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As impressive as the Mac OS might be, Windows users will regard it as having one grave flaw: No Solitaire. The programmers in Cupertino were show offs and include a Chess game. But Chess requires actual work and thought, which makes it unacceptable for wasting time or avoiding work responsibilities. I mean, jeez, what good is a game that would make you procrastinate about procrastinating. Fortunately, there are solutions at hand. Burning Monkey Solitaire (Freeverse Software, $24.95 when bought separately, but it is included in Aladdin game bundles) gets high ratings. However, it doesn't offer a lot of variations and the simian antics of the creatures that populate the game get old very fast. Solitaire purists will prefer Allgood Solitaire by Mike Perry (below; $15 well spent).
Allgood has the key ingredients one requires in a Solitaire game:
Graphics are good, although not a match for SolSuite on the PC. Among the only things that I found wanting were that you cannot drag the play area to expand it, which sometimes results in the bottom edge of the bottom cards falling off the screen. Also autoplay (automatically moving cards from the tableau - that's the cards you manipulate at the bottom - to the foundation - the stack of ordered cards you are going for) sometimes fails to work. But most egregious, there is no one-suite Spider. Microsoft put it into recent Windows versions and it is that most wonderful of games - you always win. Mike, I want to see it in your next version. Let's talk about configuring Microsoft Internet Explorer's features for tabbed browsing, password and form management, simplified URL entry, pop-up blocking, download management, integrated Goggle searches, and heightened security. Oh wait, Internet Explorer doesn't do any of that. Because of ongoing corporate rebellion at security flaws in Microsoft's
offerings, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (due in August) will add pop-up
blocking and additional security. But users looking for the rest of the
feature set will have to look elsewhere. Mac users won't have do much looking. The features enumerated above are part of Safari (right), the browser that Apple includes with its operating system. In fact, Internet Explorer for the Mac also has most of them, with the notable exception of tabbed browsing. To quickly describe these capabilities to those who haven't yet tried them:
As predicted in this space before the antitrust trials, Microsoft has gotten complacent about MSIE. New browser features have been few and far between, the company having spent most of its energies on integrating browser features and Internet capabilities into the Windows OS and Office productivity suite. But competition did not go away. Browsers just aren't so complex a programming problem that others cannot produce one. Even Netscape, now owned by AOL and its parent Time Inc., still is around. It just isn't really a stand-alone product any more. Its core code has morphed into the Mozilla quasi open source browser, currently available for free as version 1.7 and in beta form as the promising "Firefox" software (middle). While still buggy in its prerelease state, Firefox is a very nice product indeed and you can't beat the price. Just stay away from Netscape: It's just Mozilla 1.7 bundled, in standard AOL fashion, with a ton of add-on software to clutter up your system. Also available is Opera, now in version 7.5x is a Norwegian product developed in conjunction with the telephone company there. It has since evolved into one of the most sophisticated browsers around. In addition to the features shared with other browsers, it has a RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") newsreader, which lets you track blogs and other news sources online via a new communications protocol. If tabbed browsing doesn't ring your chimes, you can arrange the multiple pages to suit your fancy. As is Mozilla, it is cross-platform; available to Mac and Linux users. Also, it currently is the least-hacked browser in wide circulation. Opera will cost you -- $39 for an ad-free version; free will accept ads. Free of cash-based charges, that is; you pay for it by being interrupted by advertising. Frankly, the Opera interface is busy enough without the ads; try it for free but pay the folks the money if you plan on using it regularly.
