Adobe Photoshop Elements 10
The Organizer
The Organizer is shared by both Photoshop Elements and Adobe’s prosumer video editing app, Premiere Elements. This is where you import, organize, and share out your photos and collections. It lets you add captions, star ratings, tags, and do basic fixes like rotation and auto-corrections. Though Photoshop Elements can play and tag video, it's not easy to filter on just videos in Organizer view. A more relevant limitation (for a photo-editing app) was the inability to zoom to full pixel size in Organizer. I think that wherever I'm viewing a photo, I should be able to zoom in and out. It's just one of the problems of separating the Organizer from the Editor. Another is that once I'm in the Editor working on a photo, I can't just hit the forward and back arrows to switch to the next and previous images, as I can in so many other apps.
A full screen view of Organizer with hideable toolbars lets your photo take center stage, but I wish a similar view were available in the full editing app. You can, however, drag the image view onto a second screen for a nearly unencumbered view, though there's still a window border.
When you plug in camera media, an option added by Photoshop Elements appears in the Autorun window, called Organize and Edit ("Import" would have worked for me). This opens an old-style dialog in Organizer called "Photo Downloader"—another somewhat un-standard name. After copying the files to your hard drive
Not only can Photoshop Elements 10's Organizer find and identify faces in your digital photos after you tag some of them with people's names, but it can also now hook into Facebook, download your friend list, and attach Facebook contact's names to photos. Photoshop Elements's face recognition did a decent job of identifying more photos of the same person, but it couldn't handle profile views, and sometimes proposed persons of the opposite gender (embarrassing) or failed to recognize the same face in the same session. At one point, it even wanted me to identify a subway warning sign—clearly face recognition isn't yet a perfect science, and something I've seen in pretty much every competitor's implementation, too.
Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 is a good looking program that's easy to navigate, but it comes at an unnecessary performance price. It's a shame, because on the whole this is a very solid security package.
The Organizer
The Organizer is shared by both Photoshop Elements and Adobe’s prosumer video editing app, Premiere Elements. This is where you import, organize, and share out your photos and collections. It lets you add captions, star ratings, tags, and do basic fixes like rotation and auto-corrections. Though Photoshop Elements can play and tag video, it's not easy to filter on just videos in Organizer view. A more relevant limitation (for a photo-editing app) was the inability to zoom to full pixel size in Organizer. I think that wherever I'm viewing a photo, I should be able to zoom in and out. It's just one of the problems of separating the Organizer from the Editor. Another is that once I'm in the Editor working on a photo, I can't just hit the forward and back arrows to switch to the next and previous images, as I can in so many other apps.
A full screen view of Organizer with hideable toolbars lets your photo take center stage, but I wish a similar view were available in the full editing app. You can, however, drag the image view onto a second screen for a nearly unencumbered view, though there's still a window border.
When you plug in camera media, an option added by Photoshop Elements appears in the Autorun window, called Organize and Edit ("Import" would have worked for me). This opens an old-style dialog in Organizer called "Photo Downloader"—another somewhat un-standard name. After copying the files to your hard drive
Not only can Photoshop Elements 10's Organizer find and identify faces in your digital photos after you tag some of them with people's names, but it can also now hook into Facebook, download your friend list, and attach Facebook contact's names to photos. Photoshop Elements's face recognition did a decent job of identifying more photos of the same person, but it couldn't handle profile views, and sometimes proposed persons of the opposite gender (embarrassing) or failed to recognize the same face in the same session. At one point, it even wanted me to identify a subway warning sign—clearly face recognition isn't yet a perfect science, and something I've seen in pretty much every competitor's implementation, too.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking
NaturallySpeaking utilizes a minimal user interface. As an example, dictated words appear in a floating tooltip as they are spoken (though there is an option to set this feature so it is not displayed to increase speed), and when the speaker pauses, the program transcribes the words into the active window at the location of the cursor (Dragon does not support dictating to background windows). The software has three primary areas of functionality: dictation, text-to-speech and command input. The user is able to dictate and have speech transcribed as written text, have a document synthesized as an audio stream, or issue commands that are recognized as such by the program. In addition, voice profiles can be accessed through different computers in a networked environment, although the audio hardware and configuration must be identical on both machines. The Professional version allows creation of custom commands to control programs or functions not built into NaturallySpeaking.
