By Keith Nallawalla

Did you ever wish you could draw comics? Now it’s easy, in the form of Comic Book Creator 2 by Planetwide Media. This is a design package that has all the features you would expect for making a comic book, such as pre-set page layout templates, speech bubbles, caption boxes, separate pages and cover art. Not surprisingly for this web-savvy generation, it comes with non-traditional features such as sound and video for online comics.

The program is compatible with JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG and TIF image files; AVI, MPG, MPEG, and WMV video files and MP3, WAV and WMA audio files.

The basic program includes

• 12,000 Art Assets including clip art, word balloons and animated GIFs
• 190+ sound effects
• Over 100 templates
• PD Particles (paint and drawing software)
• Audacity (audio editor)
• Video controller to zoom, cut and loop video
• Image size and rotation controls
• Comic book fonts
• Text and colour editing
• Step-by-step instructions

You can also buy dozens of picture packs and customised comic creators such as:

• Marvel Heroes
• Speed Racer
• National Geographic Kids Silly Pets
• TOKYOPOP Manga Creator
• Charlotte’s Web Storybook Creator

getting started

When installing the program, make sure that you install the Art Assets packs or else you won’t have much to work with. These extras give you many more speech bubbles, caption boxes and clip art. The clip art is not necessarily useful, as many pictures may not work well with your drawing style, but the huge range of text boxes should cover most of your needs.
The program was initially a little tricky to work out how to use it. Fortunately, there are online tutorials, but they seem to be from the previous version of Comic Book Creator, as the interface looks a little different – but the principles are still the same. I found the tutorials a little slow to load, but once I got the hang of it, the program was easy to use. I also found that my projects took a while to load; however, my computer is four years old and in need of an upgrade.

in the frame

When I was in high school a couple of years ago, I used Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator to make comics. Comic Book Creator comes with some cool templates to frame your page, which saves time compared to the Adobe programs. Each frame panel hides the edges of the picture, so you don’t have to worry about cropping your images or making a clipping mask the way you would in other programs. The images are made to fit within the predetermined box sizes that you have chosen in your layout. You can choose the size of your page so you can print your book on various sizes of paper.

This program seems to work best in conjunction with other image-editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. You wouldn’t want to try making a comic using only what is available within this program.

It is possible to have animations and videos in your comic book for publishing and viewing your comic online. You can share comics you have created with the rest of the comic creator community on their social network www.hypercomics.com, on YouTube, or Facebook. I’m having fun using this program.

Buy from: www.amazon.com
Price US$49.99

Popularity: 32% [?]

I finally got a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 six months after its release. I had used it on a borrowed machine for a week and had acquired a taste for its improvements. However, it wasn’t until I started using it for daily work that I began to appreciate its richness, particularly on my Windows Vista laptop and also on my Windows XP desktop.

If you have a broadband Internet connection, check out http://www.office2007.com, which takes you to a Flash overview of the 2007 Microsoft Office System. (Note that AccountingExpress is not included in the Australian version.)

Installation

Installation is quite fast, provided you didn’t damage the plastic box when you opened the product. There are many reports that the hinged box gets damaged because people have not encountered it before. I still remember when a product such as Office came on numerous floppy disks and you had to feed the PC for almost an hour.

A Fluent Change

Office 2007 is a major change compared with Office 2003, which was not much different from Office 2000 or its predecessor, Office XP. The main change is the Office Fluent user interface, which is dominated by a wide menu bar known unofficially as the Ribbon. It groups logical commands together.

A small irritation for me is that unlike earlier Windows programs whose title bar becomes dark blue when it has focus, that is, you have selected it, Office 2007 does not behave like that. To the contrary, the title bar turns dark blue briefly when it is busy with a process. To be more precise, there is a subtle change in shade, but it is too subtle. It would be handy if we could choose the Classic interface, which you can in Windows XP menus.

File Format

The default file name extensions have changed, e.g. .doc is now .docx; .xls is now .xlsx and so on. These are compressed files, so they take up less space on your disk. They are in the new Microsoft OpenXML format. On the other hand, if you give them to someone using a previous version of Office, they will get a message telling them to download a free converter from Microsoft, which they will not appreciate if they are busy. Tell them gently to make the time, as they will keep encountering this situation more and more as people upgrade to the new version.

The new file format is not compatible with the OpenDocument format (ODF), which is used by open source products such as OpenOffice.org 2.0 (yes, the program name coincides with its website name). For an ODF-OpenXML converter, please see: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/.

