorbing: with your frontier empire always perched on a knife-edge, it's hard to save the game and step away.

PC Tools iAntivirus For Macintosh

Cliff Joseph — 2009-06-25T15:45:00.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World, Thursday 25 June 2009 at 15:45:00

A simple and affordable anti-virus program for Mac users

We recently heard reports about the first ever Trojan to attack the Mac. The offending malware, known as iServices.A, was present in pirated versions of Apple’s iWork software suite that had been downloaded using Bittorrent. There’s also a variant called iServices.B that was linked to pirated copies of Photoshop.

The moral of this story, of course, is not to download pirated software. But if you’d rather be safe than sorry, you could take a look at iAntivirus from PC Tools. Unlike its two main rivals Norton Antivirus for Macintosh and Intego’s Virus Barrier iAntivirus is available in both free and paid-for versions.

The two versions are identical, but if you pay the full $29.95 price for the program, you get online technical support with guaranteed 24-hour response times as well.

The program is extremely easy to use. Its main window provides just two options Scan and Protect. You will want to run a scan the first time you install the program, and the ‘Quick Scan’ option took less than 30 seconds to work through our Macbook’s 120GB hard disk, while a more thorough scan took about 24 minutes.

You can then leave the program running in the background in order to provide constant protection, or just run it occasionally in order to perform a quick virus check as required. You can schedule additional scans whenever you like, as well as downloading regular updates for no additional charge.

Admittedly, most Mac users happily get by without any anti-virus software at all, but the ability to download iAntivirus for free and then upgrade at a later date if you want the full technical support package makes it a good choice for Mac users who want to keep their options open.

Panoweaver 6

Ken McMahon — 2009-06-25T10:15:00.000Z

Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World, Thursday 25 June 2009 at 10:15:00

Create 2D and 360º panoramic images easily

Stitching together a panoramic image to give web users a virtual tour of a location is usually time-consuming and fiddly. Panoweaver 6 makes the process a lot easier, and can be used to create both 2D and 360º immersive panoramas, which can be exported to Flash, Quicktime or Java player formats.

We’ve reviewed the standard version, which is the cheapest at £87, but there are also Professional and Batch editions that cost £439 and £791 respectively.

Version 6 adds plenty of tweaks, such as automatic recognition of the lens used, cylindrical panorama production, dual-core CPU support and improved Flash player export options.

The major new feature is support for ‘normal’ and wide-angle lenses. Previous versions of Panoweaver concentrated on producing panoramas from images shot with fisheye lenses. That makes sense because you can cover a 360-degree field of view in only four shots with a fisheye lens (including the overlap).

According to Easypano the Standard edition is restricted to non-fisheye images, but using the trial version, we managed to stitch a 360º spherical image from four images shot with a Sigma 8mm fisheye lens. Another limitation is that it doesn’t include the Smartblend algorithm, which does a superb job of seamlessly blending stitched images together.

The really impressive thing about Panoweaver is ease of use. The interface isn’t pretty, but it’s very effective. Within a few minutes of importing our photos we had a fully stitched panorama ready for export to a Flash, Quicktime or Java player format.

Panoweaver’s autostitching engine did a good job, though it was necessary to add control points between two of the images to indicate matching overlapping detail. After we added these, the result was perfect.

For applications such as estate agency tours and for amateur panographers, Panoweaver 6 could save you a lot of time.

Zonealarm Extreme Security

Paul Lester — 2009-06-23T12:00:00.000Z

Paul Lester, Personal Computer World, Tuesday 23 June 2009 at 12:00:00

PC tune-up tools have been added to the security suite

Zonealarm Extreme is Checkpoint’s answer to Norton 360, adding backup and tune-up tools along with its impressive Forcefield online protection to the Internet Security core engine.

After a rather lengthy installation that requires a combination of scans and updates, it becomes apparent that the ‘headline’ additions, namely backup and tune-up, must be installed separately and behave as standalone tools.

These are both fairly rudimentary, as backup includes encryption and useful options such as multiple file-version support and live monitoring, but it can only be used to save files to the 2GB of online space provided.

