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Techradar |
- Tutorial: 15 handy Twitter tips and tricks
- In Depth: 10 iPad apps to make Android users jealous
- Review: Nisus Writer Pro 2
- Buying Guide: Tablet buying guide: 10 things to look for
- Review: MacPhun FX Photo Studio Pro
- Review: Corel Painter 12
| Tutorial: 15 handy Twitter tips and tricks Posted: 10 Jul 2011 01:00 AM PDT Twitter's immediacy and ability to put people in direct contact make it a powerful tool, but there's much more to it than simple status updates, retweets and replies. Here are 15 Twitter tips to help you to get more from your account. 1. Run a Twitter search Browse to http://search.twitter.com and enter your keywords in the search bar. You can include Twitter usernames beginning with '@', or hash tags. Click 'Search'. The results are sorted by time of posting, with the most recent first. You can filter by language and translate tweets into English. 2. Advanced search
A simple search may be enough for most occasions, but sometimes you need to dig a bit deeper to get high quality results that are relevant to you. Follow the link marked 'Advanced search' and you can specify the location of the tweets returned and a date range. You can also set the attitude of the tweets you're looking for (whether they seem generally positive or negative), and specify the author by Twitter username and any recipient. 3. Back up tweets
If you've been using Twitter for some time, you may be surprised by the number of tweets you've accumulated. You may well find that you've posted enough messages to fill a novel or two. Backing up your tweets is a sensible precaution to take so you have a local copy in case anything goes wrong. Twitter Backup is a Java program that downloads all your existing tweets to an XML file. Just enter your username and password, then provide a filename for the results. You'll need to log into Twitter in your browser and authorise the application, which includes obtaining an authorisation code to paste into Twitter Backup. The backup is stored on your PC. 4. Online backup If you'd rather entrust your tweets to a cloud based service, try Tweet Backup. It's an online service that you can use to back up your tweets on a daily basis. You need to register using your Twitter credentials via OAuth. You also need to supply an email address for contact purposes. Once logged in, go to the 'View posts' tab to see your 50 most recent tweets. Choose 'Export' and select a file format to download your most recent backup file. You can download your tweets in plain text, HTML or RSS format. 5. Send a gift Do you have an online friend who you'd like to send a gift? Perhaps you have a demo or portfolio that you'd like a potential client to see. It's quite common to need to send or receive items at a time when either party might be a little concerned about revealing their full contact details. Send Social acts as a trusted go-between, arranging to courier your items without sharing addresses. You can request a shipment despite only knowing your contact's email address or Twitter handle. Send Social contacts them and arranges delivery via its courier partner. 6. Share from Chrome Twitter is great for sharing things that you've found online, but copying a URL, shortening and pasting it into a tweet can be a clumsy affair. Even if you have a URL shortener built into your Twitter client, you still have to copy and paste the full URL of anything you want to share. TweetRight is a Chrome extension that makes it easy to send links to Twitter. Right-click the item, choose 'Tweetright' and then click 'Post link to Twitter'. 7. Try Echofon for Firefox Echofon is a Twitter client that works directly inside Firefox. Once you've installed it, you'll see an Echofon icon in the status bar of Firefox. Double-click it to open your Twitter program. It will appear on top of the web page that you're viewing. As tweets appear, you'll be updated with a popup message showing their number and a brief preview. Echofon is also available as an iPhone client, and standalone client for OS X. 8. Find a lost pet It's distressing when a pet goes missing, but the people at DogLost will do all they can to help you find an errant animal. Register with the site and provide a description of the missing animal, including pictures, and Dog Lost will publicise it on this site and via Twitter. Follow @DoglostUK for updates or check the site for a list of found pets to try and match them with a missing animal. It's a simple idea, but very effective. 9. Examine hash tags
