Web Easy 7.0 Professional Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I used Web Easy 7 Professional to make a very professional-looking web site, equal to sites created by much more expensive software. Web Easy did almost everything I required. I created my own page style and format, inserted text and hypertext links, and imported graphics and photos. Pages within a site can be different lengths, but if you start with a supplied template of a certain width, you apparently can't change it.
It's easy to preview the site you create, and what you see is really what you get. You can include meta tags on your site, but it seems that all pages of your site will have the same meta tags. You can insert a visitor counter, but you may need assistance from your ISP to have it count correctly. Many feedback form styles are available, but I haven't yet figured out how to make them send all of the information entered in the fields. The tables I could make in Web Easy were not satisfactory for a catalog with more than 50 items. You could divide your catalog up into several web pages, or use a link to open an Excel spreadsheet or Word document. Also, I couldn't paste a whole Excel or Word table into a Web Easy table.
Learning to use Web Easy took some effort, particularly because I wanted to create my own web site from scratch rather than using one of the templates supplied. The user's manual is pretty elementary, but the help menu is detailed, searchable, and generally helpful. Uploading my site to the web was frustrating. You need to enter host information into the Publish Assistant without many clues from the manual or the help menu. When I finally entered the right information, I got the cryptic error message "The web site package is older than the web site document", and only one page of my site uploaded, even though the site looked fine with the preview function. The error message should have described how to fix the problem. Eventually I figured out that it could easily be fixed by clicking Build / Web Site. You can visit my site at www.KeySynthesis.com


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Create a great website has never been easier. WebEasy includes everything you need in a one box to create your ideal website with built-in templates and e-commerce tools. Drag-and-drop simplicity and automatically HTML code generation, create the website you want without any programming or technical skills required.

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Macjournal 5.0 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The software has some positive features: good interface, reasonable to learn. And it seems to be refined and well-developed compared to other similar programs.
However, I've found that the program does not do much more than I can already do on my MacIntosh. The website suggests that the software is like Lance Armstrong choosing a good bike instead of settling for something less, but I actually feel that I can do less with the program. On a Mac, one can set up a folder (labeled Journal 2009, or the like) along the left of the finder and use MSWord or Pages for entries which have much better and more extensive graphic and text functions that MacJournal. In fact, when I tried MacJournal it felt like the program was simply reinventing the MacIntosh Finder for me, with less capability. And while it's nice to have things in one place, this also means one has too keep using the software to preserve the journaling system, or face a reorganization with lots of exporting in the future.
Also, the program creates a 'document" or like for each day, which seems like overkill. Then one has to open them separately to view. I realize that one can group such separate entries and export to wordprocessing as one document, but one could start this way in Word or Pages. With MacJournal one could reflect in one entry (renamed to something like January or 2009) for multiple days, but this again is similar to using a wordprocessing document.
Overall I'd suggest this for power journalers willing to commit to one system.

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Garmin US TOPO 24K Topographical Maps of United States Mountain Central Region (microSD/SD Card) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)For the first time Garmin is beginning to roll out 24K Topo maps on very convenient microSD cards. ( includes SD card adapter ) No computer needed, just put it in your unit and go. No fuss, no muss !
All I can say is it is about time !
They are starting with the western states and going east. If your state is not covered yet, please be patient. They are all coming.
This is the highest level of mapping detail available for your Garmin unit. They work best on the new Colorado and Oregon series units as you will see see 3-D views and color terrain shading on these units only. Very Nice !!
These are a must have for hikers, geocachers and any outdoor enthusiasts.
Highly recommended !!

