programming

If you've got the talent, Magix's Music Maker can provide you with a digital mixing tool that rocks. Expect a fairly steep learning curve if you're new to the program, but don't let that intimidate you: along with a robust feature set, Music Maker comes with tutorials and direct links to the help forums.

The new features are robust additions to the already loaded feature set. The built-in drum machine, BeatBox, has been overhauled and is more flexible. The Infobox feature teaches you about music as you're producing it, as well as displaying long-form tooltips … Read more

Raise My Rights is a free program that is supposed to give users administrator access to most applications. But thanks to an overall lack of direction, the only thing that this program raised was our level of frustration with its poor performance.

The program has an extremely vague user interface. It requires that you enter the account details for creating a shortcut. We entered our username and domain info, but once we got to the password part, we weren't sure what to enter. The program's Help feature merely gives you copyright information, so it was trial and error … Read more

Facebook plans to announce at a developer event Monday that it will open up user-contributed information to third-party developers, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.

The move would allow developers to build applications and services that--with users' permission--access user videos, photos, notes, and comments. The move would be a significant change for the social-networking site, which had previously retained tight control over the site and how developers interact with it.

To allow developers to take advantage of the free feature, Facebook users would have to give the companies access to their data, and users' privacy settings … Read more

Every computer user needs a basic text editor for Readme files and simple note taking capabilities--that's why Windows comes with Notepad. But if you want added features like a tabbed interface, search and replace functionality, or extras that help you with coding projects, you need to look for the more full-featured alternatives. The best editors come with numerous features and work great for editing code for Web sites, but also for simply writing quick notes, and pasting excerpts from the Web when aggregating research for a project.

Fortunately, some of the best software in this category is free, but … Read more

For users who do not enjoy using Windows' Start Menu, ProgramLaunch offers an alternative. While this may be a good idea for many, this program is not the efficient rescuer its manufacturers believe it to be.

This free download displays itself as a small tray you can move anywhere on your desktop. On it, users see a clock, a calendar, a Recycle Bin, and a power meter. From this general starting point, there is absolutely no direction provided for the program. Users must blindly right and left click the icons and the empty space in hopes of moving forward. Understandably, … Read more

For marketers of television programming, after the TV itself, what's the next most important home entertainment device? The remote control. Every day and night we literally fight for the viewers' "share of thumb!" Think about it.

The remote control device has gone through many changes. My first remote control was my younger brother, Peter. "Louder, please!" I would command, and Peter would get up and adjust the volume. Same for channel up and down. One could say it was actually voice-activated.

Today, Peter has his own remote. From a simple up, down, left, right, and … Read more

Writing software that can simultaneously make use of multiple processors can be hard. Yet the advent of multicore processors--four cores per chip is now common--means that more and more software needs to do just that.

With processor performance increases now increasingly coming through the ability to handle more execution threads, rather than handling individual ones faster, multithreaded programming, in one form or another, is pretty much the only path to writing faster software, going forward.

Researchers and developers are tackling this issue from a lot of different angles, including new languages and a greater focus on multithreaded programming in computer … Read more

Leave it to Zend to kick Java-loving Sun Microsystems when it's down.

PHP has become one of the hottest programming languages in technology, and the engine behind the little scripting language that could is Zend Technologies. Back in 2000 Zend released its Zend Framework to facilitate PHP development, and it's now taking this Java-bashing crusade a step further with the release of its new Zend Server, as The Register reports.

As Dave Rosenberg notes over on CNET's Software Interrupted blog, Zend Technologies is making available its Zend Server on Tuesday as both a commercial product and one … Read more

Tom and Rafe talk about some of their favorite applications and utilities for the Mac.