Find out the meaning of popular hash tags by visiting www.whatthetrend.com. You can choose trending topics, or search for a term. To learn more about a tag, try the Archivist. Enter your search term and click 'Start analysis' to see key statistics on the tag's use, including popularity over time and top users tweeting the term. You can check recent tweets too. Summarizr searches the Eduserv archive to provide statistics on a tag or user. You can see top conversations including it and the term's geographical distribution. 10. Simplify the interface Dabr is an alternative web frontend to Twitter.com that's been optimised for mobile use. It's not as pretty as the main Twitter site, but it's quick and efficient. It offers many of the functions that some third party clients provide and many users on laptops and desktop PCs opt to use Dabr because of its speed and ease of use. Browse to the site and log in with your Twitter credentials. Icons next to each tweet enable you to quickly reply, retweet, mark as a favourite or direct message the user. TwitPics appear as thumbnails in the timeline. 11. Predict followers Want to find out how many followers you're likely to pick up by next month? Twitter Counter analyses your account and provides the number of followers over time plotted on a graph. It uses this information to extrapolate your likely follower growth in future. You can also find statistics like your current ranking on twitter according to follower numbers and compare this to the most popular users on the service. You can also enter a friend's username and compare your progress, checking follower numbers and number of updates. 12. Tweet your blog posts If you have a blog, it's a good idea to let people on Twitter know you've posted an update. You can tweet a simple link, but doing so manually can be a hassle. Twitter Feed lets you automate the process by linking your blog's RSS feed to your Twitter account. You can sign in using OpenID and link Twitter to your blog. You can check for updates at hourly or daily intervals, and include your blog post title in the tweet. 13. Find more stats
Continuing the theme of Twitter analysis, Twitalyzer provides a different set of statistics to those offered by Twitter Counter. Browse to the site and enter a username to analyse it. This can take a few minutes. Results are presented in five areas: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout. Signal is the proportion of tweets that contain information, Generosity is how willing the user is to retweet. Velocity is how regularly tweets are made, and Clout is how often the user is referenced by others. Influence is a combination of these scores. 14. Find out who's unfollowed you Who followed you initially and sneaked off when you followed back? Friend or Follow helps you find the answer. Go to the site and enter your username. Friend or Follow analyses your account and presents three lists: people you're following but aren't following you back; people who follow you who you aren't following back and people you're following who are following you. 15. Schedule tweets It can be handy to set up tweets in advance. The easiest service to use for this is SocialOomph, because you don't need to leave your PC running for the scheduled updates to show. Sign up for an account and then enter your Twitter account details, authorising via OAuth. You can now select the account you want to use and set up a message. 
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| In Depth: 10 iPad apps to make Android users jealous Posted: 09 Jul 2011 05:00 AM PDT Even now, more than a year after the original iPad was released, it retains that incredible wow factor. Wherever you use it, people's eyes are drawn, mesmerised by the mere sight of the thing. But your friends and family will soon get used to the fact that you've got one, and their initial excitement will start to ebb away. Unless, that is, you can load up some apps that transform the iPad in to a jaw-dropping slab of inspiring and astonishing tech. Rather than leave you to trawl the App Store and spend your money trying out a big range of apps, we've selected 10 of the finest there are, all of which beautifully showcase what the iPad can do. When you've got people round, pop these apps together in a folder on your iPad's Home screen and stick it on your coffee table, much as you would with a book of beautiful photography. Then sit back and watch them 'ooh' and 'aah' over it all over again! Now before you turn to the shopping list and baulk at the fact that these 10 apps combined cost just shy of £50, note that several are free or less than a fiver. It's also important not to lose sight of how cheap apps on the App Store are compared to, say, a round of drinks at most bars or pubs these days. And unless you're the world's most determined sipper, these apps should last you a fair bit longer. If you've got an iPad 2, remember that it already has some impressive apps on it when you get it out of the box - we know all about the video calling with FaceTime, and Photo Booth is good for some fun with friends and family. One word of warning: your friends may be so impressed by what's on show that you're unlikely to get much conversation out of them of them for a while. Well, until you physically drag your iPad from their grasp! 01. GarageBand Nothing quite showcases what the iPad's capable of as well as GarageBand. For the cost of a coffee at a high street chain, you get a full recording studio on your iPad. A whole recording studio! And don't worry if you've never touched a guitar in your life - Apple proudly splashes the fact that you don't need any prior musical experience all over GarageBand's page on the App Store. And it's true.