The tune-up tool is focused around scanning, backing up and repairing the Registry and is hardly comprehensive, so we were a little disappointed not to see a level of integration comparable to Norton 360.

The Forcefield component works well though, protecting Internet Explorer and Firefox against a range of threats using a virtual browser, which also allows you to prevent any traces of a current session from being recorded.

The security-related aspect of the suite is typically effective and Zonealarm maintains its excellent and well-deserved reputation with a powerful firewall and comprehensive threat detection. Scan times are reasonable, at around six minutes for a quick scan and just under an hour for a normal scan and, as with Norton 360, these decrease as the software gets to know your system.

There’s little to criticise when it comes to core components but we were disappointed by the limited additional tools and poor integration. There’s still a commendable collection of security and protection on offer but we’d question the value in paying extra for the new additions to this particular version.

Fuel game

Jonathan Parkyn — 2009-06-21T16:15:00.000Z

Jonathan Parkyn, Computeractive, Sunday 21 June 2009 at 16:15:00

Let’s off-road

The idea of an open-world racer is not a new one. Several recent games, including the excellent Burnout Paradise, have offered similar worlds with no set routes, in which players can drive around to find new places to race.

Fuel promises 5,000 square miles of virtual environment to explore, making it by far the most expansive game of its type so far – something that works both for and against this ambitious racing title.

Set in an alternative near future, you and your initial vehicle are airlifted by chopper to the Wastelands area, where you can carry out a series of career races.

But once these dry up, it’s up to you to track down your next dose of high-octane racing excitement.

You’re free to cruise around the vast map looking for further career-advancing races. Exploration will also allow players to discover various challenges and secrets, such as liveries for their vehicles, fuel canisters (the game’s currency) and collectable backdrops.

Races vary from shorter on-and-off-road circuits to longer checkpoint-based rally-type events, over a remarkable variety of terrain and extreme driving conditions.

The number of available vehicles grows throughout the game, up to a maximum of 75 Mad Max-style motorbikes, dune buggies, trucks and quad bikes.

In total, there are more than 70 career races to discover and a further 190-plus challenges to take on, and that’s before we’ve even started with the multiplayer possibilities or the built-in race editor, which allows you to create your own custom tracks and races to share with your fellow petrol heads online.

The racing physics aren’t particularly realistic, but then Fuel is not intended to be an accurate driving simulation. The game’s emphasis is on arcade thrills rather than naturalism, although the pacing isn’t quite as enjoyably frenetic as with some similar titles, such as Pure.

In truth, the open-world aspect can be a bit frustrating at times, particu larly during the earlier portion of the game, when it’s easy to feel a little daunted by the huge expanse of game universe at your disposal.

But, while other similar games may do a better job of the racing itself, Fuel’s impressive, varied environments certainly make it stand out from the crowd.

Pegi age rating: 7+

Plants vs Zombies

Anthony Dhanendran — 2009-06-20T16:15:00.000Z

Anthony Dhanendran, Computeractive, Saturday 20 June 2009 at 16:15:00

Good games don’t have to be complex

Plants vs Zombies is a ‘casual game’ that bucks the trend towards ever-more-complex games with harder-to-fathom controls, featuring incredibly simple gameplay and lots of fun.

The premise is that you have to defend your house from marauding zombies, but being zombies they maraud very slowly. They can also be stopped by your plants, which fire deadly pellets, blow open or stop the creatures in other ways.

You can place a certain number of plants at any time, but sunlight is required to grow new ones, so you have to wait before putting down another. It’s also possible to plant sunflowers which generate more sunlight. All the while, the zombies approach.

It sounds easy, and it is for the first couple of levels, but there’s a good difficulty curve, with new plants becoming available each level. There are also different scenarios so things don’t get too repetitive. Graphics are good but unspectacular, and the sounds entertaining enough.

In addition to the 50 main levels there are also mini-games and puzzle modes, plus other sections that break up what might otherwise become monotonous. There are lots of different kinds of zombies, too, which helps to maintain interest levels.

This isn’t a game that requires a lot of thinking, and nor will it last those several-hour-stretches like more in-depth titles, but for the price and for regular short fun fixes, Plants vs Zombies is superb.