You can also save documents in the Adobe Acrobat PDF format, which previously required finding a decent, free converter or buying the full-featured Adobe Acrobat (Note that the “Acrobat” you see in the screen shots of menus is the full version, which I will review later, but it is well integrated with Office).

Outlook 2007

I have been a fan of Office Outlook since its first incarnation. It is a mail application and it comes with Office, although you can buy it separately. Many people who use the late Outlook Express (OE) assume that I am talking about it. No, Microsoft has finally put the confusing OE to pasture and replaced it with Windows Mail, which comes with Windows Vista.

Outlook 2007 looks similar to its 2003 predecessor, which is important for usability. There are small changes to the main view. For example, if you were not aware of “Lookout” for Outlook 2003, you should try to find it. Lookout is a very fast search tool and it is built into this version. Like all Office programs, the search box begins to populate the window with results as soon as you begin to type a few letters of your search term.

Some advanced features are tucked away within the new ribbon menus. For example, I like to view the full message headers (previously seen by opening the email and choosing View > Options). It is now hiding behind an innocuous arrow icon.

Attachments can now be viewed in the Preview Pane by clicking on the file name. This may save a step but I found myself forgetting about its presence. The handler for the specific file type, such as PDF, takes a few seconds to open the first time, so it may be quicker to open the file the old way — by double-clicking it.

The improved security features are obvious. For example, a phishing or otherwise dangerous email is highlighted with a pink strip in the Preview pane that warns you not to enable the links and visit the Web site in question. Some are not obvious, for example when you reply to an email that requires content to be downloaded, you now get an option to reply without downloading that content. Previously, you did not get this choice.

Word 2007

Microsoft Word is probably the most used word processor in the world and is easy to use. My children first used it in primary school. Office Word 2007 is mostly a pleasure to use. I like having a running word count when I am writing for a magazine, as it gives me a constant reminder of the target word count.

Academic writers will appreciate the improved Citation Manager, which enables citations to be formatted in several pre-defined styles. Corporate users will like the Building Blocks feature which enables you to assemble and view snippets of boilerplate that you can drag into a new document easily. Comparing two versions of a document is now easier, with the Tri-Pane view. Government users will love the Document Inspector, which shows version information and other content which should be stripped out before public release.

I won’t be using Word as a blog editor, but you can use it with Blogger, Typepad, MSN Spaces, SharePoint, Community Server, and others. SmartArt has had a long-needed overhaul, with some decent artwork that you can use in a corporate context. In general, typography and styles have had a major boost, so your Word 2007 documents will look more appealing than the Arial/Times New Roman fonts that have dominated our documents for many years.

One of the annoyances is to unlearn a bad old menu sequence and learn a bad new sequence. The Header/Footer sequence is my example. It used to be in the unintuitive View menu. Now it is in the Insert menu, not the Page Layout menu, which seems more logical to me. After all, you are only inserting a header or footer just once, but you may need to edit it a few times. I have to use Word 2003 at work, so it is more annoying having to remember two sequences for common tasks.

Excel 2007

Office Excel 2007 has tighter integration with Word, particularly in charts and diagrams, enabling a more consistent look across documents. I often work with large data sets exceeding 64,000 rows, which was the limit in Excel 2003 and earlier. Now I can have a million rows and 16,000 columns.

There are numerous visual and formatting improvements, but two I appreciate a lot is conditional formatting and sorting. If Pivot Tables were a black art to you before, you will find them a breeze now.

InfoPath 2007

You can build meaningful forms with Office InfoPath 2007, namely, forms that can be used by an Office application and not just a printed document. The WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop interface in InfoPath simplifies the visual design and you can attach it to a database that will collect the data. A typical use for this is to place the form in an Outlook email and then mail-merge it with an Access data set, then collect the responses via Outlook into another Access database.

Publisher 2007

Office Publisher 2007 comes with new templates and the usual visual improvements seen across this product suite. I found it very easy to use to create a variety of brochures for print and online use. In particular, attention has been given to brand management, which is important to companies. You can lock in your preferred colours, logo, business information and so on in a Business Information Set, so that your documents have a consistent appearance.

As a lightweight publishing tool, Publisher 2007 has strong support for the rendering of text and images that an office user is likely to produce. You can, for example, change the colour set from RGB to CMYK for print publication because a printer uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, whereas a monitor only needs red, green and blue to generate all colours. The Design Checker is a handy tool that will check a finished document and, for example, point out that a picture does not have enough detail at the chosen size and to find an alternative.

