In this section of articles, the history and evolution of computer software is discussed. The different usages of various computer programs are also explained, and some articles break down the way programs operate at the most basic level.
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Application assessment is an area of IT security that is closely related to penetration testing, except that you are fully dealing with an application only, not infrastructure, which is often the case when it comes to security testing. In a rapidly changing environment, the assessment tools must be able to adjust to the specific functionalities of the software itself.
If your personal computer is busted, you can easily replace it with a new one in Chicago, but you can't replace the data lost in your personal computer. Don't lose hope; disaster recovery is still possible with the help of a remote data back up service.
Using presentation software can significantly help a speaker, lecturer or any type of presenter get information across to an audience, and Microsoft PowerPoint is the one application that does this best. Although it is mainly used in a business context in Chicago, PowerPoint has been successfully applied in classrooms and small to large scale social or other types of events.
Excel is a popular spreadsheet application and is, along with Word and PowerPoint, one of the major programs in Microsoft's productivity suite called Microsoft Office. In fact Excel can be thought of as the primary Office application as it was considered back in 1993 as the 'killer application' for the personal computer.
Photoshop has come to be synonymous with photo editing. Indeed the name is sometimes informally used as a verb. For manipulating images, there is nothing like the options offered in Photoshop. Changing the color tone of your photos is one of the easier types of editing you can do in this application.
I'm InTouch is a rival to the big names in remote access, such as LogMeIn and GoToMyPC. We reviewed the Standard version four months ago (What's New, Shopper 246), and were impressed by the number of features.
Faced with tens or hundreds of websites needing passwords, most of us usually give up and write passwords down, use the same one for many websites or, at best, generate several based on a theme.
The following contains computer electronics information you should know about ten Mac 911 resolutions you should make. Read on if you or a loved one is interested in staying computer software and electronics savvy in Chicago.
In this week's Mobile Mac, Dan Frakes takes a look at a few bags for 13-inch Mac laptops.
These outstanding downloads will help you improve, manipulate, and organize your photos, and you won't have to spend hundreds of dollars on them. Heck, some of the best ones are free!
Need to record and clean up music, edit video or sound, burn DVDs, and handle other multimedia tasks? We've assembled some free and try-before-you-buy tools that you won't want to live without.
These downloads, mostly free, will help you optimize your communications with others, improve security, and generally improve your online life.
Get the most out of Microsoft Office by using these helpful downloads, which will increase your efficiency and simplify routine tasks.
Had enough of blaring ads, dopey pop-ups, and annoying fly-in Flash ads? Get rid of them with these super ad and pop-up blockers. Most won't cost you a nickel--and you can try them all for the price of a download.
Personalize your desktop, show your artistic side, or protect your privacy.
These tools can address a host of problems, ranging from cluttered hard disks to sluggish performance. Most are free or offer a free trial period.
There still aren't a lot of downloads out there that can really improve Vista, but we've found twenty real keepers that will allow you to tweak it and improve your experience with the OS.
The business may be cut-throat, but the graphics are enchanting. It looks more like a gigantic toy railway set than a realistic representation of the period. It's a system hog, though, and only those with powerful graphics cards will get it running smoothly in full detail.
A 360-degree panoramic workspace on your PC's desktop sounds great--if you don't mind the ads.
We couldn't really fault 3CX's Phone System. The free edition has most of the functions a home office or small business will need, although if you want call queuing or conference calls you'll need a paid-for edition.
You can use your Adobe Photoshop to create 3D images. Since 2Ds are obsolete and 3Ds are in, you might want to start enhancing your skill in computer graphics.
As futuristic technology concepts go, 3D screens have been right up there with the teleporter as an aspirational idea that could change the way we see the world, yet they still reside in the realm of the science fiction.
Get Windows humming again, supercharge your browser, and clear out the crud with these (mostly) free downloads.
Computerworld has reviewed hard disk drive technology, from large-capacity 1TB models and energy-efficient "green" drives to solid-state disks that outpace their spinning disk counterparts on every dimension of speed and power consumption.
Need to get real work done on your iPhone? Bill Wiecking suggests nine iPhones apps to enhance your productivity on the road.
Keep your hard drive healthy, plan a happy financial ending, and play a bouncy game.
Times may be tough, but you can still cobble together a quick-and-easy gift on the cheap: Make a PC mixtape from downloads.
You've recorded a narration track for your Keynote presentation and exported it to QuickTime yet no audio. Here's a fix.
Although the security of Vista will ultimately need to pass the test of time, it is obvious that Microsoft put forth considerable effort to develop a more secure operating system (OS). To the user, Vista improves on some familiar features found in previous operating systems and offers a variety of new security features and functionality that do a fine job protecting your system and both personal and sensitive data.