What makes this possible are Smart Instruments, which can help you sound like a guitar, bass, keyboard or drum maestro without ever having played a note. With the guitar, you can fingerpick, bend the strings and automatically strum chords in a variety of rhythms and styles, depending on how many fingers you put on the screen. On the keyboard, the app looks at what key you've set and presents you with a number of complementary chords, which you can play with a single tap. Smart Drums let you lay down a beat just by dragging percussion onto a grid. This is all well and good for beginners, but if you've already spent many hours honing your skills on your SG, Rhodes, P-Bass or whatever else you may play, those efforts won't go to waste. You can play your instrument directly into GarageBand, using either your iPad's built-in microphone, or an appropriate adapter (such as the IK Multimedia iRig for guitars). For guitarists, GarageBand comes with nine different amps you can drive your riffs through - which makes the app a worthwhile purchase in itself. If keyboards are more your thing, you can play your tunes on the iPad's on-screen effort, which uses the accelerometer to provide surprisingly good touch-sensitivity. There are 72 keyboard and synth sounds to choose from - not a huge number compared to some 'real' keyboards, but plenty to play around with nonetheless. Nothing quite beats playing the real thing, though, and GarageBand allows you to hook up your full-size keyboard over USB using the Apple Camera Connection Kit (which will set you back £25). Whichever instrument you're tapping away on, you can hit the Record button at any time to lay down your creation, aided by a metronome. This then appears in an eight-track sequencer, where you can mix several instruments together, adjusting their volume to create your masterpiece. It's just a shame you can't alter individual notes - if you get one wrong, you'll need to re-record the track in question. It's not all about the instruments, though - let's not forget the vocals. Use the iPad's microphone to sing your dulcet (or raucous) tones into the app and add them to your creation. Then, when you're all finished, share the track directly from your iPad in AAC format, export it to iTunes and listen on your PC or Mac, or keep the GarageBand file intact and continue working on it in its sister app for the Mac. Granted, if you're a pro musician, there are better alternatives out there that provide more flexibility and are therefore more suitable for you. But because they're aimed at the high-end market, they won't have the same impact as GarageBand does when your less musical friends and family try them out. 02. Star Walk for iPad Even if astronomy's not your thing, you can't fail to be impressed by Star Walk. How much it'll do depends on what device you're using it on, because it's designed to take full advantage of the camera and gyroscopes in the iPad 2 (and iPhone 4 and latest-gen iPod touch). But even on the original Wi-Fi-only iPad, the app's still got the ability to mesmerise anyone who gets their hands on it. It pinpoints your location in the world using the GPS or nearby Wi-Fi networks, depending on which model iPad you have.
Adding that information to the current time and date, it works out what stars you'll currently be able to see. Point it at the sky, and using the iPad's digital compass you'll see a virtual starscape on your screen. It gets even better when you start move around - you'll see that the view pans with you, highlighting what constellations you should be able to make out. To help you visualise what are - let's be honest - sometimes quite contrived shapes, Star Walk includes an outline of what the group of stars is named after: a lion for Leo, and so on. There's also some information for each constellation and a link to read more on Wikipedia. On the iPad 2, the app feeds through the live image from the camera and overlays it with the app's virtual sky, giving you an even better idea of what you're looking at. It's a beautiful app that really brings the sky to life. 03. The Elements: for UK & Ireland Now if only we'd had The Elements during chemistry lessons at school. OK, so it isn't as exciting at watching sodium burning or hydrogen exploding, but there's a veritable Au-mine [you're Boron us - Ed] of information here about every known element in the universe. Tap one of the animated icons in the periodic table and you'll see a rotating example of something related to that element - think a gold nugget, a lead pipe or neon light. Using real-life objects helps move the elements away from being just letters and numbers and makes them come alive.
