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ie8 fix

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Mediocre card maker

Greeting Card Studio purports to allow users to create attractive, high quality greeting cards. In reality, this program's lack of features and buggy operation makes us think we'd be better off with construction paper and markers.

The program's interface is basic and looks a lot like many other image-editing programs. The trial version comes with 16 templates, which range from cutesy to tacky. None of them was anything we'd want to give to someone (at least not someone we liked). With a program designed specifically to create greeting cards, we figured there would be options to … Read more

Astrological significance finder

MB Astrology Nithya Yoga offers to show us how our birthday and location are significant to yoga astrological beliefs. The program just barely misses the mark by not providing enough information.

The program's interface was a breeze for us to operate, though understanding it took a trip to the online Help file. Its brief explanation gave an understanding of the overall aim of the program, but the technical language of the program's results continued to confuse us. We only had to provide our birthday and time, along with the latitude and longitude of our birthplace (the program smartly … Read more

General vocab builder

Vocabulary Builder for SAT ACT GRE GMAT LSAT is a basic program that contains more than 2,000 words for vocabulary practice. Although the program works fine, we wish we knew more about where its words come from and their relevance to each test.

The program's interface is basic, with separate sections for memorizing words and taking practice tests. The word memorization section features an audio recitation feature using Microsoft Sam, which we didn't particularly like; we've always found Sam kind of hard to understand, and we'd rather read the words and definitions anyway. We wish … Read more

Afraid of swine flu? Wear this suit

If the new swine flu vaccine doesn't give you the right dose of inner peace, there's another layer of protection at your disposal. It comes from Japan, which means it looks good, too.

According to the U.K. Telegraph, Japanese menswear company Haruyama Trading has developed a suit that it claims can protect wearers from the H1N1 virus.

The suit is coated with titanium dioxide--a chemical commonly used in toothpaste and cosmetics--that breaks down when reacting with light and supposedly kills the virus upon contact. (If you read Japanese, here is the company's press release.)

Despite the … Read more

My iPhone eats draft e-mail--yours could too

I discovered a serious bug recently on my iPhone 3GS after it lost the entire contents of two different e-mail messages I had sent to my CNET editor. The bug appears to be caused by a problem between my e-mail accounts on MobileMe or Gmail and accessing them later on my iPhone.

The steps that I have used to demonstrate the bug, which I've been able to successfully replicate every time on my iPhone running OS 3.1 and my MobileMe account are shown below. I've submitted a bug report to Apple engineering.

Log on to MobileMe on … Read more

Free music finder

Music MP3 Get offers to track down a song by scouring social networking sites. With an incredibly easy layout and impressive results, this is a great way to find favorite tunes.

The interface felt so natural to us, we happily skipped the program's instructional online Help file. With only a few command buttons and an intuitive layout, we were in business in a matter of seconds. We were surprised by how quickly this program worked, especially since it had to scan several networking sites for songs. We entered our artist in the search engine and a few seconds later … Read more

Find your biggest files

Beginners and advanced users alike will appreciate the simplicity of Primitive File Size Chart, a utility that analyzes how much space files and folders are taking up on your computer.

The tool scans a specific disk or folder and lists the largest files and folders within. (By default, the program lists the 50 largest in each category, but you can increase or decrease this number.) The clean user interface displays the path, name, and size of each file and the name and size of each folder in sortable columns. The utility offers no Help file, although it arguably needs none. … Read more

Simple poker game

Poker Mania offers a single game of draw poker, but leaves a lot to be desired. While it was easy to pick up, we quickly grew bored with the program's lack of variety.

Even though we are not regular poker players, we felt instantly at home with this simple interface. The program's onscreen instructions were great and the Help file's list of winning hands clarified a lot. Poker has countless variations and we were expecting to find at least a few to choose from. Instead, we were quickly disappointed to find that the program only consisted of … Read more