One alternative for Windows users, thus, is NetCaptor (bottom) (http://www.netcaptor.com) which uses Internet Explorer as its browsing engine, and adds tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. The company claims it was the first to devise tabbed browsing. Same formula holds here as for Opera: free with ads; $29.95 for the ad-free "Pro" version, which also includes ad blocking. Of course, since it relies on MSIE, NetCaptor's security is only as good as Internet Explorer's. But NetCaptor is a useful compromise solution if you need MSIE compatibility. Alas, no download manager. For that you will need additional software such as Conceiva's DownloadStudio ($39.95). This is a handy program that also includes streaming audio and video capture capabilities as well as FTP support. It is a worthwhile adjunct to either NetCaptor or Internet Explorer. Drilling Into the Windows Registry Editing the Windows registry is right up there with going to see your dentist on the task-avoidance scale. But two new tools, RegWorks ($30; a "lite" version is 14.95) and Reg Organizer ($29.95) have come on the market to ease the pain of drilling down into the registry. Both do an admirable job, and both programs have common capabilities:
search and replace throughout the registry, create lists of search findings,
link to "favorite" keys (a misnomer if I ever saw one; in the registry a
"favorite" usually means an "un-favorite" that you need to keep monitoring),
and faster navigation. Given that the prices are the same, your choice is
primarily a matter of personal taste. RegWorks (top) can be best described as what Windows RegEdit might be if were a real program. It has a straightforward explorer tree interface that will be familiar to you. But closer inspection reveals major differences. There's a toolbar at the top to facilitate editing and other functions, tabs to direct you to "favorite" keys and tools for tweaking the registry. Also, blessedly, there is an address bar that let's you enter key names using the standard nomenclature (e.g., "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion") and navigate directly to those keys. Reg Organizer (below) opts for a flashier interface using a navigation bar and Windows XP style graphics. When you work its search and replace functions, the resulting lists come up with check boxes to select items for further action whereas RegWorks's results are a standard explorer list -- that's kind of stylistic difference to which I refer. Reg Organizer also let's you set profiles for searches, in which you can specific which registry branches and what level of information to want -- handy if you regularly do very specific kinds of searches. In my testing, RegWorks tended to search a little faster while Reg Organizer had more flexibility in setting search parameters. If I had to give a thumbnail description of the underlying differences, it would be that RegWorks operates from the premise that probes into the registry should be delicate and careful with an interface optimized for working with individual keys, while Reg Organizer opts for a "bring it on" assault and an interface optimized for mass changes. Each program has its own unique functions. RegWorks has a "Tweaks" capability that allows you to make Windows program settings changes -- security settings in Windows itself, for example -- and also has a wizard to let you add tweaks of your own. For example, I used it to set up a toggle for Outlook 2002 and 2003 that forces emails to be displayed as plain text only.
The two utilities both let you monitor changes to the registry but in different ways. RegWorks lets you monitor registry changes continuously while Reg Organizer's monitoring is tied to software installations. Both tools are the work of Russian programmers, which caught my curiosity. Eugene Loskutov, RegWorks's author said there is no particular reason for that other than such products are in high demand there. Whatever the explanation, the utilities definitely are "From Russia With Love" for users worldwide looking to ease the pain of fighting with the registry. This sound familiar? You have carefully put something away where you won't lose it and now you can't find the darned thing. It can be a physical item ("I just put the remote control down a second a ago...") or a digital one (I know that's in an email, which must be somewhere...). In the case of the former, the traditional avenue of appeal is to ask your spouse who invariably finds it right in front of your eyes. For the latter, the answer is X1 from X1 Technologies, Inc.
