An Easier Way to Share Print Screens

If you’re a tech savvy like myself, you’ve come across the annoyance of having to
do the tedious process of sharing a print screen with others. While some mediums to conquer them with live feeds such as Skype or Join.Me, sometimes you just want to share a snapshot and send it to someone else (or many others for that matter) with ease. A very good program to conquer this is LightShot. This very lightweight program, when running, replaces the usual print screen function and allows for the user to effortlessly upload their screenshot to a free hosting site, from which you can quickly share with others in a matter of seconds and saves massive amounts of time. But this is not the only option available to the user. On the pressing of the print screen button, LightShot will show an overlay, in which the user can adjust the size of the capture area, along with other things to do with their image, such as saving it to the computer instead. On top of this, the program also allows for the screenshot to be edited in their online photo manipulation site, in order to add things such as highlights and text. It is a great program and only takes a few minutes (if that), to download and install!

Rating: A* A B C D E F… G?

Link to program: www.prntscr.com

Review: Windows Speech Recognition

As of late, I have been experimenting with an essentially hidden feature that lies inside of Windows 8. It was present in Windows 7, but has been expanded upon in the more recent versions of Windows. This “hidden” feature is ‘Windows Speech Recognition‘. Much like Apple’s ‘Siri’ for their mobiles and tablets, W.S.R. allows for the user to control their device via speech. The user will say something, and then the computer will act accordingly, and is great for those who are lazy (like myself) who just want to get around their computer without having to reach to their keyboards, or mice. W.S.R. does not only control the computer, but it also allows for the user to dictate: take for example, a Word document to user wants to edit. Instead of having to type their document, said user can simply speak into their microphone and the program will attempt to type out what you had said to it. The program is actually surprisingly accurate and can understand many accents and dialects.

However, the program does not come without flaw. As much as you can navigate the computer basically, when it comes to more advanced operations, Windows Speech Recognition just does not cut the cheese. For example, the program does not have the ability to navigate webpages, which I think is its biggest problem. It only recognises control elements; meaning it can only use buttons, text fields and menus etc. that are part of the program’s interface itself, and it cannot recognise elements on a page. Considering I spend a lot of time on the internet instead of using actual applications, it isn’t really that useful. Sometimes, it’s just better off to use the mouse when navigating, which I believe is a shame.

Pros:

• Effortless navigation
• Dictation is very accurate and is good for those who cannot be bothered to type and just want to say what they want in their documents etc.
• Is very fast in analysing your commands/dictations.

Cons:

• Can be very tedious
• Does not support navigation of web-pages
• Depends heavily on the quality of your microphone; cheap ones, and ones that come with laptops for example may not be picked up well by the program.

I really like the idea of W.S.R. and in some case is very useful, however, in a lot of situations the program is just too tedious to use and you’d be better off just doing it the normal way.

Rating: A* A B C D E F… G?

c-grade: It’s pretty good.

The Hard-Drive Spy Tool

(for Windows only)
Sometimes, your hard-drive has some secrets hidden inside which slow down your computer to a standstill. As I myself have been experiencing these problems recently, I came across a program which allows you to view the space hoggers lurking in the depths of your HDD.

The program in question is WizTree. The program will scan a hard-drive you select and it will show you what and where large files are stored; even giving you percentages to how much of its parent it uses. For example: say my hard-drive had a capacity 100GB. A folder on it could be 50GB- therefore showing that this folder uses 50% of its parent, the hard-drive. But, for the individual files inside the folder, the parent for them would be the folder that contained them.

The program does this seamlessly and extremely quickly; no matter the processor speed or the amount of data stored on your hard-drive. Give it a few seconds and the program is done. From there it inherits standard Windows Explorer features, allowing you to modify, delete and move these files.

I highly recommend this software if you are going through problems with computer speed and are not sure with what the cause is; or if you just want to see what is piling up.

Download Link: http://antibody-software.com/files/wiztree_1_06_setup.exe
Portable Edition: http://antibody-software.com/files/wiztree_1_06_portable.zip

Developer Site: http://antibody-software.com/ 

XBOX Rant – Microsoft at Their Best

It just gets better. Looks like Microsoft are forcing people with XBOX 720 consoles to install their games to the system. You may think ‘what’s wrong with that, PS3 does it?’ The problem is what Microsoft intend to do with that feature. They are planning to implement a one system only install – meaning pre-owned games or friend’s games will not work on your console. This is probably one of the worst mistakes they have ever made for so many reasons.

I’m sure everybody likes times where your friend(s) bring round games which you don’t have so you can play together and have fun. Of course, now this is deemed impossible as you now have to own a copy of the game each. I’m sure that everyone likes to go down to the store and spend less money on a pre-owned game that works just like the brand new ones. This is also phased out.

