Camera Phones Plaza

Since my previous review was about a slideshow movie maker, now I will also recommend an encoder to go with it. This time, I’m not referring to a Canopus product, but a SmartSoft one, with a rather more convenient price. This converter can help you transcode various video file formats into other and also offers good conversion speeds so that you will not need to waste time.

  

The interface is quite simple and very user friendly – although not really sleek looking. As soon as you load the video file, you can also watch it in the small preview window embedded into the application. The software has been quite nicely configured by default in order to facilitate the easy and fast conversion for inexperienced users. As you can see in the screenshots, the output settings can be configured individually for each type.

  

The converter is quite flexible as well, in order to allow advanced users to enjoy full quality as well – it allows the tweaking and selecting of various settings and values in order to create very good output files. The help section within the program is quite useful when you need to find out some technical details about the files you wish to encode and here’s another really cool thing – if the converter detects you system does not have a required codec, it will ask you to download and install it with the help of the Google search engine.

  

Applicability:
 The SmartSoft Video Converter supports the following type of conversions: AVI files to MPEG (MPEG-1, MPEG-2), WMV, and RM, MPEG files (MPEG-1, MPEG-2) to AVI, MPEG, WMV, RM, Quick time files (MOV) to AVI, MPEG, WMV and RM, Windows Media files (WMV, ASF) to AVI, MPEG, WMV, RM, Real Media files (RM and RMVB) from AVI, MPEG, MOV, WMV, and ASF, DVD, SVCD and VCD.

Pro(s): The program offers quite a big selection of choices in terms of video conversions and the fast speed makes it quite a good choice on the market.

Con(s): Even if the price is somehow acceptable, the main interface could use some redesign and a better integration with Windows Vista.
 
Official website

Buy: $29.90

Download trial

SEO sounds like "UFO" for beginners, and even most experienced Web designers choose to leave the Search Engine Optimization part of their projects to people that are really specialized in the field. The drawback is that to get a really good SEO specialist to make your site well known is often more expensive than building that site, and this is why a lot of programs used for submitting sites to search engines and Web directories are available for purchase. Today's such program comes from Trellian, and it's called SubmitWolf.


Setup

SubmitWorlf's last version is 7.0, and it was released this spring, so it's not really "hot", but since the program can update its search engines database pretty often, I don't think this is a problem. The trial version available for download has some limitations, and to purchase a license of the program you'll have to take out of your pocket no less than $169.

The setup package has 3.3MB in size, and while installing the program I encountered a strange situation. The components selection screen allows you to check a lot of options, but those items are programs included in the Trellian SEO Toolkit. SO, what are we installing here, after all? Just leave this area untouched and press the Next button, as I did, and nothing bad will happen!


Interface

When using a program like this, all that I expect is to see my site's traffic going up, so I don't really care how it looks. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, SubmitWolf looks outdated, but I must tell you that working with it is easy enough for a beginner, and the interactive popup Help Wizard can assist you while getting started with the program. Anyway, since SubmitWolf's price is rather spicy, I expect the interface to be spiced up pretty soon, but until then, let's move on and check the things that can be done with this program, shall we?


Features

If you're wondering about the numbers, then I must confess that Trellian gives us some impressive ones to see: "thousands of engines and directories", and even "over 500,000 link pages". Of course, that happens with the full program, because the trial version can only submit your site to a limited number of engines, and you can't edit the engine packs in this version either. Anyway, The EngineSubscription area from the Settings window shows 845 entries for English(general), and 91 US engines, which isn't bad at all, in my opinion.

The Wizard option from the toolbar starts a wizard(what else?) built to guide you all along the way, from entering the URL you need to submit, to checking the final results. I advise you to be careful when typing the information required, because the keywords and descriptions of your site can have a big impact on your site's popularity, in the long run.

An excellent thing is that before submitting your site, you are warned about the engines and directories that will send you spam, and you even find out the number of such messages, but while some sites send you one or two confirmation emails, others will keep spamming your inbox with a variable number of messages, and there's no detailed information about that. Anyway, thumbs up for this feature!

At last, you should know that batch submissions are also possible, as well as quick access to sites that allow only manual submission, and this is only the beginning... the rest of it is up to you to discover, and share it with the rest of us here, but first, let me draw the conclusions...


The Good

SubmitWolf comes with lots of promises, and despite the limitations of the trial version, things look good. This program is easy to use and has a wide range of features, and is also backed by an unconditional money back guarantee within the first month after the purchase.

The Bad

Considering this product's price, I am not asking much if I want a better interface, suited for the year 2007, and an additional Help document with detailed information about everything that can be done with this program and maybe some additional SEO information, like keyword choosing tips and other useful hints. The "Tip of The Day" option doesn't work at all for me, at this time.

Conclusion

I don't want to advertise what I didn't test for myself all the way, so I can't really tell you that SubmitWolf will make your traffic go sky high, but since you can't lose anything, apart from a little time, if things don't go well, my advice is to get your hands on this program as soon as possible and give it a try. Also, if you purchase it and it lives up to everyone's expectations and Trellian's promises, let us know more about your experience with the program!

