Articles by Edward Mendelson
WriteRoom (for Mac)
Starting up a high-end word-processor like Office 365′s Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages is like stepping into a candy store. On display for you to enjoy are toolbars, ribbons, and dialogs offering dozens of tasty-looking formatting features that let you choose color-coordinated fonts for headings and text, set custom page margins and line spacing, create multiple…
Snagit (for Mac)
Every Mac has screen-capture features built in, so why should you spend money ($50, no less!) on a screen-capture app like Snagit? If all you need are images of the full screen or a rectangular section of it, just press Ctrl-Shift-3 for full screen or Ctrl-Shift-4 for a rectangle, and if you want to crop…
Paragon Backup & Recovery 12 Home
Paragon Software’s disk management tools routinely outclass the competition and run away with our Editor’s Choice—for example Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 2011. I expected Paragon Backup & Recovery 12 to perform equally well, but I wasn’t nearly as impressed by it as I am by Paragon’s disk tools. Paragon Backup & Recovery 12 Home…
PopTrayU
One of the few utilities that I can’t imagine living without is an e-mail notifier running in the Windows system tray, and the best I’ve found is a freeware open-source gem, PopTrayU. My main reason for wanting PopTrayU on my system is the obvious one—I want it to pop up a window that alerts me…
Snagit 11
Sooner or later, almost everyone needs screen captures—images of all or part of a computer screen—to use in presentations or Web pages or printed documents, and writers for PCMag.com typically make hundreds of screen shots a year. Our favorite screen capture, for a very long time, has been SnagIt, which combines traditional image-capture with video-capture…
NTI Backup Now 5.5 Advanced Edition
NTI Backup Now is a survivor in the local backup market. It’s been around for a long time, but it can perform impressively up-to-date tasks like continuously backing up document and image files as soon as you create or modify them—even when the backup app doesn’t appear to be running. When it performs traditional backup…
Genie Backup Manager Home Edition 9.0
Genie Backup Manager Home Edition is a long-established consumer-level backup program that has always impressed me with its clarity, power, and well-chosen range of genuinely useful features. The previous version won our Editors’ Choice award, and the latest one comes tantalizingly close to winning it again. The only thing that holds it back is its…
Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5
Acronis Backup & Recovery stores and recovers drives, partitions, folders, and files in more different ways than any other software I’ve ever seen, and, if you’re willing to learn to navigate its complex menus and obscure options, you may never want anything else. I’m deeply impressed by its corporate-level power and versatility, by its ability…
SugarSync
File synchronization is a service that every modern computer user needs, and SugarSync, a longtime PCMag.com Editors’ Choice, is one of the best and simplest freemium services you’ll find for personal use. A recent update to SugarSync’s desktop client, version 2.0 (beta) , adds some new functionalityand creates a more seamless syncing experience by echoing…
LibreOffice (for Mac)
We reviewed LibreOffice in 2011, and, as it was then, it’s still the best no-cost alternative to Microsoft Office that you can find for Windows, Linux, and OS X. In this review, I focus on LibreOffice for OS X, and the Mac-specific reasons why you might or might not want it. I think you’re far…