Publisher 2007 can take data from Access so that you can publish a large database-driven document such as a telephone or travel directory with more layout control than you could by using Word. For example, using colour bleeds on pages is very easy to achieve here.

OneNote 2007

I think that OneNote is for disorganised, left-brained people who want everything in one document. They cannot deal with a hundred different items, such as notes, appointments, voice recordings, web clippings and so on, so they put it all in one place. It has so many features and comes with so many user instructions that I will stick to separate files in my own, organised way.

Groove 2007

If several people need to work on some documents, you can do this using Office Groove 2007. When you run it, you can nominate files that you wish to share and you can invite others (who also have a copy of Groove 2007) by email to work on them. They can be managers, participants or guests. No special privilege is needed to do this, effectively giving you a virtual workspace.

Your collaborators can work on your files through an encrypted connection, so you never have to worry about confidential files getting to the wrong email recipient. 28 languages are supported, so your overseas collaborator can view the interface in another language. Groove works with SharePoint, so you can link your Groove workspace to a corporate SharePoint workspace, say, to check out a document into your Groove environment.

If you currently work at home and at the office on separate computers, you won’t need to email the documents back and forth or risk them to a USB drive. Best of all, when you are not connected to a network, you can work on your local copy of a shared document and you can synchronise when next online.

Access 2007

Access is a database manager and is used by thousands as a lightweight alternative to Microsoft’s SQL Server. As a result it tends to be dismissed as being useless for more than 5000 records. I have seen it used for much larger data sets.

I am a novice Access user, in that I use it as a glorified spreadsheet that can handle more than 64,000 rows. I realise that Access 2007 gives me many useful features that I could use.

For people like me, there is a library of pre-coded databases that can be used by most small businesses:

• Assets
• Contacts
• Issues
• Events
• Marketing projects
• Projects
• Sales Pipeline
• Tasks
• Faculty
• Students

One handy feature is being able to send emails containing a form to be completed by the recipient. This data, when received, can be entered automatically into an Access database. The simpler option is to use an HTML form so that the recipient can use any email client that can handle HTML. The other option requires both ends to have Outlook 2007 and InfoPath 2007. This procedure can collect fresh data or update existing data, so updating customer details or membership records is a perfect use for this feature.

I have come to appreciate Microsoft Windows SharePoint by using it for Melb PC and APCUG volunteer tasks and also at a previous employer. It is a groupware solution that enables many people to share documents, tasks and other information. If you have known the problem of two or more people updating their personal copy of a document and then trying to merge the two, you will like SharePoint, as it handles version control very well. Access 2007 works with a SharePoint installation very well.

Using Access with SharePoint also offers a complete audit trail of document revisions, which is important in workgroups. You can recover accidentally deleted data from a recycle bin, which is something many of us can relate to.

Presence

Not a separate product, but a valuable feature in many Microsoft products is Presence. This enables others to see where you are and what you are doing.

Availability

Office 2007 is sold in most good computer shops and online and current prices are around AU$1000. You can buy cheaper versions with fewer applications or academic versions. For example, the Office Home and Student 2007 edition sells for as little as AU$150. In the middle there is a vast ocean of versions with or without media, with a tablet, OEM editions and so on. I completely forgot that the licence enables us to install a second copy on the owner’s laptop computer, which has been the case for some years.

Conclusion

If you have not updated your copy of Microsoft Office for some versions, this is definitely the time to upgrade.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Norton 360 is billed as an all-in-one security solution from Symantec. Peter Norton’s famous crossed-arms image is nowhere to be seen, let alone his full name. In fact, the Symantec corporate name is underplayed in this product.

Certified for Windows Vista, Norton 360 will require a minimum of Windows XP Home or better and a fairly modern PC, say bought in the last five years. So what is it? It is a suite of products that covers:

• PC security
• Transaction security
• Backup & restore files
• PC clean-up

You can install Norton 360 on three computers. Each has its own serial number.

PC Security

PC Security is the heart of the application suite. It covers the following essential tasks:

• Protect against viruses, spyware and other risks.
• Act as a firewall to block intrusions over the network and the Internet.
• LiveUpdate, which fetches the latest updates for Norton 360.
• Email scanning, which checks incoming email for dangerous attachments and infections.
• Checks your Windows Update settings.
• Checks for weak passwords.
• Checks your browser for vulnerabilities.
• Checks your network addresses for the possible hijack.