Nortern internet security 2012
- An industry-leading anti-phishing technology prevents you from visiting fraudulent websites.
- A new professional-strength antispam filter blocks unwanted emails.
- Norton Identify Safe fills in usernames, passwords and other form information automatically to prevent keylogger programs to steal your personal data.
- Norton Safe Web identifies unsafe websites in search results when you are looking for something in search engines.
- Norton Internet Security 2012 has top-notch performance:
- Fast and light on system resources, it uses Norton Insight to scan only files that are at risk. This means fewer scans and therefore better PC performance.
- Its Smart Scheduler feature initiates scans only when your PC is idleso you are never bothered while running intensive tasks.
- Silent Mode is engaged automatically when playing games or watching movies so that alerts, updates and scans are delayed until you are done.
- For laptops, Power Saver Settings delay power-hungry activities until your computer is plugged in.
- Norton Internet Security 2012 protects you against today's "rapid-fire" attacks, for which "signatures" don't yet exist.
- This is done with Norton Insight Network, which uses Symantec's global security network to extract information about the very latest threats and prevent them from getting to your computer.
- Also, the SONAR 4 technology uses online intelligence and proactive monitoring to detect and block new threats.
- Finally, Norton Pulse Updates allow frequent, small updates of Norton Internet Security 2012's threat database, meaning it is as current as can be in terms of latest threat detection.
- Norton Internet Security 2012 gives you gives you information about what it is doing on your computer:
- Thanks to Norton Threat Insight, you can see if threats were detected on your system, what actions they attempted to perform and how they were removed by Norton Internet Security 2012.
- Norton Download Insight warns you of dangerous downloads you are about to make.
- Norton File Insight shows you information about applications you are trying to install, whether or not they are trusted and if they will impact your computer's speed more than you'd like.
- Norton Internet Security 2012 helps you keep your PC running at top speed:
- Thanks to Norton System Insight , you can see if threats were detected on your system, what actions they attempted to perform and how they were removed by Norton Internet Security 2012.
- There is a new automatic and on-demand application optimization feature which helps speeding up the applications running on your computer.
- In addition, it provides you with resource usage graphs which help you pinpoint resource-heavy processes even more accurately.
Kaspersky Internet Security 2012
Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 is a good looking program that's easy to navigate, but it comes at an unnecessary performance price. It's a shame, because on the whole this is a very solid security package.
The parental control tools offer decent control over what content children can see and who they can talk to online. We found the website filtering effective and easy to use, with sensible categories. Our instant messaging chats were logged, and conversations were easy to follow if there's a certain contact you're unsure about.
You can also track word usage, entering words you want to be alerted to when they're typed into a website, search engine or message. We chose the relatively innocuous 'beans' as our keyword and sure enough, each time we typed it, it was logged by the software. We could see where the word was typed, but not the context in which it was used, so its usefulness was limited.
Social network monitoring was hit and miss, taking a while to display messages sent via Facebook, and ignoring Twitter altogether.
During a scan, Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 maxed out our test PC's CPU, and even lightweight programs became unresponsive on occasion.
Our initial scan of the test PC (with 435,379 files spread over two hard drives) took one hour 19 minutes to complete. This was noticeably faster than G Data Internet Security 2012, though most of the time difference is down to G Data's DoubleScan technology.
This version benefits from better cloud protection, with on-demand whitelists and sandboxing of unknown threats. We found this to be a very good security package, but with a bit too much bloat.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Post a Comment