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IMSI FloorPlan 3D Home Design Suite Version 10 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I own both the IMSI (FloorPlan 3D Version 5) and Punch (Architect 4000) software titles, and the following are my own conclusions. I have no vested interest in either manufacturer. I have a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering, and have taught interactive computer graphics, so I guess I am more than usually familiar with computers and design.
I designed my previous home using the IMSI package, and after using it to capture the design, I passed it along to a draftsman to create drawings for the permitting process. I found that the package was easy to use (although a bit weird), and that it generally worked great. When we moved in, the home was absolutely spectacular! So, when we moved to another state to retire, we decided to repeat the process. Even though I still had the IMSI software (Version 5) and it readily installed onto XP, I thought that surely there had been improvements. So, I took the time to find the "best package out there". The reviews I read said that the Punch (Architect 4000) package was rated best, had the most features, blah, blah, blah. So I bought it, in spite of paying approximately 3X what I would pay for the latest IMSI version of FloorPlan 3D. The manual is about an inch thick, but I started wading through, thinking that this was the learning cost of a really good package. The manual seemed reasonable and there are TONS of features (read complexity), but when I actually tried to use the program, I couldn't get anything done. Everything was hard to do. Then, and this was the killer for me, whenever I saved data, I could never read the file back in. I tried everything, and eventually thought that it was my fault, so I went back to my old IMSI package because I had a house to design.
I quickly got up to speed because IMSI wins out hands down for its simple user interface. I struggled with both initially, but soon found that IMSI's wall layout tool, while weird, was useable. It's ease of use (tailorable wall heights, pushing even non-rectilinear wall segments around, changing wall thicknesses, immediate demonstration of dimensions and room square footage, changing wall and floor materials, colors, and texture, etc) allowed one to work pretty quickly. I was never able to use Punch's layout editor efficiently. Ever! Forget saving the data so you could work on a design again. Even just creating a simple layout was a huge struggle. Unless you knew the design beforehand, it was very difficult to lay out a floor plan interactively. This was what IMSI was good at. Even with a fully designed floorplan, I had trouble with the Punch program.
IMSI was also the easiest in viewing your design in 3D. Again, the viewing tools were weird and somewhat non-intuitive, but eventually useful. Punch's 3D viewer was totally useless, and I was never able to control the views, no matter what I did. And, "Hey!", I taught computer graphics.
After spending many hours getting a complete design (from my working with IMSI) entered into a freshly-reloaded Punch, I again tried to save my work. When I went back to work on it some more, it was unreadable. The file was there, but there was some formatting error that made it unreadable. I was furious, but thankfully, I had the IMSI design captured. So, I had a decision- Waste more time trying to debug a program I had paid 3X more for than the IMSI FloorPlan 3D, or spend my time getting work done on my house plan. Actually, I downloaded a free upgrade to Version 5.1 and got busy. Now I am thinking of purchasing IMSI's Version 11 as I am finalizing our house plan and like some of the new features and abilities of the new software.
To be candid, neither software package was bug-free. IMSI occasionally doesn't allow you to move a wall, but that is almost always because there is some constraint that is disallowing the modification. I found Punch to be even more restrictive. While I was able to export the IMSI design as a vrml file and e-MAIL it to my son to review, Punch had the greatest number of export file options. Too bad it always lost my saved designs. Neither package really creates beautiful 3D graphics, but IMSI's simple renderings were adequate for previewing the design work. I also liked IMSI's design methods using internal room dimensions. But, neither program made it clear how to proceed in starting a design from scratch. Nowhere did they tell you whether you could design the 2nd floor first, whether you had to layout the foundation beforehand (Punch), etc.
Finally, I should mention that I wanted to input site information for my lot, but that was too costly in terms of time. Interestingly, I downloaded Google's free Sketchup software, imported my IMSI design (in dxf file format), and was able to place it on the terrain using a Sketchup to Google Earth tool, and then interactively view it in 3D on my 10 acre lot using Google Earth. I found out that I have some serious grading and fill work to do on the build site.

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FloorPlan 3D Design Suite 10 makes designing your dream home and garden simple! Easy-to-use tools give you the power to transform ideas into stunning photorealistic 3D images you can view, navigate, and share. Whether you're remodeling your kitchen or bath, planning your garden, or designing your dream home, FloorPlan 3D has it all

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Data Backup 3 By Prosoft Engineering Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The Pros:
--A comprehensive group of pre-defined backup sets. The software is determined to help you keep good backups. Kudos!!
--Ability to define your own backup sets, very simple UI for this. And the advanced features in defining backups are very good.
--Good scheduling for the backup sets. Can have separate schedules for the various sets.
--Response to email support inquiries has been fast and courteous.
The Cons:
--As reported by other reviewers, the software often asks you to re-enter the serial number. This is anoying at best, and fatal if it occurs during an automated backup in the middle of the night.
--Cryptic log file. You'll get a report that an error has occured during a backup, but the log file doesn't give much help in determining which files were involved.
The Summary:
Buy this software for the good UI and ease of use. But quality and reporting needs to improve before I can give it another star.

