6. Apple Safari – I tested Apple’s browser at work yesterday and found it very slow, sure browsing speed was fast but the software itself kept stalling and smacked of software built mainly for another operating system.

5. Flock – Flock is the best of the smaller browsers. It allows you to keep an eye on your social networks with a style largely based on Firefox even borrowing the rendering engine

4. Internet Explorer 8 – Its become rather cool to mock Internet Explorer, IE8 goes a long way to fixing the problems but its still not as good as several other browsers but with IE9 coming in a few months time Microsoft will be hoping that they can get back onto peoples computers.

3. Opera – Opera were the company making the biggest noise about the need for microsoft to stop packaging IE in Windows which immediately made me hate them. That said though they have built a decent and speedy browser with some very neat addons to improve the experience including a turbo button that puts sites through their server, compresses the images and then shows it to you a lot quicker than usual. They have also added a system to allow you to share files and host websites via your browser.

2. Google Chrome – I’ve liked google chrome for a long time for its speed and minimalist style. This is the fastest browser in my opinion and it never nags you about updates which is a bonus.

1. Mozilla Firefox – Firefox has gone downhill a little in the last year or two, the browser has gotten slow and clunky but the range of extensions and its brilliance as a browser for web design makes it a must have for me.

What do you think? Which browser do you use?

This analysis is not meant as a general means for everyone, I mainly use image editors to prepare images for websites so a little minor touching up, a bit of text addition and a lot of resizing and optimisation. I do not get the most out of these pieces of software that are built for so much more.

First off though two suites that Craig recommended that I could not work out what need I had for. I am sure that for some they are very useful but for me, not so much.

So last:
Xara Xtreme and Xara Xtreme Pro – as I said I just could not find a use for these products that really justified the price.

Now to those that I found could do most if not all of the things I wanted.

6. Paint.net
Paint.net is largely a wonderful tool, it is intuitive and has almost all of the image editing features you could need and being free only sweetens the deal. It is easy to resize and optimise images for the web and will do simple design… BUT it is last of the editors that had the features I needed because of its really bad text tool. The Paint.net help pages explain it best:

“While typing, you may press the Esc key to finish the text and render it to the layer. Once you have finished with text, it may not be modified except by undoing it and retyping the text. To be precise, after the text is rendered it no longer exists in the image as text, but only as pixels and that is why this limitation exists.”

Well sorry but sometimes I make mistakes in my text and want to edit it. I do not want to have to retype the text every time I want to change a word or make a small change. This is retarded and ruins an otherwise excellent free program.

5. Gimp 2
Gimp has been around for ages but I’ve never really seen eye to eye with it, while it did everything I wanted it to it sometimes took more steps than I thought it should and it is not always an intuitive program to use. Being designed primarily for linux means the interface looks dated. That said it could do everything I wanted to do, it just took me a while.

4. GimPhoto – BEST FREEWARE
It turns out that people have been releasing their own updates to the Gimp freeware, this version aims to make the software more like Photoshop and it largely succeeds. Everything feels a little bit newer and a bit sleeker. It is definitely an improvement over the original design and represents my top rated piece of freeware.

3. Corel Paintshop Pro – £59 on amazon
My Father introduced me to Paint Shop Pro years ago with out Windows 98 machine. Back then we had our first digital camera and the software was pretty dang basic. Now though the software is a lot better with many of the features of Photoshop. It just seems to nag a little too much, be a little slow in places and lack a bit of the sheen of the premier product. If you are looking to manage and touch up a photo collection then this would be a good choice.

2. Photoshop CS4 – £580
The big daddy of image editing is about to get a new release. This program offers pretty well any tool I could ever need and does everything in an intuitive way. It is very easy to resize images, manipulate images in any way and has a save for web option. Adobe Bridge is also a pretty good way of managing your images and overall this software is just a joy to use. The downside is the price, oh to be a student and be able to get this program for £200. £580 is just too much for a piece of software for the majority and it leads many to find other means of getting Adobe’s masterwork. If adobe halved the price I would snap this up in a second but when I can buy Photoshop or a new PC, TV or a heck of a lot of games and some grand prix tickets or 20 times Karting it is just no deal. No matter how good it is I just cannot justify the cost for what I would use it for. If my livelihood were image editing and design then I would have to swallow the bill but its not, I just need some light editing and touching up for websites.

Therefore…

1. Photoshop Elements 8 – £50 – OVERALL WINNER
With all the features that I need to do everything at the moment and a pretty good image manager built into it as well Photoshop Elements is a clear winner. At a tenth of the price of its big daddy you would expect something a lot more cut down than what you receive here. Sure you might be missing bigger modern features but what I am doing is things that could have been done years ago and so have happily filtered down into the Elements program. Its fast, its optimisation is identical to CS4 and it maintains the same straightforward interface in most places. I see no reason to spend the extra £550 on the bigger software.

