Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has been almost too successful. The defining moment was perhaps when Microsoft announced a free PDF export add-on for Office 2007, a feature OpenOffice has had for years. Now that both creating and viewing PDF documents is convenient and free, what market is there for Adobe's official authoring product, Acrobat 9?

Adobe's answer is to emphasise features that go beyond simply capturing the content and layout of a document in a portable format. Acrobat 9 introduces three key features: native Flash support lets you embed multimedia content without depending on external media players; portfolios let you create sophisticated multi-document presentations; and links to Acrobat.com, a hosted document management site, offer collaboration without the pain of email attachments.

I suffered a few glitches during my review. I tried to embed an MPEG 2 video, which is meant to convert it to Flash format, but although no error was reported the import failed. It worked fine when I converted the file to H.264 using an external editor. I also got a "no response from the server" error when trying to upload a large PDF to Acrobat.com, although this worked well with smaller files. The progress bar when uploading did not work properly for me; it goes to 100 per cent almost immediately, then states "Not responding" until the upload is done.

Using scanner features caused Acrobat 9 to crash, which is possibly a scanner driver issue but still unpleasant. Still, these are relatively minor grumbles. Once video was successfully embedded, the built-in player worked well, and if you need to distribute multimedia documents without relying on the web the new PDF format is a great option. Acrobat.com, now in beta, is already useful; and gathering responses from PDF forms is significantly easier in version 9.

Despite these benefits, for many users who simply need to convert documents to PDF, Acrobat is not an essential purchase. Further, Burton Group analyst Guy Creese believes that the format is out-of-step with the web. "The mental model of PDF (a paper
lookalike for documents) means that Adobe is not thinking of content as recombined snippets, which is what XML is starting to allow. XML, XQuery, publishing on the fly, wikis, are all driving companies to create dynamic documents rather than snapshots of documents," he told
me.

An annoyance for Mac users: the Extended Pro version, which includes video conversion, only works on Windows.

Author: Tim Anderson

Posted by Madeline Bennett on July 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Xerox's Mobile Express Driver is a free download that helps laptop users connect and print to a variety of printers without having to install specific drivers.

If you are a travelling executive, or anyone who has taken a laptop on a business trip, the chances are that at sometime you've wanted to print a document but been unable to because you didn't have network access rights, or the correct drivers.

I tried out the Mobile Express Driver on both a Windows Vista laptop and on a Windows XP desktop, neither of which were joined to the corporate Windows domain in IT Week's offices.

Once installed, the tool looks like any other print driver on your computer, and you simply select it as you would any standard printer when sending a document for output from an application.

The Mobile Express Driver then scans the network subnet your PC is connected to, and lists any printers it finds. If it does not find any, you can instead specify an IP address range to search through.

In my tests, the Mobile Express Driver quickly found about a dozen printers, allowing me to select one that I knew was close by and hit 'print'.

There are some limitations users should be aware of; the Mobile Express Driver only works with printers that support PostScript, although this should include pretty much any network or departmental printer that ships these days.

If you are using a laptop and have jumped on the Wi-Fi guest access at a site you are visiting, then the chances are that you won't find any printers. Guest access often provides users with a connection only to the internet, for obvious security reasons.

However, if you can find a live Ethernet port and plug into it, the chances are that you will be able to find a printer and use it, making the Mobile Express Driver a handy tool to have if you want to print out and leave some documents with a customer, for example.

The Xerox Mobile Express Driver can be downloaded here. The full version is about 48MB in size.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on June 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2003 Symantec gobbled up PowerQuest, the company that produced PartitionMagic, DriveImage, and V2i Protector. I still use the desktop version of V2i Protector, but have recently got hold of some equivalent Acronis packages, specifically version 11 desktop, server and home versions of their True Image software. We’ll be putting out a review of the desktop/server suites in the New Year, but for now, here’s my thoughts on the home user package.

It looks pretty similar to V2i Protector both GUI-wise and with respect to the functionality. However, it does have extras which make it relatively easy for home users to protect their systems. It has a ‘clean up’ disk tool, which flushes all the caches and temporary files, so if you have a couple of gigabytes worth of web content gumming up the ‘C’ drive, this can get rid of it prior to making an image of your OS. It does differential backups as well, so if you’re used to continually trying out new software, it means, for example, you could apply Microsoft's monthly patch bundle and do an differential backup. If something breaks, roll back to before it broke - simple. True Image can also securely clean up your disk, if you’re selling it on and you don’t want hackers digging out all those credit card details.

