Hasta La Gadget!

We all love a good debate about how the tech giants of today are competing with each other, but rarely do we get a handy reference sheet like this to point people to. Nick Bilton of the New York Times has put together a segment-by-segment comparison between America’s tech heavyweights, which does a fine job of pinpointing who competes with whom and where. We find the gaps in coverage more intriguing than the overlaps, though, with Microsoft’s only unticked box — mobile hardware — raising habitual rumors of a Pink phone. Apple’s absence from the provision of mapping services might also soon be at an end, given the company acquired map maker Placebase in July of last year (see Computerworld). Anyway, there should be plenty more for you to enjoy, so hit the source for the full chart and get analyzin’.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo compared at the macro level originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tracking Down Great Software For You!

Paint.NET is an photo and image editor that is about as feature intensive as you can get while still keeping it a fast (and light) application. When you start Photoshop you have to wait 10 to 30 seconds before you can start using it, but Paint.net is ready to go almost instantly…which is why this is one of my favorite image editors. Most of the time I am looking to do something quick, and Paint.NET can do 95% of the tasks that I need to do, which primarily consists of cropping or rearranging an image.

The new Paint.NET 3.0 just made things a lot better with my two favorite additions being the “tabbed” interface and a new gradient tool:

• Simple and intuitive tab-based multi-document user interface.
  
• Now available in 8 languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish.
• Interactive Gradient Tool that makes it very easy to draw and then fine-tune placement and coloring of a gradient.
  
• User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel).
  
• New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen.
• More intuitive and more powerful toolbar.
• Generally improved and cleaner user interface.
• History files are now compressed to save disk space, reduce disk activity, and improve performance.
• “Merge Down” layer command.

The only thing that I would like to see now is a right-click menu for a lot of the various options. For example, when managing layers I would like to be able to right-click on one of them and select “Delete” to remove that layer. I find myself right-clicking expecting a menu to popup in Paint.NET since I have become so accustomed to Photoshop’s right-click menus. Maybe they’ll work on that for the next release.

Overall though, I would hate not having this application installed on my PC now. I haven’t looked into being able to put this program on a USB drive and take it with me, but it would be really nice to have it wherever I go so I might try that out to see what happens.

Congrats to the Paint.NET team for making such a great application…I think this should be included with Windows.

Download Paint.NET 3.0
News Source: CyberNet Forum [thanks javasharp]

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The venerable 2001 classic of an OS, Windows XP, strikes again. The scribes over at Laptop have put together a rather damning battery life comparison between old greybeard and the fresh Windows 7, which finds that on average netbooks get 47 minutes less battery life with the upgraded software. In the case of the ASUS 1008HA, that deficit was a meaty 57 minutes, or 16.7%. Liliputing and jkOnTheRun have run their own tests which invariably reached the same conclusion. Adding these data to an earlier comparison with Snow Leopard, where Windows 7 was again markedly worse than its competitor, leads us to the conclusion that perhaps Microsoft’s 7th heaven hasn’t quite been optimized for the mobile mavens out there… yet.

Read – Stick with XP? Windows 7 Battery Life Worse on Netbooks
Read – Windows 7 + netbooks = lower battery life?
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Filed under: Laptops, Software

Windows 7 bested by XP in netbook battery life tests originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want a “high-quality” machine that represents the “best of the best in laptops?” Microsoft’s got your back with its all-new PC Scout, a Flash-based laptop recommendation engine whose delivery is unfortunately more than a little reminiscent of those misguided Windows 7 launch party promos. Ah well, should you successfully navigate your way past bad jokes about space-cats and online dating, and on to the Selection section, you’ll find a thoroughly decent laptop comparison tool — with sliders for price and features narrowing or expanding your available choice in real time. With future plans to expand it to cover desktop hardware as well, Microsoft is making a commendable and seemingly rather useful effort to aid its users in picking out a new machine. Kudos for that, now how about hiring some real actors for a change?

[Via Ars Technica]

Filed under: Laptops, Software

Windows PC Scout patronizes, offers surprisingly good comparison tool originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on September 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’ve been excited for quite some time to see what Google would be able to pull out of their Online Presentation service, but I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed with the final result. For starters, one of the great things that they did is shorten the name of their “Office Suite” to just Google Docs (prior to this it was Google Docs & Spreadsheets), but the service is still in Beta.

Before you get too excited, everything that Google Presentations has to offer isn’t all that great. Take for instance the export feature which has a lot of shortcomings. It only lets you save a presentation as a ZIP file that contains a web-based version of your presentation. It can then be viewed in any browser without an Internet connection being needed, but they don’t let you save it as a standard PowerPoint file.

Initially you may not think that is too bad since you can just email people the link to view it online instead of attaching the file itself to an email, but there was one thing that really irked me. The file size limitation on a Google Presentation is 10MB, and once you hit that you’ll be scrambling to find some way to get the presentation into a desktop app. Sorry, but the only way around that right now is to create a second presentation as a sort of continuation to the first.

Here’s a roundup that I put together of the good, the bad, and the ugly:

The Good (things I like):

• Add and position text and images
• Copy/duplicate slides
• Choose from 15 somewhat stylish themes
• Revision management makes it easy to revert prior changes
• Makes it easy to share a presentation with multiple people
• Remotely present slides with minimal work needed
• Imports PowerPoint (PPT) presentations

The Bad (things that would be nice to have):

• No animation or slide transitions
• Can’t embed videos or audio (they could have at least incorporated it with YouTube for goodness sakes)
• No editing of photos (integration with Picasa seems like a no-brainer)
• Charts and diagrams…where are they? Google Spreadsheets already supports this feature, and for most businesses this is a must when creating presentations!

The Ugly (things that will prevent me from using it):

• Can’t export presentations as a PowerPoint (PPT) presentation
• 10MB file size limitation — be careful of how many photos you insert! You can also have no more than 5,000 images across all of your presentations, documents, and spreadsheets combined.
• It’s a bit sluggish…not nearly as responsive as a desktop app
• Just 5 pre-formatted slide layouts
• Positioning of images and text is terrible if you’re trying to get them to line up nicely. They need a grid feature or the ability to line up multiple objects along, for instance, their top edge.
• Doesn’t work in Opera

Click to Enlarge

Note: I made the above presentation available for public viewing.

Google Presentations will hopefully shape up fast, and turn into a compeitor of Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org. Impress isn’t even in order. Heck, Google Presentations can hardly stand up to the likes of ThinkFree and Zoho, so putting it in a side-by-side comparison to a desktop Office app would not shine well on Google.

Google Docs Homepage

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