What do you think though? I will certainly be trying out CS5 next month. Content Aware Fill looks incredible and I can’t wait to try that out. What image editors do you use and what was I meant to use Xara for?

The categories are now near the top so they are easier to find, still not perfect but definitely an improvement. At the same time I’ve improved the twitter widget I am using and also added my xbox gamercard as well. If you have an xbox feel free to add me. I have also added the link to my amazon wishlist back in as well in case you have a need to buy me something… not sure why you would but just in case…

Lastly I have started allowing registrations so that you can now sign up so it remembers your login for when you post comments. I will eventually move this functionality over to the gallery as well when I make changes to it later in the year so if you want to make comments sign up to make it easier for yourself in future.

Also let me know on this post if you want any other changes made or have any issues with the site.

Thanks guys.

Tapovan

My aunt wanted a website for her Gite in the south of France. It launched last week and is already near the top of google in searches for the region. Currently I am finalised a gallery and ideas for an online booking system but for now if you are interested in a holiday in a beautiful area in the south of France then take a look and contact them.

The other thing I have been working on is a pet project, being a Formula One fan for the last 12 years and not missing a single race in that time while also playing every F1 game that has come out in that time. I have been a member of a forum for the last 5 years that was a great community but its somewhat fallen into disrepair as the owner lost interest. I therefore wanted to take the theme and improve upon it. I have therefore launched the first version of f1gaming.com.

f1gaming.com

The idea behind the site is to place the latest f1 and f1 game news onto the website on a daily basis with several writers keeping out community updated. In the next couple of months we will be launching a forum on the site and a full database of race results and racing games with reviews and user reviews. For now though the site only has the ability to allow users to sign up and post comments on most news stories with a lot of other parts coming soon.

Other sites I am working on:
A church website
A telecoms and courses website
This Blog
My film news website
Our hosting site

So if you want a website or you have comments about my work let me know… but be prepared to wait for a little while due to my current workload… and the fact I occaisionally don’t want to work in the evenings.

While I will happily say that a touch screen gives a great interface and input method that I believe is an improvement on a mouse in a lot of devices. And with the abilities of touch screen only going to improve I still can not see a sound reason for a touch screen to replace the keyboard. For a start I think that it is a mistake to create desktop machines with a touch screen. I do not want to sit at my desk and have to raise my hands to click on something every five minutes, that sounds stupidly tiring. I think touchscreen though is a good idea for laptops, laptops with swivel screens have been around for years, multitouch makes them cool.

I like the idea of having a conventional laptop and then spinning the screen around to create a tablet pc to demonstrate something to someone. I do not, however, see the point of having a dedicated tablet device. Certainly whatever apple comes out with later today will be seen as a very cool tablet pc and it may be a game changer in terms of that market and of ebook readers but it suffers from the issue of typing on a touch screen being inaccurate or inconvenient.

Every device that I have used that tried to handle text input well using solely touch has failed compared to a traditional button input. This is worst on mobile devices (where such things have really taken off recently). While I have been using a phone with a touch screen for the best part of six years now until the HTC Hero they all had an input keyboard. I tried to use the onscreen attempts but constantly failed miserably. There is no conceivable way that without the feedback of a regular keyboard a touchscreen a device can compete for accuracy or speed. Certainly the hero makes up for this with predictive text but really I wish I could type the words correctly myself instead of relying on technology to interpret what I am trying to say (and it often fails to do that).

The problem is that the mobile industry is now moving so fast away from buttons and towards touch screen because of the iphone that millions are left disadvantaged. Sure it looks flashy that stylish piece of plastic in your pocket but do you honestly enjoy the experience of typing on the screen, getting your grubby mitts on it and making it grimy?

In the latest issue of PCPro (January 2010 issue: 185 page: 134) Paul Ockenden ran a test between six handsets, 4 with onscreen keyboards and 2 with traditional button based input. He then typed the first couple of verses of Lou Reed’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, timed himself and counted the errors. The two button based devices were the only ones on which he made zero errors and he finished over 40 seconds faster than using any of the touch screens. I do not see how it is possible that on mobile devices that are getting smaller and smaller any new innovation can appear that brings back those 40 seconds or the accuracy.

An iphone or my current phone (the HTC hero) could become my favourite phone but for the lack of slide-out keyboards if HTC or Apple add one then I will buy it very quickly but y’know a big ole keyboard is not exactly sleek or stylish and so will it happen? no and we are worse off because of it.

Therefore my favourite phone and the one that has been the most useful and convenient remains my faithful Tytn2. Sure it was not perfect carrying a fairly awful Windows Mobile OS but the keyboard and features made it a true joy. If it had been touch screen only it would have been pure unbridled hell. Slap a faster processor and a chunky SSD on that baby and it would last me a long time.

The greatest phone of all time? Update it and I would buy it again…
image from pdagear.com