Flaviu Volosciuc

PICASA Picasa is a nice stand-alone graphic utility developed by Google. Actually the product is the creation of Picasa Inc., a company which was discovered by Idealab. Google bought all the rights of this product from Idealab. The first version delivered through Google was 1.618, which was far from being a prefect product. But because it was free, the product got better and better and version 3 is the latest version.  Picasa can be installed on all major platforms such as Windows, Linux and Mac. The main important feature of this product is the scanning function. From the first use, the application will scan all your hard drives and will find all the pictures from your computer. You will surprised how many pictures you just forgot that you have them. All the pictures found will be automatically organized into albums selected by date. If your pictures are saved in folders, Picasa will take the title from every folder by default and use it as the title of the album.  Besides the scanning function, you can also import pictures from different locations, including digital cameras. Although the albums, that include local pictures, are made based on the date of creation of every picture, if you import them from your camera, the date displayed will be the one of the importing moment, not the one of the creation.  Picasa works with all major image formats such as JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD, and movie files and is compatible with most digital cameras. Picasa is basically compatible with all other photo sharing products and digital cameras.  The editing tools are very basic and includes cropping (standard or custom), removal of red-eye, and enhancing--even switching from color to black and white. The good thing about the using of any effect or filter, is that you can see the results instantly, without having to wait until the preview renders. The multiple levels of the undo function makes it very easy to com back to the original form, if you don't like the result picture after applying several effects and filters.  If you make a comparison between the displaying time of the Windows Explorer thumbnails and Picasa thumbnails, you will see that the gap between both of them is huge. Picasa can do this almost instantly. But there is a price for this. Users with older computers will encounter problems. That's because Picasa uses a lot of memory when displaying these thumbnails.  From Picasa, you can update your blog immediately (if you're using a Blogger.com account), you can create picture collages, you can Geo-tag images in Google Earth or you can upload images to photo albums.  You can also e-mail photos with Picasa's built-in client and order photo-lab quality prints. You can also print prints at home if you have the necessary gear.  The only backup solution is to burn the pictures in CD or DVD. This can be made with a built-in writer which allows you to select the pictures with or without an integrated slideshow function and with or without the Picasa application. The application will automatically calculate the amount of CD, or DVD discs that you need in order to write all the pictures that you want.  The AutoFix button usually works well and the results are remarkable. It doesn't matter if you want to apply the auto contrast or the auto color, the results occur instantly on the picture.  Pluses: beautiful and intuitive interface; Autofix function; the scanning function; the undo function; the Timeline viewer;  Drawbacks / flaws:  In conclusion:Because of its beautiful and intuitive interface and because of its basic editing tools which are very well implemented, Picasa is one of the best in its field. WINRAR Winrar archiver is a powerful tool which allows you to create, manage, and control archive files.  It supports RAR and ZIP 2.0 archives, special algorithms optimized for text, audio, graphics, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel executables compression. You can now handle archives directly from Windows Explorer due to the shell integration including drag-and-drop facility and cascaded context menus. Winrar features wizards for beginners and command line interface for advanced users. It doesn't only open rar files, it can also handle non RAR archives (7-Zip, ACE, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LZH, TAR, UUE, Z, GZip) management, solid archiving which can raise compression ratio by 10% - 50% over more common methods, particularly when packing a large number of small, similar files.  Using Winrar you can create multivolume archives, self-extracting archives (also multivolume) using the default or optional SFX modules. You can use a lot of service functions, such as encryption, archive comments, error logging, etc. Winrar has also an inbuilt viewer for viewing the content of text files within archives. You can create compression profiles in order to optimize your activity.  Winrar has a very friendly user interface, so that the menus are customizable and offer access to important archive commands like extract, test, comment, protect, and lock, but also other important tools such as scan, convert, or benchmark and hardware test.  Pluses: There are several versions of RAR, for a number of operating environments: Windows 32 bit and 64 bit, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS, OS/2, MacOS X. You can test, lock and repair/recover physically damaged archives or volumes allowing to reconstruct missing parts of multivolume archives. You can also take advantage of miscellaneous options such as Background archiving, turn PC off when done, compression estimation.  