Tag: REVIEW

The first release of Freespire, the community-driven (a la Red Hat's Fedora) Linux distribution from Linspire, is due in a couple of weeks, but the first release candidate is now available and DesktopLinux.com is running an early look at it, which gives a good overview of what we can expect in the new platform. Out of the box, Freespire has support for a wide variety of media formats, including ...

Blogger and web designer Christian Watson has posted a round-up and comparison of ten web-based image editing suites along with a very informative comparison table. The editors in question are Cellsea, ImageAuthor, LookWow, NetImager, nexImage, Phixr, Picture2Life, PXN8, Snipshot (formerly Pixoh), and VicImager. His ultimate choice is Cellsea, though in the comments Beau Hartshorne points out that ...

Rejoice, fellow Backpack users, for 37Signals today added a much-requested new feature for paid users: a calendar. As you may come to expect from the traditional KISS approach of 37Signals, the calendar is incredibly easy to use and enter appointments into. It's also 'smart', as it can figure out what events like "January 7 Catherine's birthday" and "6:30pm Dinner" mean, and it will place them ...

ExtremeTech is running the sort of round-up article I've been waiting to see: Opera 9 vs. Firefox 2 vs. Internet Explorer 7. While the latter two are both in beta, ExtremeTech gives them all a thorough go-'round. The review also includes some revealing benchmarks, testing their memory usage with and without a bunch of open tabs (spoiler: IE wins with one tab, Opera wins with a bunch) as well as ...

Oh, how we love the Top 10 lists. TechWeb's Alexander Wolfe has written a Top 10 list that's actually one Top 6 list and one Bottom 4 list: Top 10 Windows Vista Hits & Misses, i.e. what's awesome in Vista and what ain't so great. Here's your basic spoiler: Hits: Sidebar and gadgets Pretty Aero interface Media Center integration Windows Media Player 11 Non-intrusive DRM Flip 3D ...

Microsoft has released build 5456 of Windows Vista to its closed testing group, the first test build since the public release of Vista Beta 2 a couple weeks ago, and Windows guru Paul Thurrott has his usual screenshot-packed overview of what's changed in this version. Thurrott wasn't especially pleased with Beta 2's bugs but says build 5456 "makes up a lot of lost ground," and that "it's hard not ...

Is 3D the future of the web? Well, if VRML is any indication... no. Still, there are a few web browsers out there that attempt to bring 3D worlds to the browsing experience, or vice versa, and ExtremeTech has a nice round-up review of three of them: 3B, Browse3D, and SphereXPlorer. 3B facilitates web browsing with an "airport" metaphor, which lets you travel to different "cities," or themed areas ...

Awhile back we linked to a head-to-head comparison of music recommendation sites Pandora and Last.fm (to refresh your memory, Last.fm came out on top) . Of course, Pandora and Last.fm aren't the only fish in the sea, and ExtremeTech is running a round-up review of eight similar services: MusicStrands, Liveplasma, UpTo11.net, Audiri, Pandora, Mercora, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio, and Last.fm. They ...

With little fanfare Microsoft released Windows Media Player 11 in beta form last week coupled with Urge, the music service from Microsoft and MTV designed to compete with Apple's iTunes Music Store. WMP11 is a sort of preview of what we can expect to see next year in Windows Vista, and the question that seems to be on everyone's minds is whether Microsoft can finally best Apple's rock-solid player ...

I'm a huge fan of uTorrent for its speed and low profile, but many prefer Azureus for BitTorrent downloads because it's open source, cross-platform, and a little more featureful. One other thing Azureus has going for is its powerful plugin API, which brings us to a great article at ZeroPaid called Top Azureus Plugins Revealed, which is an overview of nine of the best Azureus plugins available. The ...

A blog called Plasticsfuture has tests 17 different programs for making backups on a Mac and written up the results in an article called Mac Backup Software Harmful. Why harmful? It turns out that most Mac backup software will save your files but nuke some of the associated metadata. Of the 17 apps, only one gets a "Highly recommended" rating, and four get "Avoid at all cost." ...

Genuine Windows enthusiast Paul Thurrott keeps us constantly supplied with new info and screenshots from Redmond, and this week over at his Windows SuperSite he's posted his review and screenshot gallery of the most recent build of Windows Vista, 5365. This is the last build of Vista before Beta 2, and Thurrott says, "Windows Vista is, overall, a huge improvement over Windows XP," which ...

It's not exhaustive, but informative. Joshua Drake has been using Linux professionally for over 10 years, and he shares his opinions and comparisons in an admittedly subjective but thorough comparison of the five major Linux distros for "non geeks." The comparisons are between Red Hat ES, Novell SLES, Fedora FC4, OpenSuSE 10, and Ubuntu Breezy Badger. Notice Linspire isn't in there? ...

InternetWeek has an interesting round-up review of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera, and Maxthon. Four editors go to bat for each of the Windows browsers, and included is a nice "Visual Tour" of each plus side-by-side comparisons of some key features. There's no "this one is best" conclusion but it's a nice way to get an idea of what each browser does best. ...

A couple weeks back I posted about PC World's BitTorrent client review round-up, in which four BT clients were tested. This week Webmonkey (yes, it's still around) has its own "shootout" between six of the top BitTorrent clients. With the exception of the cross-platform Azureus and BitTorrent (the official client), the rest are Windows clients: uTorrent, BitTornado, BitComet, and ...