So what? You say. Isn't that what Windows' and Outlook's search tools are for? First off, X1 is much faster. The company's claims that it will give you results as quickly as you can type in keywords isn't far off; X1 blows away Windows search. Second, Outlook won't search inside attachments and X1 will, but more than that X1 also will search Outlook Express and Eudora, and it will search multiple Outlook data (pst) files, even those you don't have open at the moment. The latter is a huge help as it allows you to keep your main data file down to efficient size and offload items to pst archives, yet find what you need when you need it. Setup can be done in a few minutes, with a few more set aside for you to set program preferences. Note that by default, X1 will include the deleted items and junk mail folders in Outlook; you will want to decide whether to change that. The advantage of including them is that it will help you find messages that inadvertently got directed there; downside is, of course, that you have that a bunk of junk messages to search through. The only slow part is the first time you run the program. X1 builds an index (its database on where things are) of your files and that will take quite some time depending on how much data you have. Subsequent index updates only take a few seconds. Thereafter using it is a breeze. You type keywords into a box on the X1 search window -- a tabbed interface sets the search for emails, attachments, files, and contacts. By default, X1 will look for all the words, you can make exclusions by putting a "-" before undesired terms -- e.g., "Red Sox -curse." You can set X1 to launch with Windows -- I recommend that -- and have it run either as a standard program window or as a hideaway toolbar at the top of your screen -- also my recommendation. Be aware, however, that those index files take up a lot of space -- on my system, nearly three-quarters of a gigabyte. So if you have more than one hard drive or multiple partitions on a drive, put X1 on the one with the most space. Also, by default, X1 indexes email every minute and your files every five, which takes up a lot of computer resources. I am seeing satisfactory results at five and 15 minutes. Alas at $99, X1 may be carrying a bigger pricetag than the market will bear. The $60 volume discount price sounds more like what the base price should be. Also, two missing features -- the ability to do one unified search of all four components and to search by exact phrases will not be rolled out until later this year. When you take into account the time you lose finding files on your PC, X1's impressive capabilities well may pay for themselves. Media burning software used to be relatively simple. For years, Roxio has been selling the market leading Easy CD Creator software. It allowed computer users to easily compile and burn CDs. And that's pretty much what it did -- prepare content for CDs, burn CDs, and make labels for CDs.
But as time has gone on, more and more functions became part of the package: sound file editing software; software to encode and decode MP3s and the like; photo software to enable the creation of photo slideshow CDs. Then came DVDs and the need for video editing and production capabilities. All of a sudden the "easy" program wasn't so easy; it was a collection of more than a dozen separate components.
Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 Digital Media Suite ($58 after various
discounts) tackles the issue by going beyond the typical launch pad approach
-- a dialog that sends you the various component programs -- by more tightly
integrating those components. There is still a Creator Home Page, but
whereas you usually had to keep going back to it to move from one component
to another, there now are linkages within components. The suite now has a
uniform look and feel, with common interfaces so users don't feel like they
have to juggle -- and learn -- a multitude of different applications.
A good example of the practical value of this integration is creating a DVD slideshow from still pictures:
You might begin by using PhotoSuite to import, edit, and retouch photos from your digital camera. Then use Creator Classic (the new name for the core CD burning application) to rip tracks from a music CD to use as background music, and then edit them with Sound Editor. The next step would be VideoWave to build a "storyboard" (content layout) of your photos, background music, transitions, and effects. Finally, DVD Builder burns it, and Label Creator prints labels for it.
The usual Easy Creator caveat applies -- the software never has been tolerant of multitasking; when you do a project on it, shut down other tasks. A special caveat for Version 7 is that, like all DVD and video suites, it makes heavy demands on your hardware -- so I would be cautious about upgrading on an older PC. On the other hand, if Version 6 is running fine, the tighter integration of Version 7 makes it a sensible upgrade.
There are two major ways to
significantly improve a computer program: add significant new features or
make the current features significantly easier to use. After a long series
of changes along the former lines,
TechSmith has unveiled SnagIt 7, which makes the screen capture
utility's robust feature set readily accessible to users.
SnagIt 's capabilities made it a TNPC recommended product (Vol. 6 No. 11). The software is better characterized as data capture rather than screen capture. However, getting control over all of its functions could be a struggle, with multiple menu and option boxes to deal with. Version 7 changes that by providing a unified web page-like interface, tied to specific functions and jobs.