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Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I wish I had read the reviews more closely before buying this product (particularly the companion reviews of the regular edition Roxio Toast 10). Usually I discount all the people who give low ratings for poor service as having just had a bad experience. In this case, though, I too have experienced the "unhelpful automated email response" bot. Given the number of reviewers who've mentioned the poor service, it isn't just a couple bad experiences.
Having used the product, I'm not surprised they've gone to automated response. They must be overwhelmed with support requests. The product is a bundle of different programs each of which is shareware-quality. There's no coherency in the user interfaces. Much of the interaction with your media involves dragging things around from the Finder. The "software update" process involves unzipping new applications and copying them on top of the old ones. No smart auto-update.
That said, the collection of "features" is impressive, even if not coherently arranged. AVCHD, Blu-Ray, H264, Elgato, iPhone, Apple TV, Tivo integration are all terrific features to have. I'll admit I haven't played with most of them yet. Thus far I've focused on the Tivo->iPhone pathway.
I installed it on my Macbook Air with attached Apple CD/DVD burner. Performance seems reasonable, though when I accidentally hit "edit" for a Tivo video or try to browse through a bunch of Tivo videos with the Media Browser, it becomes painfully slow.
But the main reason I'm giving it 2 stars is because the Tivo->iPhone pathway has serious defects. Namely, if you set up Tivo Transfer to automatically export to Toast and then set up Toast to automatically convert to iPhone and submit to iTunes, you lose all the series/episode meta-data. Instead each item is given a unique name which destroys the TV Show grouping in iTunes. iPhone syncing works by selecting the most recent unviewed episodes of your selected series. When every episode appears as its own new TV series, syncing becomes very painful.
Further, if you've moved the location of your iTunes media (say to an external drive), Toast can't tell and just puts it in the original location.
Additionally, if you tell Tivo Transfer not to automatically transfer and instead click "Toast It" from within Tivo Transfer, then you're automatically taken to the DVD-burning section of Toast. If you switch over to Convert to iPhone or Apple TV, you can no longer see the transferred video.
The only way I have found to convert items from Tivo to iPhone while preserving Series/Episode data is to find the raw video that Tivo downloaded in Finder and drag each one into Toast and click the convert button. This is rather painful given this is supposed to be a 1st-class feature of Roxio Toast 10.
I have additionally had problems with conversions failing half-way through, but continuing to use 100% of the machine's CPU. In my experience, trying to "Stop" a conversion in process is hit-or-miss... sometimes the CPU just keeps spinning until you manually kill the process from the shell. Also, if you set up Tivo to auto-convert, it appears there's no visible status of what is happening, so there's no way to stop.
In conclusion, for a product labeled "version 10" and "pro" it feels one step better than shareware, but if you need the features it may well be shareware worth buying... just expect some pain with no relief from product support.** UPDATE **
Service has gone from bad to worse. Instead of answering my question as to why the Series/Episode data wasn't preserved when performing auto-export, they first responded with a general email telling me how to delete all my preferences and re-install Toast 10. I dutifully did as they suggested hoping there was a magic bullet there. Sadly it didn't help. When I replied again, they responded with a general email about how to reset and restart all my Tivos.
To make things worse, these boiler-plate emails spell "preferences" as "prefrences" and "MAC address" as "MAK address". Ridiculous.

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Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro is the best way to get pro-quality results in burning, video and photo projects. Enjoy all the power of Toast 10 Titanium plus Blu-ray video authoring and four award-winning photo and audio applications.


Burn HD video to DVD and Blu-ray The Toast 10 High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-in lets you take high-def video footage from AVCHD camcorders, TiVo DVRs and EyeTV and create Blu-ray discs or even standard DVDs with HD content that can be played on any standard Blu-ray set top box or PS3 game console.

High-def to DVD: author HD video to standard DVDs for playback on Blu-ray players
Author HD video to Blu-ray Discs

Use it with your iPhone or iPod
Stream video from your Mac to your iPhone over the Internet, with Streamer iPhone application available from iTunes App Store (free for Toast 10 users)
Cut, trim, and send your favorite video, EyeTV and TiVo recordings, or DVD clips to iTunes for syncing with your iPhone
Capture, identify, and tag streaming Internet audio – automatically sent to your iTunes library
Rip audiobook CDs, complete with individual chapters and pause/resume support for easy playback on iPod or iPhone
Save streaming web video from your favorite web sites and have it sent directly to iTunes

Create a custom soundtrack SmartSound Sonicfire Pro lets you easily orchestrate sophisticated soundtracks for your videos and slideshows. Use unique automatic "Mood Mapping" or select from a library of included music tracks to perfectly match your productions.

Create professional custom soundtracks for movies and slideshows
Easily find musical styles and variations to fit the mood of your movies
Customize the length, arrangement and instrument mix
Change the tempo and pitch
Bonus--mood configurable music tracks

Remove unwanted noise BIAS SoundSoap SE automatically removes unwanted noise like wind, hissing, scratches, and pops from LPs, cassettes, or almost any audio, music or video soundtrack. An intuitive user interface makes advanced noise filtering a breeze.

Remove noise from analog or digital recordings
Remove hiss, room noise, rumble, electrical hum, & other background noise from most digital media files
Solve most simple noise problems with the Learn Noise button
Powerful fine tuning offers even better sound results

Easily add drama to all your photos LightZone is an essential tool for photo enthusiasts. Easily enhance your photos with sophisticated features like zone mapping and relight for professional quality light and color balance. It's a perfect complement to Aperture and iPhoto.