Serif Photoplus X3

Ken McMahon — 2009-06-20T11:00:00.000Z

Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World, Saturday 20 June 2009 at 11:00:00

Plenty of tools for both novice and advanced photographers

Serif has christened version 11 of its image-editing software Photoplus X3.

This could be an effort to go one better than Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, or perhaps Serif simply felt it sounded less prosaic.

The name is not the only change, of course. This release adds support for Camera Raw images, High Dynamic Range (HDR) merging, support for 16-bit-per-channel images and some new effects.

These additions expand on an already comprehensive suite of existing tools and features that places Photoplus X3 squarely in the realm of the serious photographer.

The Layers palette often provides a good indication of a photo editor’s capabilities and this one allows you to add new layers and organise them into groups, independently lock their transparency, pixels and position, adjust their opacity and blend modes plus add adjustment layers, layer masks, layer effects and depth maps (otherwise known as displacement maps).

In a tabbed group within the Layers palette you’ll also find a Channels palette, vector paths and a macros palette X3 supports recording and playback of macros as well as batch processing.

X3 does a good job of making these advanced features and other editing tools accessible to beginners or anyone unfamiliar with the program. There’s a Quickfix Studio window that provides a range of image adjustments and effects including white balance, brightness and contrast, cropping, red-eye and blemish removal, noise reduction and sharpen tools, in a single location. The only complaint here was that it didn’t seem to work with 16-bit images.

There’s also a How To panel, which provides guided help for a range of editing activities broadly categorised into Getting Started, Image Adjustments, Retouching, Makeover Studio, Black and White Studio, Creative Effects and Photo Finishing. This has been well thought out and implemented.

Any editing application that aims to attract serious hobbyists has to offer support for Camera Raw formats. The Photoplus X3 documentation doesn’t say which Raw formats are supported, though the open dialogue box now specifies CRW, CR2, ORF and NEF, that includes Canon, Olympus and Nikon and we were also able to open Adobe DNG files.

The Raw Studio importer provides a good set of conversion controls including white balance, exposure, highlight recovery, noise reduction and chromatic aberration. You can export files with either eight or 16 bits per channel, tagged with a colour space profile. It doesn’t offer the sophistication of more expensive Raw converters but nonetheless does a great job.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) tools, which produce a composite image from a set of bracketed exposures, are becoming common in photo applications, but both ease of use and quality of results have been lacking; X3 manages to score well in both these areas.

Using HDR Merge we imported six 16-bit TIFFs and produced an excellent tone-mapped composite image in a matter of seconds. The HDR merge controls include a local contrast radius slider, which helps to overcome the flatness problem typical in HDR images, and colour temperature and saturation controls to save you having to make these adjustments subsequently. You can then save images as eight- or 16-bit tone-mapped files or in EXR or HDP formats.

Photoplus X3 is up there with Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 in its ability to cater for digital photographers of all levels.

Avanquest Will Maker Deluxe 2009

Cliff Joseph — 2009-06-19T16:00:00.000Z

Cliff Joseph, Computeractive, Friday 19 June 2009 at 16:00:00

Create a will without resorting to a solicitor

It’s important to have a will but people are often deterred from making one by the cost of hiring a solicitor.

A low-cost piece of software that simplifies the process of drawing up a legally binding will sounds attractive, then.

But while Will Maker Deluxe 2009 from Avanquest does provide useful help in drawing up your will, we encountered a few flaws along the way.

Installing the program from its CD took just a few seconds, and once installed it displays a simple window that lists the three main steps in creating a will – selecting the correct type of will, planning its contents, and then actually filling it in.

The first two steps – Will Selection and Will Planning – simply present the user with documents to read, which explain the different types of will and how to estimate the value of your estate.

This is useful information of course, although it can be found for free on the Age Concern or the Citizen’s Advice Bureau's websites.

The third step is to Create Your Will. At this point the program uses one of its built-in will templates to ask a series of questions and uses that information to draw up the will, couched in all the appropriate legal jargon.

But although the earlier selection process refers to three different types of wills – basic, comprehensive and discretionary – the Will Maker program only includes templates for four variations on the ‘comprehensive’ format.