Transaction Security

Transaction security refers to warning you if you try to go to Web sites that have been marked as conducting fraudulent activities such as phishing. It also authenticates genuine Web sites. This protects you when you shop online or do your banking.

Backup & Restore

You can back up your files to a CD, DVD, USB drive or an external hard disk, including mapped network drives. You can even back up to Symantec’s Web-based drive, with a limit of 2 GB. Trust me, you will not want to do that with the kind of bandwidth we get in Australia. Needless to say, you can restore from those locations should the need arise.

PC Tuneup

The PC Tuneup routine covers the following tasks:

• Cleaning up Internet history, which is set to run manually.
• Cleaning up Internet temporary files, such as the ones created by your browser.
• Cleaning up Windows temporary files, which can get out of hand if you are not deleting them manually.
• Disk Optimisation, which defragments the hard drive to speed up access to your files.

Norton Add-on Pack for Norton 360

Buried in the Tasks & Settings menu is a link to Norton Add-on Pack for Norton 360, which is downloadable from the Symantec Web site. It also works with Norton Internet Security 2007. Curiously (because these features are expected in an “all-in-one” security solution), it is not mentioned in the packaging. Its features include:

• Email spam protection.
• Parental control over inappropriate Web sites.
• Prevention of your confidential information being sent over the Internet without your consent.
• Blocking pop-up/pop-under windows and banner ads while surfing the Web.

In Use

I uninstalled Trend Micro PC-cillin, which I reviewed some months ago. It was doing a good job but it used to take over my PC to perform its tasks and slowed down my work. I wanted to see how Norton 360 behaved in this regard.

The installation and fetching updates procedure was very quick, compared to PC-cillin. Norton 360 seems to be perpetually scanning my email but it has not hogged system resources so far. This is usually the irritation that other products cause - you want to be protected without being constantly reminded about it. While Norton 360 isn’t totally invisible, it is not unduly intrusive.

I keep my Outlook data file on a separate Data drive, not the default location. The backup wizard found the original, unused outlook.pst file and my Outlook Express newsgroup .dbx files, but not my real file. I had to select Add A File to ensure that the required files were selected. It correctly identified my external backup drive.

Once configured, Norton 360 can be left to its own devices. It sends me an email at the desired interval to remind me to clean up my disk or to perform a backup and so on. I have entrusted one of my home PCs to Norton 360.

Availability

You will get the Norton 360 3-user pack from various outlets around the AU$100 - $110 mark including GST. You can also get it from Amazon.

Popularity: 59% [?]

As a web professional and marketer, I am excited by the technology used online - it is mainly clever programming and scripting. I bought a script that displays an enticing “peel-away” edge at the top right of the page. I am not showing it on the main blog, but you can see it on the Peel Away Ads page linked from the top of the screen. I won’t leave it up for long as it detracts from this site but I may use it on some of my affiliate sites.

Popularity: 41% [?]

by Ash Nallawalla

CyberLink PowerDVD Copy is a simple program with one purpose - it enables you to copy a DVD. More precisely, the DVD must not have any copy protection on it. The majority of Western movies these days are protected, but home-made or non-commercial videos are not. The program will not copy a data DVD - it must be a video DVD.

You can back up the DVD to your PC’s hard drive - which is commonly done by overseas travellers who take a laptop on the plane. Spinning a hard drive seems to consume less battery power than spinning a DVD drive, but I have not explored that theory in depth.

You can copy a DVD9 (8.5 GB) dual-layer DVD to a DVD5 (4.7 GB) using compression or you can customise the compression. Compression reduces picture quality, so, for example, if your video was 6 GB in size, there is no need to go for 50 percent compression when copying to a DVD5 disc. The Auto Fit option takes away any guesswork, so you don’t need to work out the optimum compression ratio.

Certain movies have additional language tracks and you can choose not to copy them, saving some space. Similarly, you can filter out unwanted subtitles, as is seen in Asian versions of videos.

The interface gives a preview window so you can see what file you have selected. If this is the first time you have copied a DVD you may get confused by the various file names, so this preview feature is useful.

PowerDVD Copy “works with Windows Vista” and does not carry the “Certified for Windows Vista” label. I tested it on Windows XP. It works on versions from Windows 98SE onwards. You can order it online for US$39.95 or download a trial version.

