Apple's iLife suite comes free with each new Mac sold, but is also available as a standalone package. The new version, designated iLife '08, has been heavily revamped, with major rewrites to the core applications iPhoto ...

Without giving a history lesson, but for the benefit of those whose life has more exciting things in it than tracking the evolution of software companies, Paint Shop Pro was acquired by Corel a few years ...

Hidden within the depths of Microsoft's assorted Web entities, with an eye firmly on the success that Google has enjoyed with a similar set-up, is the online presence of Microsoft Live Labs. This is where a ...

Thanks to the arrival of the computer, the days when architects and manufacturers spent hours painstakingly drawing floorplans and exploded diagrams by hand are virtually gone. However, computer-aided design packages have often been prohibitively expensive, thus ...

If God made the human race in his own image, the question is, did he use Photoshop to air-brush out any rough edges? Or was he - or indeed she - more of a shareware sort ...

A recently-released Mac tool that's moving into its new PC home, Roxio Crunch is an application designed to take video files and shrink them down to an iPod or mobile phone-friendly size. Assuming, given the drop-down ...

The success of sites like YouTube and Google Video that promote video sharing suggests that this is an area that will only continue to grow in popularity. Portable multimedia players, mobile phones and gaming handhelds that ...

We've met previous versions of Pinnacle Studio more than once on our review bench, and often had to send them home with the same words: a super piece of software, but with worrying stability issues. And ...

Adobe's Creative Suite for graphic designers has been so successful that the company has gathered almost all of its programs into themed suites and released new versions all at the same time. There are now Production ...

Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer consists of three programs rolled into one. The main two are Magix Xtreme Photo Designer 7, a comprehensive photo editor, and Xtreme Graphic Designer, the remit of which is vector-based graphics ...

Now under the stewardship of Corel, Ulead's competent VideoStudio product nonetheless faces some familiar problems. Firstly, it has at heart a relative simplicity, which it fails to offset properly against more advanced tools for experienced users ...

Anyone who has played The Sims 2 will be used to the idea of designing your own home and then filling it with furniture, electrical fittings, plumbing and adding gardens, fences and hot tubs, etc. You'll ...

Corel Painter is the leading 'natural media' painting program, which means that it attempts to simulate the use of physical watercolour and oil paints, ink, pencil, charcoal and pastel in an electronic form. It can be ...

What number follows 11? According to Serif it's X2, an oddly similar scheme to Corel, who couldn't face releasing CorelDraw 13 and switched to the Roman hybrid X3 a year or so ago. Whatever the reasoning, ...

The Windows platform suffers no shortage of graphics software, but Xara always offers something special that lifts its products clear of the seething mass of competition. The new Xara Xtreme Pro is another good example. It's ...

You can kill two birds with one stone, people sometimes cheerfully remark, as if this were a good thing. They never seem to point out that you'd have to be a vicious, animal-hating sadist to do ...

Think of entry-level video editing and the products that spring to mind are probably Adobe Premiere Elements or Ulead VideoStudio, but there should be another on your shortlist; Magix Movie Edit Pro 11 Plus. As the ...

Whatever your view on its software, you have to at least admire Serif's business model. One of the few proponents of productivity software that isn't owned in some form by a larger US-based software company, Serif ...

Before we get to the good stuff, a small moan. Photoshop Elements 5 joins the growing army of programs that insist on jumping in and doing things you've not asked them to do. In this instance, ...

After using the recently-released Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, it was a relief to move onto something a little snappier. For while Corel's image editing tool is undoubtedly strong, it also took glee in slowing down ...