There are further zoomable and rotatable examples of each element along with fascinating little snippets of information. We've lost count of all the 'I never knew that' moments the app has provided us with. Did you know that you can get pacemaker battery cases that contain plutonium? We didn't. Of course, there's all the scientific data you could ask for, such as the atomic weight and density of each element and its boiling and melting points. We were also intrigued by the data that shows what percentage of the universe, sun, Earth's crust, oceans and humans are made up of each element. Should you still need to know more, there are links to the Wolfram Alpha database. What makes the whole thing so good are the words that tie it all together. Author and columnist Theodore Gray's writing is at the same time informative and entertaining, peppered with interesting tidbits of knowledge (one of which we actually put to use in a recent pub quiz). It's more like he's telling you a story than you're reading a book about scientific data. Our only gripe is that the main periodic table gives so much prominence to the graphics that the element letters are too small, though there is an alphabetical listing you can browse. 4. 50 Greatest Photographs of National Geographic 50 Greatest Photographs of National Geographic is like having one of those books of beautiful photography on your coffee table, but at a much lower cost. It contains 50 of National Geographic's best shots from around the world, showcasing both natural wonders and humanity. There really is something here for everyone, from long exposures on board a plane coming in to land to a shot of the Titanic wreck and an eye-opening image of a shark caught in a fishing net. What makes it all the more powerful are the explanations of the context in which the photo was taken, from the mouths of the photographers themselves. In some cases, you even get additional images from the photoshoot or related videos.
As well as browsing the images by thumbnail, a tappable world map lets you explore them based on where they were taken. There are also some fascinating browsable timelines of key photography landmarks over the years. While some images are more striking than others, it's nothing if not thought-provoking. 5. Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime Rather than just reading your children nursery rhymes, why not make the whole thing more interactive by letting them play with the characters in the verses you're reciting? Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime is a beautifully designed and cleverly implemented app which lets your little ones drag Jack and Jill back up the hill, chop off the three blind mice's tails or share out the three bags full of wool. Real attention has been paid to the detail - one of our favourites is the sparkly trail you see as you drag the smiling twinkling star around the night sky, lighting up the rhyme's words. On top of that, there are sound effects in there, too.
One of the best parts of the app is StoryTime, which allows you to read the nursery rhymes to your kids from anywhere in the world, using an iPad or iPhone 4/3GS - yet another example of the innovation we're seeing from developers of iOS apps. At the time of writing, there were seven nursery rhymes included, which may seem a small number, but another three are imminent. 6. Phaidon Design Classics Phaidon Design Classics is a collection of classic industrial designs from the last two centuries that might seem expensive by iOS app standards, but there's 1,000 items to browse. (The hardback original ancestor of this app is a three-volume behemoth that costs a hundred pounds, so that £12 price tag looks like a positive bargain!) Browsing through the app's Cover Flow-like display, you'll come across countless items you'll have used or consumed. The vast range includes often-seen items like household scissors, park benches and the dartboard, as well as the predecessors of modern items, including the Model T Ford and an old Leica camera. Each comes with a description of how the design came about and its significance, while some even include additional related pictures. We've had to tear ourselves away from it to write this, because we could have sat browsing all day. 7. djay Ever fancied trying a bit of scratching or mixing your favourite tracks together, but shirked away at the price of decks and vinyl? Well djay brings the experience to iPad in style. An uncluttered mixing desk with two turntables has all you need within easy reach, including individual volume controls, beats per minute (BPM) displays for the tracks, sliders to adjust the speed and a crossfader. Pull in music from your library and the artwork appears on the vinyl, so you need only glance at it to know which you're about to scratch. Up top, there's a waveform for the track, which zooms in as you turn the record around to cue it up to the right place. If you have the correct adapter, you can split your audio output so that you can cue up the following track while your revellers dance away to what's playing now. Remember, though, that DJing is a skill that needs practice, so have a go by yourself first before you try it out in front of your friends! 08. The Guardian Eyewitness If you love showing your friends and family your books of glossy photography, you'll love this free app from The Guardian. Unlike the National Geographic app, which is a static collection, Eyewitness delivers a new image every day. The shots are a combination of architecture, wildlife and edgy news images, and at any one time there are 100 to leaf through. There's a description with each, though we often found ourselves wishing that there were more details, such were the questions they raised in our minds. Oh, and for aspiring photographers, there's a related Pro Tip with each shot from sponsors Canon. You can banish the control bar and description by tapping the screen, so as to enjoy each wonderful photo in all its glory, and there's also a slideshow mode to relax and enjoy. 09. Flipboard What makes Flipboard so good isn't just the fact it provides you with a customisable news and social networking hub, but the way in which it's done. The clue's in the title - choose one of the preinstalled categories, such as news, and then flip through the selection of articles. It works smoothly, is beautifully laid out and generally just looks, well, stunning. It gets really good when you start customising the front screen, removing the things that don't interest you and adding your own sections. These could be your Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr or Instagram accounts, as well as custom news searches, blogs or individual Twitter feeds. Once you've customised, sit back with the iPad and immerse yourself in the content (and get used to the way it all works, but this won't take too long). One of our favourite features is the way it pulls in images that people have shared on Twitter - no need to view the individual tweet or an external website. 10. Art Authority for iPad Art lovers, listen up. You've no need to step out of the door to browse your favourite paintings. And before you point out that all you need do is step over to your bookshelf, you'd need one heck of a library to house all the images that Art Authority has packed in here. It's a seriously impressive collection of artists, and for each, an incredible catalogue of their work. Browse pictures in a frame-on-a-wall mode (and see where each is displayed in real life) or blow them up to fullscreen and enjoy them in all their glory. Our only real criticism is the time it takes to load everything up, but the sheer amount of content here means we can forgive it this. 