Among the new features of Winrar we may mention: new buttons (options) such as: "Define volume sizes...", "Rename automatically", "Multithreading" option added to "Benchmark and hardware test" command, new command lines, increased compression speed (5 -15%) for some data types. The publisher states that they fixed some bugs in the multithreaded text compression algorithm.  The speed versus the rate of compression came out as medium compared to WinAce and WinZip: a directory containing multimedia and text files in total size of 104 Mb compressed at a normal rate by Winrar resulted in a 64 Mb in 51 seconds compared to 76,2 Mb in 17 seconds for WinZip and 64,2 Mb in 1 minute and 11 seconds for WinAce.  Drawbacks / flaws:  In conclusion: A good compression over a quite short archiving time sets WinRAR in a very good position among the well known archivers. The program is a very good and reliable archiving solution. You can download Winrar for free and within the free trial, you can use the program at it's full potential (free rar extraction, archiver, of many archive files and more). If you wonder about how to open rar files, this is one of the best rar opener and manager on the market. GARENA Chat and game with your friends using this gaming platform for Windows. Gaming is one of the biggest reasons behind computer sales. One of the biggest trends in gaming right now is the need to communicate with team mates within your gaming party. That's one of the reasons why I like Garena. It’s a gaming communications platform for Windows. Garena is a game platform similar to an instant messenger. Garena allows gamers to develop buddy lists, to chat with friends and to check on game progress and achievements. Gamers are able to form groups or clans, and chat with multiple gamers simultaneously through public or private channels. Garena has also provided a great GTalk platform which is useful for gamers to interact with. Like other online game services, Garena uses Shells for a virtual currency. Gamers can create their own unique identity by customizing their avatar or changing their names. Users can also use Shells to purchase Gold memberships for instant access to the platform anytime, to create clans, or to buy themselves back in to the platform or to a game or clan. App Pro’s: Free App Con’s: pricey, Information on what games cost and how to play them are unclear Conclusion: Garena is a decent PC gaming platform. It allows you to not only play but to communicate with clans and hoards while you play with and against them. It’s a bit on the pricey side, however, as 3000 shells cost $60 USD, and Gold membership will cost you 1900 shells a year. Information on what games are available and what they cost, over and above your gold membership fee are unclear, and not readily available on the site.  Its difficult to understand what might be available and what it might cost. Photivo Editing a picture from your personal collection may be a simple task considering the multitude of photo editors that are available on the market. You can choose from a huge offer of similar products, but there are few that can be considered professional tools and can be used for free. But there are exceptions. One of these is Photivo, a free photo editor that stands out in front of other much more popular applications because of its complexity and high level of editing procedure. With Photivo you can work with regular bitmap files but also with RAW files, giving the user a huge amount of control while editing uncompressed images.  Being an open source project, with a huge collection of special effects and other photo tweaks arranged in a non-conformist interface, Photivo looks a bit overwhelming, and demands a steep learning curve in case you want to master it. Even its main objective as an application is unique because unlike Photoshop, CorelDraw or other similar products, with Photivo you cannot deteriorate, view or manage photos in a classic manner. You can only develop the pure form of a single photo by using geometrical parameters, numerous filters, curves based on brightness or colors spectrum. Therefore Photivo is the perfect tool for professional photographers.  Each modification takes a while to be previewed on the original photo, which can become frustrating on weaker PC's if you apply complex operations on a large picture. Additionally on the downside, you are not able to undo or redo an operation. In this situation you can either reset the picture to its original state, or manually save a pipe after each new modification. In this way you can resume any past picture state and re-process it with the new parameters.  I consider Photivo to be a must-have editor for any professional photographer mainly for its complexity and RAW support. But also because there are a lot of people involved in the Photivo project, making the application to grow fast bringing new cool features but also revised ones.  Pluses: free, applies modifications without deteriorating the original file, lots of complex features, RAW support;  Drawbacks/flaws: slow processing speed, needs a steep learning curve to master it, lack of undo/redo system;  In conclusion: Photivo offers a lot more compared to a similar commercial software in terms of photo editing, but its unorthodox implementation makes it a complex application suitable only for average users.