Reviewing digital media devices and services
In part one of our review we started to look at what Xara Xtreme has to offer. Read on to find out what we thought of the package as a whole.
As a DTP editor, Xara still has a way to go before it can compete with the big names, but it costs only a fraction of the price of Quark and Indesign and, as a cut price alternative, there’s certainly enough typographic and layout control on tap for many designer’s needs.
Proudly billing itself as the ‘world’s fastest graphic program,’ Xara continues to serve up an enticing mix of unbeatable speed and real graphics power at a bargain basement price.
We’ve been using the vector and bitmap illustration package program since it first appeared back in 1994 as Xara Studio, and instantly appreciated its super-speedy processing and no-nonsense, simple interface, backed by comprehensive help files and handy movies to get users started.
In part one, we took a walk down memory lane looking at the Ricoh’s previous offerings such as the GX100 and introduced the GX200.
In part two we continue to review the latter and give you our thoughts on it’s performance.
Reviewing high end Ricoh digital cameras is turning out to be an expensive business for us.
The first time we took a look at one – their fixed lens Ricoh GR compact – we ended up liking the camera so much we went straight out and bought the ruddy thing (but only after Ricoh had prised the review model out of our cold, snapping hands).
For a long time, one option for the music business to save themselves has been to offer an ‘all you can eat’ option for music – pay a monthly fee and listen to all of the music you fancy.
If you’re getting frustrated by the limitations of the Windows Explorer interface and fancy something a bit more geared towards the power user, it may be worth taking a look at the feature-stuffed Directory Opus, a commercial file manager that offers more bells and whistles than Santa’s float at Carnival.
For ramblers, hikers and general all-terrain rugged folks looking to capture some outdoors photography, lugging a decent tripod around can be a bit of a chore, so Trek Technologies are hoping that their hybrid tripod/walking stick will prove a hit.
A hybrid what do we hear you ask? Well, indeed. It might seem like a curious creation on paper but it’s even weirder when you get your hands on the thing. For starters, it’s not so much a walking stick as a ruddy great staff that looks like it should be waved about by Charlton Heston as he busies himself parting the Red Sea.
It’s all well and good strutting around town with your snazzy slim’n’light ultraportable laptop but if there’s no optical recorder lurking inside you’re going to feel a bit of a chump when you need to back up content or access material on CD or DVD.
According to a recent study, the humble computer mouse is set to die out in the next five years to be usurped by fancy-pants touch screens and facial recognition systems.
That’s as maybe, but we still need one to get around our Thinkpad laptop right now, so we invested in the wireless Logitech VX Nano, a sleek black and dark grey number with natty rubberised side panels and slinky contours that feel good to the touch.
Sometimes it’s the little software utilities that make a pleasing difference to your productivity, and one that’s currently making our workload a little bit lighter every day is Melloware’s PlacesBar Editor.