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| Posted: 09 Jul 2011 03:30 AM PDT Mention Nisus Writer to a Mac user of a certain vintage, and they're likely to go all dewey-eyed and start muttering things like "Remember Compact?" and "Lovely macros!". It's a powerful word processor with a long and illustrious heritage. The move to OS X a decade ago, however, meant that the developers had to go back to the drawing board. They regrouped and brought out Nisus Writer Express, a simple word processor (more a souped-up TextEdit than a cut-down Word, and none the worse for that) then introduced its big brother, Nisus Writer Pro. And now we have Nisus Writer Pro 2, which adds more features and further consolidates Nisus's position as a credible alternative to Apple's Pages and Microsoft Word, even for power users. In fact, while you can treat even Nisus Writer Pro 2 as 'TextEdit with knobs on', you could argue that it's actually a far more powerful and flexible word processor, and one that can be better customised to suit your particular needs and style of working, than the behemoth that is Word. It's clean, fast, stable and can be personalised in many ways. Nisus's traditional strengths are there too – its crazily powerful Find and Replace, and its macro system, to name just two. But there are lots of new features to tempt upgraders and new users alike. It gains support for Track Changes, making it easy to collaborate on documents, add comments and review changes made by other team members. It's not without fault: though it can happily open DOC and DOCX formats so you can share files with Word-using colleagues on both Mac and PC, it converts them on opening, forcing a slightly awkward round-trip if you're pinging the same document back and forth. (Nisus's default file format is the widely supported RTF; annoyingly, while Word opens RTFs with Track Changes turned on, Pages only seems to accept Track Changes in DOC/DOCX.) Writer Pro 2 also adds some simple drawing tools – shapes, lines, floating text boxes – in a nod towards basic desktop publishing abilities. It would be foolish to think of it as a DTP package, however; Pages is much better for DTP, though it's a weaker word processor than Writer Pro 2. One small but welcome feature is an easy way to add special characters to your documents. You can customise one of the panels in the Tooldrawer to suit. As well as some additional formatting and style options such as paragraph-level borders, shading, and document watermarks, this new version builds on its predecessor's rich tools for building structured documents by adding the ability to export PDFs (with clickable links for cross-references, tables of contents and more) and EPUB. You'll need to tinker to get the EPUB export right, such as for viewing/selling on iOS's iBooks app; nevertheless, it's good to have the option. It's a very different beast to apps such as iA Writer: it has similar complexity, power, and flexibility to Microsoft Word, with none of the bloat or – to some – irritating automation. If you write long or complex documents, collaborate with others, or just want a clean, elegant word processor that you can customise to suit how you work, you should at least try the demo of Nisus Writer Pro 2 on your MacFormat disc. 