Developer: Trellian
Price: $169
Trial Link: Download

The process of saving and editing of your “digital memories” – the little family movies and photos can have very serious consequences regarding the quality if proper software tools are not used. Canopus Imaginate comes as an extremely professional tool, specialized in creating in movie-slideshows with custom of theme-based soundtracks.

  

Right from the start, I was glad to discover that the application integrates seamlessly with the Windows Vista Aero interface (even if it's not really new) and it also offers you tips and tricks as soon as you start adding your favorite images. You can even customize the scene templates according to your needs. The Imaginate Scene Wizard along with Storyboard mode will help you create compositions within minutes.

  

The intuitive interface has a real-time preview and a detailed key-framing option for tweaking any animated sequence. Canopus Imaginate projects can include music or can be combined with other Imaginate projects and can be exported to many video formats that are ready for video editing or VideoCD/DVD authoring.

 

The image processor keeps a very high quality and sharp image, with accurate details. The wizards can help you in the fast deployment of your projects. The Key-framable Blur filter enables realistic camera effects while the Anchor and Spline controls ensure precise camera positioning for intricate motion sequences.

 

The software comes with a CD-ROM and a manual. As hardware minimum requirements, you will need a 1GHz CPU (at least) or faster, 256 RAM memory, 80MB disc space and Windows 2000, XP SP2 or Vista.

Applicability: This program can create high-quality slideshow-movies with very nice soundtracks and it supports the following image formats: Bitmap (.bmp), JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg), Targa (.tga), Photoshop (.psd), JPEG Network Graphic (.jng), Portable Network Graphics (.png), Tagged Image File Format (.tif, .tiff), Amiga IFF Format (.iff, lbm), Multiple Network Graphic (.mng), Kodak PhotoCD (.pcd), PCX Bitmap Format (.pcx). As supported audio/video formats when importing you can choose from the Wave (.wav), MP3 (.mp3), Windows Media Audio (.wma), Windows Media Video (.wmv), AIFF (.aif, .aiff), AVI (.avi), MPEG (.mpg, .mpeg, .mpa), MPEG-2 (.m2p, .mp2) and ASF (.asf) formats. The exported files can be movies files like uncompressed RGB AVI (PAL/NTSC, 16:9/4:3), Microsoft DV (PAL/NTSC, 16:9/4:3) or just any DirectShow AVI codec-encoded video.

Pro(s): I really enjoyed working with Canopus Imaginate and I liked how fast I learned new methods on how to take advantage of the real value of the software. The interface is sleek and most of the projects can be finished in a very short time if you have the files for import ready.

Con(S): The only thing that is rather tricky is the price of the software – you do get quite a valuable piece here, but in my opinion the price should go down a bit.

Official Website

Buy: $199

Demo (you need to register before downloading)

Roxio is very well known into the business of burning (saving) of data on optical drives for many years. Actually, if I remember correctly, the Creator Classic (from the Easy Media Creator Suite) was the first program I ever used to burn a CD. And so I was pretty curious and interested to find out what has changed in the meantime and what improvements have been brought to the application suite.

From the start I can say that the Complete Suite of applications has changed very little in concept – that is – having a full collection of programs that would help you bring the best results in your work. These range from the burning of CD/DVDs to photo handling and video capturing and editing. In the default start-up application interface you can see 8 categories presented as sections within the suite, each having a lot of software solutions for any task you might require or you would expect to find in such a rich application.

In the Audio section you will find Easy Audio CD which is meant to help you record and create Audio CDs.  You can also create MP3 Music Discs or Jukebox Discs. The Quick Music DVD will create music DVDs that are playable on any DVD and the Rip CDs or Multi CD Ripper applications will turn the music from your Audio CDs into digital music files.

The name says it all for the Edit Song Information program and you also must notice the Convert LPs and Tapes feature which can also be helped by the Sound Editor. The Batch Converter can transcode multiple audio files, one after another, from one format to the other, with extensive output options and advanced settings, while AutoMix generates playlists based on your selections and your mood.

In the Data and Back-up section you can create Data Discs or you can just use the Creator Classic for data handling and copying which includes compression and encryption (I will add some more details on the encryption method later on). With Roxio BackOnTrack you can save or restore your files, media and important data on another hard drive or CD/DVD disc.

The Copy section from the suite offers you the following options: you can Copy Disc, Copy DVD Movies, Create Disc Image or just Burn a CD/DVD Image to Disc. When compared to other utilities created by other companies dedicated to these purposes, Roxio presents to the user quite competitive products.

In Media and Devices you can handle the files from external storage units such as media cards, external hard drives, digital cameras, USB memory sticks. You can go even further in these in the Photo and Video sections. While the Photo suite contains a lot of software for handling and manipulating images, ranging from photo enhancing to creating slideshows, batch image processing and printing. The Video section is full of movie processing tools, such as capturing from devices, movie creation with custom soundtrack, movie DVD creation, and video file conversion (including a DivX DVD maker module).