As a result of our feedback, the software publishers tell us that they will be adding new templates for ‘basic’ wills, and making those available as a free download soon.

Unfortunately, you will still have to pay an extra £65 to order templates for the ‘discretionary’ will online, but most of us will be able to get by with just the ‘basic’ or ‘comprehensive’ wills, so that’s not a major problem.

Will Maker does have the potential to save both time and money when making a will, but the without those additional ‘basic’ templates we can’t truly recommend it as a reliable alternative to using a solicitor.

Myfax online fax service

Paul Lester — 2009-06-19T16:00:00.000Z

Paul Lester, Computeractive, Friday 19 June 2009 at 16:00:00

Send and receive faxes from an email account

Despite being overtaken by faster, more efficient and more environmentally friendly methods, fax machines still exist in some homes and offices.

But people who need to send or receive faxes don’t have to buy a machine any more, with the advent of computer-based services such as Myfax.

Registering for the service was fast and it’s fairly cheap at £5 per month for 100 sent and 200 received pages.

Once we’d registered we received an email confirming our new fax number and account setup details.

Setting it up involved following a simple step-by-step procedure to send a test fax, creating a password and viewing an optional demonstration video, making it extremely easy for even total beginners to get started.

The online account page shows current fax usage and allows users to send and receive faxes, but the service also integrates with email applications such as Microsoft Outlook, if you have a compatible one installed.

To send a fax, the fax number and country code are entered into the To line of the email with ‘@myfax.com’ at the end.

For emailed faxes, the subject line carries the name of the recipient and any body text forms a cover sheet. Up to eight attached documents then form the fax message itself, so sending faxes through Myfax really was as simple as sending an email.

Received faxes, on the other hand, arrive in your email inbox as attached PDF documents, from where they can be saved, printed or sent on.

If you do have trouble during any stage of the process there is documentation available along with a quick-start guide and freephone support number.

We were impressed by the straightforward setup and operation of the service and, though it took a while for faxes to arrive (between 30 seconds and one minute per attached page), it is still going to be more convenient than dealing with reams of paper.

At £5 per month for the basic service, this is a cheap and convenient way for home users and small businesses to remain fax-capable without having to shell out for new machines and more paper.

Plants vs. Zombies

Daniel Griffin — 2009-06-18T16:15:00.000Z

Daniel Griffin, Personal Computer World, Thursday 18 June 2009 at 16:15:00

Defending your home from the undead horde

Zombies: the cannon fodder of choice for gamers and publishers alike. If a zombie isn’t already cast as the main enemy in a game these days they can usually be found festering in a bonus level such as WW2 shooter Call of Duty.

With Plants vs. Zombies, the scenario is a little different. Essentially a tower-defence game, your goal is to halt the encroaching zombies and prevent them from reaching your base by using strategically placed towers or in this case, plants. Although Plants vs. Zombies may sound utterly silly (and it is), we think you will be completely hooked after playing it for five minutes.

You decide from a varied selection what offensive and defensive plants you will use to stop the undead in their tracks (such as pea-shooting pods or exploding cherry bombs). But you also need to regenerate your resources in the form of sunlight to keep your plant defences growing and save your brains from the hungry horde.

Different seeds have different growing times so you have to continually estimate what to plant and when, while contending with the Zombies themselves, which also come in a wide variety of guises and abilities. It is a case of forward planning as well as experimenting with your arsenal to find the best way of coping with the onslaught.

Despite the simple concept of Plants vs. Zombies, the strategic demands and learning curve are pitched just right and the effect is a very polished and crucially, fun experience. With an excellent sense of humour, well-balanced controls and catchy tunes, we felt smitten with what PopCap (producers of Peggle and Bejeweled) have created.

Mini games add to the longevity, as does the opportunity to buy a stack of new equipment once you have built up enough in-game credit. So while the waves of zombies never seem to end, there is also enough variety in the game play between levels to keep you interested as well as challenged.

Plants vs. Zombies gave us a welcome reminder that first and foremost a great game must be fun and this one does it in spades.