The various settings for each task are organized into a single profile, with users having the option to modify the default profiles or create new ones of their own. For example, SnagIt can be set to take a shot of the visible portion of a program window or automatically scroll through all the content of the window. Or you can set it to capture information as text instead of as a graphic. You can set the file format for saving data, the location where the captures will be stored, the default file name, and so on. All this was possible before, but now all the settings are right a hand in a clear dialog on the right of the main program screen. The same principle also applies to editing functions, which now are integrated into the main interface as well as into the window that appears after a capture. There is one important new feature -- a really nifty webpage thumbnail and slide show creator that creates collections that look as good and often better than those from higher priced graphics software. Price, meanwhile, is one thing that hasn't changed -- still a best buy at $39.95. Adobe Photoshop Album 2Adobe's Photoshop Album, favorably reviewed here a few months ago already has undergone a metamorphosis into a Version 2 ($26 after rebates). There is no huge breakthrough here; if you have Version 1, upgrading to 2
is not a must. But Adobe has taken a nice program and improved it. The main
new feature is the capability to send your photos directly to Palm OS
handhelds, mobile phones, and TiVo Series 2 digital video recorders with the
Home Media Option. Otherwise, there have been numerous detail refinements in what already was a clever interface. Tagging and categorizing photos -- already its strong suit -- has been improved by allowing for more subcategories. Album adds a calendar view to enhance its capabilities for organizing pictures by the date you added them to your collection. Black-and-white and sepia-tone conversion filters were added to the editing tools. One nice touch was to substantially simplify the job of assigning captions (used in Album's various publishing features, such as creating calendars or photo albums). Unlike its sister program, Photoshop Elements 2, Album is Windows only. (It would be redundant on Macs, which ship with the similar iPhoto software.) Windows users, though, should definitely check out the Photoshop Album 2/Photoshop Elements 2 bundle. With various incentives, it is available for $78, making it a definite best buy for digital photography and graphics enthusiasts. So you have finally figured out all the various ways you can set Microsoft Outlook to trigger alarms and reminders -- calendar items, tasks, "flags" on messages and contacts. So now, how do you keep track of them? The answer is Ken Slovak's Reminder Manager. Ken Slovak of Slovak Technical Services, Inc in Winter Park, FL, has authored a number of add-ins that tame some of Outlook's quirks. I previously recommended his Extended Reminders, which allow you to expand the flagging to any Outlook folder you desire. Now he has unveiled an expanded utility -- Reminder Manager ($30 for a single user; sliding per seat scale for larger purchasers). It contains Extended Reminder's features, but adds a unified reminder
window that gives you a list of all pending reminders -- and when they are
due to trigger. You can configure the kind of alarm you want -- a pop-up
window (like the Outlook default), a sound, a flash of the icon that In the course of a day, I usually have several reminders that go off, which is confusing enough. But then when I start snoozing them, and set different snooze lengths, all organization is lost. Now I can call up the Reminder Manager dialog and see what's coming up when. So I can find out the time that Project X, which I snoozed until I-am-not-sure-when, is due to trigger again. It takes a couple of days to get used to the new reminder method and once you are, you will find yourself wondering how you managed without it. No program triggers more anguished calls for help from friends than Microsoft Outlook. This is an irregular series of tips on how to solve Outlook problems. Problem: You have created a new Outlook data file. When you go to send a message, you click on the "to" button to bring up your contacts to bring up the email address for the intended recipient and there's nothing there. No contacts. Nada. Solution: Right-click on the Contacts folder on the Folder List or Outlook Bar (you can open either or both via the Outlook "View" menu) and choose "Properties." Click on the "Outlook Address Book" tab. Make sure the "show this folder as an email address book" check box IS checked. Outlook can be maddeningly inconsistent when you fix or change data files. In theory, the Contacts folder of the new file should be an email address book by default. The reality is that sometimes that doesn't happen and the manual fix is required. On Dec. 19, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for District of Columbia overturned a lower court ruling that required Verizon to turn over to RIAA the names of those suspected of illegally sharing copyrighted songs -- and who then would become the target of the RIAA's piracy suits. The court's opinion said "We are