The Ergotron Neo-Flex Combo Lift places your MacBook right next to your display when you're working at a desk.
Virtual Assistants (also known as VAs) are home-based entrepreneurs who take pride in providing fellow small business professionals with a wide range of office tasks, from administrative support to web design & maintenance.
The Internet has opened up whole new avenues of freedom for people: freedom of information, thoughts and the ability to achieve anonymity while still being active in a community. But there is also grey area on internet, read the following article and get to know abandonware.
The word processor, Ability Write, now lets you add an automated table of contents. It also has a nifty new function that creates charts from data held in tables within the text document, handy for reports. According to the makers, you can now place frames in headers and footers.
Ability Office is the budget alternative to Microsoft Office. The Home Edition comprises a word processor, an image organiser, an image editor, a vector-drawing tool, a presentation program and spreadsheet.
For many of us, backups are something that we never quite get round to doing. Ability, the maker of the popular Ability Office suite, is hoping that TurboBackup will take the pain out of the process.
For those who demand more new toys, Ableton has added a new flagship product called Ableton Suite. This includes Live and its Essential Instrument Collection.
Actiontastic is one of many OS X apps released recently that attempt to simplify all this. Everything you need to do is either a one-step action ('Call mum'), or something requiring many steps ('Build client website'); if it's the latter, it's known as a Project.
Bento fits comfortably with applications like iTunes and iPhoto by virtue of its similar layout.
DayChaser is a much more limited application, eschewing all the standard PIM features. Its more limited feature set means it should have a much broader appeal than the very specialised Daylite.
Daylite 3 will be both welcome and frustrating for existing users: welcome because of the myriad improvements and new features; frustrating because this software has a relatively steep learning curve.
Endo is the latest of these, offering something of a new approach and some nice new features.
Exposure presents itself as two different filter effect choices in Photoshop or any other Photoshop filter-compatible application; Black and White Film, and Color Film.
Like File Viewer, FlyPath uses a series of columns to display nested folders and the files within them. It also has two wide horizontal bands across the top showing user-defined shortcuts (the Shelf) and your current path within the file system.
IBank makes it easy to keep track of incomings and outgoings. The program lists current, savings and investment accounts as well as other assets and liabilities in its left-hand pane, with transactions and reports in the main area of the window.
The iClip panel stays out of the way until you either mouse towards it or hit a key combination of your choice to bring it forward. By default, you get four sets of eight bins to choose from, and you can add more sets if you wish.
OmniFocus aims to manage your tasks so they don't get in the way of the rest of your life. The best way to start is to enter all your upcoming tasks - called actions in the main OmniFocus inbox and 'brain dump' in Getting Things Done parlance.
Internet connection accelerator Onspeed claims to increase dial-up speeds by a factor of five, and even broadband by a factor of three, all for less than 50p per week. Not surprisingly then, we were deeply cynical that the cost-to-benefit ratio could be anywhere near as impressive as it appears.
Pixaria was created to solve a specific need - setting up an online photo library for a website without the pain and hassle of writing your own server-side solution.
Plopp is a new drawing program for kids with a twist: draw anything you like and Plopp will turn it into a 3D object for you. Sounds impossible? Not quite, but it's fiendishly clever.
Posterino saves files without embedding the images; it just records pointers to the images used. Consequently each file you save is just a few kilobytes.
First-person shooters don't come any darker, or stranger, than Prey. It tells the story of Tommy, a Native American car mechanic guilty of turning his back on his people, his reservation and, more significantly, his culture.
Software as a service, sometimes known as on-demand software, is a new model for deploying business services ... that requires the provider ... to make access to the functionality available typically through a browse.
A QuickTime export component is also installed to allow iMovie, Final Cut Pro and other applications to use it. EyeTV 2.5 can't leverage it directly, so recordings first had to be exported as a program stream and dropped onto VideoExpress.
Group Policy was introduced in Windows 2000 Server and was a great boon to administrator productivity. While Group Policy was enhanced and extended in Windows Server 2003, there were not many improvements to the actual settings that Group Policy could manage from a networking standpoint.
Software development services in India take up numerous offshore software application development projects, which they expedite using features of Object Oriented Programming, including Abstract Type.
Accounted is promising and cheap, but is it worth buying? If you're self-employed and understand the accounting principles the program's simplicity is appealing. It's also tailor-made for Studiometry devotees. The absence of support for features such as payroll or stock control is to be expected given the price but the lack of VAT reporting and inability to export data may put off many.
Within the software industry, one can expect to find a great many different software packages. Choosing the one that is right for you as an individual or business depends on your needs.
Typically one of the most important parts of setting up new accounting software would be to be able to invoice your customers in a professional manner and to control who owes you what and how long it has been outstanding for.