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| Buying Guide: Tablet buying guide: 10 things to look for Posted: 09 Jul 2011 03:00 AM PDT With more tablets arriving on the market, how do you choose which is best for you? Here's our quick and easy guide to choosing your perfect tablet. 1. What operating system does it run? There are various different operating systems available for tablets. By far the most popular is iOS - the Apple option found on the iPad and iPhone. Many of the tablets due out during 2011 will run Android 3.0 - a new purpose-built version of the Google-backed operating system found on many phones. See our article What is Android? for more. Other operating systems are on tablets from Blackberry and HP. Although there are some tablets that run Microsoft's Windows 7, this operating system isn't specially designed for tablet use but Windows 8 is looking increasingly tablet-friendly. For more on tablet operating systems, check out Tablet operating systems compared. 2. How big is the screen? The screen size is one of the most important factors to consider when deciding which tablet is best for you. Obviously, the size of a tablet that you go for depends on just how comfortable you are with the various sizes - or how portable you need it to be. The iPad 2's screen is identical to the original iPad at 9.7-inches, mostly because it proved such a popular size. Many of the new Android 3.0 tablets are bigger with 10.1-inch displays. However, some smaller options exist - 7-inch is another popular size; the Dell Streak 7 and Blackberry Playbook are good examples. Smaller tablets do exist but there's a thin line between a 5-inch tablet and a smartphone. 3. What processor does it run?
All tablets are based on ARM processor technology - the same as virtually all mobile phones. Different companies have produced their own versions of the ARM chip design and many of them are now dual-core, like a lot of PC processors. Apple's iPad 2 runs the Apple A5 chip, while Android 3.0 tablets generally use Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor. You can read more about the technology in different tablets in Tablet tech explained. 4. Do you need a 3G tablet? All tablets support Wi-Fi so you can wirelessly connect them to your home network. However, many tablets come in two versions. And, as well as Wi-Fi, one of those versions will also support 3G so you can put a mobile internet-enabled SIM card into it and use the internet while on the move. The 3G versions are generally more expensive and you also have to have to sign up to a data contract. The good thing about this is that many stores offer tablets at subsidised rates just like they do with mobile phones. 5. Does it have cameras?
The new iPad 2 has two cameras, as do many Android 3.0 tablets. The purpose of the front-facing camera is for video-calling so you can use Skype or apps such as Google Talk. The rear-camera can be used to take pictures or, as on mobile phones, video. Indeed, many tablet cameras are capable of taking 720p high definition video, so check that out if it's important to you. Most new tablets have two cameras too - but it's worth checking out before buying. 6. How many apps are compatible with it? The Apple App Store has the most apps, with over 300,000 now available. The iPad 2 runs almost all of them but there are around 65,000 specially designed for the iPad. For Android, there are only a couple of thousand 3.0 apps, but still they cover all the main bases. Other operating systems also have app stores, but they are small in comparison. However, for all but the most obscure operations you should still find apps to do what you need. 7. How much storage space does it have?
How much storage you require depends on what you want to use your tablet for. 16GB is more than enough for storing a load of music and photos, but large applications and HD video require a lot more memory. If you're not going to store a lot of music or video, the smaller sizes will be fine. The iPad doesn't have a memory card slot but many of the other tablets have microSD/microSDHC slots, so you can expand the storage. 8. Can it connect to your TV set? Many tablets can also connect to monitor displays and televisions via an HDMI cable. This is great if you have video content on your tablet that you can then play on the bigger screen. If this is important to you, look for a full-size or mini-HDMI output, available on many different tablets such as the Motorola Xoom. You will need to buy a cable to connect your tablet to the TV. In the case of the iPad 2, there is a special kit (pictured) for connecting your tablet to an HDMI display. The catch is that it'll cost you an additional £35. 9. How thick is it and how much does it weigh?
While a lot of noise has been made about the iPad 2 weighing just 601g and being the thinnest tablet available at just 8.8mm thick, other tablets more than hold their own. The 7-inch Blackberry Playbook is a mere 9.7mm thick and weighs just over 400g as it's smaller. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, meanwhile, is 10.9mm thick and weighs a mere 599g, while the Motorola Xoom is surprisingly heavy at 730g. Weight and thickness is more of an aesthetic concern than anything else, but if you're going to be holding your tablet for a long period of time (or in one hand) you'll certainly start to notice heavier models after a while - ditto if you're going to be carrying it around in a small bag. 10. Do you actually want a laptop?
Don't get us wrong, we think tablets are amazing. But while there are productivity applications - like word processors and spreadsheets available - as well as image editing tools and online apps like Google Docs, don't expect miracles from a tablet in terms of work. A tablet can be a great addition to your tech armoury, but it can't replace a full-blown Mac or PC with powerful desktop software. Replacing a netbook- now that's a different matter. Tablets really are a whole new category of computing. 
