processing

Sporting some interesting user interface conventions and a fairly powerful set of image-editing tools, iPhoto makes a fairly splashy debut, especially at the relatively reasonable price of $4.99. Though it lacks some of the capabilities of the more expensive Photoshop Touch, including cross-iOS/Android compatibility and compositing, it looks like it has a reasonably broad image-editing feature set and a major advantage: it can handle images up to 19 megapixels, while Adobe's app is limited to 1,600x1,600 pixels. Though it was launched with the new iPad--and will probably be really nice to use with that model'… Read more

Sporting some interesting user interface conventions and a fairly powerful set of image-editing tools, iPhoto makes a fairly splashy debut, especially at the relatively reasonable price of $4.99. Though it lacks some of the capabilities of the more expensive Photoshop Touch, including cross-iOS/Android compatibility and compositing, it looks like it has a reasonably broad image-editing feature set and a major advantage: it can handle images up to 19 megapixels, while Adobe's app is limited to 1,600x1,600 pixels. Though it was launched with the new iPad--and will probably be really nice to use with that model'… Read more

Gamers don't like to share. They love multiplayer environments, to be sure, but when it comes to their systems' resources, they're selfish; anything that saps gaming power has to go, at least for the session. Process Cleaner is a simple tool that can terminate all non-Windows processes with a click. It also manages Services and the Start menu, cleans your hard disks and browser, and optimizes ActiveX.

Process Cleaner collects all these tools in one simple, plain interface, which is not a bad thing. And since Process Cleaner basically unifies existing functions, everything worked well enough. Before we … Read more

Intel today spelled out in more exacting detail just what the Ivy Bridge chip delay means in the wake of comments published Sunday from an Intel executive.

"Reports of an eight-week delay to the Ivy Bridge launch are inaccurate and our schedule has only been impacted by a few weeks," spokesman Jon Carvill told CNET today.

So, for instance, if a desktop Ivy Bridge product was slated for an April launch, that would be pushed to May. And a mobile product scheduled for May, would launch in June. Intel always staggers production schedules. For example, Intel's most … Read more

I've listened to a lot of speakers over the past thirty-odd years, and I can tell you this, they're all imperfect.

No hi-fi or home theater sounds like live music, and not a single one of the most exalted high-end speakers has truly flat frequency response.

Of course, everyday speakers are less accurate, which is why just about every receiver sold today has a calibration system that corrects speaker anomalies and tames room acoustic problems.

That's all fine in theory, but most speaker calibration systems only change rather than improve the sound of a hi-fi or home theater. So I'm a bit of a skeptic about the benefits of this type of processing, but I finally heard a correction system that delivered the goods. It's the DEQX HDP-Express. I listened to it over a very high-end system (owned by DEQX's publicist).

The sonic transformation was at once subtle and dramatic. I first listened to the system without any correction, and the sound was excellent. The speakers were large floor-standing towers (Focal Utopias). I played a few recordings I know well, and the sound was beautifully balanced and natural.

Ah, but then my host switched on the DEQX speaker correction, and the sound of the "Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play the Blues" CD snapped into focus.… Read more

When we reviewed Tomahawk Gold from NativeWinds, we found it to be a very good integrated PDF and word processing program: fast, light, and portable, yet ready for business. Tomahawk PDF+ ("PDF Plus") is a freeware version of Tomahawk Gold. Some of the premium tool's features are disabled in PDF+. For example, it can create PDFs and convert documents to PDF, but it can't open PDFs created by some other programs, including Adobe PDFs. However, it can extract data from many of those documents with its PDF Extractor and Image Manager.

PDF+'s user interface is … Read more

Anyone with a digital camera knows how quickly the sheer number of photos on your hard drive can become completely unmanageable. Photo View is a simple program that lets users easily preview images and their properties. It's a handy tool to have if you need some help managing your image files.

The program's interface is simple and easy to navigate. Down the left side a tree hierarchy lets users navigate to images wherever they're stored. Select a folder and a pane along the bottom of the interface displays thumbnails of all of the images within. Clicking on … Read more

The reported acquisition of Anobit should catapult Apple into the ranks of leading flash memory companies and mirrors what it has done with the A series of chips in its iPhone and iPad.

Apple is in the process of buying Anobit, an Israel-based flash memory firm, according to Israel's Calcalist business news site. The purchase price isn't small--in the range of $400 million to $500 million, according to reports.

So, what does a payout in that range bring to Apple? First of all, it's important to understand that Apple is not a flash memory neophyte, according to … Read more

I've met a lot of audio designers in my time, and all of the best ones have one thing in common, they have great "ears." They know what good sound sounds like. The opposite camp is populated with engineers that rely exclusively on measurements to "prove" their designs are better. To my way of thinking, the second group rarely makes great sounding products. Audio is too complex to be analyzed with just numbers alone.

Nowadays I'm meeting more digital audio engineers specializing in designing room and speaker correction software. They are usually very nice … Read more