Updated photo management app offers more organizing features and added flexibility with RAW files, but you'll need a powerful PC.
Acorn, from Flying Meat Products, is an image editor that keeps things simple while sticking with Photoshop's working practices. The interface is simplicity itself, and consists of an image editing window and a second floating window that contains the tools and the Layers stack. Tools are arranged by class, although putting the Image View controls in the Move section seems a little odd.
The Internet Radio supports the 802.11b/g wireless standards and can connect to networks protected by WEP and WPA encryption. Its controls aren't particularly intuitive, but most functions are available with just the jog wheel and a couple of buttons.
For much of its 15-year life, Adobe's Acrobat has worn two hats: one for its role in the print industry and another for business. But this beta represents the program's first steps into a third environment - as a ubiquitous online multimedia format. And we'd bet on it succeeding.
Acronis Disk Director 10 is a suite of programs designed to help you organise and maintain your hard disk. It consists of Partition Manager, for resizing, moving and reorganising the partitions on a hard disk; Boot Manager, which allows you to run more than one operating system at once; Partition Recovery, which does what its name suggests; and Disk Editor, an advanced disk repair utility.
True Image 10 is easy to use. Every important setting is available from the program's main screen. At first, this didn't seem like a good idea; it makes the main screen look cluttered.
Despite this, it's hard to see Acronis True Image 2009 as a completely new product; it's really the same old backup tool under a superior interface. That interface is enough to justify its recommendation and keep it on the A List for those who haven't yet shelled out.
Great at backups, but its interface can be confusing.
You’ve heard other companies talk about their ACT CRM—or customer relationship management—systems and how their companies have been streamlined by the efficiency and easy-to-use features offered by ACT solfware.
At its core, ACT! is a contacts database. What makes it more than just a glorified address book is its ability to connect each individual's or company's record to a log of all your dealings with them and to all the correspondence, emails and other documents that were involved. In this way you can see what's happened, what needs to be done and what the trends are.
Actinic's version 8 upgrade to its suite of "internet shop in a box" software is a different story, though: the whole range has changed significantly, as has its pricing and the options it presents for the developer community.
Actinic offers a range of e-commerce products, from the web-based Express, which costs £20 a month, to its "shop in a box" products such as Actinic Catalog and Business.
Few of us have the luxury of time or specialist equipment to really dive into the depths of Active Directory (AD), the directory service included in Windows 2000. The aim of this workshop is to provide some insightful knowledge without you getting your hands dirty.
Supermicro is proving to be a popular choice as Adaptec is one of many vendors that use its chassis and motherboards for its storage solutions. The new Snap Server Series 500 family brings a range of interesting new features with the top-of-the-range 550 reviewed here aimed firmly at the mid-sized business.
Learn a few methods of creating a view of all your iTunes content-whether it be music, TV, movies, podcasts, or audiobooks.
Using iTunes' Comments field, you can expand Apple's rating system or customize the app in other ways.
iMovie '09 includes travel maps that let you specify starting and ending locations. However, its list of locations is limited. Learn how to add your own places with a bit of text file editing.
Learn a couple different ways of putting the trash can in the Finder's Sidebar.
We've chosen Photoshop 7 because its Extract filter makes it much easier to separate an image into several different parts, but you could always achieve the same thing using the marquee tool in any image editor to copy and paste the relevant parts manually.
Addressing mail has never been so quick and easy as it is now that addressing equipment is available in Chicago. With your own addressing machine you can take the tedium out of addressing mail manually and add to the professional appearance of the items you send.
Acrobat 9 brings significant improvements not only to the application itself but also to the format and Adobe Reader. The biggest change is support for embedded Flash content. Other improvements include faster launch times, a real-time online-collaboration tool, improved handling of forms in creation and data processing and a print engine that brings benefits for professional printing.
Tom Arah delves deep into the many facets of the most exciting Acrobat release since the launch of the all-important free Reader.
After Effects is Photoshop for moving images. It specialises in animations and complex video effects, often combining lots of discrete objects. Features such as randomisers and particle generators separate it from general-purpose video-editing software. Adobe has dispensed with the Standard version for this release, which means that £1,033 is now the starting price for After Effects.
It's this interoperation with the other Adobe CS4 applications that's key to the CS4 upgrade of After Effects and it marks a major step forward, but it's a double-edged sword. The improvements are impressive - particularly the inclusion of Mocha - and ensure it remains the king of compositors, but many of the most significant new abilities will be lost on those buying it on its own or simply upgrading from a previous version.
Buzzword is an online word processor written in Flash, and is Adobe's stylish attempt at stealing some of Google Docs' thunder. Its text-editing capability never moves far beyond basic: you can set the font, size, colour and use attributes such as bold, italic and underline.