Create dramatic, impactful photos with professional quality light and color balance
100% non-destructive editing
Supports RAW, JPEG, TIFF and DNG formats
Change exposure without changing color and vice-versa

Gorgeous HD photo slideshows FotoMagico turns your pictures into a spellbinding story and presents it in high definition. Innovative text, transition and alignment tools ensure astonishing results. Burn your slideshow to DVD or Blu-ray Disc for easy viewing and sharing.

Turn pictures into a spellbinding stories and present them in stunning HD
iPhoto library integration
Export to Toast
Drag & drop slideshow authoring

The Standard for Disc Burning on the Mac
Drag, drop, burn Toast 10 is the easiest and fastest way to burn your music, video, photo and data files on to CD, DVD or Blu-ray Disc for both Mac and PC. Span large projects across multiple discs. Archive up to 50 GB on high capacity Blu-ray Discs.

Unleash your HD videos AVCHD Archive makes it one-click simple to back up an entire camera of HD video to disc and automatically keep a preview version on your Mac for easy browsing.

Smart folder synchronization Sync up folders bi-directionally--between multiple computers, network volumes, or external hard disks.

Easy search and fast retrieval Automatically catalog your discs as you burn--with photo thumbnails saved on your computer, you can easily preview the contents of your discs and find any file or photo without the disc in the drive.

Share on both Macs and PCs Create hybrid discs with content unique to the Mac or PC--including custom icons, background images, and discs that "autorun" on PCs.

Every file at your fingertips Toast's convenient Media Browser includes file browsing, data filters, Spotlight search, Aperture and iLife '08 library access.

Copy, Compress and Convert Everything
Copy discs with one click Create exact copies of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs--including audio CDs*** with one click. Recover files from scratched and damaged discs while copying.

Every file at your fingertips Toast's convenient Media Browser includes file browsing, data filters, Spotlight search, Aperture and iLife '08 library access.

Custom DVD compilations Create custom DVD compilations with up to 4 hours of DVD video on a single disc. Choose the individual DVD movies, audio and languages you want, while maximizing available disc space and video quality.

Video copy & convert Save time with Batch DVD conversion. Compress multiple DVD-Video folders at once to fit on a single DVD. Or convert them for playback on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, BlackBerry devices, and more.

Video Quality Preview Ensure the video quality you've selected is optimal before kicking-off lengthy video conversions. Preview a short clip of your video at selected quality settings in just seconds.

File Recovery for Damaged Discs Don't risk losing vital data. Recover previously unreadable files from damaged discs and copy them onto a new disc along with a list of unrecoverable files. Some of the data is always better than none!

Expand Your MP3 Library
Audiobook CDs on your iPod Convert audiobook CDs complete with individual chapters and pause/resume support for easy playback on iPod, iPhone and other portable players

Digitize LPs and tapes Digitize and restore your LPs and tapes, without the pops, clicks and hisses. Then burn them to CD or DVD, or send to iTunes for syncing with your iPod and more.

Automatic music capture If your Mac can play it, you can record it. Capture any streaming Internet audio on your Mac. Split audio into tracks, automatically identify and tag them, and add to your iTunes library.

Name that tune automatically Unique audio fingerprinting technology identifies and tags unknown tracks by adding artist, title and genre information. Now you can enjoy the music rather than doing the typing.

Your Video, Movies & TV Shows Anytime, Anywhere
Enjoy Web video anywhere Save streaming web video from your favorite web sites and burn to DVD for viewing on your big-screen TV. Easily convert web video to other formats for playback on the portable device of your choice and enjoy it anywhere you go.

HD video on standard DVDs Easily import video from your AVCHD camcorder or other HD sources and create high-def DVD discs for playback on Blu-ray Disc players, including the PlayStation 3.*

Stream TV Shows Stream your TiVo and EyeTV recordings and other video files from your Mac to iPhone and iPod Touch over the Internet. Easily browse, sort, and search your TV shows. Toast will even notify you by email when new shows are ready for streaming.

Mac2TiVo Send standard and HD video from your Mac to your TiVo DVR for viewing on television. Publish folders full of video on your Mac and stream them on-the-fly to your DVR without lengthy video conversions.

Easily grab video highlights Extract video clips from your home DVD movies** and convert them to view and share on the playback device of your choice.

Striking DVD menus Choose from over 20 stunning new DVD and Blu-ray Disc menu styles for all occasions--in both full-screen and widescreen versions.

*HD video authoring functionality for DVD and Blu-ray Discs requires the purchase of High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-In. **Does not copy encrypted or protected content. USE OF THIS SOFTWARE TO MAKE ILLEGAL COPIES OF MOVIES AND OTHER CONTENT IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED

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