produce

You're a budding or aspiring filmmaker. You wrapped up all your shots and you're ready for post-production and distribution. Or you're an avid videographer or adventurer with a million video clips of family gatherings begging to be showcased on a TV. Cyberlink PowerProducer offers a video-production program for these folks and anyone looking to create DVDs or Blu-ray Discs.

Cyberlink PowerProducer is a user-friendly suite that lets users create and burn movie discs, complete with high-quality menu templates and Blu-ray support. The suite doesn't offer much as a real movie editor, per se -- you won'… Read more

Perfectly sanitized dimpled spinach leaves or tender greens like baby lettuce has been high on the wish list of the $3.1 billion bagged-salad industry since its inception. The race to develop better wash systems for cleaning took off in earnest in 2006, after the high-profile E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to bagged spinach killed five people and sickened more than 200, leaving the leafy green industry with a black eye and an ego-bruising $350 million price tag in recalls and lost sales.

Advances to date in cleaning salad greens have mostly centered on chlorine-based washes and plenty of … Read more

We usually cover news about Apple, the computer company, but here's some news about apples, the fruit.

Supermarket produce often comes with those pesky labels that are a pain to pull off without injuring the fruit's skin. But Scott Amron, award-winning electrical engineer and concept artist, has come up with Vanishing Fruitwash Labels, which dissolve into an organic produce wash.

The labels are water-resistant and are triggered when rubbed with water. The wash can help remove dirt, wax, fungicides, and pesticides. The labels can display price look-up codes, which are used for inventory and checkout purposes, and can be pulled off like a sticker, too.

Some may argue whether washing your fruit is really necessary, and that all you need to do is to shine up that apple on your shirt. You can also use something like baking soda or vinegar in a spray bottle to wash your produce. Regardless, this is an interesting idea.

The idea is still a concept, and Amron is advertising a 10 percent stake as an investment opportunity. … Read more

The General Ledger has been the basic bookkeeping tool of double-entry accounting since the Green Eyeshade days. It records financial transactions as both Credits and Debits in balance sheets, which before the advent of software were bound together in huge volumes like something out of a Dickens novel. BS1 General Ledger from Davis Business Systems brings the General Ledger up to cyberspeed with a variety of easy-to-use accounting tools that can track budgets and financial data and generate income statements, balance sheets, and other reports. It's freeware, a good start, accountancy-wise.

At just 1.44MB, BS1 is a fairly … Read more

Apple has rolled out a new tool for developers looking to create ads for iAd, the company's mobile-ad platform.

Launched yesterday, the new iAd Producer is designed to help developers create, test, and launch mobile-ad campaigns to run under iAd. Freely available to any paid member of Apple's iOS Developer Program, iAd Producer runs under Mac OS X 10. (No word from Apple on a possible Windows version.)

The software presents a visual design layout in which developers can specify the device they wish to design for and then see how their ad would flow from page to … Read more

Washing fruits and vegetables before you eat them is a matter of common sense. The Produce Washing Net makes the task a little easier: you can hang the net over your faucet, fill it with produce, and start running the water. Your fruit or vegetables are rinsed and drained; you can leave your produce in the net to dry. If you need to soak your fruits or vegetables, the Produce Washing Net can help you keep things contained. The net has a foam ring around the top that will float. When you're ready to drain your produce, you just … Read more

yWriter4 provides novelists with a tool to not only create their new story, but keep it tightly organized. This no-frills layout and inventive categorization may help bring that story from daydreams to the page.

The program's cluttered interface, full of buttons with no onscreen direction, practically begged us to visit the Help file. Luckily, while there, we discovered a wizard that walked us through the process and made everything much less confusing. The program required us to do a lot of prep work before we even wrote a word. However, we quickly learned that setting up databases of characters, … Read more

Shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables has a knack to make our shopping bags look bigger than our recipes; it's not hard to buy too much food when it looks so good. Problem is, then we are left with more produce than we can eat before it goes bad. Preserving this overabundance of fruits and vegetables can be achieved by canning, freezing, pickling, or drying (salting, not so much). In the case of dehydration, you are either going to need to construct a dehydrator, or pick up a commercial model.

The Nesco Gardenmaster Dehydrator is a spacious, fast-drying countertop … Read more

ProShow Producer allows users to create impressive-looking slideshow presentations that blow Microsoft PowerPoint out of the water. But all this power comes at a price as its many features might easily overwhelm users.

The program's interface is attractive and sleek, but it contains a lot of options and it's not immediately obvious how a user should begin. A visit to the built-in Help file offers guidance and allows users to get started creating slides. The basics are easy, but users will need to take some time to figure out how to best exploit the many features that the … Read more