GenTechReview

This is a quick smack down of the leading operating systems in the market. I will look at price, performance, tools, and compatibility for each and declare the winner.

Vista Business Editon

Price: A bit on the high side, but considering the distance between major upgrades, and there willingness to release major upgrades as free service packs it becomes more reasonable

Performance: The interface is great eye candy, and works well over all. There are some sluggish moments, and everything does not neccsarily work as advertised

Adobe has announced plans to pull te plug on there stock photo service that was integrated with the Adobe Creativity Applications.  The application itself was great and well designed in my opinion, but I feel that it’s shortfall is exactly the reason that never used it in a professional situation.  It relied on the big business end of stock photography, where the use of an image  in a project  could cost over a hundred dollars.    I personally use iStock Photo where I can by a picture for print for less than $10, and web use for even less.  There are a few big agencies and businesses that will use the premium services, but that is not enough to keep development on this feature up to date.  I guess it will be nice to regain a little hard drive space.

I have been a loyal fan of my internet browser for a long time.  But the last little while things have started to change.  Some sites are not displaying as they should, occasionally the application totally goes blank and takes 30 -50 seconds before the web page shows up again.  Flash causes errors everytime it tries to load a flash based error.  It seems to have gone from a solid app to a buggy mess.  Well I have been using an alternative for about a week now and I have to say that Internet Explorer 7 is working great.  Perhaps it’s not that evil, no good, dirty, rotten browser that I read about on many sites.  Is it possible that they just are jealous of the company who makes it and so everything they produce gets critisized blindly.  I have loved firefox, and will likely go through the process of unistalling it and reinstalling it to see if that will work out the bugs, but for now IE7 is working out just fine. 

Sony Creative Software has released the newest version of their popular Vegas Video Editing software. Vegas 8 adds a few new valuable features to there already very capable base. Among the new features are multi-cam editing, 32 bit multi-point processing, pro type title, digital signage support, a new mixing console window, Blue Ray disk support (Not Really) , and a handful of other enhancements. The multi-cam feature is a great addition. It has been possible through the purchase of expensive plugins, but it is great to see that it will be a native feature. The 32-bit processing is a more under the hood kind of thing but it does enhance the picture and puts it as a solid option in the broadcast and high def market. Now whether it’s interface or reputation allows it to creep into that market remains to be seen, but it certainly has the capability. Titling in Vegas for years has been lacking. Although it was always easy to use the ability to do advanced effects with titles has been a problem. Although it doesn’t relate to me much the digital signage support is a great addition. The Vegas interface is really right down a creative marketing type of persons ally. The composting and mixed format capabilities of Vegas really make it the best option hands down for developing ads and signage. I suspect they will pick up a big chunk of market share with this move. With the addition of the mixing console I can now see myself no longer needing the audio specific software Sound Forge. Vegas started as an audio application so it has alway been strong in audio capability, but did and still does lack some of the features of Sound Forge. Now with the addition of the mixer I personally have everything in Vegas 8 that I need as an editor. A serious audio tech would probably disagree. The Blue-Ray support (Ha-Ha) was very disappointing. You can now create a Blue-Ray disk that will record a high def movie to play on a Blue-Ray player, but you have absolutely no capability to create a menu. It is simply a play only disk. Sony is the biggest player in the Blue-Ray format and I expected a little more from them than this most basic of functionality.

Aside from my gripe with the Blue-Ray Support Sony Vegas 8 is a great upgrade to a great product. It has strengthened many of it’s weak areas and is a more solid video solution than ever.

In a previous article I wrote regarding my pleasant surprise of the ease of use and power of Corel WordPerfect X3.  I stand behind the article and still claim that it is the best office product I have used.  But one issue with its use did put a kink in my workflow.  As an early adopter of Microsoft Office 2007 many of my files are in the new.docx format.  Corel WordPerfect X3 could not open the new Microsoft format.  The work around for me is obvious, I simply Open it in Word and save it back to the old  format.  But if I used Corel WordPerfect exclusively it could present problems if clients sent documents in the new format.  I contacted Corel regarding this issue, and they too expressed concern about this issue.    Corel made the following statement regarding support: “Corel would move to make “Open, view and edit” capabilities (Saving will be to the binary formats at first) available in WordPerfect Office for both Microsoft Office OOXML and OASIS ODF in 2007″
Although they did not give me a date of when this would be supported they said it would be soon.  I will post information as soon as it is available.
If you are not sharing files on a regular basis with MS Office users this is not really an issue, but for those actively sharing documents with office users this is an area of consideration.  My personal recommendation would be to keep using what you are now until the support is available.  If you must make a purchase now, I would still recommend Corel Word Perfect X3 because the time and effort you will save by using a better product will be well worth a few headaches until the new format is supported.