not unsympathetic either to the RIAA’s concern regarding the widespread infringement of its members’ copyrights, or to the need for legal tools to protect those rights," but held that RIAA was trying to stretch the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA ) way too far. Peer-to-peer file sharing "was not even a glimmer in anyone’s eye when the DMCA was enacted," the opinion said. "It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite the DMCA in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry or threatens being to the motion picture and software industries." RIAA greeted the ruling with its usual subtlety: it is vowing to press on with its lawsuits and promises to respond by getting nastier by not offering their targets an opportunity to reach a settlement before suits are filed. So for now an ISP can protect the privacy of its users. I recommend that you ask your ISP what it's policy is going to be. It was ironic to me here in Massachusetts that Verizon -- the phone company, for goodness sake -- took on the battle while Comcast -- the cable giant with an entrepreneurial history -- caved in to RIAA without hesitation. Quicken 2004 is being marketed by Intuit as the "20th Anniversary Edition," which among other things recalls the days when software markets were competitive and consumers benefited from that competition. If you remember, for example, back when WordPerfect and Lotus were offering real challenges to Microsoft Office one phenomenon was that all the companies strived to come up with innovative new features -- and that once one company came up with a good idea, the others would incorporate it in their next edition. Personal financial software is about the last remaining software category where this still is true. As witness
Quicken 2004 Premier Home and Office ($78), Quicken did integrated bill
payment services; Microsoft Money got integrated bill paying services. Money
redid its interface to focus on a snapshot of your financial situation, so
Quicken 2004 has a "Financial Overview" feature (The same would be true in reverse, by the way -- if you are used to Money, there isn't a compelling reason to switch to Quicken. The truth is that converting from one to the other can be a pain, which more than negates any temporary product advantage one might have in any given release.) Quicken's Financial Overview is much less busy than Money's home page. But even better, the overview features can be incorporated into Quicken's long standing custom home page capabilities, letting the user create a page with a mix of both the old (focused on your accounts and transactions) and the new (the overview). Quicken's checkbook metaphor remains the easiest data entry method, and it has solid graph and reports capabilities. It does not, however, directly export to Word or Excel; users have to settle for copying Excel reports and pasting them manually into a spreadsheet or table. Microsoft Money 2004 does have an edge in the bill payment arena as it includes a year of online payment in its Premiere bundle while Intuit only gives you a month's trial. On the other hand, Money failed to support my printer properly while Quicken always has and still does, giving it an edge in the paper check department. All-in-all Quicken 2004 is a solid upgrade that will keep Quicken users happily in the Quicken camp. Just HOW much has Microsoft had to patch Windows XP? I was helping a friend do a clean install from the original XP setup disk. After installation, I ran XP's online Windows Update, connected up to Microsoft and was advised that there were more than 55 updates to be downloaded. The first installation was of Service Pack 1, and that cut the number down substantially. But I still wound up downloading and installing more than 30 patches. It takes about an hour to install XP, but three hours more to do the updates. Office XP is a little better. You have to install SP1. Then SP2. Then the security updates to SP2. I commend Microsoft for stepping up to the plate on security updates. But this update mechanism is way too dependent on the assumption that everyone has been doing the regular automatic updates. Maybe they have. Or maybe the typical user ignores the updates and waits for their friendly neighborhood geek to help them with it. Either way, Microsoft needs to look at putting together more "cumulative update" packages to simplify downloading and updating. And Windows XP SP2 can't get here soon enough. There is more than one way to set up file sharing in Windows XP; who knew? If you have Windows XP Home Edition, ignore this. You have what is called "Simplified Sharing." Only. XP Professional has Simplified Sharing on by default, but you can change that. Simplified Sharing is minimalist, somewhat like Windows 98 except you can make share settings for specific folders not just entire drives. You right-click on the drives or folders you want to share across your network. You choose "properties" and then go to the "sharing tab." It gives you just two options, with checkboxes: Do you want to share the folder or drive? Do you want to let others on the network change the files> Pretty straightforward and just want you want for a home or even a small business network.