How long does it take? Well, imaging a 12GB XP Professional system took around 50 minutes, but I did choose to compress the image to the highest degree possible. The compressed backup only used 50 percent of the space taken up by the operating system on the C drive, and it's best to store these images on a network drive. Restoring the image took just over 20 minutes. An incremental backup after installing Microsoft's December patches took

If you think you have a virus or some malware, it may be quicker to re-image your system rather than run a virus scan, since some scans take significantly longer than the re-imaging process. Plus, you can be sure that you’ve got rid of whatever your system picked up - unless of course, the virus writer has somehow managed to infect your BIOS.

Another neat feature is the Try&Decide mode. Here, Acronis sets aside part of your disk as a ‘Secure Zone’ and writes, in effect, a virtual OS to this area, so if anything nasty happens – you can roll back. This feature looks to be tailor-made if you’re planning on visiting any dodgy websites or installing applications of unknown provenance.

All in all, a pretty impressive and comprehensive package.

Warning : if you’re playing games on your system and you’ve just got through that phenomenally hard level – make an incremental backup, because if you have to roll back to an earlier image of your system, you’ll loose the current state of your trek through the game, and have to battle your way through that level all over again!

Posted by Dave Bailey on December 20, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been trying out the beta version of LogMein's updated remote control service, which is due to go live at the end of this month. It adds a number of new features that make life easier when accessing a computer remotely.

LogMeIn's service is useful if you need to access your computer remotely, whether to fetch some documents you need or to use an application that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.

I've found the service extremely useful when working from home. Our company email system uses Lotus Notes, and web-based access to this is rather primitive and unsatisfactory. Rather than install Notes on my home PC, it's easier to  remotely view the screen of my office computer instead.

The new LogMeIn version makes the controls clear and easier to find than before. You can go into a remote control session or open the file transfer window at any time by clicking a single button. When in a remote control session, a pop-up control panel lets you flick between the browser view and full screen mode, and select various other options.

New features include support for drag and drop file transfer. If I've written an article at home, this lets me copy the document file to my office PC as easily as you would move a document between folders on the same computer.

However, LogMeIn also seems to have improved the performance of the remote control viewer itself. A year or two back, most remote control tools suffered to a greater or lesser degree from network latency, meaning that when you moved the mouse, the pointer on the remote screen took a fraction of a second to follow.

Using the new LogMeIn, I didn't experience any of this. When in full-screen mode, I found it easy to believe that the Windows desktop I was using belonged to my home PC in front of me, and not the remote office system. However, there is a floating status message and a toolbar at the top of the screen that gives the game away.

My only gripe is that I couldn't get LogMeIn to bring sound from the remote computer to my home PC, but this is likely to be an issue that is sorted out before the updated service goes live at the end of September.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on September 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Martin Veitch takes a brief look at Microsoft's Tafiti sample application.

Microsoft has uploaded an open beta of its Tafiti search site that has led to critics queuing up to admire its user interface. However, while Tafiti is noteworthy, don’t expect to dump Google anytime soon.

Tafiti requires Microsoft’s Silverlight cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in that is intended to provide a platform for rich internet applications, and also mandates that popups are enabled.

It certainly has an interesting user interface with searches conducted through a virtual index card, a “carousel” for search types and the ability to store results stacked on a “shelf”.

Some reviewers suggest that Tafiti is slow although it performed well on a standard Windows XP laptop across a corporate internet connection.

The main, indeed the overwhelming, drawback is that Tafiti is based on Microsoft’s LiveSearch, which is still lagging behind the mighty Google. Searches were largely relevant but not as good as those from the world’s most popular site.

To get a second opinion on Tafiti, I spoke to Julian Harris, senior business consultant at Conchango, a UK services firm that is behind a lot of the smartest new consumer and retail web sites, many of them based on the latest Microsoft code.

“The usability is definitely taking a back seat to the eye candy and it’s basically a showcase for Silverlight,” Julian told me.

“It looks great and it’s fun to demo but there is no help if you mistype a search query, no cached view, and you can’t even search on the [stacked searches].”

The best way to think about Tafiti is, as Julian suggests, a flag-waving exercise for Silverlight. Many such proof-of-concepts get a bit of attention then fade away. So in that sense at least, maybe Tafiti is a case of “job done” for Microsoft.