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| Review: MacPhun FX Photo Studio Pro Posted: 09 Jul 2011 03:00 AM PDT Sooner or later, everyone wants to do more with their photos than iPhoto allows. FX Photo Studio Pro is potentially the next step, offering editing tools as well as 159 special effects. FX Photo Studio Pro's interface is simple, easy to use – but also fun. Just drag and drop an image onto it and the program will give you a scrolling set of effects. Click on one to see the 'before' and 'after' versions next to each other and a palette offering you customisation options. Click on the green 'Apply' button to apply it, then continue adding as many effects as you want. There are also tools for cropping and rotating the image that are just as easy, if not easier to use as iPhoto's. And there's an Adjust section for changing colour balance, levels, sharpness, noise, shadows and highlights, as well as the usual brightness, contrast, and so on. You can save the image in formats including raw, JPG, TIFF and CR2, or share the image on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter or Flickr. You can also share a combination of effects you've used as a 'Preset' – a simple code to type in to recreate the complete set. FX Photo Studio Pro is a fun, easy tool to use. Many of its 159 effects feel like they're there to bolster the set, rather than because anyone would use them. But there are some decent ones in there. Still, at nearly £25, it's an expensive app that's halfway to the price tag of Adobe Photoshop Elements. While it's worth considering, do so carefully. 
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| Posted: 09 Jul 2011 02:30 AM PDT Corel Painter has long been the pro choice for digital painting, thanks to its amazing natural media feature set that accurately replicates the look and feel of traditional materials such as paint, pencils, gouache and, well, you name it really; if you can use it in real life you can simulate it in Painter. In recent times, it has had a number of high-quality competitors – ArtRage and the excellent SketchBook Pro to name but two – so what does version 12 bring to the table to help artists achieve their best work yet? Quite a lot, as it happens. The first thing you notice is the new interface. It's not a major change, but the app feels slicker and more intuitive. You can, from the welcome screen, now choose a workspace preset depending on what you're using the app for – concept art, illustration and so on. Painter then loads the panels that are associated with that particular workflow. It's nothing new but it makes customising Painter a lot easier. You can also add a paper texture and set up document presets from the welcome screen. Other workflow enhancements include enhanced layer and colour preservation when switching between Painter and Photoshop; and a High Quality display mode, giving you a view of how your image will print when zoomed right in (rather than displaying pixels). There's also enhanced brush library management and a new Temporal Colours palette, it being a simplified HSV wheel that floats above your document. But enough of the workflow – what are the creative tools? Well, most notable are the new Mirror and Kaleidoscopic Painting modes. The Mirror mode enables you to paint in perfect symmetry across a number of planes. You can change the amount of planes and their position. This tool is great for quickly sketching faces and the like, meaning you only have to draw one side before refining. The Kaleidoscopic mode is a little more bizarre: you specify a number of planes and then have your artwork reflect in the segments between the planes. We're not sure you'll use it that often, but it is a lot of fun! Being able to clone from multiple sources is also a nice addition.
A new Painter release wouldn't be complete without new brushes though, and thankfully Painter 12 has some great additions. Firstly, the whole engine has been speeded up with multicore support, meaning brushes are faster. There's also 'Computed Circular brush controls'. This means brush properties are calculated rather than being a bitmap – and you can, in the Computed Circular brush control panel, specify the tip profile of certain brushes. This enables you to change dab opacity and hardness, which controls the colour density at the outer edge of the dab. It's all behind-the-scenes stuff that speeds up Painter and makes it a much more enjoyable app to paint with. In terms of new brushes, there's Gel brushes, enabling you to tint an image's underlying colour (with blending mode controls); six new digital airbrushes; and Real Watercolour – these simulating working with a watercolour brush, paper, pigments and a glass of water. And they are great – you can adjust paper texture settings on the fly and even specify wind settings to determine which way the paint will flow. They are a joy to use and add another dimension to your creative toolbox. There's also Real Wet Oils, to which you can add solvents to thin and create washes, and so on. Overall, Painter 12 is a great update. And a must for anyone serious about digital painting. 
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