Vufone online storage service

Laurence Gunn — 2009-06-18T16:02:00.000Z

Laurence Gunn, Computeractive, Thursday 18 June 2009 at 16:02:00

Synchronise your phone and your computer automatically

Mobile phones may not quite be disposable yet, but they do have to be replaced now and again. Vufone, which promises to store and synchronise your phone data online, therefore seems to be a useful service.

Vufone is a subscription service costing £10 a year. It gives users a 250MB of password-protected online storage that synchronises automatically with their mobile phones using a downloadable application.

Most major handsets and all networks are supported, including those from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung and LG models (a full list is on Vufone's website), though there is currently no Apple iPhone support.

The service stores phone numbers, text messages, calendar events, pictures, video and music and can be used to remotely delete personal information from your phone, which could be handy if it is stolen.

Vufone can also be used to send text messages – a potential money-saver – and synchronise information with Google’s Calendar and Contacts applications.

There are online players for stored music and videos that support major file formats, as well as a function to upload photos to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa automatically. There is also a cute tool called Mypersona that makes an image of your choice appear on friends’ mobile phones when you call them.

It was easy to install and automatic in use but there were drawbacks. You really need to have unlimited data included in your talk plan, as all the transfers are made over the mobile network.

If you don't have this, you’ll get a nasty shock when the phone bill arrives. (Vufone does make this clear in the terms and conditions).

And the 50MB storage limits for video and music are not really enough in this day and age.

The music player’s controls weren’t very responsive when we used it in the Internet Explorer or Safari browsers, while video uploads of large files took so long, even from a fast broadband connection, that we gave up. A few other glitches while using it made the experience annoying.

Most modern phones can be synchronised with a PC or Mac, while some mobile phone contracts even include online backup of your data. The ability to wipe the phone if it is stolen might justify the subscription charge, though.

A larger amount of storage and fewer glitches would have made Vufone more attractive.

Acebit Password Depot 4

Alan Stevens — 2009-06-18T10:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, Personal Computer World, Thursday 18 June 2009 at 10:00:00

Store user names and passwords securely on your PC

There are lots of ways to keep track of passwords, such as jotting them down on paper or in a spreadsheet or another computer file.

However, none of these can be considered properly secure, and finding and using the information when needed can be an issue.

If that is the case you might want to consider a custom password organiser, such as Password Depot from Acebit.

Password Depot is designed solely to manage passwords. Now in its fourth release, it lets you store and organise all your account names, passwords and other login information in a set of lists.

The software automatically applies 256-bit AES encryption to protect the data both on disk and in computer memory. It also provides active protection against keyloggers and ensures sensitive user and password information is cleared from both the Windows clipboard and system memory when not needed.

Other benefits of the Acebit software include its ability to rate the strength of your passwords as you type them or it will create them for you using a random password generator.

The latest version also lets you attach files, such as product keys, to passwords and synchronise the contents of multiple password lists. Plus it lets you track password histories, encrypt/decrypt other files on the host PC and store the application and password lists on USB memory keys, enabling you to carry your credentials around and use them on any PC.

Written for use with any version of Windows from 98 onwards, we tested Password Depot in conjunction with the optional Password Deport Server. Available free for up to three users (for six users licences start at £129 ex Vat), this add-on package enables passwords to be centrally stored and shared rather than kept on user PCs.

The Password Depot Server installs as a Windows service on either a server or desktop PC, with a separate control panel for management which can be run on the same host or remotely.

The server does little beyond sharing centrally stored password lists and users interact with the application via the same interface, whether using it standalone or in conjunction with the server program. We found this reasonably easy to follow and there is an option to minimise the GUI to a small toolbar to reduce the amount of on-screen space it needs. However, you are presented with lots of tools beyond simple password management, many of which you may never need and it takes a while to get to grips with what’s on offer.

There are wizards to help with some of the more common tasks, such as capturing login information and passwords when you sign on so you don’t have to type everything into the program from scratch. Likewise, you can get Password Depot to auto-fill login screens on the fly rather than you having to look up the information and enter it manually.

It all works and a few tutorials are included but we did have a few concerns over the level of training likely to be needed simply to secure user passwords. We would also like to see more supporting documentation beyond the rather basic user guide supplied. Otherwise Password Depot does what it’s supposed to and is a huge improvement over jotting down passwords on bits of paper.