This is just one of Microsoft’s stupid ways of getting more of the dosh. But I personally think that their greed is going across the line here. People are going to be spending so much more money on these things that the prospect of an XBOX 720 seems ridiculous. The console cost, plus XBOX Live costs and now game costs altogether will just stop people from wanting to buy one, as they don’t want to be broke by the end of the month.

I strongly disagree with their decision to do this and it would be much wiser to leave these features as-is. Like I said with the iPhone; people will still buy the product. But I feel as if sales will be brought down as a result of this. Let me know what you think about this matter in the comments.

What A Surprise… iPhone 5S is Coming

Of course, it is now rumored that the iPhone 5S is coming soon. It has been said that a new camera is being installed to allow the user to create stunning, high resolution photos that makes the viewer think they were actually there. As normal, Apple is also following it’s tradition in improving the phone’s processor.

But as much as this sounds nice, I have questions about this. Here are a couple of my questions:

1. Do we need a new processor?
   Apple has upgraded their processor so much recently it seems sort of pointless. Are there really any apps which will need    such an amazing processor and it’s not as if people are going to multitask 25 different applications at once
   
2. Are iPhones just becoming more pointless each release?
   I’m sure many will disagree but I think that the phones are becoming more pointless as they go along. To me it seems Apple are just chucking out loads of new phones with slight adjustments all the time; as they know all the Apple fans and followers will buy their products just because it’s the latest fad.
   

Maybe we will find out later this year, to see if my questions will be answered.

New Videos Soon To Arrive

OK, everybody.

I know I have said this many times before, saying that I would come back hopefully to do more videos. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes I will upload one video and have done with it for a few months. When I say I’m coming back now, I’m not guaranteeing that I will come back and upload content all the time. Half the time when I say that, it never works out. So, I’m posting this now to tell you that I’ll be uploading a few videos in the future. Some of these videos could include:

• Some sort of Java tutorial
• Continuation of my earlier Flash Pro tutorials on how to make a simple point and click game with AS3.
• Continuaton of my Unity tutorials (since these are seemingly popular)
• Possibly some Cinema 4D

Getting used to some new software, so new content should be even better than before. Hope you enjoy the new content. :3

 

Review: FL Studio 10 (music production)

Hello!

In this review I will be talking about the music production software ‘FL Studio’ by Image-Line. So to start off, this is the most efficient, most exciting software you can get for music composition/remixing. It’s interface and structure is perfect for this. The synthesizers it come with are also top notch, with many different plugins which supply a unique and individual sound, perfect for variety of sorts. It has many different options for changing the way your synths sound to make them even better, everything you could think of can be created using synths in FL Studio. But don’t forget, the pattern maker, the unique piano roll and the sidebar. These all make life so much easier, from making epic drum beats to extremely precise note outputs. It’s all here, everything you need, in this one small, simple package. I totally recommend this. Get it here.

You can also check out some of my stuff at my music blog: www.poltergeistdubstep.wordpress.com

FL Studio 10 Logo.

Rating: A* A B C D E F… G?

500GB PlayStation 3 Is Coming!

Phew! Thank you Sony! I have been waiting for something like this for ages… I’m sure that many PS3 users have faced the annoying task of deleting things off their HDDs because they have run out of room for installing new games they want, whether that be on a disc or downloaded from the PlayStation Store. This is a great step from Sony, as now people can actually have more than about 20 games installed. Heh heh.

An example of a 500GB hard-drive disk.

Photoshop CS7 Drops Windows XP

That’s right. Adobe has revealed that Photoshop CS7 is dropping Windows XP support. Now we all know, despite it’s age, that Windows XP is still a very popular operating system. That could mean that Adobe could lose a lot of money as not as many people will be able to buy the next Photoshop, and they may not upgrade to Windows 7/8 just for a graphics/photo manipulation program. They may do, but it’s less likely that Adobe will still make as much money as they did with the previous version. Well, we will just have to wait and see, won’t we.

The current Adobe logo.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta Is Released

Last Wednesday Adobe released the beta of Photoshop for Creative Suite 6. There have been quite a few additions to this, mainly the Adobe Mercury Engine which features in Premiere Pro CS5.5. This really boosts the rendering times and performance of the program and it will respond more. The interface looks a little better and there are a few new cool features. But one not so good thing is the poor 32-bit support. 32-bit support will be supported on Windows, but with some of the feature de-activated as they can only be used for 64-bit, and 32-bit Mac support is dropped altogether. Overall, PCS6 is OK, but to be honest, I’ll stick with CS5.1 for now, unless they really impress me.

RANK:  A* A B C- It’s pretty cool. D E F … G

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Logo. You know, CS5.1's logo was better than this...