Posted by Editor on August 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

It was 25 years ago last month that Clive Sinclair's home computer, the Spectrum was launched in the UK. Did I really pay £175 for a 48K Sinclair Spectrum all those years ago? I did indeed, and that system still works to this day, although the cassette recorders needed to load those classic (?) games, may have long since gone.

Sinclair's legacy is probably apparent in some of things it 'encouraged' programmers to do – for 'encouraged' read 'forced'. The games were an object lesson in how to compress data, and use the most efficient algorithms. Most of the better games usually consisted of little more than a massive amount of graphics data, pushed around your TV screen with control routines. You'll be glad to know (or maybe not)that some of these games can still be downloaded and played on your PC now, although they’re a far cry from, well - 'Far Cry'.

Having just 48Kb to write a game which would hold people's attention, brought out the best in those games programmers. Many of them would have a book of Z80 assembly language instructions and maybe even a copy of the Spectrum ROM disassembly. I did, and sometimes little good did it do me. Crashes when writing in assembler can be slightly different to those occurring with higher level languages like Pascal, which have run-time 'safety nets'. Add to this the debugging and hardware execution options available today and it could be said that programmers today are slightly cosseted. However, given the expectations users have of today’s applications, maybe programmers need all the help they can get. A quote from programming expert Scott Meyers from his books on producing more effective C++ code, sums it up neatly, “… too many programs can blame their sorry pace and bloated footprint on nothing more than bad design and slipshod programming.”

Posted by Dave Bailey on May 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Anybody who’s programmed in Fortran will acknowledge a debt to John Backus, developer of ‘formula translation’, aka Fortran, who died a couple of weeks ago. Fortran allowed programmers to kick the method of 'hand' assembling code into touch and let them write in something, which whilst not English, led to a vast improvement in programmer's productivity.

My first experience of the Backus programming environment, was Fortran 77 at Birkbeck College on a VT100 terminal connected to one of DEC's esteemed 11/750 VAX systems. For some reason, Fortran was always pigeon-holed as the scientist's programming language, whereas Cobol was always touted as for businesses. Windows 2.0 was just about to be released, as was Mathematica the next year. If you weren't yet that good at programming, or didn't even want to be, you hassled somebody who was or, had a program that did what you wanted to do. If you couldn't find such a beast (person or program), it was time to get out a standard Fortran textbook and start to ascend the staircase to enlightenment.

Funnily enough, I've just installed the latest version of Mathematica (5.2) and I'm about to install the latest version (2007a) The Mathworks core software package. Both are programming environments designed to tempt those without god-like coding skills to short-circuit the time needed to sort out knotty scientific problems.

Mathematica installed quickly and it's fairly easy to knock together a few statements that can do a lot of data processing and graphical output. I'm about to install the Matlab package, but I did notice on an earlier install attempt that they use the FlexLM license manager. I've had a few run-ins with this license manager before, one of which was trying to get the computational fluid dynamics package Fluent up and running. Hopefully, it won't be another 'Death or Glory' mission.

Posted by Dave Bailey on March 29, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

After a few false starts, Dell has finally managed to deliver to IT Week Labs one of the dual-core desktop systems it launched this summer.

My delight at the compact small form factor case of the OptiPlex 745 was tempered slightly when I opened the accompanying monitor box to find a clunky old 17in CRT display. I sincerely hope that this is not a representative sample of what Dell regards as suitable for the modern business desktop.

With the release of Windows Vista just around the corner, I took the opportunity to install the most recent build available (RC2), and see how it performed on the OptiPlex, which represents the state-of-the-art for corporate desktop systems at the moment.

The results seem to suggest that newly bought systems will be adequate for Windows Vista, but no more than that, and so companies might, perhaps, want to wait a while before any upgrade to the new operating system.

After installation, Vista automatically runs an analysis of the computer's performance, and generates a Windows Experience Index (WEI) for overall performance, plus the performance of major subsystems such as processor, hard disk and graphics.

When RC2 booted up for the first time, I was somewhat puzzled to find that it rated the OptiPlex 745 with a WEI of just 1.0. This is lower than the 3.0 scored by the Fujitsu-Siemens Pentium 4 system I have been using to evaluate Vista so far.