Popularity: 25% [?]

by Ash Nallawalla

System Mechanic 7 Professional (SM7Pro) is a suite of security, maintenance and diagnostic programs by Iolo. It works with Microsoft Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista. I tested it on Windows XP.

SM7Pro includes the following programs:

• System Mechanic 7 - (Described later)
• iolo AntiVirus - It provides email and disk protection from computer viruses.
• iolo Personal Firewall - It is a bi-directional firewall that stops unwanted people or programs from accessing your PC.
• Search and Recover 4 - It recovers deleted files, apparently even “years after the data was lost”.
• DriveScrubber 3 - It wipes clean your hard drive to the standards of the US Department of Defense.

I did not install the AntiVirus and Firewall, because removing and restoring my existing software takes a long time and I am not in a position to test these features in a controlled environment.

Search and Recover 4

I let it loose on a 30 GB partition and it estimated initially it would take about 90 minutes to find deleted files. This estimate kept increasing and it looked like it might run all night. Unlike other file recovery programs, it appears to undelete seemingly impossible things, such as individuals email, calendar tasks, notes and so on.

At the 30 percent mark, it had found 25,000 deleted files plus 92,000 others that were filtered out. The latter includes temporary file fragments that you won’t want to worry about. The process ended sometime while I was in bed and it found almost 29,000 files, with a prognosis of “Fair”, “Unknown” or “Good”. Only about 30 files were marked “Good”. I think I had deleted them about three months ago. I restored a file that was 238 MB in size and it opened as expected. I defragment my drives regularly, which may explain why so few recoverable files were found.

Drive Scrubber 3

This wipes an entire drive or just the free space on a drive. I let the latter loose on my 23 GB download drive that is never backed up. It took about seven hours. I have no way of knowing how well the drive was scrubbed. If you have truly incriminating evidence on your drives, I suggest doing what the Feds do - pulverise the disk platters into tiny fragments.

System Mechanic 7

This is the core functionality that you are buying and it is very reassuring because it spouts these large numbers of things it fixes - broken shortcuts, invalid uninstallers, registry problems, recovered memory, dangerous and unnecessary startup problems, Internet clutter fixed, and so on. Honestly, I could not tell if my PC was working faster or if I was better protected, but it certainly felt reassuring to be free of all these negative bits and bytes.

A feature called SafetyNet enables you to undo SM actions, in case you deleted something in error.

The only feature I was able to compare one day after the initial cleanup (I used the PC quite a bit) was detection of spyware. SM7 found only two (I couldn’t tell which ones they were) while Spybot Search & Destroy (a free program) found nearly 100 instances in 13 categories. After Spybot had removed them all, a re-scan with SM7 still saw two spyware parasites. I let it remove these unidentifiable nasties and had sound sleep.

I was a little sceptical about its complaint that I had “never” backed up the Registry. After letting SM7Pro do this backup, I also backed it up with Spybot 1.4 a few days later. Today, SM7Pro sent me a ActiveCare E-Mail Report saying that I had never backed up the Registry:

Critical problems (2)

• Your computer has 3.23 GB of system clutter.
  With regular usage, temporary files and other unneeded debris accumulate. It is recommended that excessive amounts of system clutter be deleted to reclaim disk space and speed overall processing.

• Your computer has 7 registry problems.
  Over time, the Windows registry can become corrupt, leading to degraded performance and system crashes. Removing obsolete and invalid entries improves overall PC efficiency and stability.

Warnings (4)

• Your computer has 1 unnecessary startup item
  Various programs and services load when Windows starts. Eliminating startup items that are unneeded or potentially dangerous boosts overall PC speed and reclaims valuable memory.

• 2 of your hard drives are more than 19% fragmented
  When a drive becomes highly fragmented, files take longer to open and PC performance declines. Defragmenting reorganizes scattered data, which boosts file access speed and increases drive efficiency.

• Your computer has 41 broken shortcuts
  Broken shortcuts occur when the target files have been moved or deleted. Repairing these shortcuts speeds processing and eliminates unexpected errors.

• The registry has never been backed up
  The Windows registry is vital to your computer’s ability to run correctly. Backups allow you to restore the registry if it ever becomes damaged. It is recommended that you back up the registry every 14 days.

Conclusion

Overall, SM7Pro is a very useful suite of programs. You can buy SM7Pro online from www.iolo.com for US$69.95. Just SM7 costs US$49.95.

Popularity: 47% [?]