To turn on full sharing, you have to go to an unlikely place. In Windows Explorer, click on the Tools menu and select "Folder Options." Go to the "View" tab, and look in the "advanced setting" section. Scroll down to nearly the bottom and you will find a checkbox for "use simple file sharing (recommended)." Unchecking it puts your system into NT-type industrial strength sharing mode. And, of course, following these steps and checking the box gets you back to the simple method. Which is precisely why I tracked down this procedure. Somewhere along the line I inadvertently put my PC into heavy duty mode, and I began having problems sharing files across my home network. While I did amuse myself by figuring out how to set permissions correctly, it was tedious. Going back to simple sharing was the simple solution. Thumbs Plus, the mother of all of graphics thumbnail and album software, has reached Version 6. Cerious software, its maker, claims nearly 100 improvements. While a few of them (such as pretty pictures on the "about" menu) are marginal, most are useful detail refinements for the program. Key among them is that Thumbs Plus' efficiency has been improved and speed has increased.
It is not a breakthrough release, but it isn't priced like one either -- $30 for an upgrade. Multimedia formats and needs change; programs need to stay up to date. Thumbs Plus 6 represents Cerious's commitment to do just that. CoolEdit Is Now Adobe Audition Meanwhile, Cool Edit, long my preferred sound editor is no more. Adobe Systems purchased its maker, Syntrillium, and has released an updated version of the software under the new name: Adobe Audition. Audition is a replacement for Cool Edit Pro, Syntrillium's professional
product, rather than Cool Edit 2000, the consumer version. It is a
full-fledged multitrack sound editor, with numerous audio effects, and the
capability to produce video soundtracks (Adobe includes it in its Video
Collection suite).
Pricing, $290, is as robust as its feature set. However, Adobe is making Audition available to Cool Edit 2000 users at an upgrade price of $99, which is cheaper than an upgrade from 2000 to Pro used to be. Or, put another way, it's half the price of adding the four optional modules to CE2K that would be required to give it the same array of capabilities. Adobe says Audition 1.0 is simply a "rebranded" Cool Edit Pro 2.1. There have been very few changes in the Syntrillum interface. No doubt that will change in future releases. For now, the acquisition is a -- you know what's coming here -- sound investment for Adobe as it expands it multimedia offerings. (c) 2004 Al Gordon. In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a principal in the Boston-area strategic consulting firm, Mary Fifield Associates, www.maryfifieldassociates.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can reach Al Gordon at: |
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Happily for Windows users there is a little bit of a browser war taking
place now, It's not a rerun of the Microsoft vs. Netscape-type corporate
death struggle, but one that might actually yield a few benefits to
consumers. The last one, as we all know, ended with Netscape in a near-death
state and Microsoft in federal court facing antitrust charges.
Of course,
these days many web sites either require Internet Explorer or don't display
properly without it. Mozilla sometimes skates by as a Netscape clone, while
Opera has settings that allow it to masquerade as Internet Explorer.
Sometimes that doesn't work and you will have to fall back on MSIE. (Same is
true on the Mac with Safari.)
Reg
Organizer's specialty is a registry cleaner that finds and eliminates
useless keys. Registries are always getting mucked up by the remnants of
programs that you uninstalled but left their settings behind. The feature
has a built-in backup as a safeguard against going too far with your
cleaning.
The
company has devised a search engine that will go through your email messages
and attachments, your contracts, and the files on your hard drive.
Reminder Manager places in your system tray, or some combination thereof.
You can also arrange for reminders to go to you by email or pager for when
you are away from the office.
to do the same. I liked Money 2004 and flirted with switching, but Quicken
2004 makes that totally pointless.
But
XP Professional also offers heavy duty NT-type sharing, complete with the
full methodology of setting specific permission levels for specific users.
If you installed the NTFS file system, you can make the settings specific to
individual files. This is network administrator stuff, not for the typical
user.
The
interface includes a number of new viewing options, including a "loupe"
(magnifier) for viewing details within images and a preview for photographic
web pages. There are more filters included, more support for Photoshop
add-ins, and new multimedia capabilities.
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