Fortunately, the cause soon became apparent – RC2 had not installed suitable drivers for the embedded graphics functions of the Intel Q965 chipset, and it had defaulted to a standard VGA driver. Clicking on 'Update Driver' in Device Manager did not fix the problem, even when Vista was allowed to check back with Microsoft for a solution.

A quick search on Google located suitable drivers on Intel's web site, but it seems odd that Vista is this close to launch, but does not already include drivers for what is now Intel's mainstream business chipset.

With the new drivers in place, the WEI rose to a more respectable 3.4. This represents the score of the lowest performing subsystem, which was still the graphics – the processor and disk scores were both above 5.

However, a score of 3.4 is enough for users to enable the Aero user interface, which renders parts of the on-screen windows translucent, so that you can see what is behind them. The effect makes on-screen windows appear to be edged with smoked glass. Windows also blur open and closed, as if appearing out of the mist towards the user.

The neatest part of Aero is the way it lets you switch between running applications. Instead of Alt + Tab, you press the Windows key + Tab, and Vista morphs the open Windows into a 3D stack viewed from an isometric projection. Hitting Tab cycles through the open windows, like flicking through the cards in a Rolodex.

But all of this is just bells and whistles as far as most business customers will be concerned. All buyers need to know is that a system such as this will handle Windows Vista, but they should probably treat this as the baseline configuration when specifying new systems.

For the record, our review unit has a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB memory and a 160GB Serial ATA hard drive. This is more than adequate for Windows XP, but buyers would be well advised to include double the memory, especially if they expect to be using these systems for more than a couple for years into the future.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on October 19, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft this week released a new beta version of its forthcoming Windows Vista, known as build 5536. This version is labelled 'Pre-RC1 Windows Vista Ultimate', although some of the Help documentation explicitly refers to RC1, suggesting that the first release candidate is now very close.

I have only had time for a brief look at this version, but some differences are already noticeable from the Beta 2 of a few months back. Firstly, Microsoft has fixed some of my earlier gripes - Vista now recognises the Intel 945G embedded graphics in our test PC without any problems, for example – and it also feels more responsive.

The first time Vista is run after installation, it now tests the PC's performance and reports an overall 'Windows Experience Index', plus sub-scores to indicate where the PC might be falling short. Not surprisingly, our test PC was held back by its graphics capabilities and returned a score of 3.0.

This overall score is reportedly on a scale of 1 to 5, although the links to 'What do these numbers mean?' and 'Learn more about these scores online' do not actually lead to any useful information at present.

Other differences from the earlier beta include Windows Defender, which is designed to block spyware, and Windows Mail, which replaces Outlook Express as the basic email client included with Vista.

This version also supports the BitLocker disk encryption tool, but I was unable to test this; it requires you to already have a separate data partition from that used to boot Windows, and a trusted platform module (TPM) to store the encryption key, which the test system lacks.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on August 31, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Desktop search is one of the areas supposedly getting a major revamp in Windows Vista, according to Microsoft. But if my experiences with the Beta 2 release are anything to go by, users are likely to be disappointed.

While trying out Vista, I did a quick search for a particular executable file. To my surprise, Vista couldn't find it. Trawling through the hard drive manually, I soon found the file was there after all. What was going on?

Microsoft seems to have optimised its Search tool in Vista chiefly for multimedia files. I'm sure that IT managers out there will be pleased to know how much easier it is for workers to find the digital photos and music they've stockpiled on their work PC, but what about other files?

Searching for anything else seems to have become a much more complicated and long-winded process than is currently the case with Windows XP.

For example, this is the process I went through to search for the install file for VMware's Player, which I had already downloaded to the PC. All seems well at first; Vista now puts an Instant Search box in the Start menu. Typing 'vmware', however, comes back with 'No items match your search'.

Trying the main search function, now called the Search Folder, elicits the same response. At this point, the inexperienced user will probably assume the file isn't there and give up.

However, you can choose a specific search location from the drop-down Search Index. Selecting the C: drive and clicking OK starts a search that eventually locates the VMware install file, but not until nearly thirty seconds have passed.

The search tool under Windows XP is often maligned, but is much easier to use and finds files much faster by comparison. Just select Search from the Start menu, click 'All files and folders', type 'vmware', and Windows finds the file almost instantly.

You may argue that the average office worker has little need to search for executables and other system files, but IT staff and other professional users will often need to. Why make it so tricky?

Posted by Daniel Robinson on August 18, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)