Evaluating software can be dizzying. With dozens of options to choose from, they all start to look the same after a while. But this isn’t a decision that you can afford to make lightly. Adding a new piece of software into your tech stack has the potential to impact nearly every aspect of your business.
My son is 6, and his favorite subject in school is coding — mostly because he gets to play with little robots, but it’s still a very worthwhile and useful life skill. He also loves all things Star Wars, so when Kano offered us the chance to review their Star Wars The Force Coding Kit, we had to give it a shot!
One thing I have missed using Android, rather than iOS as my main phone, is the ability to send and receive messages on my phone, tablet or laptop. And while Android still has a long way to go to get close to the functionality or usability of iMessage, they have taken a step in the right direction with Android Messages for Web.
I’ve been a Creative Cloud subscriber for a couple of years now. Adobe has always been adding apps on the mobile side but it’s always been a bit disjointed. That has now ended now with their new Lightroom CC, however, they’ve added to the confusion by continuing the previous desktop oriented Lightroom and calling it Lightroom CC Classic. I’m not sure if this will work for them.
Oooh, Dropbox, it looks like you could be in some trouble!! Amazon Cloud Drive is hot on your heels with a new storage plan that’s not only cheap, but is intriguing enough to make most folks consider jumping ship.
Nearly four years ago, Adobe introduced Forms Central, an online service that let you easily distribute, collect and analyze data using web or PDF forms and surveys. Last week they announced they were killing off the product, and final retirement was July 28, 2015. For users of the service this means finding a new home, such as FormStack.
Judie and I were huge fans of eWallet from its earliest days, back when we used Palms; we synced the info on our Palms to the eWallet program on our desktop PCs. Later on we used eWallet on our Pocket PCs. Once the app became available for iOS, we loaded it onto our iPhones and eventually also on our Macs.
Evernote just topped 100 million users; that’s pretty impressive. Even more impressive is the fact that those 100 million users can be found in any of 190 different countries. Taken together, the two numbers speak to the fact that the popular and powerful service meets a truly international need; this milestone reminded me that many of us were early subscribers.
Dan took a look at the Toshiba Transmemory Pro USB drive recently, and after he’d finished with it I had the chance to test out its security features. You can partition and secure parts of the drive to keep private files on it, which is great in theory; the execution, however, left quite a bit to be desired.
There’s no better price than free, and that’s how much you’ll currently pay for the book “Notes to a Software Team Leader”. Targeted to anyone with a leadership role in the software business, this book is normally $25. If people look to you for technical guidance, then this book may help makes it easier for you to help. Get it here.
Google Reader and Google Keep are two different services, but when placed side by side they offer a cautionary tale for anyone using the web. There has been a good deal of chat among the Gear Diary team on our backchannel, and Judie, Mike, Carly and I have been further discussing the demise of Reader and the introduction of Google Keep among the four of us quite a bit. Here’s some of what we have to say… As Joel posted Wednesday, Google has just rolled out Keep, their Evernote and OneNote competitor. Evernote, as you likely know, offers users a…
Yesterday Google launched a new service called Google Keep. After playing around with it a bit last night, I have a much better idea of what it can and can’t do, and what it really is. Will it be good enough to replace Evernote? Is it even close? In a word, no. Google Keep Phone Interface The phone interface is reminiscent of the Google Now interface; each note appears as a card. There’s a Multi-column view and a single column view. Across the top is the bar you interact with to add notes. tap the note to create a note, the…
I was just starting to listen to This Week in Google live after work, when right before the show they shouted Google just launched Google Keep! I’ve already got it installed on my phones and my tablet. What IS Google Keep? It’s very similar to services like Evernote or OneNote. It’s designed to take notes, make checklists, and more. It hangs off of your Google Drive, and it uses the new real-time API that Google also announced this week. Google Keep doesn’t appear to support tagging like Evernote does, and while you can import pictures into your Google Keep, it does not appear to look at…
If you are looking to use the state of the art digital editing suite from around 2005, you are now in luck! Last week Adobe shut down the activation servers for their Creative Suite 2 (CS2), but wanted customers of the older version to continue to be able to make use of the software. So they assigned a generic serial number and listed it along the download links for the files for Mac and PC. Immediately some blogs hopped on the ‘giveaway’. Turns out it was a mistake, not an intentional ‘giveaway’. Here is the explanation: Effective December 13, Adobe…
If you work in a creative industry, chances are you use software programs from Adobe’s extensive creative suite. The issue, of course, is that these applications are insanely expensive. Interested in image-manipulation through Photoshop CS6? MSRP will cost you $700 for that program alone. You can grab it off Amazon right now for $560, but that’s not exactly a bargain. What about Illustrator? Dreamweaver? After Effects? The list goes on and on. How can anyone possibly afford to keep a solid library of digital tools? Here’s the answer: Adobe Creative Cloud. Subscription services have been around for ages, but software-based…
For those individuals like me who have just started using the latest Microsoft OS incarnation that is Windows 8 on their PCs, Slacker announced the official launch of their music service supporting Windows 8. The free Slacker app is designed such that it takes advantage of the new tiling and UI aspects of Windows 8, multitasking, and even the Share charm feature. In Windows 8, apps like Slacker don’t flip to the “old” Windows 7-style desktop but are integrated into the Windows 8 UI, providing a fluid, seamless experience, particularly if you’ve set up Windows 8 with a Microsoft Live…
Let’s be honest here. If you’re over 40 years old, there’s a good chance you’re not looking your best. I’m not saying that you’re a hideous monster or anything like that, but it’s certainly possible you could use a little work. If you’re much older than 40, you could definitely use some work. That’s where the Portrait Professional Studio software enters the picture. Portrait Professional Studio is capable of “airbrushing,” a technique of photographic retouching and enhancing that removes imperfections and similar surface-level “problems.” Usually reserved for models in the glamor and fashion industries, Anthropics Technology has created an intelligent,…
Image courtesy of OrganicKuwait blog Hi there, SBCGlobal users! I’d like to speak to those of you who work on Macs or Macbook Pros; I’ve been off Windows for a while (wow; I make it sound like heroin, don’t I), so I don’t know if what happened to me today is true on Windows boxes as well as Macs. Read on if you like, though, because maybe you’ve bumped into this problem, too! One of the things that pleased me when I upgraded to OS X Lion was with regard to the email program. I like Apple’s email program; I…
If you are like me, you enjoy taking occasional videos of sundry things, and if you are like me, you are hardly an expert. Far too often there is something going on at the drop of a hat that you would love to get on video, only to later discover on playback that the quality of the resulting video isn’t quite in the same league as David McLean’s Dr. Zhivago. No, the output looks more like a scene from “Battle: Los Angeles”, except you were just trying to film the kids on the swingset, not experiencing a ground-shaking alien…
If you use a Mac, then you probably use iPhoto for basic image editing and iMovie for basic video editing. But what if you use a PC? The tools included there are not nearly as capable, friendly or integrated. And what if you want to go further than the basic editing capabilities of the iTools? That is where Adobe Premiere Elements 10 & Photoshop Elements 10 come in – offering integrated photo and video editing and production tools for both OS X and Windows 7. The folks at Adobe sent me a review copy, so let’s take a look!
Last fall I applied for and received a grant that will allow my synagogue to build a new technology lab. Within the next few months we will have a number of iMac desktop computers and a host of iPads being used by our kids and adults alike. In fact, I’m working on a special tutorial program for students becoming bar and bat mitzvah that will run on the iPad. It uses the awesome iOS application MentalCase. More on that at a later date. When I found out we were getting the grant, I reached out to a number of companies…