The CinePlayer might not work on all computers and configurations – it sets itself as the default DVD player without asking for permission and I found that very annoying – it may be cool and ok for the average user, but irritating for the computer specialists who have their own settings and preferences when it comes to watching movies, DVDs. I haven’t tested it under XP (just on Vista Ultimate) but if it worked OK on Vista, it would probably work well in XP too.

The last section, Tools presents you with the options of creating disc labels, to gain some disc information, erase RW discs, finalize CD/DVDs and load disc images. The Disc gallery is pretty much digital library software that lets you keep a record of your discs and their content for faster access.

This tendency to bring it all together into one big package is quite wonderful but not always a good idea as the developers tend to literally throw in as many modules and applications into one big suite with the hope that they would create a huge fan user-base and will gain financially a lot from the monopolistic policy. The shallowness inevitably occurs at the level of quality of the many added features “on-the-go” – the image of the software dedicated to the amateur and inexperienced user is quite clear here but what I obviously dislike is that certain important features (like the relatively new CinePlayer) have been neglected. Yes, when you look at a program like that it makes you wonder – “is there anything that this program doesn’t know how to do?” – but does it really do everything according to today’s standards? Not really!

Applicability: As I said above – this software suite is capable of doing a lot of things, like saving data on CD/DVD, other hard drives, back-ups, video transcoding and multiplication, especially with the traditional features, like the Classic Creator – well, it is a classic indeed and does its job very well – it even adds protection to the CD/DVDs by securing them with password protected 128bit encryption so that you would be the only person who can have access to the respective discs.

Pro(s): A lot of the applications in the suite offer very good alternatives when compared to other “famous” solutions and t does include a wide variety of different types of file handlers. For about $99 you can get a nice package with a lot of advantages (you’re not wasting money on this at all – you get what you paid for) – it might be practical like I said for companies who wish to have many-in-one products without having to buy other individual ones. Also the newbies will be glad that the suite has built-in a very nice looking user-guide. You can even watch a visual demo here.

Con(s): I really dislike application set-ups (so anything besides drivers) that require a restart of the system in order to insert a bunch of useless programs into the start-up process which can seriously slow down the computer (I’m referring to modest configurations). Many of the names or the programs themselves are very similar and give a repetitive aspect. It’s a sad but true thing to say - I’m just not as pleased as I was with older versions: the CinePlayer is not reliable and the whole setup installs many other codecs that would seriously interfere with the ones you may already have on your computer – and so this renders the dependencies of the application as being based on the third party decoders which is very old as technology – Bad boy, Roxio, bad!

Official website

Buy Download: $99 (+$4 the extended download service)

There is no option for trial download of the reviewed version.

Since weather started to cool down and I even got a small cold last days, I think it's the right time to talk about viruses again. Of course I'll leave the health issues for those specialized in the field, because I usually work with computers, not people. Since computers also get sick from time to time, everyone had their eyes on antivirus software lately, and the application I spotted today is called simply ID AntiVirus.


Setup

ID AntiVirus is a fresh product on the market, its current version being only 1.2. Priced at $47, this application is also available for a free trial, but with some limitations, of course. The setup package is very small in size, having about 1.7MB, and the installation went fine, as you can see in the screenshots below...

Interface

If you want to enter the over crowded antiviral and security market, having a bad interface is suicide, unless you compensate for that with incredible detection rates and speed, and since the later are harder to achieve, most antiviral products look great. ID AntiVirus doesn't get out of this pattern, and you can see in the screenshot to the left that its producers can be proud of their work, because nobody can say this program looks bad...


Features

Each time I get my hands on a new security product, the first thing I do after installing it is to update the database, or at least check for updates, and this time I have done the same. Unfortunately, all I got was a window saying that "In order to complete delete all the viruses from your computer you have to register for a full license". Well, first of all, I didn't try to delete any virus, I was just trying to update the database, and second... "in order to complete delete" - is this English or Klingonian?

After closing my browser, that opened after pressing the OK button in the window mentioned above (the only button available, of course), I checked to see the current status of the program. Just as a mention, the page that opened when I pressed the OK button was supposed to allow me to purchase the program, but I got a nice "The requested document was not found on this server." error! Now... the database seems to be dated on the 26th of March 2005, and the number of definitions is 33592. Oooh, this trial version also expires in 15 days! Great...

In the Settings area, the only real-time protection setting I have found is the Hijack Protect area, which allows you to set default pages for Internet Explorer, and nothing more. Well, for almost 50 bucks, it would be nice that this antivirus could protect at least Firefox's settings!

Scanning my drive using the Quick Scan setting wasn't quick at all, so I cancelled the process. Now, when I get to press the News button, I get another "Not Found" error, and this is the last drop to fill the bucket - enough is enough!


The Good

ID AntiVirus looks very good, is easy to use and includes a Hijack protection tool.

The Bad

The Help, News and Register buttons lead to dead links on the official site, and this says it all. The database included in the trial version is ancient, and the price is huge, considering what I have seen.

Conclusion

ID AntiVirus managed to have a good interface, and that's a point to start with, but there's a lot more needed to make this product ready for use. I don't know how different can be the full version, but after trying the shareware one, I can't recommend it to anyone.

Developer: Fastlink2
Price: $47
Trial Link: Download