If you are a reader from my first blog EdTechReview.net you will know that I love Google Earth.  Google earth has many powerful features that make learning about and exploring our planet very fun and interesting.  I stumbled across a little hidden feature inside Google earth that takes it to a whole new level.  Google Earth has a hidden flight simulator built in.

To access the hidden flight simulator mode on a Windows PC press Ctrl + Alt + A and on a MAC press Command/Open Apple Key + Option + A (Must be capital A). After you have accessed the flight simulator mode for the first time, you can open it by going to Tools > Enter Flight Simulator.

You get the choice between an F-16 Fighter jet and a small passenger plan.  Although this is not on the same level as Microsoft Flight Simulator, it’s simple controls are easy to learn and fun to use.  The scenery is much better because it uses images from Google earth.  So instead of generic imagery between major locations you can see the real thing.

Many years ago before the dawn of the internet age a company dominated the word processing market. Wordperfect was the standard in most businesses that used word processing. Then another powerhouse entered the market in 1995 and there was a significant shift in the business market to Microsoft Office. Quite honestly at that time Microsoft had a little better package available for business and Businesses converted in masses and never looked back. Should they? In the title wave of Microsoft dominance, Wordperfect now owned by Corel has been responding by pushing invasion to make a better product and reducing their price to make an office suite more affordable. Has all of this work been enough to catch up with Microsoft? Well in sales no, but when it comes to the quality and value of the product, I think they have.

I am reasonably adept at Microsoft Office, and personally love the enhancements in Office 2007. I have not used Wordperfect in 10 years, So I thought that I could not give a fair comparison to the products since Corel Wordperfect X3 is so new to me. I was wrong. Within 5 Minutes on Corel Wordperfect X3 I knew I was using a far superior tool than Microsoft Office 2007. I was doing advanced formating of a document with tables, photos, dynamic links, within 20 minutes without even referring to the help menu. I have used Corel Wordperfect X3 for about 4 days and can not ever see me going back to the miserable limitations of Microsoft word. Unfortunately my trial version runs out in about three weeks, and I’ll have to pay for my copy, but with the reasonable price point I have no problem with the change. There ya go Corel your market share just went up .00001% Another small step in the right direction.

http://dapple.geosoft.com/default.asp 

Dapple makes it easy to find and visualize massive quantities of geoscientific data available on the Internet.

• View geoscience data, satellite imagery, remote sensing data, geology maps, geophysical data, and many other earth data sets of interest to geoscientists.
• Save an earth view and share your view with colleagues.
• Add new Geosoft DAP and WMS servers of interest.
• View GeoTIFF files.

Dapple is a great resource and product. It is fun to use, and interesting. Is it a replacement to Google Earth? well no. Google Earth has many capabilities that make it a powerful tool itself. Dapple is a great addition to Google Earth however, and is great for those that really want to get in to geology.

It has been a very busy summer, and thus I have had few posts, but I have stumbled across a product that I think deserves mentioning. The program is made for writing scripts with competitors such as Final Draft, Sophocles, and Movie Magic Screenwriter.

The biggest difference in Celtx and the other screenwriting software is that Celtx is Open Source. In addition to Celtx being free, it is also much more than just screenplay formatting software. Celtx has the Screenwriting component, a storyboard, scheduling, with online collaboration capabilities. The software was easy to download and get started. I have used both Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft, and I found that the ease of use, and the powerful capabilities of Celtx are as good if not better than the competition that costs much more.

So why am I discussing this in a education blog? I believe that creating films in the classroom is a powerful educational tool. You can just put the kids on a word processor to write their script, but I feel that it is important to teach the kids the correct formatting for the script. I have considered using Final Draft but I did not feel that the cost even with academic pricing was justified. Celtx is a perfect solution because it’s free and can take students through the preproduction process. It begins with listing characters and coming up with a story line, and then scripting it. Students can also crate a story board to help out line there film. I believe that this is a great writing activity even if you do not progress to creating the actual films.