screen

Not picture perfect

ScreenShot does exactly what its name suggests; it takes screenshots of whatever's in view and turns them into JPEG images. Aside from its drab interface, our computer was sluggish while the program was active.

It seems that not a lot of time and energy was spent on the program's user interface. Once accessed, a small window appears on your desktop that haphazardly displays instructions, the most recent screenshot, and a cluster of buttons for editing the image. You can crop the screenshot, but the crop tool is awkward. Like any other crop tool, you have to drag the … Read more

A new way to glean the Rubik's Cube

Looking for an '80s pop culture phenomenon with a modern twist? Of course you are, otherwise Transformers could not have made more than $300 million in the U.S. alone. Think smaller though, as in cube-shaped and able to fit in your hand. Of course it's a Rubik's Cube silly!

Gizmodo is reporting on a Rubik's Cube, the TouchCube, that features a touch screen, and has an accelerometer and a button that makes it solve itself. It also can purportedly even teach you how to solve it step by step. The new cube is scheduled for a … Read more

Write without distraction

JDarkRoom is a free, full-screen text editor that's designed to help you focus on your writing by eliminating distractions. When you open JDarkRoom, your screen goes completely black except for a blinking green cursor. By design, JDarkRoom gives you a limited feature set, with support for only basic word-processing functions such as cut, copy, paste, undo, and line and word count. JDarkRoom opens quickly (although not quite as quickly as Text Edit) and offers many options for fonts, auto-saving, and screen and type color. Its interface can take some getting used to (for example, it uses some nonstandard keystrokes, … Read more

An equal-opportunity player

Providing one-stop shopping for all your video needs, open-source and cross-platform Miro deserves much of the praise that's been heaped upon it. The latest major point to version 2.0 continues to impress.

The concept is brilliant, yet simple: Create a video player that can subscribe to and download video podcasts while managing the videos you've saved on your hard drive. On the face of it, this might sound like iTunes, but the sharing component is an essential aspect of the program. Miro has always been geared toward video and it shows in the program's design. When … Read more

An equal-opportunity player

Samsung's Lapfit monitors complement laptops

Forget your laptop stand and hideously mismatched secondary display, because Samsung's Lapfit series offers external LCD monitors that will match your laptop beautifully. The Lapfit External Display, which coordinates with the design of Samsung's latest laptops and comes in 19- and 22-inch versions, connects to your notebook, considerably enlarging your workable display area.

The pair of low-profile, wide-screen monitors, the LD190G (19-inch) and LD220G (22-inch), sit at the height of your typical laptop and have adjustable tilt angles from 10-30 degrees. Both monitors offer 1,360x768 pixel resolution (16:9 aspect ratio), 4ms response time, and a 20,… Read more

Sony X-Series Walkman hands-on photos

Remember that X-Series Walkman that Sony kept behind protective glass at this year's CES like it was the Mona Lisa? The one I swore would never actually hit the states? The one that U.K.'s Stuff Magazine had to fly to Sony headquarters in Japan just so they could fondle the prototype (see below)? Well, the lucky bastards at France's Le Journal du Geek actually got their hands on a legitimate version of the X-Series Walkman and then proceeded to photograph the living bejeezus out of it. [Correction: Sony has confirmed with us that the X-Series unit … Read more

Photos: Philips ultra wide-screen 21:9 TV unveiled

We already knew this was coming, but now we have actual pics that give a better sense of its scale.

Philips introduced its new Cinema 21:9 TV with a wider-than-wide-screen display at a press event in London. Our favorite blokes at Crave UK were in attendance and snapped a few frames of the "mutant telly."

Head over to Crave UK for a whole gallery of photos, as well as their take on the trouble of a new viewing format. (Alternatively, if you find wide screen worthless, head here.)

No help, no problem

Because it lacked any kind of real help feature, our first impression of this free utility was not a good one. But after we played around with it for a few minutes, it proved to be a decent screen capture tool.

Once activated, ScreenParts introduced a transparent window to our desktop. We found that we could easily resize the window by dragging and dropping the corners, but it wasn't quite clear where to go from there. A right-click revealed a menu that contained options for resizing the window, resetting the capture counter, and configuring the capture timer. In Settings, … Read more

The myth of width: When wide screens don't work

The displays of the world are getting wider. For those of us who work, this is not progress. Sure, wide-screen computer screens look cool, but in the real world of working on laptops, a wide-screen display is an ergonomic step backwards.

Before I slam the move to wide-screen computers, I will gladly admit that for entertainment content, wide-screen works. Our eyes are side-by-side, after all, and having a story unfold in a way that more closely respects how we see gives a more engrossing, absorbing experience. Wide-screen plasma and LCD television sets make sense, as do CinemaScope movie theaters.

But when we have work to do, the fact that our eyes are set up to spot a herd of jackals approaching us over the plain becomes irrelevant. For most people, the world of work is in portrait mode, and wide-screen displays offer scant benefits.

Like reading a page of text or a book, most Web sites are set up with strong vertical orientation. That works for text-based material, since wide lines of text, longer than about 60 characters, become hard to read (the reader has a hard time finding the beginning of the next line). … Read more