Captivate's slide-based approach and Flash-based handling of interactivity come into their own when adding quiz elements to a presentation. When you select the Insert | Question Slide command, there are eight question types, including new drag-and-drop sequencing and hot-spot options.
When it was first introduced, Contribute was a radical development in web authoring, as it enabled non-expert users to safely update a website's content without the risk of breaking its design. However, as the previous version was only launched at the beginning of the year, it's unfair to expect similar fireworks this time around.
Adobe has appreciated as much and, rather than trying to add significant new features to Contribute itself, it has settled for a cosmetic, interface-based upgrade. It has focused its attention, instead, on an alternative approach: the new server-based InContext Editing capability. The idea is simple: sign up to the service and, using Dreamweaver CS4, you can mark-out areas in the page where your clients can edit content directly and for free in their browsers.
So the new professional platforms for both print and web design have arrived. With four CS3 Design and Web bundles based on nine major applications, it's a lot to get your head around.
In fact, with industry-leading software packages across the board, and all of them working more tightly together than ever, the two CS4 Design Suites remain the benchmarks by which all others must be judged. Despite the inflated UK prices, it's difficult to argue with the flexibility, power and value that each one offers.
Adobe's background is in print design and its web efforts such as GoLive and ImageReady have been, to put it kindly, less than impressive. It seemed something of a miracle then, when Macromedia agreed to be taken over, allowing Adobe to add the market-leading web apps to its market-leading print portfolio.
These days, however, it's relatively rare for a designer to be interested in only paper and, after its takeover of Macromedia, Adobe is now as strong when it comes to online design as it is for print.
Adobe certainly hasn't been twiddling its thumbs. There are no new applications in the Production Premium CS4 bundle, but the key components see significant improvements. As with the last iteration of Adobe's apps, video editors have a variety of bundle options to choose from.
Device Central is the only completely new application in the suite, and although its easy to dismiss it as a gimmick, it's actually a very rich tool designed to help you produce content for mobile phones.
The Adobe Document Center is designed to let you protect, share and track the use of Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents. The program lets small businesses dynamically grant and revoke access to documents distributed either inside or outside the firewall.
Fireworks, also covered here, appears only in the two Web-prefixed suites and the Master Collection, as its intended use has subtly changed. Many expected it to disappear altogether in the face of competition from Photoshop and the embedded ImageReady optimisation tools.
CS3 is the first version of Dreamweaver released since it passed from Macromedia to Adobe. Adobe hasn't changed its price significantly. Users of the last three versions published by Macromedia (Dreamweaver 8, MX 2004 and MX) can upgrade for around £165 including VAT.
Dreamweaver has dominated the world of web design since its introduction. Recently, however, there's been growing concern that it's been trading on past glories, and with Adobe's takeover of Macromedia there was even the possibility it might be replaced by Adobe's own GoLive.
Adobe's web page authoring package gets an update, but can it keep up with today's fast-moving web environment? Dreamweaver CS4 offers a range of preset workspaces, including a Dual Screen option and the ability to collapse panels to spring-loaded icons ready to open with a single click.
Adobe's Encore DVD is a DVD-authoring program that gives extensive control over menu design and disc navigation. Adobe was a late arrival in this field when the program launched in 2003, but version 1 had the sophistication and stability required for serious work.
When Adobe took over Macromedia, there was doubt over whether it would carry on developing Fireworks. Without the new shared CS3 interface, and with some of its promised features still missing in the press beta under review, it certainly seems semi-detached. But the good news is that Fireworks is still here and firing on all cylinders.
Fireworks CS4 also goes back to basics when it comes to its new design power. The core Rectangle tool has been reworked to enable nine-slice scaling of rounded corners. The Text tool has also been re-engineered and is now based on the core Adobe text engine, while the new Attach in Path command lets you create text block shapes and runaround effects.
In Flash CS3 Professional, workflow improvements aren't limited to the new user interface of most CS3 applications. Importing of content from Photoshop and Illustrator is much more flexible, and the Pen tool has been given an overhaul, too.
Under Macromedia's development, Flash came to dominate the Macromedia Studio authoring suite, with each release pushing the boundaries of end-user web experience. Naturally then, we were anxious to see what new power the first Adobe version would unleash.
But with this release Adobe is repositioning Flash, turning it into a universal platform for rich online delivery for all the CS apps - a screen-optimised equivalent of PDF. The fact that, in the process, Flash CS4 Professional's role as central authoring application becomes less important, is a bonus.
Tom Arah looks at Adobe's new development environment, designed to develop Flash applications away from the web and on your desktop.
DITA is based on XML, for which FrameMaker's longstanding tagged document approach is a natural partner. FrameMaker 8's XML handling has the ability to preserve comments and processing instructions, such as tracked edits when round-tripping.